Download or read book Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains written by Sarosh Kuruvilla and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains examines the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility on improving labor standards in global supply chains. Sarosh Kuruvilla charts the development and effectiveness of corporate codes of conduct to ameliorate "sweatshop" conditions in global supply chains. This form of private voluntary regulation, spearheaded by Nike and Reebok, became necessary given the inability of third world countries to enforce their own laws and the absence of a global regulatory system for labor standards. Although private regulation programs have been adopted by other companies in many different industries, we know relatively little regarding the effectiveness of these programs because companies don't disclose information about their efforts and outcomes in regulating labor conditions in their supply chains. Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains presents data from companies, multi-stakeholder institutions, and auditing firms in a comprehensive, investigative dive into the world of private voluntary regulation of labor conditions. The picture he paints is wholistic and raw, but it considers several ways in which this private voluntary system can be improved to improve the lives of workers in global supply chains.

Download or read book Steelworker Alley written by Robert Bruno and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For retired steelworkers in Youngstown, Ohio, the label "working class" fits comfortably. Questioning the widely held view that laborers in postwar America have adopted middle-class values, Robert Bruno shows that in this community a blue-collar identity has provided a positive focus for many residents.The son of a Youngstown steelworker, Bruno returned to his hometown seeking to understand the formation of his own working-class consciousness and the place of labor in the larger capitalist society. Drawing on interviews with dozens of former steelworkers and on research in local archives, Bruno explores the culture of the community, including such subjects as relations among co-workers, class antagonism, and attitudes toward authority. He describes how, because workers are often neighbors, the workplace takes on a feeling of neighborhood. He also demonstrates that to understand class consciousness one must look beyond the workplace, in this instance from Youngstown's front porches to its bowling alleys and voting booths. Written with a deeply personal approach, Steelworker Alley is a richly detailed look at workers which reveals the continuing strength of class relationships in America.

Download or read book Differences That Matter written by Dan Zuberi and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book shines a spotlight on the causes and consequences of working poverty, revealing how the lives of low-wage workers are affected by differences in health care, labor, and social welfare policy in the United States and Canada. Dan Zuberi's conclusions are based on survey data, eighteen months of participant observation fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with seventy-seven hotel employees working in parallel jobs on both sides of the border. Two hotel chains, each with one union and one non-union hotel in Seattle and Vancouver, provide a vivid crossnational comparison because they are similar in so many regards, the one major exception being government policy.Zuberi demonstrates how labor, health, social welfare, and public investment policy affect these hotel workers and their families. His book challenges the myth that globalization necessarily means hospitality jobs must be insecure and pay poverty wages and makes clear the critical role played by government policy in the reduction of poverty and creation of economic equality. Zuberi shows exactly where and how the social policies that distinguish the Canadian welfare state from the U.S. version make a difference in protecting Canadian workers from the hardships that burden low-wage workers in the United States. Differences That Matter, which is filled with first-person accounts, ends with policy recommendations and a call for grassroots community organizing.

Download or read book New Working Class Studies written by John Russo and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "We put the working class, in all its varieties, at the center of our work. The new working-class studies is not only about the labor movement, or about workers of any particular kind, or workers in any particular place—even in the workplace. Instead, we ask questions about how class works for people at work, at home, and in the community. We explore how class both unites and divides working-class people, which highlights the importance of understanding how class shapes and is shaped by race, gender, ethnicity, and place. We reflect on the common interests as well as the divisions between the most commonly imagined version of the working class—industrial, blue-collar workers—and workers in the 'new economy' whose work and personal lives seem, at first glance, to place them solidly in the middle class."—from the Introduction In John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon's book, contributors trace the origins of the new working-class studies, explore how it is being developed both within and across fields, and identify key themes and issues. Historians, economists, geographers, sociologists, and scholars of literature and cultural studies introduce many and varied aspects of this emerging field. Throughout, they consider how the study of working-class life transforms traditional disciplines and stress the importance of popular and artistic representations of working-class life.

Download or read book Framed written by Christopher R. Martin and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher R. Martin argues that the mainstream news media (and the large corporations behind them) put the labor movement in a bad light even while avoiding the appearance of bias. Martin has found that the news media construct "common ground" narratives between labor and management positions by reporting on labor relations from a consumer perspective. Martin identifies five central storytelling frames using this consumer orientation that repeatedly emerged in the news media coverage of major labor stories in the 1990s: the 1991–94 shutdown of the General Motors Willow Run Assembly Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan; the 1993 American Airlines flight attendant strike; the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike, the 1997 United Parcel Service strike, and the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization's conference in Seattle. In Martin's view, the news media's consumer "take" on the labor movement has the effect of submerging issues of citizenship, political activity, and class relations, and elevating issues of consumption and the myth of a class-free America. Instead of facilitating a public sphere, the democratic ideal in which the public can engage in discovery and rational-critical debate, Martin says, news organizations have fostered a consumer sphere, in which public discourse and action is defined in terms of consumer interests—the impact of strikes, lock-outs, shut-downs, and protests on the general consumer economy and the price, quality, and availability of things such as automobiles, airline flights, and baseball tickets.

Download or read book Changing by Design written by Deone Zell and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do corporations achieve change? In the first analytic book about Hewlett-Packard, Deone Zell also offers an ethnography of corporate redesign, documenting Hewlett-Packard's radical reorganization of both a manufacturing and a research division. Because she writes from within the process as it unfolds, Zell is able to demonstrate how the inclusion of employees in every step of redesign can inspire the knowledge and commitment to transform an organization. Hewlett-Packard is among a growing number of companies in the United States exploring what is called sociotechnical systems (STS) redesign. As competitive pressures have grown, interest in STS has increased because it has the potential to catalyze comprehensive organizational change and avoid the pitfalls of a piecemeal or small-scale approach. STS works from the ground up, involving front-line employees in analysis and redesign of the entire organization and in explicit examination of an organization's culture. In Hewlett-Packard's California Personal Computer Division, production operators worked alongside managers to redesign their printed circuit assembly line into self-managing teams of employees. In the Santa Clara Division, a very different workforce of engineers, initially unwilling to standardize their creativity, had to develop commercial applications and become more responsive to customers in order to survive. On the basis of Hewlett-Packard's success, Zell concludes that, with top-level support and a high investment of resources at the outset, redesign can inspire relatively rapid change, especially suitable for organizations in fast-paced environments. As one H-P manager commented, "Empowerment is no longer a nice thing to do. It is now a business imperative."

Download or read book The Blue Eagle at Work written by Charles J. Morris and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Blue Eagle at Work, Charles J. Morris, a renowned labor law scholar and preeminent authority on the National Labor Relations Act, uncovers a long-forgotten feature of that act that offers an exciting new approach to the revitalization of the American labor movement and the institution of collective bargaining. He convincingly demonstrates that in private-sector nonunion workplaces, the Act guarantees that employees have a viable right to engage in collective bargaining through a minority union on a members-only basis. As a result of this startling breakthrough, American labor relations may never again be the same. Morris's underlying thesis is based on a meticulous analysis of statutory and decisional law and exhaustive historical research.Morris recounts the little-known history of union organizing and bargaining through members-only minority unions that prevailed widely both before and after passage of the 1935 Wagner Act. He explains how vintage language in the statute continues to protect minority-union bargaining today and how those rights are also guaranteed under the First Amendment and by international law to which the United States is a committed party. In addition, the book supplies detailed guidelines illustrating how this rediscovered workers' right could stimulate the development of new procedures for union organizing and bargaining and how management will likely respond to such efforts.The Blue Eagle at Work, which is clear and accessible to general readers as well as specialists, is an essential tool for labor-union officials and organizers, human-resource professionals in management, attorneys practicing in the field of labor and employment law, teachers and students of labor law and industrial relations, and concerned workers and managers who desire to understand the law that governs their relationship.

Download or read book Freelancing Expertise written by Debra Osnowitz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contract work is more important than ever—for better or for worse, depending on one's perspective. The security once implied by a full-time job with a stable employer is becoming rarer, thereby erasing one of the major distinctions between "freelance work" and a "steady gig." Why hang on to a regular job for the sake of security if security can no longer be assumed? Instead, contractors, hired temporarily for specific knowledge and skills, market their expertise as they move from project to project. Even though their employment is precarious, a great many consider freelancing preferable to holding a "regular" job: the control they feel over their time and careers is well worth the risks that come with relatively uncertain cash flow. Freelancing Expertise is a qualitative study of decision making, work practices, and occupational processes among writers and editors who work in print and Web communications and programmers and engineers who work in software and systems development. Debra Osnowitz conducted sixty-eight extended interviews with representatives of both groups and twelve interviews with managers and recruiters, observed four different work settings in which contractors work alongside employees, and monitored blogs and online discussions among contractors. As a result, she provides a unique and sensitive assessment of a cultural shift in occupations and organizations. Osnowitz calls for a reconfiguration of the employer/employee relationship that accepts more variation and flexibility: just as "freelancing" has, over time, taken on many traits considered characteristic of traditional career paths, so might regular jobs make themselves more appealing to today's workforce by mimicking some of the positive aspects of transactions between clients and contract workers.

Download or read book Behind the Kitchen Door written by Saru Jayaraman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sustainability is about contributing to a society that everybody benefits from, not just going organic because you don't want to die from cancer or have a difficult pregnancy. What is a sustainable restaurant? It's one in which as the restaurant grows, the people grow with it."-from Behind the Kitchen Door How do restaurant workers live on some of the lowest wages in America? And how do poor working conditions-discriminatory labor practices, exploitation, and unsanitary kitchens-affect the meals that arrive at our restaurant tables? Saru Jayaraman, who launched the national restaurant workers' organization Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, sets out to answer these questions by following the lives of restaurant workers in New York City, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Detroit, and New Orleans. Blending personal narrative and investigative journalism, Jayaraman shows us that the quality of the food that arrives at our restaurant tables depends not only on the sourcing of the ingredients. Our meals benefit from the attention and skill of the people who chop, grill, sauté, and serve. Behind the Kitchen Door is a groundbreaking exploration of the political, economic, and moral implications of dining out. Jayaraman focuses on the stories of individuals, like Daniel, who grew up on a farm in Ecuador and sought to improve the conditions for employees at Del Posto; the treatment of workers behind the scenes belied the high-toned Slow Food ethic on display in the front of the house. Increasingly, Americans are choosing to dine at restaurants that offer organic, fair-trade, and free-range ingredients for reasons of both health and ethics. Yet few of these diners are aware of the working conditions at the restaurants themselves. But whether you eat haute cuisine or fast food, the well-being of restaurant workers is a pressing concern, affecting our health and safety, local economies, and the life of our communities. Highlighting the roles of the 10 million people, many immigrants, many people of color, who bring their passion, tenacity, and vision to the American dining experience, Jayaraman sets out a bold agenda to raise the living standards of the nation's second-largest private sector workforce-and ensure that dining out is a positive experience on both sides of the kitchen door.

Download or read book The Violence prone Workplace written by R. V. Denenberg and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Almost every week reports of violence erupting in the workplace make headlines. Contrary to popular opinion, such incidents are not random and senseless but, according to Richard V. Denenberg and Mark Braverman, typically result from conflict that has been allowed to fester. Combining the insights of both crisis management and dispute resolution, their book presents a comprehensive look at the problem of violence on the job, including ways of preventing it.Rather than focusing on the supposedly "lethal" or dysfunctional employee as the source of danger, Denenberg and Braverman point to the dysfunctional workplace as the problem. They describe underlying factors in the workplace which can foster extreme behavior and prevent an effective response. Calling for early intervention in situations that could result in violence, the authors suggest specific techniques for reducing the risk that an office, plant, or school will suffer crises arising from threats or a climate of hostility.At the heart of the book are fourteen vivid examples of real-life incidents involving violence, a threat of violence, or a perception that such a threat was made. They include instances in which domestic violence spilled over into the workplace, difficulties caused by racial and ethnic tension, and explosive behavior in response to common workplace occurrences such as downsizing or a change in corporate culture. Each example is followed by an analysis of the response to the actual or potential danger, indicating where mistakes were made because of poor information, bad judgment, absence of a clear policy, lack of consensus, or even irrational fear. An extensive appendix provides government guidelines and sample policies intended to serve as templates for violence-prevention plans. Both the examples and sample policies allow organizations to benefit from the experience of others and avoid common mistakes.

Download or read book High Tech and High Touch written by James E. Coverdill and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In High Tech and High Touch, James E. Coverdill and William Finlay invite readers into the dynamic world of headhunters, personnel professionals who acquire talent for businesses and other organizations on a contingent-fee basis. In a high-tech world where social media platforms have simplified direct contact between employers and job seekers, Coverdill and Finlay acknowledge, it is relatively easy to find large numbers of apparently qualified candidates. However, the authors demonstrate that headhunters serve a valuable purpose in bringing high-touch search into the labor market: they help parties on both sides of the transaction to define their needs and articulate what they have to offer. As well as providing valuable information for sociologists and economists, High Tech and High Touch demonstrates how headhunters approach practical issues such as identifying and attracting candidates; how they solicit, secure, and evaluate search assignments from client companies; and how they strive to broker interactions between candidates and clients to maximize the likelihood that the right people land in the right jobs.

Download or read book Values at Work written by George Cheney and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tensions over democratic values in today's business market -- The development of the Mondragón cooperatives -- Key value debates at Mondragón -- Practical lessons from Mondragón -- Participation and marketization at Mondragón and beyond.

Download or read book Injury Impoverished written by Nate Holdren and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining archival research, critical theory, and gender- and disability-analysis, Nate Holdren argues that Progressive Era reform to employee injury law created new employment discrimination against disabled people and a new injury culture that treated employees and their injuries instrumentally.

Download or read book Beyond the Ruins written by Jefferson Cowie and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book Transnational Tortillas written by Carolina Bank Muñoz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book looks at the flip side of globalization: How does a company from the Global South behave differently when it also produces in the Global North? A Mexican tortilla company, "Tortimundo," has two production facilities within a hundred miles of each other, but on different sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The workers at the two factories produce the same product with the same technology, but have significantly different work realities. This "global factory" gives Carolina Bank Muñoz an ideal opportunity to reveal how management regimes and company policy on each side of the border apply different strategies to exploit their respective workforces' vulnerabilities. The author's in-depth ethnographic fieldwork shows that the U.S. factory is characterized by an "immigration regime" and the Mexican factory by a "gender regime." In the California factory, managers use state policy and laws related to immigration status to pit documented and undocumented workers against each other. Undocumented workers are subject to harsher punishment, night-shift work, and lower pay. In the Baja California factory, managers sexually harass women—who make up most of the workforce—and create divisions between light- and dark-skinned women, forcing them to compete for managerial attention, which they understand equates with job security. In describing and analyzing the differences in working conditions between the two plants, Bank Muñoz provides important new insights into how, in a globalized economy, managerial strategies for labor control are determined by the interaction of state policies and labor market conditions with race, gender, and class at the point of production.

Download or read book The New Politics of Transnational Labor written by Marissa Brookes and published by ILR Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the years many transnational labor alliances have succeeded in improving conditions for workers, but many more have not. In The New Politics of Transnational Labor, Marissa Brookes explains why this dichotomy has occurred. Using the coordination and context-appropriate (CCAP) theory, she assesses this divergence, arguing that the success of transnational alliances hinges not only on effective coordination across borders and within workers' local organizations but also on their ability to exploit vulnerabilities in global value chains, invoke national and international institutions, and mobilize networks of stakeholders in ways that threaten employers' core, material interests. Brookes uses six comparative case studies spanning four industries, five countries, and fifteen years. From dockside labor disputes in Britain and Australia to service sector campaigns in the supermarket and private security industries to campaigns aimed at luxury hotels in Southeast Asia, Brookes creates her new theoretical framework and speaks to debates in international and comparative political economy on the politics of economic globalization, the viability of private governance, and the impact of organized labor on economic inequality. From this assessment, Brookes provides a vital update to the international relations literature on non-state actors and transnational activism and shows how we can understand the unique capacities labor has as a transnational actor.

Download or read book Mobilizing against Inequality written by Lee H. Adler and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Among the many challenges that global liberalization has posed for trade unions, the growth of precarious immigrant workforces lacking any collective representation stands out as both a major threat to solidarity and an organizing opportunity. Believing that collective action is critical in the struggle to lift the low wages and working conditions of immigrant workers, the contributors to Mobilizing against Inequality set out to study union strategies toward immigrant workers in four countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and United States. Their research revealed both formidable challenges and inspiring examples of immigrant mobilization that often took shape as innovative social countermovements. Using case studies from a carwash organizing campaign in the United States, a sans papiers movement in France, Justice for Cleaners in the United Kingdom, and integration approaches by the Metalworkers Union in Germany, among others, the authors look at the strategies of unions toward immigrants from a comparative perspective. Although organizers face a different set of obstacles in each country, this book points to common strategies that offer promise for a more dynamic model of unionism is the global North. Visit the website for the book, which features literature reviews, full case studies, updates, and links to related publications at www.mobilizing-against-inequality.info.