Dockers The Impact Of Industrial Change

Workers, Managers, and Technological Change: Emerging Patterns of Labor Relations contributes significantly to an important subject. Technological change is one of the most powerful forces transforming the American industrial relations In fact, the synergistic relationships between technology and indus system. trial relations are so complex that they are not well or completely understood. We know that the impact of technology, while not independent of social forces, already has been profound: it has transformed occupations, creating new skills and destroying others; altered the power relationships between workers and managers; and changed the way workers learn and work. Tech nology also has made it possible to decentralize some economic activities out of large metropolitan areas and into small towns, rural areas, and other coun tries. Most important, information technology makes it possible for interna tional corporations to operate on a global basis. Indeed, some international corporations, especially those based in the United States, are losing their national identities, detaching the welfare of corporations from that of particu lar workers and communities. Internationalization, facilitated by information technology, has trans formed industrial relations systems. A major objective of the traditional American industrial relations system was to take labor out of competition.

Industrial issues are often inextricably linked with labour market concerns and policy approaches that attempt to consider production and employment separately are inherently flawed." This controversial statement sums up the heart of this important book. With contributions from such scholars as Keith Cowling, Malcolm Sawyer and Michael Kitson, Industrial and Labour Market Policy and Performance covers such topics as: * the increasing inequality between rich and poor * the links between innovation, competition and collaboration * education, skills formation and human resource management The evidence-led nature of the book will make it an important and useful read for students and academics involved in labour economics, industrial economics and industrial policy. The controversial findings of many of the chapters and its readable style will also appeal to informed policy commentators as well as policy-makers themselves.

Workers who loaded and unloaded ships have formed a distinctive occupational group over the past two centuries. As trade expanded so the numbers of dock labourers increased and became concentrated in the major ports of the world. This ambitious two-volume project goes beyond existing individual studies of dock workers to develop a genuinely comparative international perspective over a long historical period. Volume 1 contains studies of 22 major ports worldwide. Built around an agreed framework of issues, these 'port studies' examine the type of workers who dominated dock labour, their race, class and ethnicity, the working conditions of dockers and the role of government as employer, arbitrator and supporter. The studies also detail how dockers organized their labour, patterns of strike action and involvement in political organizations. The structure of the port city is also outlined and descriptions given of the waterside environment. These areas of investigation form the basis for a series of 11 thematic studies which comprise Volume 2. Drawing on the information provided in the port studies, these essays identify important aspects and recurring themes, and explain how and why particular cases diverge from the rest. The final chapter of the book synthesizes the various approaches taken to offer a model which suggests several configurations of dock labour and presents suggestions for future research. This major scholarly achievement represents the most sustained attempt to date to provide a comparative international history of dock labour. An annotated bibliography completes this essential reference work.

"This is an urban history of London during the pivotal years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the metropolis was transformed from an industrial city that the Victorians might have recognised to an embryonic modern 'world city.' Previous work on London in these years has tended to focus upon the 1960s -in particular the 'Swinging London' phenomenon. Mary Quant, Carnaby Street and the King's Road, Chelsea, all appear in these pages, but it is argued that the 'swinging moment' of the mid-sixties was a passing symptom of a much broader transformation from an industrial to a service-based city, and it is that transformation which this book examines. London is too complex and diverse a city to be comprehended in a simple linear narrative; this book adopts instead an innovative approach to urban history, by which London life and London's transformation are examined through a number of case studies looking at specific themes and areas of the city. Consumerism and the 'experience economy', home ownership and gentrification, deindustrialisation and deprivation, racial tension and unemployment, the attrition of public services and the steady loss of confidence in public agencies - national and local - emerge as overarching themes from the individual case studies in this book. Their combined effect, it is argued, was to prepare the ground for the Britain that Margaret Thatcher is usually held to have created after 1979 - without Thatcher herself having anything to do it"--

This book maintains that container shipping is vital to the actualisation of globalisation, and that without it, globalisation would remain a concept rather than reality. It argues that container shipping has been academically overlooked as a global business sector in favour of more prominent sectors such as oil or arms trade, and aims to provide a complete history of containerisation from the 1950s to the turn of the millennium. This history explores the growth of the container industry due to prominent innovation in vessel design, early adoption of the internet, large international mergers, and significant physical alterations to the global port system. With particular emphasis on the east-west trade, the chapters cover the growth and development of the container industry, to the social changes experienced by seafaring labour forces, the cultural impact of the container - bringing a domineering land-presence to maritime activity, through to the environmental concerns surrounding the industry. The study is not a quantitative economic analysis of the industry, rather, an updated history that strives to demonstrate the importance of transport infrastructures to any consideration of global business sectors, by providing evidence of the container industry’s stimulation of the global economy.

First published in 1999, this volume describes the political climate and state of trade unions after the second world war in Britain. Detailing the transition of individuals who had survived in the war or had taken part in the war effort to going back a civilian life in 1945. Following the rise of the Labour party in Britain until 1964.