Over the last fifty years in the United States, unions have been in deep decline, while income and wealth inequality have grown. In this timely work, editors Richard Bales and Charlotte Garden - with a roster of thirty-five leading labor scholars - analyze these trends and show how they are linked. Designed to appeal to those being introduced to the field as well as experts seeking new insights, this book demonstrates how federal labor law is failing today's workers and disempowering unions; how union jobs pay better than nonunion jobs and help to increase the wages of even nonunion workers; and how, when union jobs vanish, the wage premium also vanishes. At the same time, the book offers a range of solutions, from the radical, such as a complete overhaul of federal labor law, to the incremental, including reforms that could be undertaken by federal agencies on their own.

Several major transformations have characterized the world of work in recent years. Those transformations follow different patterns in different countries, yet their dynamics are so interrelated that it is often hard, if not impossible, to distinguish the causal relationships among them. Technological advances, globalization, old and new media, demographic changes, and new production and economic systems are all key factors acting on this ongoing transformation which is impacting both the world of work and society as a whole. In the spirit of Karl Polanyi, the well-known scholar who described the rise of market-based societies, we are led to wonder if we are witnessing a new “Great Transformation of Work”, on such a scale that it might change the very meaning of work in our society, and even its anthropological connotations. Accordingly, this volume investigates and discusses the different aspects of this transformation from a comparative perspective. In order to propose better solutions to cope with these changes, it is necessary to analyze their ongoing dynamics. Lawmakers, unions, scholars and practitioners are all called to do their part in order to achieve the goals of sustainability and fairness of our economic systems.

The economic crisis has highlighted major shortcomings in the EU flexicurity strategy which, although suitable to tackle structural unemployment in a period of economic growth, it proved unable to stand the impact of the recession, which requires specific measures to maintain employment. Against this background, the authors of the present papers, which were presented at the International Scientific Conference “Labour Market of the 21st Century: Looking for Flexibility and Security”, on the occasion of the 370th Anniversary of the establishment of Vilnius University’s Faculty of Law, that took place on 12–14 May 2011, investigate the development of labour regulation in the 21st century, with particular reference to the relation between flexibility and security and to the need to strike a balance between these two elements. The contributions address the issue in a comparative and transnational perspective and provide some insights into the development of national models of flexibility and social security.

Employment Relations in the 21st Century' provides a full and integrated insight into labour law and industrial relations. It cannot be denied that in recent decades, for many, if not most people, work has become unstable and insecure, with serious risk and few benefits for workers. As this reality spills over into political and social life, it is crucial to interrogate the transformations affecting employment relations, shape research agendas, and influence the policies of national and international institutions. This implies to focus on transnational regulatory structures and new forms of social protection and representation for different typologies and forms of work as a way to avoid increasing inequalities across (and within) countries. This volume brings together thirty-nine scholars (both academics and experienced industrial relations actors) in the fields of employment relations and labour law in a forthright discussion of new approaches, theories, and methods aimed at ameliorating the world of work.

This volume looks into current thinking and policy options on workIt consists of a selection of articles from the ILO's flagship journal, the International Labour Review. To most people, work is the mainstay of livelihood, social integration, and identity. But the twentieth-century meaning of "work" can no longer be taken for granted. As patterns of work continue to shift in response to the demands of production and trade in the global economy, major challenges have arisen not only in the lives of individual workers, but also for employers exposed to global competition and for the makers of national and international policy and law. At the heart of the debate lies the challenge of reframing the concepts and rules whereby people's socioeconomic security and the human dimensions of work can be reconciled with the global market's growing need for competitive labor flexibility.

Labour market institutions, including collective bargaining, the regulation of employment contracts and social protection policies, are instrumental for improving the well-being of workers, their families and society. In many countries, these instituti

'Balancing paid work and family life remains a significant challenge; indeed, the challenges are intensifying as economic austerity threatens the pursuit of gender equality. This excellent book provides extensive justifications for laws and policies which encourage and facilitate the reconciliation of paid work, family life and care-giving. It provides a wealth of data, from a number of jurisdictions, and examines recent trends. It is vital that this area of law and policy is protected and developed and this book plays an important role in that process.' – Clare McGlynn, Durham University, UK This unique selection of chapters brings together researchers from a variety of academic disciplines to explore aspects of law's engagement with working families. It connects academic debate with policy proposals through an integrated set of approaches and perspectives. Families, Care-giving and Paid Work offers an original approach to a very topical area. Not only does it consider the limitations of law in relation to the regulation of care-giving and workplace relationships, but it is premised upon a re-consideration of law's potential and engages with suggested strategies for bringing about long-term social change. Offering a range of analyses, this book will strongly appeal to policymakers and practitioners involved with promoting work and family issues, students in labour and employment studies, law and social policy, as well as academics interested in work and family reconciliation issues, or gender and law issues.

This book offers a unique contribution that examines major recent changes in conflict, negotiation and regulation within the labour relations systems and related governance institutions of advanced societies. The broad scope of analysis includes social welfare institutions, new forms of protest including judicialisation, transnational structures and collective bargaining itself. As the distinguished group of participating authors shows, the accumulation of numerous crucial changes in the interactions of unions, employers, political parties, courts, protestors, regulators and other key actors makes it imperative to reframe the study of collective bargaining and related forms of governance. The shifting dynamics include the growing relevance of multi-level interactions involving transnational entities, states and regions; the increasing tendency of workers and unions to turn to the courts as part of their overall strategy; new forms of solidarity among workers; and the emergence of new populist and nationalist actors. At the same time, sectors of the workforce that feel under-represented by existing institutions have contributed to new types of protest and 'agency'. Building on classical debates, the book offers new theoretical and practical approaches that insert the study of collective bargaining into the analysis of governance, solidarity, conflict and regulation, as they are broadly construed.

Why does the United States assign responsibility for different aspects of labor and employment law (e.g., wages and hours, safety and health, collective bargaining, discrimination, etc.) to different agencies, when France, Spain, and their former colonies assign all aspects of labor and employment law to a single agency? Does the US approach, which essentially reduces to "one inspector per law," perform better or worse than the "Latin" model, which implies "one inspector per firm?" And what are the implications for the division of labor in the public sector more generally? Root-Cause Regulation addresses these questions by comparing the evolution of labor market regulation in developed and developing countries over the course of the past century. The results speak not only to the protection of work and workers in the twenty-first century but to the organization of the public sector more generally.--

This book reviews, integrates, and synthesizes research on emotional labor and emotion regulation conducted over the past 30 years. The concept of emotional labor was first proposed by Dr. Arlie Russell Hochschild (1983), who defined it as "the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display" (p. 7) for a wage. A basic assumption of emotional labor theory is that many jobs (e.g., customer service, healthcare, team-based work, management) have interpersonal, and thus emotional, requirements and that well-being and effectiveness in these jobs is determined, in part, by a person’s ability to meet these requirements. Since Hochschild’s initial work, psychologists, sociologists, and management scholars have developed distinct theoretical approaches aimed at expanding and elaborating upon Hochschild’s core ideas. Broadly speaking, emotional labor is the study of how emotion regulation of oneself and others influences social dynamics at work, which has implications for performance and well being in a wide range of occupations and organizational contexts. This book offers researchers and practitioners a review of emotional labor theory and research that integrates the various perspectives into a coherent framework, and proposes an agenda for future research on this increasingly relevant and important topic. The book is divided into 5 main sections, with the first section introducing and defining emotional labor as well as creating a framework for the rest of the book to follow. The second section consists of chapters describing emotional labor theory at different levels of analysis, including the event, person, dyad, and group. The third section illustrates the diversity of emotional labor in distinct occupational contexts: customer service (e.g. restaurant, retail), call centers, and caring work. The fourth section considers broader contextual influences – organizational-, societal-, and cultural-level factors – that modify how and when emotional labor is done. The final section presents a series of ‘reflective essays’ from eminent scholars in the area of emotion and emotion regulation, where they reflect upon the past, present and future of emotion regulation at work.