The collapse of Britain's powerful labor movement in the last quarter century has been one of the most significant and astonishing stories in recent political history. How were the governments of Margaret Thatcher and her successors able to tame the unions? In analyzing how an entirely new industrial relations system was constructed after 1979, Howell offers a revisionist history of British trade unionism in the twentieth century. Most scholars regard Britain's industrial relations institutions as the product of a largely laissez faire system of labor relations, punctuated by occasional government interference. Howell, on the other hand, argues that the British state was the prime architect of three distinct systems of industrial relations established in the course of the twentieth century. The book contends that governments used a combination of administrative and judicial action, legislation, and a narrative of crisis to construct new forms of labor relations. Understanding the demise of the unions requires a reinterpretation of how these earlier systems were constructed, and the role of the British government in that process. Meticulously researched, Trade Unions and the State not only sheds new light on one of Thatcher's most significant achievements but also tells us a great deal about the role of the state in industrial relations.

Hugh Clegg was a founding figure of post-war British Industrial Relations, the forerunner of Employment Relations and Human Resource Management, as taught in most Business Schools today. He defined ‘industrial democracy’ as collective bargaining with trade unions, laid the foundations for the pluralist approach to Industrial Relations, was a key figure in the post-war social sciences and a major public policy player. More widely, he was an important figure in the Cold War social democratic academic left, who broke with his earlier Communism to champion free trade unions in a liberal democratic society. He also produced the major Oxford University Press trade union history. This book aims to understand the politics and industrial relations of the post-war period in Britain (in which trade unions were central) through the life of a key public intellectual. It will help readers understand the political and social science roots of contemporary Employment Relations and Human Resource Management through a deep historical study of Clegg’s life and times, in the context of his post-war social democratic generation. It illustrates how the failures of post-war industrial relations led to Thatcherism. Current Employment Relations academics and public policy can learn much from this history, making it of value to researchers, students, and academics in the fields of Human Resource Management and business and management history.

Prosser argues that labour movements respond to European integration in a manner which instigates competition between national labour markets. The book's hypothesis has key implications for debates about labour movements and the EU and its engaging style will captivate scholars, students and policymakers.

This book employs a variety of perspectives such as Institutional, Social Democratic, Marxist, Gender and Informal, Biblical and Dalit, to critically examine the impact of neo-liberal globalisation on both formal and informal sectors of the labour market and the industrial relations system. The narratives not only interrogate current institutions and paradigms, but also outline future developments.

As wealth inequality skyrockets and trade union power declines, the living wage movement has become ever more urgent for public policymakers, academics, and – most importantly – those workers whose wages hover close to the breadline. A real living wage in any part of the world is rarely its minimum wage: it is the minimum income needed to cover living costs and participate fully in society. Most governments’ minimum wages are still falling short, meaning millions of workers struggle to cover their living costs. This book brings new, vital insights to the conversation from a carefully selected group of contributors at the forefront of this field. By juxtaposing advances across sectors and countries, and encompassing many different approaches and indeed definitions of the living wage, Dobbins and Prowse offer a rich tapestry of approaches that may inform public policy. By including the experiences and voices of those workers earning at, or near, the living wage alongside the opinions of leading experts in this field, this book is a pioneering contribution for public policymakers as well as students and academics of work and employment relations, public policy, organizational studies, social economics, and politics.

This revised edition of Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice follows the approach established successfully in preceding volumes edited by Paul Edwards. The focus is on Britain after a decade of public policy which has once again altered the terrain on which employment relations develop. Government has attempted to balance flexibility with fairness, preserving light-touch regulation whilst introducing rights to minimum wages and to employee representation in the workplace. Yet this is an open economy, conditioned significantly by developing patterns of international trade and by European Union policy initiatives. This interaction of domestic and cross-national influences in analysis of changes in employment relations runs throughout the volume.

Organizing Matters demonstrates the interplay between two distinct logics of labour’s collective action: on the one hand, workers coming together, usually at their place of work, entrusting the union to represent their interests and, on the other hand, social bargaining in which the trade union constructs labour’s interests from the top down. The book investigates the tensions and potential complementarities between the two logics through the combination of a strong theoretical framework and an extensive qualitative case study of trade union organizing and recruitment in four countries – Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. These countries still utilize social-wide bargaining but find it necessary to draw and develop strategies transposed from Anglo-American countries in response to continuously declining membership.

Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff’s now classic 1984 book What Do Unions Do? stimulated an enormous theoretical and empirical literature on the economic impact of trade unions. Trade unions continue to be a significant feature of many labor markets, particularly in developing countries, and issues of labor market regulations and labor institutions remain critically important to researchers and policy makers. The relations between unions and management can range between cooperation and conflict; unions have powerful offsetting wage and non-wage effects that economists and other social scientists have long debated. Do the benefits of unionism exceed the costs to the economy and society writ large, or do the costs exceed the benefits? The Economics of Trade Unions offers the first comprehensive review, analysis and evaluation of the empirical literature on the microeconomic effects of trade unions using the tools of meta-regression analysis to identify and quantify the economic impact of trade unions, as well as to correct research design faults, the effects of selection bias and model misspecification. This volume makes use of a unique dataset of hundreds of empirical studies and their reported estimates of the microeconomic impact of trade unions. Written by three authors who have been at the forefront of this research field (including the co-author of the original volume, What Do Unions Do?), this book offers an overview of a subject that is of huge importance to scholars of labor economics, industrial and employee relations, and human resource management, as well as those with an interest in meta-analysis.

This collection analyses the contribution of industrial relations to social science understanding.

The ten essays in this book explore the intersection of race and class in the study of labour on three continents. Leading scholars examine the way in which working-class identities took shape and changed over time in a variety of settings from the sea ports of southern Africa to the copper mining region of the American Southwest.