Unions And Divisions

Introduction : Medieval and Renaissance personal unions : main debates, new approaches / Paul Srodecki -- Unions as a structural element : preconditions, intentions, and realisations / Ludwig Steindorff -- Dynasties and dynastic rule between elite reproduction and state building in Europe / Frederik Buylaert, Thalia Brero and Erika Graham-Goering -- Dynastic Unions and the development of stable and extensive Christian polities in Iberia, c. 1100-c. 1300 / Luis García-Guijarro -- The "Angevin Empire" (1150-1204) : a twelfth-century union / S.D. Church -- The emergence of the Polish-Lithuanian union / Rimvydas Petrauskas -- Bishop, administrator, guardian : Albert of Hoya and his reign in Minden, Osnabrück and Hoya / Frederieke Maria Schnack -- The title rex Galiciae between ambitions and reality (c. 1100-c. 1400) / Márta Font -- The union between Hungary and Croatia : myths as reality / Neven Budak -- The Lusatias in personal union with Brandenburg and Bohemia / Norbert Kersken -- The foreign policy of the last Přemyslids : a first attempt at unifying Central Europe? / Robert Antonín -- How did the grand masters of the Teutonic Order interpret their dependency on the Polish Crown (1466-97)? / Adam Szweda -- An autonomous dependency : the unstable relationship between Royal Prussia and the Polish Crown, 1466-1569 / Beata Możejko -- Enfeoffment as a tool in the safeguarding of power? : Dithmarschen between Holsatian and archiepiscopal power claims / Stefan Brenner -- Wenceslas II Přemyslid and Louis I of Anjou : two personal unions of the Polish Kingdom in the fourteenth century / Andrzej Marzec -- Mary and Maximilian, Burgundy and Habsburg : the rise of an empire / Jan Hirschbiegel -- Albert II of Habsburg's composite monarchy (1437-39) and its significance for Central Europe / Julia Burkhardt -- King Ladislas II Jogaila of Poland, Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania and the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Church union / Darius Baronas -- The unions between Sleswick, Holsatia and Denmark in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their Nordic precursors / Oliver Auge -- The Nordic union wars, 1451-1523 / Jens E. Olesen -- Policies for and from the dynastic union : the crowns of Castile and Aragon in the fifteenth century / María Bonet Donato -- Corona regni bohemiae : the integration of Central Europe as conceived by the Luxemburgs and their successors / Lenka Bobková -- The path towards the "Danube Monarchy"? : the political legacy of Emperor Sigismund and his "executors" in the fifteenth century / Přemysl Bar -- In search of a Jagiellonian Europe : internal and external perceptions of the dynasty and its legacy in East-Central and Eastern Europe / Paul Srodecki.

Providing a comprehensive and engaging account of personal unions, composite monarchies and multiple rule in premodern Europe: Unions and Divisions. New Forms of Rule in Medieval and Renaissance Europe uses a comparative approach to examine the phenomena of the medieval and renaissance unions in a pan-European overview. In the later Middle Ages, genealogical coincidences led to caesuras in various dynastic successions. Solutions to these were found, above all, in new constellations which saw one political entity becoming co-managed by the ruler of another in the form of a personal union. In the premodern period, such solutions were characterised by two factors in particular: on the one hand, the entry of two countries into a union did not constitute a military annexation — even though claims to the throne were all too often imposed by force; on the other hand, the new unitarian constellation retained, at least de jure, the independence of its respective components. The twenty-four essays, ranging in scope from Scandinavia to Iberia, from England and France to Central and Eastern Europe, examine whether the respective unions were the result of careful planning and deliberations in the face of a long-foreseen succession crisis or whether they emerged from dynamic developments that were largely reactive and dependent upon various random factors and circumstances. Each union is assessed to provide an understanding, for students and researchers, of the political and social forces involved in the respective countries and investigates how the unions were reflected in contemporary literature (pamphlets, memoranda, chronicles, diaries etc.), propaganda and in legal and historical discourses. This volume is essential reading for students and researchers interested in the history of monarchy, political history and social and cultural histories in premodern Europe.

"Work is widely thought to have become more precarious. Many people feel that unions represent the interests of protected workers in good jobs at the expense of workers with insecure employment, low pay, and less generous benefits. Reconstructing Solidarity: Labour Unions, Precarious Work, and the Politics of Institutional Change in Europe argues the opposite: that unions try to represent precarious workers using a variety of creative campaigning and organizational tactics.00Where unions can limit employers' ability to 'exit' labour market institutions and collective agreements and build solidarity across different groups of workers, this results in a virtuous circle, establishing union control over the labour market. Where they fail to do so, it sets in motion a vicious circle of expanding precarity based on institutional evasion by employers. Exploring the struggle of the unions against the expansion of precarious work in Europe, Reconstructing Solidarity explains the importance of how unions build, or fail to build, inclusive worker solidarity. It uses a diverse range of comparative case studies to describe the struggles of workers and unions in industries such as local government, music, metalworking, chemicals, meat-packing, and logistics, to argue against the thesis that unions act primarily to protect labour market insiders at the expense of outsiders."--Back cover.

From journalist and historian Richard Kreitner, a "powerful revisionist account"of the most persistent idea in American history: these supposedly United States should be broken up (Eric Foner). The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the nineteenth century. It was there at our founding and has never gone away. With a scholar’s command and a journalist’s curiosity, Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the thirteen colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil. From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age.

For those who want to build a fighting labor movement, there are many questions to answer. How to relate to the union establishment which often does not want to fight? Whether to work in the rank and file of unions or staff jobs? How much to prioritize broader class demands versus shop floor struggle? How to relate to foundation-funded worker centers and alternative union efforts? And most critically, how can we revive militancy and union power in the face of corporate power and a legal system set up against us? Class struggle unionism is the belief that our union struggle exists within a larger struggle between an exploiting billionaire class and the working class which actually produces the goods and services in society. Class struggle unionism looks at the employment transaction as inherently exploitative. While workers create all wealth in society, the outcome of the wage employment transaction is to separate workers from that wealth and create the billionaire class. From that simple proposition flows a powerful and radical form of unionism. Historically, class struggle unionists placed their workplace fights squarely within this larger fight between workers and the owning class. Viewing unionism in this way produces a particular type of unionism which both fights for broader class issues but is also rooted in workplace-based militancy. Drawing on years of labor activism and study of labor tradition Joe Burns outlines the key set of ideas common to class struggle unionism and shows how these ideas can create a more militant, democtractic and fighting labor movement.

Call centers have come, in the last three decades, to define the interaction between corporations, governments, and other institutions and their respective customers, citizens, and members. The offshoring and outsourcing of call center employment, part of the larger information technology and information-technology-enabled services sectors, continues to be a growing practice amongst governments and corporations in their attempts at controlling costs and providing new services. While incredible advances in technology have permitted the use of distant and "offshore" labor forces, the grander reshaping of an international political economy of communications has allowed for the acceleration of these processes. New and established labor unions have responded to these changes in the global regimes of work by seeking to organize call center workers. These efforts have been assisted by a range of forces, not least of which is the condition of work itself, but also attempts by global union federations to build a bridge between international unionism and local organizing campaigns in the Global South and Global North. Through an examination of trade union interventions in the call center industries located in Canada and India, this book contributes to research on post-industrial employment by using political economy as a juncture between development studies, the sociology of work, and labor studies.

The first edition of Spatial Divisions of Labour rapidly became a classic. It had enormous influence on thinking about uneven development, the nature of economic space, and the conceptualisation of place arguing for an approach embedding all these issues in a notion of spatialised social relations. This second edition includes a new first chapter and an extensive additional concluding essay addressing key issues in the debates and controversies which followed initial publication.

The Polish crisis in the early 1980s provoked a great deal of reaction in the West. Not only governments, but social movements were also touched by the establishment of the Independent Trade Union Solidarnosc in the summer of 1980, the proclamation of martial law in December 1981, and Solidarnosc's underground activity in the subsequent years. In many countries, campaigns were set up in order to spread information, raise funds, and provide the Polish opposition with humanitarian relief and technical assistance. Labor movements especially stepped into the limelight. A number of Western European unions were concerned about the new international tension following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the new hard-line policy of the US and saw Solidarnosc as a political instrument of clerical and neo-conservative cold warriors. This book analyzes reaction to Solidarnosc in nine Western European countries and within the international trade union confederations. It argues that Western solidarity with Solidarnosc was highly determined by its instrumental value within the national context. Trade unions openly sided with Solidarnosc when they had an interest in doing so, namely when Solidarnosc could strengthen their own program or position. But this book also reveals that reaction in allegedly reluctant countries was massive, albeit discreet, pragmatic, and humanitarian, rather than vocal, emotional, and political.