Workplace Industrial Relations In Transition

Examines the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS), a study designed to contribute to the debate on the reform of British industrial relations by making available large scale systematic evidence about a broad range of industrial relations and employment practices in the economy.

This collection analyses the contribution of industrial relations to social science understanding.

Examines the transformation of the employment relationship in governmental agencies, with particular emphasis on human resources policies and workplace practices.

The organization of working time in advanced industrial nations is currently in the midst of a profound shift away from standard hours and toward greater flexibility and diversity of schedules. This shift has major implications for industrial relations systems, the relative power of employers and unions, and the politics of labor markets and gender equity. This volume explores the broad significance of these developments cross-nationally in Europe, the United States, and Japan. The essays examine technological, and market changes that place a premium on greater flexibility, the successes and limits of trade union campaigns for shorter standard hours as a response to employment crises in the 1970s and 1980s, the impact of reducing standard work hours upon leisure time, the increasing diversity of employee preferences, and the decline in the male norm's influence on working time and working life. Developments in part-time and temporary work, as well as more innovative policies in parental leave, job sharing, and flexible retirement, are analyzed. Placing these developments in broad historical and theoretical perspective, the authors reveal the centrality of time as a contested terrain of workplace and gender politics. Working Time in Transition elucidates the underlying structural and political conflicts that lead to changes in working time regimes in Western nations and Japan. It will be of interest to employers, union leader, state and federal policy makers, economists, and corporation and union researchers. Author note: Karl Hinrichs is Research Associate at the Centre for Social Policy Research at the University of Bremen. William Roche is Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations at University College in Dublin. Carmen Siranni is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University and the coeditor of the Labor and Social Change Series.

Based on three surveys of human resources managers in several hundred enterprises: a Human Resource Survey, a five-year 1985-1991 longitudinal Working with Technology Survey, and a Workplace Reorganization Survey.

The successful 1997 strike by the Teamsters against UPS, and the overwhelming support the American public gave the strikers highlighted the impact of contingent work—an umbrella term for a variety of tenuous and insecure employment arrangements such as temping, independent contracting, employee leasing, and some self-employment and part-time or part-year work. This new book contends that contingent work represents a profound deviation from the employment relations model that dominated most of this century's labor relations. It delineates essential features of contingent work from both the worker's and the organization's point of view. Articulating a variety of perspectives from various disciplines, the contributors examine the business forces driving contingent work and assess the consequences of working contingently for the individual, family, and community, taking into account issues of race, class, and gender. They ask how current labor and employment laws need to be rewritten to provide contingent workers with the same comprehensive protections offered to permanent employees. In the final chapter, the editors comment on the status of research on contingent work and chart future research directions.

Many commentators expected the Russian trade unions to collapse along with the system of which they were an integral part, but the trade unions survived the storms of the Yeltsin era by adopting a strategy of 'social partnership'. This book, based on case-study and survey research in eight Russian regions, provides a detailed account of the development of trade unionism in Russia since the collapse of the soviet system. Against the background of the role of the trade unions in the soviet system, the book reviews the political role, structure and functions of the trade unions, development of social partnership at federal and regional levels, and provides a detailed account of the activity of the trade unions at the level of enterprise. The book concludes with a critical assessment of the Russian unions' strategy of 'social partnership' and locates it in comparative perspective.