The Pilbara, a large, thinly populated region in the north of Western Australia, has become central to the Australian economy and imagination. With millions of tons of iron ore shipped to China, the Pilbara is a media staple, through stories of mining companies' profits, the earnings of fly-in-fly-out workers, and the wealth of new entrepreneurs. For all this, what we know about a vital region such as the Pilbara remains incomplete. The boomtime stories do not reveal much about the Pilbara itself, a place completely transformed across fifty years of mining. No one has acknowledged the Pilbara's ancient history, or the men and women who worked there from the 1960s, building unions and making communities as they worked the mines. In those days, the Pilbara excited both hope and dread about its workers and their power. "From the deserts prophets come," AD Hope wrote years before in his poem, Australia. And it appeared that the Pilbara might be the site of a novel kind of unionism, with workers winning not only high wages but control of the places where they worked and the towns where they lived. But it was not to be. Starting in the 1980s, the companies fought back, defeating the unions and remaking the Pilbara. The managers were now the prophets, with new ways of organising work and managing workers. The companies reinvented the Pilbara through workplace control, fly-in-fly-out labor, and twelve-hour shifts. Their vision reshaped not just the desert but the cities, not just the work in mines and ports but in offices and shops. When the biggest boom in mining history came along, it unfolded across a Pilbara landscape very different from a generation earlier. The union prophets were gone; the companies' profits grew. This book reveals the story of fifty years of conflict over work and life in the Pilbara, and how this conflict has affected the rest of Australia. [Subject: Australian Studies, Labor History]

Ruth Milkman's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality presents four decades of Milkman's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define. Milkman's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: her interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on her pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. In the book's second half, Milkman turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers. A first-of-its-kind collection, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality is an indispensable text by one of the world's top scholars of gender, equality, and work.

The product of an October 1993 conference on labor law reform jointly sponsored by the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell U. and the Department of Economic Research at the AFL-CIO, this volume both argues the need for fundamental reform of the legal and institutional underpinnings o

This edited collection contributes to the theoretical literature on social reproduction—defined by Marx as the necessary labor to arrive the next day at the factory gate—and extended by feminist geographers and others into complex understandings of the relationship between paid labor and the unpaid work of daily life. The volume explores new terrain in social reproduction with a focus on the challenges posed by evolving theories of embodiment and identity, nonhuman materialities, and diverse economies. Reflecting and expanding on ongoing debates within feminist geography, with additional cross-disciplinary contributions from sociologists and political scientists, Precarious Worlds explores the productive possibilities of social reproduction as an ontology, a theoretical lens, and an analytical framework for what Geraldine Pratt has called “a vigorous, materialist transnational feminism.”

The author is convinced that there is a ruling class in America today. He examines the American power structure as it has developed in the 1980s. He presents systematic, empirical evidence that a fixed group of privileged people dominates the American economy and government. The book demonstrates that an upper class comprising only one-half of one percent of the population occupies key positions within the corporate community. It shows how leaders within this "power elite" reach government and dominate it through processes of special-interest lobbying, policy planning and candidate selection. It is written not to promote any political ideology, but to analyze our society with accuracy.

Although the world's poorest inhabited continent, Africa has recently shown signs of being a source of economic growth in the coming decades, with increased foreign investment - notably from China - and huge growth in GDP from a number of African states. In contrast to the heaving weight of books focusing on business opportunities in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, Africa has been poorly served by academic publishing. This compendium of scholarship offers cutting-edge knowledge relating to business in Africa. The objectives of this collection include: To shed new light on the socio-cultural and historical underpinnings of business practice in Africa and their implications for promoting entrepreneurship and business behaviour in the region To consider the important constraints on business activities in Africa, and the emerging 'best practice' for redressing their real and potential impacts To facilitate a better understanding of contemporary business practice in Africa through the application of relevant theories and models, including emergent ones. The Routledge Companion to Business in Africa is a comprehensive reference resource that provides the perfect platform for embarking on research and study into Africa from the business perspective.

Praise for previous editions of The State of Working America: "The State of Working America remains unrivaled as the most-trusted source for a comprehensive understanding of how working Americans and their families are faring in today's economy."--Robert B. Reich"It is the inequality of wealth, argue the authors, rather than new technology (as some would have it), that is responsible for the failure of America's workplace to keep pace with the country's economic growth. The State of Working America is a well-written, soundly argued, and important reference book."--Library Journal "If you want to know what happened to the economic well-being of the average American in the past decade or so, this is the book for you. It should be required reading for Americans of all political persuasions."--Richard Freeman, Harvard University "A truly comprehensive and useful book that provides a reality check on loose statements about U.S. labor markets. It should be cheered by all Americans who earn their living from work."--William Wolman, former chief economist, CNBC's Business Week "The State of Working America provides very valuable factual and analytic material on the economic conditions of American workers. It is the very best source of information on this important subject."--Ray Marshall, University of Texas, former U.S. Secretary of Labor"An indispensable work . . . on family income, wages, taxes, employment, and the distribution of wealth."--Simon Head, The New York Review of Books "No matter what political camp you're in, this is the single most valuable book I know of about the state of America, period. It is the most referenced, most influential resource book of its kind."--Jeff Madrick, author, The End of Affluence "This book is the single best yardstick for measuring whether or not our economic policies are doing enough to ensure that our economy can, once again, grow for everybody."--Richard A. Gephardt "The best place to review the latest developments in changes in the distribution of income and wealth."--Lester ThurowThe State of Working America, prepared biennially since 1988 by the Economic Policy Institute, includes a wide variety of data on family incomes, wages, taxes, unemployment, wealth, and poverty-data that enable the authors to closely examine the effect of the economy on the living standards of the American people.