Collective Bargaining And Collective Action

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.

In this groundbreaking study of the relations between workers and the state, Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker examine the legal regulation of workers' collective action from 1900 to 1948. They analyze the strikes, violent confrontations, lockouts, union organizing drives, legislative initiatives, and major judicial decisions that transformed the labour relations regime of liberal voluntarism, which prevailed in the later part of the nineteenth century, into industrial voluntarism, whose centrepiece was Mackenzie King's Industrial Disputes Investigation Act of 1907. This period was marked by coercion and compromise, as workers organized and fought to extend their rights against the profit oriented owners of capital, while the state struggled to define a labour regime that contained industrial conflict. The authors then trace the conflicts that eventually produced the industrial pluralism that Canadians have known in more recent years. By 1948 a detailed set of legal rules and procedures had evolved and achieved a hegemonic status that no prior legal regime had even approached. This regime has become so central to our everyday thinking about labour relations that one might be forgiven for thinking that everything that came earlier was, truly, before the law. But, as Labour Before the Law demonstrates, workers who acted collectively prior to 1948 often found themselves before the law, whether appearing before a magistrate charged with causing a disturbance, facing a superior court judge to oppose an injunction, or in front of a board appointed pursuant to a statutory scheme that was investigating a labour dispute and making recommendations for its resolution. The book is simultaneously a history of law, aspects of the state, trade unions and labouring people, and their interaction within the broad and shifting terrain of political economy. The authors are attentive to regional differences and sectoral divergences, and they attempt to address the fragmentation of class experience.

Informal Workers and Collective Action features nine cases of collective action to improve the status and working conditions of informal workers. Adrienne E. Eaton, Susan J. Schurman, and Martha A. Chen set the stage by defining informal work and describing the types of organizations that represent the interests of informal workers and the lessons that may be learned from the examples presented in the book. Cases from a diverse set of countries—Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Liberia, South Africa, Tunisia, and Uruguay—focus on two broad types of informal workers: "waged" workers, including port workers, beer promoters, hospitality and retail workers, domestic workers, low-skilled public sector workers, and construction workers; and self-employed workers, including street vendors, waste recyclers, and minibus drivers.These cases demonstrate that workers and labor organizations around the world are rediscovering the lessons of early labor organizers on how to aggregate individuals' sense of injustice into forms of collective action that achieve a level of power that can yield important changes in their work and lives. Informal Workers and Collective Action makes a strong argument that informal workers, their organizations, and their campaigns represent the leading edge of the most significant change in the global labor movement in more than a century.Contributors Gocha Aleksandria, Georgian Trade Union Confederation Martha A. Chen, Harvard University and WIEGO Sonia Maria Dias, WIEGO and Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil Adrienne E. Eaton, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Mary Evans, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Janice Fine, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Mary Goldsmith, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco Daniel Hawkins, National Trade Union School of Colombia Elza Jgerenaia, Labor and Employment Policy Department for the Ministry of Labour, Health and Social Affairs, Republic of Georgia Stephen J. King, Georgetown University Allison J. Petrozziello, UN Women and the Center for Migration Observation and Social Development Pewee Reed, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Republic of Liberia Sahra Ryklief, International Federation of Workers' Education Associations Susan J. Schurman, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey Vera Alice Cardoso Silva, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil Milton Weeks, Devin Corporation

Collective bargaining and workers’ voice are often discussed in the past rather than in the future tense, but can they play a role in the context of a rapidly changing world of work? This report provides a comprehensive assessment of the functioning of collective bargaining systems and workers’ voice arrangements across OECD countries, and new insights on their effect on labour market performance today.

This original book is a wide-ranging, radical and highly innovative critique of the prevailing orthodoxies within industrial relations and human resource management. It covers: central problems in industrial relations the mobilization theory of collective action the growth of non-union workplaces and the prospects and desirability of a new labour-management social partnership an historical account of worker collectivism, organization and militancy and state or employer counter mobilization a critique of postmodernism and accounts of the end of the labour movement Containing a detailed examination of the evolution of industrial relations, it argues that the area is often under-theorized and influenced by the policy agenda of the state or employers, and will prove informative reading for students of industrial relations.

USA collective bargaining textbook. Historical evolution since 1800. Government influence and management attitudes. Reassignment, layoffs, promotion, discipline, wages, hours of work and fringe benefits. Grievance handling. Power and policies of trade unions and management. Comment on labour legislation. Economic theory and economic implications. Effect on wage policy and income. Strikes.