Industrial Relations News

Fiona McQuarrie's Industrial Relations in Canada received wide praise for helping students to understand the complex and sometimes controversial field of Industrial Relations, by using just the right blend of practice, process, and theory. The text engages business students with diverse backgrounds and teaches them how an understanding of this field will help them become better managers. The fourth edition retains this student friendly, easy-to-read approach, praised by both students and instructors across the country. The goal of the fourth edition was to enhance and refine this approach while updating the latest research findings and developments in the field.

Comprehensive and clearly focussed, this is a must-read text for students of employment relations. The accessible writing style is combined with a wealth of contemporary examples, allowing the reader to fully engage with the key critical debates surrounding each topic.

This book, which includes extensive interview material and primary research, examines technological innovation and workplace restructuring carried out by News Corporation in its newspaper holdings in Britain, the United States and Australia. Timothy Marjoribanks finds that while some outcomes at various local sites were similar, many were dramatically different. His study reveals that the nature of existing social relations in a particular location has a major impact on workplace reforms. The book finds that the prevailing balance of power between trade unions and workers, management and employers, and the role of the state in these relationships are the most influential factors in determining the course of events. Significantly, it emphasises the importance of analysing the connections between events occurring locally, nationally and globally if we are to understand the growing influence of corporate actors such as News Corporation.

As the influence of labor unions declines in many industrialized nations, particularly the United States, the influence of workers has decreased. Because of the need for greater involvement of workers in changing production systems, as well as frustration with existing structures of workplace regulation, the search has begun for new ways of providing a voice for workers outside the traditional collective bargaining relationship. Works councils—institutionalized bodies for representative communication between an employer and employees in a single workplace—are rare in the Anglo-American world, but are well-established in other industrialized countries. The contributors to this volume survey the history, structure, and functions of works councils in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Canada, and the United States. Special attention is paid to the relations between works councils and unions and collective bargaining, works councils and management, and the role and interest of governments in works councils. On the basis of extensive comparative data from other Western countries, the book demonstrates powerfully that well-designed works councils may be more effective than labor unions at solving management-labor problems.

Shaping the workplace of the future.