Organizing Matters demonstrates the interplay between two distinct logics of labour’s collective action: on the one hand, workers coming together, usually at their place of work, entrusting the union ...to represent their interests and, on the other hand, social bargaining in which the trade union constructs labour’s interests from the top down. The book investigates the tensions and potential complementarities between the two logics through the combination of a strong theoretical framework and an extensive qualitative case study of trade union organizing and recruitment in four countries – Austria, Germany, Israel and the Netherlands. These countries still utilize social-wide bargaining but find it necessary to draw and develop strategies transposed from Anglo-American countries in response to continuously declining membership.
In response to the last recession, the European Union (EU) adopted a new economic governance (NEG) regime. An influential stream of EU social policy literature argues that there has been more ...emphasis on social objectives in the NEG regime in more recent years. This article shows that this is not the case. It does so through an in‐depth analysis of NEG prescriptions on wage, employment protection and collective bargaining policy in Germany, Italy, Ireland and Romania between 2009 and 2019. Our main conclusion is that the EU's interventions in these three industrial relations policy areas continue to be dominated by a liberalization agenda that is commodifying labour, albeit to a different degree across the uneven but nonetheless integrated European political economy. This finding is important, as countervailing transnational trade union action is the more likely, the more there is a common threat. Even so, our contextualized analysis also enables us to detect contradictions that could provide European labour movements opportunities to pursue countervailing action.
An exploration of why the US has been more conservative in its domestic policies than other Western democracies, arguing that US conservatism is derived from a continuous war on labor, especially ...before the 1930s, with powerful economic bodies using repression to control unions & workers, presented in V PARTS containing 17 Chpts, with an Introduction, in which it is contended that US conservatism comes not from internal weaknesses of "labor-Left" organizations, but rather, from the repressive use of corporate power & money against the labor-Left. PART I - CONSERVATISM AND UNION DECLINE - opens the vol with (1) Conservatism and the War on Labor -- explains that, following a brief period of empowerment during the New Deal era, labor's power began to decline in the mid-1950s, & by 1990, only 16% of the labor force were union members; (2) Consensus, Constraints, Conflict -- reviews various explanations for the loss of labor's power, all of which fail to recognize the hostile attitude of conservative institutions toward the labor-Left; & (3) Unions and Leaders -- questions the theory that labor has lost its power because its leaders have "sold out" or cooperated with the capitalist establishment. PART II - UNIONISM: STRATEGIES OF REPRESSION - offers (4) Employers, Mercenaries, and Armed Force -- reviews the history of actual physical violence against labor in the US carried out by employers' vigilantes, mercenaries, & the public armed forces; (5) The Legal System: "We Are the Law" -- discusses the adversarial role that the US legal system has consistently taken toward organized labor; (6) Steel: 1892 and 1919 -- examines two efforts to unionize steel workers (in Homestead, Pa, in 1892, & an industry-wide attempt in 1919), revealing how employers respond to strikes with mercenaries & government troops; & (7) Critical Conflicts: Railway, Craft, and Industrial Unionism -- considers two attempted strikes in the railway industry & two labor conflicts in the craft industry to explain labor's inability to attain mass industrial unionism before the 1930s. PART III - LABOR-LEFT POLITICS: STRATEGIES OF REPRESSION - continues the vol with (8) Socialists and Sedition: The World War I Era -- explains how the lack of a well-established union base has prevented the development of the political Left, which has allowed political repression against dissenters (most notably around the two world wars) to go unchecked; (9) Un-Americanism: World War II and Cold War Eras -- assesses the impact that the post-WWII condemnation of all things "un-American" had on labor-Left politics; (10) Peculiarities of the American Political System -- discusses how the organization of the US political system, which suppresses third parties & empowers special interests, has effectively repressesd the labor-Left; & (11) Labor-Left Politics -- reveals that, despite the biased US political system, labor has consistently endeavored to gain political legitimacy, but with only limited success. PART IV - STRATEGIES OF ECONOMIC MANIPULATION AND VIOLENCE - includes (12) Subtler Technologies of Subjection: Managing Workers -- explains that, following the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1940s, employers adopted more subtle means of controlling workers through technological change & manipulation, eg, automation, scientific management, & paternalism; (13) Labor Law, the NLRB and Gentrified Union Busters -- reviews data from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that detail employer resistance to union activity from the mid-1950s through the 1980s; & (14) Macroeconomic and Political Manipulations -- discusses the machinations toward labor that take place at higher public policy levels (eg, deregulation, buyouts, industrial restructuring, recession) that are impervious to strikes or other labor strategies. PART V - THE POWER TO REPRESS - concludes the book with (15) That Peculiar Institution, American Capitalism -- details the aspects of the US capitalist economic system (eg, control of economic institutions, excessive influence on government) that have allowed it to sustain its continuous repressive response to the labor-Left; (16) The Media Monopoly -- contends that the business-owned mass media deliver conservative views to the public, despite arguments that big-business owners & advertisers do not influence media reporting; & (17) Reprise and Prospects -- reviews how the powers of US capitalism have been used to repress the labor-Left, & considers how labor can acquire enough power to advance its cause. References are encompassed in Chpt Notes. 1 Table. R. Logsdon
In May and June of 1968 a dramatic wave of strikes paralyzed France, making industrial relations reform a key item on the government agenda. French trade unions seemed due for a golden age of growth ...and importance. Today, however, trade unions are weaker in France than in any other advanced capitalist country. How did such exceptional militancy give way to equally remarkable quiescence? To answer this question, Chris Howell examines the reform projects of successive French governments toward trade unions and industrial relations during the postwar era, focusing in particular on the efforts of post-1968 conservative and socialist governments. Howell explains the genesis and fate of these reform efforts by analyzing constraints imposed on the French state by changing economic circumstances and by the organizational weakness of labor. His approach, which links economic, political, and institutional analysis, is broadly that of Regulation Theory. His explicitly comparative goal is to develop a framework for understanding the challenges facing labor movements throughout the advanced capitalist world in light of the exhaustion of the postwar pattern of economic growth, the weakening of the nation-state as an economic actor, and accelerating economic integration, particularly in Europe.
For many years, the employment relations (ER) literature took the perspective that employee voice via trade unions could channel discontent and reduce exit, thereby improving productivity. In ...organizational behaviour (OB) research voice has also emerged as an important concept, and a focus of this research has been to understand the antecedents of the decision of employees to engage or not engage in voice. In OB research, however, voice is not viewed as it is in ER as a mechanism to provide collective representation of employee interests. Rather, it is seen as an expression of the desire and choice of individual workers to communicate information and ideas to management for the benefit of the organization. This article offers a critique of the OB conception of voice, and in particular highlights the limitations of its view of voice as a pro‐social behaviour. We argue that the OB conception of voice is at best partial because its definition of voice as an activity that benefits the organization leaves no room for considering voice as a means of challenging management, or indeed simply as being a vehicle for employee self‐determination.
During the 1990s, a prominent strategy of economic adjustment to the challenges of competitiveness and budgetary retrenchment among the non-corporatist countries of Europe was the negotiation of ...social pacts. Since the onset of the great recession and the Eurozone crisis, social pacts have been conspicuous by their absence. Why have unions not been invited into government buildings to negotiate paths of economic adjustment in the countries hardest hit by the crisis? Drawing on empirical experiences from Ireland and Italy-two cases on which much of the social pact literature concentrated-this article attributes the exclusion of unions to their declining legitimacy. Unions in the new European periphery have lost the capacity either to threaten governments with the stick of protest or to seduce policymakers with the carrot of problem-solving. They are now seen as a narrow interest group like any other. Adapted from the source document.
Labor unions and tax aggressiveness Chyz, James A.; Ching Leung, Winnie Siu; Zhen Li, Oliver ...
Journal of financial economics,
06/2013, Volume:
108, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
We examine the impact of unionization on firms' tax aggressiveness. We find a negative association between firms' tax aggressiveness and union power and a decrease in tax aggressiveness after labor ...union election wins. This relation is consistent with labor unions influencing managers' in one, or both, of two ways: (1) constraining managers' ability to invest in tax aggressiveness through increased monitoring; or (2) decreasing returns to tax aggressiveness that arise from unions' rent seeking behavior. We also find preliminary evidence that the market expects these reductions around union elections and discounts firms that likely add shareholder value via aggressive tax strategies.
Linear regressions with period and group fixed effects are widely used to estimate treatment effects. We show that they estimate weighted sums of the average treatment effects (ATE) in each group and ...period, with weights that may be negative. Due to the negative weights, the linear regression coefficient may for instance be negative while all the ATEs are positive. We propose another estimator that solves this issue. In the two applications we revisit, it is significantly different from the linear regression estimator.
This first ethnographic study of factory workers engaged in radical labor protest gives a voice to a segment of the Japanese population that has been previously marginalized. These blue-collar ...workers, involved in prolonged labor disputes, tell their own story as they struggle to make sense of their lives and their culture during a time of conflict and instability. What emerges is a sensitive portrait of how workers grapple with a slowed economy and the contradictions of Japanese industry in the late postwar era. The ways that they think and feel about accommodation, resistance, and protest raise essential questions about the transformation of labor practices and limits of worker cooperation and compliance.
Abstract
As skill formation systems are increasingly under pressure from de-industrialization and the rise of knowledge economies, their ability to include the low-skilled has been strained. But what ...determines how skill formation systems adjust to this challenge? By explaining the divergence of two most-similar systems, those of Austria and Germany, the article highlights the key role of trade unions and of the institutional resources and legacies available to them. Where institutional resources are high and legacies positive, as in Austria, unions were crucial in setting an inclusive pathway of reform of the training system. Where, on the contrary, institutional resources are low and legacies negative, as in Germany, unions’ strategies for inclusion failed, paving the way to a dualizing outcome. The article therefore provides a novel analysis of institutional change in skill formation systems, while also offering broader insights on the relationship between coordinated and egalitarian capitalism in post-industrial knowledge-based economies.
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