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Through historical and anthropological inquiry, this paper addresses the issue of memory antagonisms involving cultural landscapes in the context of a former mining region: the Belgian Black Country. This region, which became increasingly industrialized in the 19th century through the massive development of coal mining and steel industry, subsequently experienced deindustrialization, and now finds itself mobilized in a process of 'post-industrial' mutation. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part, it examines how the landscapes inherited from industry, and in particular the slag heaps of the coalfield, have over time become repositories of a working-class memory, through the living and working practices of the communities surrounding the mines. It also documents the various representations attached to these landscape objects, whose contradictions echo the oppositions between capital and labor that have marked the development of industrial capitalism. The second part of the paper, which focuses on the present situation, examines how these representations are remobilized in the valorization processes that are initiated by different actors, in the context of a 'post-industrial' urban transition strategy that seeks to produce a unified and pacified historical narrative. We'll be looking at how historical conflicts still permeate the representations of these landscapes, the question of their conservation, and their possible future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between economic development and inequality has been closely examined by researchers. From the seminal work of Kuznets to the more recent work of Piketty, market forces in boom cycles, on the one hand, and institutional action, on the other, have been featured as the main drivers of change in income distribution towards more egalitarian societies. In the Spanish case, previous research has described varied processes with regard to the period of growth that followed the approval of the Stabilisation Plan during the Franco dictatorship (1959–1973). Thus, Alcaide reportedly detected a limited capacity of the developmentalist growth model to reduce inequality, which he attributed to institutional limitations. In contrast, later studies have highlighted the decline in inequality during the same period. This paper aims to investigate the effects of this growth cycle by examining the behaviour of wages in the most dynamic sector of the Spanish economy, industry. Specifically, by using the wage survey compiled by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, the paper nuances previous research and shows how despite explosive growth, the developmentalist model and the peculiar institutional framework built within the Franco dictatorship contributed to increasing wage dispersion and income inequality in most industrial sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes two major contributions: firstly, following on recent research, it offers a more detailed critical analysis of the historical role and structure of Employers' Associations (EAs), concentrating on a detailed analysis of the range of member services offered by a local Employers' Association within the Engineering Employers Federation (the EEF) during the 1970s. This focus is in contrast to the literature which has concentrated on the EAs national or 'central peak' level. It secondly addresses the 'countervailing power' hypothesis, and in so doing it illustrates the key roles of the disputes procedure. The study, as a typical or representative case, uses a qualitative methodology of documentary research combined with triangulation interviews of former officials: evidence which has so far not been prominent in the literature. This paper is, therefore, a significant addition to our understanding of these institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on something not previously addressed by the literature, labour inspection in Spain in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. Despite the Franco dictatorship's fascist-style approach of regulatory interventionism, this research shows a relapse into an abstentionist conception of labour inspection that led to worker vulnerability. The study has not only found, as was already known, normative similarities with the contemporaneous Italian and German dictatorships, but also similar (although more severe) limitations to the functioning of the inspection service. The slight improvement registered from 1947 onwards and the effort to achieve a limited equivalence with Western democracies also failed to notably improve working conditions, occupational safety and worker protection. The Labour Inspectorate suffered from understaffing and a lack of resources up to the very end of the dictatorship, something which the incipient democracy then inherited. These human and material resource shortages continue to be a problem and are currently debated in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We remain without an adequate understanding of the process through which militant dissent was managed, and marginalised, during the inter-war development of British industrial relations. The industrial cooperation conferences between trade unions and business associations during the late 1920s reduced industrial conflict and reinforced the state's strategies to avoid a crisis during the interwar years in Britain. The TUC's involvement in the cooperation talks helped to legitimise trade unionism in the view of the state and capital. Furthermore, in joining the industrial conversations, the TUC reinforced its strategy of side-lining industrial dissident organisations, notably the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM). Scholarship on industrial relations has inadequately grasped the relevance of the industrial cooperation talks in reducing industrial conflict and marginalising dissent during the interwar years in Britain. Using archival research and documentary analysis, this paper contributes to the literature on British industrial relations, highlighting the TUC's attitudes against the NUWM during the late 1920s. In doing so, it advances an Open Marxist account, emphasising the role of the state in seeking to oversee smooth processes of exchange, distribution and production, which in turn has an impact upon the operation of trade unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negotiations over wages have always been a central part of industrial relations in capitalist economies. The unstable value of money in the 19th and 20th centuries has made these negotiations both crucial and complex. Linking contemporary understandings of monetary values to wage bargaining provides an important historical background for a better understanding of real wage developments and the agency of workers. Adopting a comparative perspective, this paper discusses how managers and workers dealt with changing monetary values in Germany and the United States from the 1870s to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The paper also discusses the extent to which actors understood the instability of their respective currencies' purchasing power and whether their perceptions changed over time. The paper reveals that negotiations were never exclusively shaped and guided by concepts such as inflation or the 'cost of living' in both countries but that the importance of the concepts changed with the level of price fluctuations and institutional setting. Indices could achieve a dominant role only in exceptional circumstances due to their artificial and contestable nature, their neglect of the complexity of workers' job contexts and living environments, and their normative implications concerning wage demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has to date been no in-depth analysis of the way in which industrial relations practices - in particular labor agreements - diffuse vertically through an organization and horizontally through an economy. This is despite the titles of empirical research in this area. This process of diffusion however, is both an important and yet neglected area of theory. The theory of the diffusion of innovations can be applied to the empirical findings here and encompasses several previous studies: it thus enables a more thorough investigation of the way in which changes in industrial relations are promulgated both within and between organizations. This paper presents evidence of such a diffusion of innovation effect in the oil sector of the UK economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article questions the hypothesis, put forward by several historians and IR academics, that the 1980s decline in British union membership and strike frequency, was driven by major industrial defeats, a cultural shift away from collectivism, and the adverse effects of the Conservative Government's anti-union legislation. In contrast, this paper argues that international economic developments, most notably the globalisation of manufacturing production, along with the British Conservative Government's economic policies, which resulted in mass unemployment in heavily unionised areas of the economy, were the principal reasons for the declines in union membership and strike frequency during the 1980s. In support of this theory, my article draws upon extensive contemporaneous research, which I conducted when I worked in the Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick in the late 1980s. This research illustrates how strike frequency and union membership fell in the early and mid-1980s, before membership stabilized, and the frequency of strikes relative to the number of unionised workplaces increased, during the short-lived economic upturn of the late 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about the Urban Archives Center at California State University at Northridge, California. The Center was established in 1979 through the efforts of university faculty and concerned community organizations and leaders. The primary purpose of the Center has been to collect the historically significant records of voluntary associations and prominent citizens who have directed growth in Los Angeles County and influenced government and public thinking since the beginning of the 20th century. Major subject areas developed during the Center's first 10 years of operation include, trade, tourism, and urban development; education; minority and ethnic organizations; politics; social services; women of Los Angeles; and recreation, sports and leisure studies. The center sent out 800 questionnaires inquiring about materials being stored in union halls and administrative offices. The responses revealed the existence of a wealth of untapped historical documents as well as the willingness of many labor organizations to participate in an archival program.

This paper is a case study chronicling and analyzing the strategic considerations given to industrial relations in a proposal to upgrade and renew a major production unit in a UK oil refinery. The study is based on interviews and substantial internal documents provided by the case study managers. This represents a unique illustration as to the extent a company goes through in considering the way in which a major capital project needs to consider industrial relations issues before being considered acceptable to the Corporate-level audience and its decision-makers. In particular, the context is interesting - that of an American multinational taking up a national agreement from a process of sector-wide multi-employer bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departments of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations in Turkey have their roots in social policy education in the Turkish university system dating back to a pre-republican (1923) period. The social policy discipline, which was influenced by the German and in part by the French approaches during its establishment, has over time been exposed to intense Americanization efforts, which led to the creation of departments of Labour Economics and Industrial Relations. The paper analyses this transformation in two dimensions. The first dimension is related to the historical development of the institutionalization process. The second is that under whose influence was this institutionalization process shaped? It argues that Labour Economics and Industrial Relations as an academic discipline has come to be represented by two different traditions involving four generations of academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The flexibility inherent in temporary agency work allows employers to cut labour cost in a variety of ways. Recurring themes in the employment literature draw attention to the duality of the labour market rooted in type-of-contract segmentation. This duality in the labour market carries with it a number of undesirable consequences. Drawing on qualitative data from six case studies in Pakistan, this paper reports on an in-depth study of deceitful labour market intermediaries, through which employers attempt to bypass statutory obligations concerning workers' constitutional rights. A case study inquiry, based on qualitative interviews, suggested that the agencies were 'created' or 'arranged' to illustrate indirectness of employment relationship by misclassifying effectively permanent employees as 'agency workers'. The evidence points towards a growing trend for agencies to be, simply, a sham arrangement. This study broadens our comprehension about the nature of temporary agency employment and subsequent labour market duality in Pakistan, beyond the traditional functional model of legitimate labour market intermediaries. Precarious work in Pakistan, a large and growing economy, shares many features in common with the rest of the world. These findings offer useful policy and social implications for national and multinational companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents news briefs on labor history as of March 1994. Theme of the Commonwealth Fund Colloquium to be held at University College in London, England; Objective of the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars; Information on the membership meeting of the Michigan Labor History Society.

This paper gives an overview of the movement of people and money in the GCC countries. The Gulf region is the third most important migration region in the world. It also embraces top remittance sending countries. Historically, the demand for foreign labor was met from other Arab countries but has been steadily replaced by workers from South Asia. This change is clearly evident in the remittance flows in the region. The paper also discusses the causes and consequences of this modification in labor. In light of the latest political unrest in the MENA region, the topic is of great significance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the transformation of South African labor relations during the 1980s. In 1979, prompted by new shop-floor militancy, the Wiehahn Commission recommended that black workers, previously excluded from state labor machinery, be permitted to join recognized trade unions. Most discussions of this shift in apartheid labor relations focus on the ensuing debate within the black unions, torn between preserving their independence or securing state legitimation. This article looks instead at the related debate about 'levels of bargaining': should emergent black unions demand to negotiate at the factory level, where they had secured shop-floor strength through organizing and democratic practice, or pursue the benefits of the corporatist bargaining structures that had long excluded them and had privileged white workers? The eventual drift towards corporatism, I argue, imprinted the character of the South African labor movement into the post-apartheid era. An understandable desire to wield influence at the level of the national political economy eroded the tradition of workers' control, shop floor democracy, and struggle unionism that black unions had forged during the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using original documents, this paper describes and analyses the case study of one of the productivity bargaining agreements from a leading exponent of productivity bargaining, Mobil's Coryton Refinery. As well as being important in the UK oil industry these agreements spread throughout the economy. They resulted in major concessions by the unions to relax inter-craft and craft-production trade boundaries and to changes in work methods. These are illustrated in detail and placed in context. Such changes were heralded as 'new look industrial relations' and as such were based on a conception of joint regulation. However, other interpretations are possible, and these are then explored and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically the British Trades Union Congress's (TUC) role in a significant number of major industrial disputes has been subject to both accusations of 'betrayals' and 'sell-outs' as well as more sympathetic accounts which emphasise the constraints faced by the TUC both in terms of their institutional role and their relationship with constituent unions. Drawing on evidence concerning the role of the TUC in significant disputes including the 1926 General Strike, the strike wave of 1972, 1975–8 Grunwick dispute, the 1978/9 'winter of discontent', the 1984/5 miners' strike, the 1986–7 News International strike and more recent examples, the paper highlights four constraints on the role of the TUC in relation to major disputes: their political loyalty to the Labour Party; an aversion to defying the law; the avoidance of appearing to challenge state power; and structural constraints to an extent inherent within trade union officialdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to analyze the role of American trade unionism during the Brazilian dictatorship examining the activities of American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD). It will pay particular attention to the political repression and anti-labor policy conducted by the dictator Emílio Garrastazu Médici (1969–74). The examination of the U.S. labor policy in Brazil during the heydays of the cold war in Latin America is an interesting case study of the contradictions and paradoxes of the AFL-CIO and American international relations during that period, as well as a stimulating example of transnational trade union and international solidarity relations during this period. The paper investigates how AIFLD reacted to human rights violations perpetrated by the Médici regime, highlighting the fine line between American international labor solidarity and foreign intervention during the cold war period. As a final point, the paper analyzes the workers’ resistance to the dictatorial regime, as well as the U.S. interpretation of the Brazilian labor movement in this context of repression and human rights violations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an introduction to the journal CIO. The author wishes to thank various archivists and historians for their assistance in preparing archives of different papers in the journal. The single most significant recent publication affecting CIO historiography features the industrial union federation in only a cameo role. Researcher Gary Gerstie's article "Working-Class Americanism" brings together insights drawn from the ethno-cultural, workers' control and new institutional perspectives. On one level, Gerstie treats in sympathetic detail, lives and experiences of French-Canadian and Belgian-American textile workers in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who created a militant, democratic and effective independent industrial union in the 1930s and 1940s. In important respects, Gerstie acknowledges, their experience was singular. The production of woolen textiles depended heavily on unique skills that gave mulespinners a degree of worker control, which they readily translated into shop floor and community power, unusual in an age of semiskilled labor. The other major development in writing about the CIO era in recent years involves expansion of the new institutional analysis of the New Deal-World War II era's legal-administrative labor relations structures.

When violence broke out in the strike-ridden coalfields of Colorado in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson was called upon to send federal troops into the State. Wilson had already made several attempts to bring about a settlement and was now faced with a decision fraught with political implications. The role Wilson played in the strike — the story of his critical decision to use federal troops — is less well known. In the spring of 1914, Wilson had problems enough on the international scene. Tension was mounting in Europe and, more immediately, the incident in Mexico had reached proportions of an inter-American crisis. Then, in April, violence flared up in Colorado, and Wilson ordered federal troops to occupy part of that State. Understanding the decision behind this movement is important in understanding Wilson's attitude toward the presidency. The situation in Colorado had not developed suddenly. The State had earlier been the site of serious labor disturbances in the mineral industry and these disturbances left a legacy that would intensify emotions of Colorado's citizens when the 1913 strike began.

In the decade following World War I the anthracite coal industry of Pennsylvania found its domination of the domestic fuel market in the eastern U.S. under serious challenge. The emergence of intense competition from oil, gas, electricity and soft coal threatened to destroy the entire hard-coal business. Under these circumstances the anthracite industry could ill afford to indulge itself in bitter labor disputes. Strikes only created a vacuum for the new substitute fuels to fill. Indeed, short work stoppages in 1920 and 1923 and a hundred-and-sixty-three day strike in 1922 put the hard-coal industry on the brink of extinction. Yet it was impossible to conclude that another anthracite strike might be avoided in 1925. The identical problems, which caused the previous strikes, persisted. At the contract negotiations in July 1925 representatives of the anthracite operators and the United Mine Workers of America reached an impasse from the outset. The union demanded a 10 percent wage increase while the operators claimed that, to save the industry, a reduction of wages was mandatory.

This paper is a case study chronicling and analyzing the strategic considerations given to industrial relations in a proposal to develop a coherent and deliberate strategy for industrial relations by the U.K. subsidiary of an American multinational oil company. The study is based on interviews and substantial internal documents provided by the case study managers. This represents a unique illustration as to the extent a major company goes through in considering the way in which it needs to consider industrial relations issues. Seldom has a document such as this been able to be analyzed by industrial relations researchers, and it illustrates the lack of strategic thinking, even in such a large sophisticated organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of regulation is central to industrial relations. Deregulation, re-regulation and the transfer of regulatory responsibilities have characterised five decades of reform projects. The concepts of ‘negotiated’ change and ‘colonisation’ are engaged as ways of understanding key moments of regulatory change in UK industrial relations since the 1960s. The stigmatising and undermining of trade unionism has been a key theme in modern British industrial relations. This paper explores five features of the way in which the regulatory spaces of industrial relations were colonised once the project of formalisation failed: strategies of marginalisation, strategies of containment, strategies of voice and legitimacy, the development of new expert knowledge and the rise of new actors and boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the 1970s, governments around the world have been engaged in a conflict over the appropriate role of public services in society. In the U.S. and elsewhere, public services have faced pressures to restructure, reduce the size of government, and make government more ‘business-like.’ This paper examines how the evolution of public services and public sector unions shaped the distinctive character of public sector industrial relations in the U.S. Next it demonstrates how this distinctive character made public services and public sector unions vulnerable to neoliberal attacks and New Public Management reforms. It concludes by theorizing about how the frameworks of citizenship at work and union renewal may be used to strengthen the essential identity and restore the positive role that public sector unions have traditionally played in society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Whitley Reports, 1917–1918 were seen by contemporaries as conservative: they reflected pre-existing voluntaristic approaches to the labour problem rather than a radical departure. Largely neglected by the well-established private sector, for whom they were intended, Whitley Councils were taken up by the newly emerging public service unions. The interwar years demonstrated Whitleyism’s lack of clout. But, endorsed by governments during and after the Second World War, public sector Whitleyism came to embody the tenets of progressive public administration by providing nationally determined pay, career progression and a public service ethos. These hard-won union gains are under attack from neoliberal reforms that attempt to model public service labour relations on the private sector. The paper examines the major weaknesses and strengths of the Whitley model for managing public service industrial relations through an analysis of a century of Whitleyism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper I first detail some of the geographical concepts that help us make sense of capitalism's spatiality. I then provide several brief vignettes which illustrate how conflicts over how capitalism's geography is made can be central to disputes both between and within groups of workers and capitalists. The paper's purpose is to argue that understanding how social life is geographically structured can add important insights to explaining economic and political praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Presents an update on issues concerning labor history in the U.S. as of January 1993. Overview of the 1993 Lowell Conference on Industrial History; Information on several conferences on labor studies and industrial relations; Establishment of a working group to focus on labor movements and free trade.

This paper seeks to explain the development of capitalism in Eritrea and Kenya from a labour history perspective. Indeed, the assumption in this research is that capitalism can only be explained by taking into consideration free wage labour as one of the sine qua non conditions for the existence of the capitalist mode of production. Therefore, the article looks at the paradigmatic socio-economic shifts: from unfree to free labour, from free to precarious labour and from unfree to precarious labour. These are the result of the complicated relationship that exists between capital and labour. The point of departure of the analysis is the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis on the structural origins of slavery, which despite severe criticism, it has been largely remained unchallenged until the present. In Eritrea, colonised by Italy, and Kenya, colonised by England, free wage labour fully developed between the nineteenth and twentieth century. This could be considered the era of the advent of capitalism, with the advent, for a fraction of the working population, of labour relations based on wages. The precarisation of life of free wage workers is also partially analysed in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1923, leaders of the American steel industry agreed to end the twelve-hour working day, a subject of public dispute for some fifteen years. Though under intense pressure from President Watren Harding and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, industry might not have conceded were it not for a small band of reformers, most of them connected in one way or another with Survey magazine. These reformers — not workers — first made the twelve-hour day an issue, though it became a rallying point for the steel unions in 1919. They defined the terms of attack. These rolling and finishing plants had to reheat the metal and working hours in these plants often became organized around a specific number of heats. This in turn led to working hours of from anywhere between eight and fourteen a day. Late nineteenth-century technological advances led to integration of the steps of steelmaking. Companies began building plants that had both blast furnaces and the finishing mills on the same premises.

The paper presents preliminary findings of qualitative research, case study based, on the organization and collective mobilization of two groups of precarious workers in the city of Buenos Aires. Contrary to research that looks at trade unions’ institutional strategies for organizing precarious workers and at workers’ responses to these, the article starts with a bottom-up approach centred on workers’ self-activity. This helps to show empirically how a complex net of structural and contextual factors, which includes the spatial organization of the labour process, the institutional and legal framework and the socio-political context, creates material circumstances that generate processes of workers’ association. This approach is rooted in long-standing theoretical debates about the structuring of workers’ collective interests and action and helps to ground debates on the perspectives of precarious workers’ organization within the context of currently and locally existing capitalist relations rather than in more abstracted trade unions’ strategies and responses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Well known is that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) in the United States places a largely per se ban on nonunion employee representation (ER) groups which deal with employers over a term or condition of employment. Much less well known is that America’s other labor law, the Railway Labor Act (RLA, 1926), takes a different approach and permits employers to operate such councils and committees as long as they do not perform a collective bargaining function or interfere with workers’ free choice of a bargaining agent. Thus, under the RLA Delta Air Lines is able to operate what is today the closest living approximation to a 1920s-style ER plan while hundreds of other companies (e.g. Polaroid) under the jurisdiction of the NLRA have been forced over the years to disband similar groups on grounds they are a proscribed company union. No study to date has explored the history behind the RLA and NLRA’s divergent treatment of nonunion ER groups so this article takes a first look. The main part of the story covers the 1920–1935 period and examines the events, people, and experiences associated with company unions and ER in, respectively, the rail and manufacturing industries and why the legislative outcome in the former was a permissive stance on nonunion committees but prohibitive in the latter. The last part of the paper fast-forwards the RLA-NLRA story from the 1930s to contemporary law and practice in order to demonstrate how “history matters” when it comes to what employers can and cannot do with nonunion representation groups, such as works councils, participation and involvement committees, and dispute resolution forums. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on a case study of Brazil, this paper explores the extent to which and how International Labour Organisation's (ILO) freedom of association norms, supervision and promotion affect domestic provisions for workers' associational power. In terms of its legislative, judiciary and executive dimensions, ILO illustrate key challenges of a ‘soft law’ regime; indeed, it has allowed successive Brazilian governments to escape key freedom of association obligations. I detail what this means for workers in agriculture: crucially, Brazil's non-standard provisions for associational power exacerbate, rather than countervail, labour's structural disadvantages vis-à-vis capital. ILO norms have nevertheless been of great political significance. They sat at the heart of the discourse through which oppositional labour framed repressive labour–state relations during the late 1970s and 1980s. However, in the context of neoliberal globalisation, the meanings that Brazilian labour inscribed in these norms saw ‘rightwards’ slide, while the political connotations of the previously discredited corporatism slid in the opposite direction. Eventually, labour failed to support Lula's attempt, during the 2000s, to align Brazil's labour relations system with ILO's standards. Still, the deep historical identification of Brazil's left with ILO norms has, in combination with ILO's regularly issued denunciations and recent domestic ‘decent work’ promotion, helped a certain permutation of legal and political practice. The case suggests that the force of ILO is highly contingent on particular structural conjunctures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article concerns a case study in labor history which represents an interesting example of union action in a workers' community characterized by intersections between ethnic and class belonging. The focus of the article is on labor conflicts in Toronto's construction industry between 1968 and 1973. In that period, the Torontonian residential sector represented a sort of ethnic niche dominated by Italian immigrants, who populated this industry both as workers and as contractors. At the same time, important economic, technological, and organizational innovations formed part of this niche. In particular, it refers to the new Toronto real estate boom and to the introduction of new building techniques such as the drywall technique, or concrete forming, as well as business innovations such as the flying form or the creation of teamwork. This article tells the story of successful unionization in a peculiar industry dominated by continuous formal and informal bargaining. Moreover, the powerful presence of the phenomenon of mafiosi and widespread racism made the context still more difficult. In this situation, despite the ambiguities, the final result was the unionization of thousands of workers and the successful signing of collective contracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence of the global economic crises of the 1970s, in Australia, micro-economic reform of the economy, and in particular the labour market, was seen as a key catalyst in providing a more competitive industrial base for the country. Underpinning this was a fundamental change in the conflictual industrial relations structure that had framed work patterns and practices since Federation. The Williamstown Naval Dockyard in Melbourne was the Australian Federal Government's premier dockyard. It had a long-standing reputation for poor productivity, inefficient work practices and industrial unrest and had been described as Australia's worst worksite. After several failed attempts to reform the dockyard, the Federal Government privatised this utility as a catalyst to reform the work culture. On 1 January 1988, the dockyard was transferred to the highly competitive private shipbuilding sector. As the first public utility sold by an Australian Federal Government and the first workplace to adopt micro-economic labour reforms, including enterprise bargaining, the dockyard provides an opportunity to examine the nature of workplace restructuring in the most radical time of change for labour and trade unions in Australia's history. The dockyard was seen at the time as at the vanguard of this change. This paper explores the reforms undertaken in the dockyard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we explore the development of Spanish industrial relations institutions in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This period witnessed a change from a semifascist dictatorship toward a democratic regime as well as from economic growth to a deep economic recession. In spite of these transformations, we evidence remarkable continuity in the corporatist industrial relations institutions created in the last years of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. The analysis of collective bargaining practices in two regions with different trade union traditions and industrial configurations shows how the experience of Comités Paritarios (joint committees) initiated in 1926 had lasting institutional effects. This contrasts with the views expressed by some authors, as well as accepted wisdom according to which state corporatism is necessarily rhetorical and accounts for little more than a mechanism to disarm the labor movement. Based on a historiographic analysis and a previously unexploited source, we provide further support to the view that Primo de Rivera contributed significantly to the modernization of labor relations in Spain. Collective bargaining expanded significantly during this period, and the joint committees system was an institutional innovation that persisted, with minor changes, during the Second Republic, until 1935. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents announcements related to various events. The Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration and the Newcomen Society announce a postdoctoral fellowship in business history in the amount of $13,000 to be awarded for twelve months' residence, study, and research at the Harvard Business School during 1976-77; The Mid-Atlantic Radical Historians Organization is currently planning its third Spring Conference, to be held sometime in March or April 1976 in New York City; University of Michingan researchers at the Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations want to interview some 50 women from different parts of the country who have been leaders and activists in the trade union movement. Their experiences will be recorded as part of a one-year oral history project, "The Twentieth Century Trade Union Woman: Vehicle for Social Change," funded by the Rockefeller Foundation; The National Archives has announced that its Machine Readable Records Division has acquired from the Department of Labor's Manpower Administration an updated version of the National Longitudinal Surveys, originated to determine the socio-economic characteristics of the labor force, and changes in activity and attitudes.

The development of industrial relations in China is moving into a critical period in which capitalism has become the dominant form of social organization. Official unions have sought to adapt to the changing environment through a range of initiatives through each level of their organizational structure. This paper explores the inherent problem in official unions by examining a period at the end of the 1990s when decline in the traditional organizing base was addressed by significant innovations in organizing methods and establishment of new forms of unions. Although many new unions were simply fictitious, unionization has increased. Nevertheless, owing to problems in the method of establishing unions, most notably the absence of worker involvement, unions are extremely weak. When the opportunity to reform arose, official unions lacked interest in initiating genuine representation, and in consequence have become increasingly irrelevant to China's unfolding industrial relations system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the last notable period of working-class unrest in Britain and America, the 1968-74 'upsurge.' It questions the widespread dismissal of such workplace-based, 'economistic' forms of resistance as disconnected from more explicitly political forms of rebellion. The explosive, dynamic character of the rebellion is argued to have contained both the potential and actuality of a transformed consciousness and thus fundamental questioning of existing political and economic relations. The loss of 'what might have been' is attributed less to absence of a grand political narrative, despite the ruling-class panic of 1974, than to a simple failure to build cross-class networks which could have achieved the coordination and unity of often separate struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the close intellectual kinship between the academic field of industrial relations and the labor institutionalism of the Wisconsin School, their historical evolution over the twentieth century, and the reasons for the marked decline in the academic fortunes of industrial relations in recent years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the New York police's control of strikes as an important development in the changing role of the state in labor relations. Claims by police historians that state police was created as an element of working class repression; State police's replacement of the military in handling strikes; Decentralization of authority to call out the New York Guard during strikes.

Presents an update on issues and events related to labor history in the U.S. as of September 1993. Conferences; Grants and fellowships; Library materials made available to the U.S. public.

This article expounds on the political power and influence held by railroad unions in the U.S. during the 1900s. Several historians have noted that 16 railroad unions and, in particular, the four operating Brotherhoods came to enjoy considerable power during the 1920s. It is well know that in 1916, the four operating unions succeeded in winning the eight-hour day, thanks partly to the intervention of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, and in gratitude they campaigned vigorously for his re-election. It was during the war, however, that the rail workers really reaped the benefits of what they considered their political influence. The nationalization of the railroads allowed the unions to achieve a high degree of unity and to establish themselves as representatives of all railroad workers. During the war, they secured collective bargaining and satisfactory machinery for settling grievances while winning improved working conditions and large wage increases. As a result, the shop-craft union made great gains in membership, becoming powerful organizations for the first time, and the operating Brotherhoods made striking gains. When the war ended, the rail unions had a tradition of working together at the national level and were also confident that life would continue to improve at the same pace.

Confederación de Sindicatos Unitarios de Trabajadores (CSUT, Confederation of Unitary Workers' Unions) and Sindicato Unitario (SU, Unitary Union) were two unions promoted by the largest Maoists parties in the Spain of 1970s: Partido del Trabajo de España (PTE, Labor Party of Spain) and the Organizacion Revolucionaria de Trabajadores (ORT, Workers' Revolutionary Organisation), respectively. Both trade unions, if they had been presented together, would have been the third trade union force in Spain during the Transition to democracy. The following text presents two parts: In the first, a general approach to unitary unionism is set out, in order to understand its emergence, development, difficulties and disappearance. Through this text we will try to understand the unitary and assembly-based proposal of CSUT and SU in its context, considering the dynamics of the labor movement in the previous years, the change of cycle of the struggle of the revolutionary left, the transformations that were taking place in labor relations and the labor movement in the late 1970s. In the second part, however, we will focus on a specific case, that of Navarre, the region where these unions obtained the best results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the special issue on topics including public service industrial relations, career progression and public service ethos, and the weaknesses and strengths of the Whitley model for managing public services.

The Robe River dispute of 1986-7 was the anti-union New Right's first attempt to defeat union power at a large workforce in Australia. This occurred during an industrial relations period of 'cooperation' between unions, employers and government under Australia's social contract – the Accord. The dispute was also the first successful attack of its kind in Western Australia's highly strike-prone Pilbara iron ore industry. Despite its subsequent victory, Robe River management was in a weak position during the dispute, and successful industrial action was a viable prospect. Unionists at the Robe River company were the most militant in the industry. Yet after a six-month dispute, union power was no longer. This article argues union officials' strategy of avoiding industrial action at all costs led to defeat. This strategy was adopted in the context of firstly, the social contract promising peace between unions and employers, secondly, the Pilbara industrial relations environment of strong localised grassroots networks of union power, conflict with metropolitan-based union officials, and worker encroachment on managerial prerogative, and thirdly, the contingent conservatism of the trade union bureaucracy. Union power in the Pilbara had underlying political weaknesses, meaning that an alternative strategy to that adopted by the union bureaucracy did not win out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour unrest in the United Kingdom during the Second World War was concentrated within the coal industry that accounted for around half of all strikes. This article proposes that institutional industrial relations within this regionally constituted industry should be analysed through a regional lens, as opposed to a national approach. It uses a case study of the south Wales coalfield to examine how the regional union and employers' association interacted with each other and the state to govern industrial relations. It makes two arguments. One is that war transformed their relative power given the need to produce sufficient coal to fuel the war economy. The South Wales Miners Federation gained influence as it offered co-operation to boost production, but the Monmouthshire and South Wales Coalowners Association lost agency as it sought unsuccessfully to maintain pre-war approaches, while ongoing crises forced the government to accelerate interventions. The other is that these shifts enabled regional unions to outflank owners and co-opt the state to achieve their goals within industrial relations; the recreation of national bargaining machinery and obtaining higher wages. Although unions could not secure nationalization, the war ended with a consensus that the ownership status quo was untenable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the period of the mid-2000s to 2015, in response to increasing labour disputes and workers' grievances, China initiated a series of regulatory reforms to promote collective labour relations and enhance workers' rights. Surprisingly, these reforms were not as successful in limiting the increase in labour disputes as anticipated. To understand this puzzle, the current study goes beyond existing state-union dominated explanations for the problems in Chinese labour relations by examining Chinese managers' perceptions and behaviour towards trade unions and workplace power-sharing over the years 2009–2014. The qualitative data collected from 21 firms revealed that managers viewed workplace trade unions as submissive assistants, dominated workplace employment decisions, and were not committed to power sharing. This evidence is consistent with the Chinese labour relations literature developed up to the mid-2000s, indicating unchanged managers' beliefs, attitudes and behaviour in this regard. Drawing on cultural lag theory, this article argues that there exists an authoritarian cultural lag in China's labour relations system, with managers still managing with their long-established authoritarian mode of thinking and acting against pro-labour changes in the macro environment. The concept of authoritarian cultural lag can assist in understanding why macro level pro-labour reforms have encountered difficulties in improving labour protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the historiography of the American labor movement, the 1920s have long been characterized as ‘lean years’. Historians have identified many explanations for this decline, but they have not fully accounted for the role of ‘public’ or ‘middle class’ anti-labor sentiment. Opportunistic employers appealed to growing middle-class consumer discontent, set in motion by the mounting ‘high cost of living’, to build support for crippling unions during the immediate post-World War I period. Using Chicago as an example, this essay emphasizes the relationship between employers and the white-collar ‘middle class’ as an important factor in explaining the origins of the lean years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the engineers, open-shoppers, Americanizers, and propagandists in Worcester, Massachusetts in the first quarter of the 20th century. Engineers, open shoppers, and Americanizers made it through World War I without confronting any major domestic interruptions, but industrial peace and patriotic generosity did not last. Open-shoppers undoubtedly demonstrated inflexibility during industrial conflicts, but they claimed that they treated honest and industrious workers with matchless warmth, which was ostensibly reciprocated. Indeed, members and non-members of the National Metal Trades Association realized the usefulness of non-combative methods. Engineers approached the overall question of management and welfare work with great seriousness, believing it was of paramount importance to maintain a shop atmosphere free from all harassing and hindering influences. In their view, the most unsettling influences were political ideologies that questioned the legitimacy of free market capitalism and private property, and employers spoke out sharply against socialism. The National Metal Trades Association publicity committee gave their full approval to Americanization programs, propagandizing that they were better than what was taught in the Worcester public schools: the public schools spread the gospel of unrest and discord. Classroom instruction was only part of the Americanization process; employers also encouraged workers to display their unconditional commitment to the country by marching in colorful parades and by participating in fundraising activities.

The Dual Labour Market theory suggests that in collective bargaining, the perceived threat of outsiders leads to a more beneficial outcome for insiders, while the outsiders are further marginalized. The history of part-time employment in the Dutch labour market suggests a different path. After female labour force participation started to increase in the 1970s, the Netherlands witnessed a growing divide between core workers with a 'standard employment relationship', who were mostly male breadwinners, and part-time working women who were often underpaid and had little protection against dismissal and other social risks. Flexible part-time jobs, however, were not just desired by women who aspired to combine work and care, these jobs also fitted the needs of certain businesses, particularly in the retail sector. To prevent low wage competition between retail companies, unions in the retail sector started to demand equal treatment between part-time and full-time employees. To mitigate the burden of more expensive part-time jobs, however, several organizations promoted high-quality part-time work across the sectors so that part-time workers would not crowd in one sector. Eventually, this programme was meant to contribute to making voluntary part-time work a legitimate and fully fledged option in the Dutch labour market [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]