Download or read book Strong Governments Precarious Workers written by Philip Rathgeb and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-12-15 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do some European welfare states protect unemployed and inadequately employed workers ("outsiders") from economic uncertainty better than others? Philip Rathgeb’s study of labor market policy change in three somewhat-similar small states—Austria, Denmark, and Sweden—explores this fundamental question. He does so by examining the distribution of power between trade unions and political parties, attempting to bridge these two lines of research—trade unions and party politics—that, with few exceptions, have advanced without a mutual exchange. Inclusive trade unions have high political stakes in the protection of outsiders, because they incorporate workers at risk of unemployment into their representational outlook. Yet, the impact of union preferences has declined over time, with a shift in the balance of class power from labor to capital across the Western world. National governments have accordingly prioritized flexibility for employers over the social protection of outsiders. As a result, organized labor can only protect outsiders when governments are reliant on union consent for successful consensus mobilization. When governments have a united majority of seats, on the other hand, they are strong enough to exclude unions. Strong Governments, Precarious Workers calls into question the electoral responsiveness of national governments—and thus political parties—to the social needs of an increasingly numerous group of precarious workers. In the end, Rathgeb concludes that the weaker the government, the stronger the capacity of organized labor to enhance the social protection of precarious workers.
Download or read book Work and Politics written by Charles F. Sabel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1982-07-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Work and Politics develops a historical and comparative sociology of workplace relations in industrial capitalist societies. Professor Sabel argues that the system of mass production using specialized machines and mostly unskilled workers was the result of the distribution of power and wealth in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain and the United States, not of an inexorable logic of technological advance. Once in place, this system created the need for workers with systematically different ideas about the acquisition of skill and the desirability of long-term employment. Professor Sabel shows how capitalists have played on naturally existing division in the workforce in order to match workers with diverse ambitions to jobs in different parts of the labor market. But he also demonstrates the limits, different from work group to work group, of these forms of collaboration.
Download or read book Private Government written by Elizabeth Anderson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.
Download or read book No Shortcuts written by Jane McAlevey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An examination of strategies for effective organizing"--
Download or read book The Fight for Workers Power Revolution and Counter revolution in the 20th Century written by Tom Bramble and published by . This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the 1917 Russian Revolution, revolutionary upsurges erupted around the world: workers power was on the agenda. This book recounts the rise and fall of the Communist International and the lessons it holds for today.
Download or read book On the Job written by Celeste Monforton and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiring story of worker centers that are cropping up across the country and leading the fight for today's workers For over 60 million people, work in America has been a story of declining wages, insecurity, and unsafe conditions, especially amid the coronavirus epidemic. This new and troubling reality has galvanized media and policymakers, but all the while a different and little-known story of rebirth and struggle has percolated just below the surface. On the Job is the first account of a new kind of labor movement, one that is happening locally, quietly, and among our country's most vulnerable—but essential—workers. Noted public health expert Celeste Monforton and award-winning journalist Jane M. Von Bergen crisscrossed the country, speaking with workers of all backgrounds and uncovering the stories of hundreds of new, worker-led organizations (often simply called worker centers) that have successfully achieved higher wages, safer working conditions and on-the-job dignity for their members. On the Job describes ordinary people finding their voice and challenging power: from housekeepers in Chicago and Houston; to poultry workers in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and Springdale, Arkansas; and construction workers across the state of Texas. An inspiring book for dark times, On the Job reveals that labor activism is actually alive and growing—and holds the key to a different future for all working people.
Download or read book Politics at Work written by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics at Work documents how and why U.S. employers are increasingly recruiting their own workers into politics-and what such recruitment means for American democracy and public policy.
Download or read book American Workers Colonial Power written by Dorothy B. Fujita-Rony and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-03-04 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An immensely ambitious book, American Workers, Colonial Power is a regional history with ever widening spatial and social circles, each one layered and complex. Filipina/o Seattle, this study shows, reflects and exemplifies much of the American West and U.S., and affirms the mutually influential relationship, especially in terms of culture, between the U.S. and the Philippines. This is a work of deep scholarship and broad significance."—Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Common Ground: Reimagining American History
Download or read book Labor and Power in the Late Ottoman Empire written by Can Nacar and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-16 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early twentieth century, consumers around the world had developed a taste for Ottoman-grown tobacco. Employing tens of thousands of workers, the Ottoman tobacco industry flourished in the decades between the 1870s to the First Balkan War—and it became the locus of many of the most active labor struggles across the empire. Can Nacar delves into the lives of these workers and their fight for better working conditions. Full of insight into the changing relations of power between capital and labor in the Ottoman Empire and the role played by state actors in these relations, this book also draws on a rich array of primary sources to foreground the voices of tobacco workers themselves.
Download or read book Power in Our Hands written by William Bigelow and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This celebrated book provides entertaining, easy-to-use lesson plans for teaching labor history. "Most school teachers are drowned in paper, but here is one book I want to recommend to them. It is a way of getting American teenagers not just interested, but excited and passionate about their history - modern American labor history." - Pete Seeger
Download or read book Power Politics and Influence at Work written by Tony Dundon and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-24 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how power operates in workplace settings at local, national and transnational levels. It argues that how people are valued in and out of work is a political dynamic, which reflects and shapes how societies treat their citizens. Offering vital resources for activists and students on labour rights, employment issues and trade unions, this book argues that the influence workers can exert is changing dramatically and future challenges for change can be positive and progressive.
Download or read book Threads written by Jane L. Collins and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-09-03 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans have been shocked by media reports of the dismal working conditions in factories that make clothing for U.S. companies. But while well intentioned, many of these reports about child labor and sweatshop practices rely on stereotypes of how Third World factories operate, ignoring the complex economic dynamics driving the global apparel industry. To dispel these misunderstandings, Jane L. Collins visited two very different apparel firms and their factories in the United States and Mexico. Moving from corporate headquarters to factory floors, her study traces the diverse ties that link First and Third World workers and managers, producers and consumers. Collins examines how the transnational economics of the apparel industry allow firms to relocate or subcontract their work anywhere in the world, making it much harder for garment workers in the United States or any other country to demand fair pay and humane working conditions. Putting a human face on globalization, Threads shows not only how international trade affects local communities but also how workers can organize in this new environment to more effectively demand better treatment from their distant corporate employers.
Download or read book Labor s End written by Jason Resnikoff and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-01-18 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Labor's End traces the discourse around automation from its origins in the factory to its wide-ranging implications in political and social life. As Jason Resnikoff shows, the term automation expressed the conviction that industrial progress meant the inevitable abolition of manual labor from industry. But the real substance of the term reflected industry's desire to hide an intensification of human work--and labor's loss of power and protection--behind magnificent machinery and a starry-eyed faith in technological revolution. The rhetorical power of the automation ideology revealed and perpetuated a belief that the idea of freedom was incompatible with the activity of work. From there, political actors ruled out the workplace as a site of politics while some of labor's staunchest allies dismissed sped-up tasks, expanded workloads, and incipient deindustrialization in the name of technological progress. A forceful intellectual history, Labor's End challenges entrenched assumptions about automation's transformation of the American workplace.
Download or read book Forces of Labor written by Beverly J. Silver and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-04-21 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents
Download or read book Money Power and the People written by Christopher W. Shaw and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-09-05 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An “engaging and well-researched study [of] ordinary people who joined together to challenge financial institutions” (Choice). Banks and bankers are hardly the most beloved institutions and people in this country. With its corruptive influence on politics and stranglehold on the American economy, Wall Street is held in high regard by few outside the financial sector. But the pitchforks raised against this behemoth are largely rhetorical: We rarely see riots in the streets or public demands for an equitable and democratic banking system that result in serious national changes. Yet the situation was vastly different a century ago, as Christopher W. Shaw shows. This book upends the conventional thinking that financial policy in the early twentieth century was set primarily by the needs and demands of bankers. Shaw shows that banking and politics were directly shaped by the literal and symbolic investments of the grassroots. This engagement remade financial institutions and the national economy, through populist pressure and the establishment of federal regulatory programs and agencies like the Farm Credit System and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Shaw reveals the surprising groundswell behind seemingly arcane legislation, as well as the power of the people to demand serious political repercussions for the banks that caused the Great Depression. One result of this sustained interest and pressure was legislation and regulation that brought on a long period of relative financial stability, with a reduced frequency of economic booms and busts. Ironically, this stability led to the decline of the very banking politics that brought it about. Giving voice to a broad swath of American figures, including workers, farmers, politicians, and bankers alike, Money, Power, and the People recasts our understanding of what might be possible in balancing the needs of the people with those of their financial institutions.
Download or read book Workers Control and Socialist Democracy written by Carmen Sirianni and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent scholarship has rediscovered the genuinely mass character of the Bolshevik-led revolution that toppled Russian absolutism in 1917. In this major study, Carmen Sirianni undertakes a comprehensive study of the forms of popular power that emerged in the course of the struggle against Tsarist, and their destiny in the formative years of the new Soviet state. He successively discusses the factory committee movement, the attitudes of the trade unions and the left parties towards workers control, the unfolding of dual power, the tole of the peasantry, and the organization of labour and industry in the civil war. The developing theme of these chapters - the unsettled, often antagonistic relationship between working-class and peasant initiatives and demands and Bolshevik political and economic conceptions - is subjected to theoretical examination in the second part of the book. Here Sirianni analyses the particular constitution of Lenin's Marxism, and discerns in it a 'productivist evolutionism' which, he maintains, adversely affected the Bolsheviks' appreciation of working-class self-organization both in industry and in the exercise of political power, and vitiated their perception of the rural masses. Finally, Sirianni sets Russian policy and experience in its international context, considering the different, but also limited, views of Gramsci and Pannekoek, and the 'councilist' movements of Western Europe. He concludes with a reflection on the subsequent course of the revolutionary state and the options available to its leaders, as the defeat of the Left Opposition and then of Bukharin prepared the triumph of Stalinism. Workers Control and Socialist Democracy unites historical, political and theoretical judgement to make a fundamental contribution to our understanding, both of the Russian Revolution and of central unresolved issues of socialism in the twentieth century.
Download or read book Who Rules America Now written by G. William Domhoff and published by Touchstone. This book was released on 1986 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author is convinced that there is a ruling class in America today. He examines the American power structure as it has developed in the 1980s. He presents systematic, empirical evidence that a fixed group of privileged people dominates the American economy and government. The book demonstrates that an upper class comprising only one-half of one percent of the population occupies key positions within the corporate community. It shows how leaders within this "power elite" reach government and dominate it through processes of special-interest lobbying, policy planning and candidate selection. It is written not to promote any political ideology, but to analyze our society with accuracy.