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Work Under Capitalism (New Perspectives In Sociology Ser.)
by Chris TillyWork Under Capitalism synthesizes recent institutionalist and Marxist ideas about the organization of production, situating production within a social context. Starting with the transaction rather than the individual, it builds upon a coherent theory and applies it to a wide range of experience, from household labour to transformations of health c
Work, Welfare and Taxation: A Study of Labour Supply Incentives in the UK (Routledge Library Editions: Labour Economics #4)
by Michael BeenstockFirst published in 1987. The reform of the welfare state in the United Kingdom is high on the agenda of all political parties and the proposals for reform, both official and private, are numerous. In this book, Professor Beenstock and his colleagues took a comprehensive account of the social security of the 1980s, as well as the tax system, as it had evolved over the Beveridge era and how it affected our incentive to work. The book describes the theory of labour supply decisions in their relationship to the tax benefit system. It illustrates how tax and social security arrangements affected labour supply decisions as well as monitoring how these decisions had evolved over the post-war period. It also considers retirement decisions in the UK as well as the government’s plans to reform the social security system.
Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism
by Phil JonesAn accessible analysis of the new forms of work whose seismic changes will increasingly determine the future of capitalismAutomation and the decline in industrial employment have lead to rising fears of a workless future. But what happens when your work itself is the thing that will make your job obsolete?In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker - have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital ecomomy. But what happens to work when it makes itself obsolete. In this stimulating work that blends political economy, studies of contemporary work, and speculations on the future of capitalism, Phil Jones looks at what this often murky and hidden form of labour looks like, and what it says about the state of global capitalism.
Workaway: The Human Costs of Europe’s Common Labour Market
by Jonathon W. MosesThis agenda-setting book shows how freedom of movement has made the integration of Europe’s labour markets a contentious issue, for example in the aftermath of the eurocrisis, where workers had to make great sacrifices to enable the currency area to function. It argues that the process of market integration in Europe has undermined the power and influence of European workers and generated significant human costs. In starting from the position of labour, this book offers an alternative approach which balances the needs of justice and efficiency. With appeal across a wide range of readers interested in economic integration, it provides lessons for policymakers in how to integrate Europe’s member states to better protect workers and citizens.
Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work Is Killing the American Dream
by Jamie K McCallumAn award-winning sociologist reveals the unexpected link between overwork and inequality.Most Americans work too long and too hard, while others lack consistency in their hours and schedules. Work hours declined for a century through hard-fought labor-movement victories, but they've increased significantly since the seventies. Worked Over traces the varied reasons why our lives became tethered to a new rhythm of work, and describes how we might gain a greater say over our labor time -- and build a more just society in the process.Popular discussions typically focus on overworked professionals. But as Jamie K. McCallum demonstrates, from Amazon warehouses to Rust Belt factories to California's gig economy, it's the hours of low-wage workers that are the most volatile and precarious -- and the most subject to crises. What's needed is not individual solutions but collective struggle, and throughout Worked Over McCallum recounts the inspiring stories of those battling today's capitalism to win back control of their time.
The Worker: Dominion and Form
by Ernst Jünger Bogdan Costea Laurence Paul HemmingWritten in 1932, just before the fall of the Weimar Republic and on the eve of the Nazi accession to power, Ernst Jünger's The Worker: Dominion and Form articulates a trenchant critique of bourgeois liberalism and seeks to identify the form characteristic of the modern age. Jünger's analyses, written in critical dialogue with Marx, are inspired by a profound intuition of the movement of history and an insightful interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy. Martin Heidegger considered Jünger "the only genuine follower of Nietzsche," singularly providing "an interpretation which took shape in the domain of that metaphysics which already determines our epoch, even against our knowledge; this metaphysics is Nietzsche's doctrine of the 'will to power.'" In The Worker, Jünger examines some of the defining questions of that epoch: the nature of individuality, society, and the state; morality, justice, and law; and the relationships between freedom and power and between technology and nature. This work, appearing in its entirety in English translation for the first time, is an important contribution to debates on work, technology, and politics by one of the most controversial German intellectuals of the twentieth century. Not merely of historical interest, The Worker carries a vital message for contemporary debates about world economy, political stability, and equality in our own age, one marked by unsettling parallels to the 1930s.
Worker Activism After Successful Union Organizing
by Linda MarkowitzShows how different levels of worker participation during a union organizing campaign influence the perceptions and actions of those same workers after the campaign ends, and, thereby, the long-term effectiveness and success of the organizing effort. Drawing on historical and current examples, the author analyzes the political and economic contexts within which today's unions are organizing, including a detailed examination of the impact of the Wagner Act.
The Worker Center Handbook: A Practical Guide for Starting and Building the New Labor Movement
by Kim Bobo Marien Casillas PabellonWorker centers are becoming an important element in labor and community organizing and the struggle for fair pay and decent working conditions for low-wage workers, especially immigrants. There are currently more than two hundred worker centers in the country, and more start every month. Most of these centers struggle as they try to raise funds, maintain stable staff, and build a membership base. For this book, Kim Bobo and Marién Casillas Pabellón, two women with extensive experience supporting and leading worker centers, have interviewed staff at a broad range of worker centers with the goal of helping others understand how to start and build their organizations. This book is not theoretical, but rather is designed to be a practical workbook for staff, boards, and supporters of worker centers.Geared toward groups that want to build worker centers, this book discusses how to survey the community, take on an initial campaign, recruit leaders, and raise seed funds. Bobo and Casillas Pabellón also provide a wealth of advice to help existing centers become stronger and more effective. The Worker Center Handbook compiles best practices from around the country on partnering with labor, enlisting the assistance of faith communities and lawyers, raising funds, developing a serious membership program, integrating civic engagement work, and running major campaigns. The authors urge center leaders to both organize and build strong administrative systems. Full of concrete examples from worker centers around the country, the handbook is practical and honest about challenges and opportunities.
Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream
by Janice FineLow-wage workers in the United States face obstacles including racial and ethnic discrimination, a pervasive lack of wage enforcement, misclassification of their employment, and for some, their status as undocumented immigrants. In the past, political parties, unions, and fraternal and mutual-aid societies served as important vehicles for workers who hoped to achieve political and economic integration. As these traditional civic institutions have weakened, low-wage workers must seek new structures for mutual support. Worker centers are among the institutions to which workers turn as they strive to build vibrant communities and attain economic and political visibility. Community-based worker centers help low-wage workers gain access to social services; advocate for their own civil and human rights; and organize to improve wages, working conditions, neighborhoods, and public schools. In this pathbreaking book, Janice Fine identifies 137 worker centers in more than eighty cities, suburbs, and rural areas in thirty-one states. These centers, which attract workers in industries that are difficult to organize, have emerged as especially useful components of any program intended to assist immigrants and low-wage workers of color. Worker centers serve not only as organizing laboratories but also as places where immigrants and other low-wage workers can participate in civil society, tell their stories to the larger community, resist racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and work to improve their political and economic standing.
Worker Cooperatives in India
by Timothy Kerswell Surendra PratapThis book discusses the experiences of cooperative enterprises in India that have been operated by or influenced to a significant extent by trade unions. It describes the origins of these movements in India presenting a political-strategic view of their development and, in some cases, their decline. The book also presents case studies of groundbreaking social experiments conducted in India in which trade unions have formed cooperatives for production and service provision for the working class movement. It also offers lessons learned from previous social experiments and explains how to use them for future strategies in the working class movement by using primary research undertaken on trade union cooperatives in India. With globalization often given as a reason for the decline of trade unions and transformative social movements, this book demonstrates that where movements declined it was due to their own internal weaknesses, while presenting successful case studies of movements which have shown resilience in the face of globalization. The book also gives an extensive criticism of India’s Self Employed Women’s Association as a model of a depoliticized trade union cooperative. The main lesson of this book is that cooperatives represent a viable strategy to build working class power in the 21st century in India, and elsewhere.
Worker Safety Under Siege: Labor, Capital, and the Politics of Workplace Safety in a Deregulated World
by Vernon MogensenThis eye-opening book shows how the rights of workers to safe and healthful workplaces are under greater attack today than at any time since the passage of the landmark Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970. This collection is organized around three thematic issues that pose significant challenges to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's ability to protect workers' safety and health. First, the economy has shifted from an industrial base to a white collar/service base, which includes more women workers than ever before - yet many of the safety and health problems that affect women are not being adequately addressed. Second, free market ideology and globalization have served to undermine worker safety and health laws. And finally, the effects of 9/11 have exacerbated the trend toward weakening workers' rights and safety standards in the name of national security.
Workers against the City: The Fight for Free Speech in Hague v. CIO (Working Class in American History)
by Donald W. RogersThe 1939 Supreme Court decision Hague v. CIO was a constitutional milestone that strengthened the right of Americans, including labor organizers, to assemble and speak in public places. Donald W. Rogers eschews the prevailing view of the case as a morality play pitting Jersey City, New Jersey, political boss Frank Hague against the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and allied civil libertarian groups. Instead, he draws on a wide range of archives and evidence to re-evaluate Hague v. CIO from the ground up. Rogers's review of the case from district court to the Supreme Court illuminates the trial proceedings and provides perspectives from both sides. As he shows, the economic, political, and legal restructuring of the 1930s refined constitutional rights as much as the court case did. The final decision also revealed that assembly and speech rights change according to how judges and lawmakers act within the circumstances of a given moment. Clear-eyed and comprehensive, Workers against the City revises the view of a milestone case that continues to impact Americans' constitutional rights today.
Workers and Capital
by Mario TrontiThe classic text of Italian workerism available in English for the first time.Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-parliamentary Left in Italy and beyond. In the decade after its first publication in 1966, the debates over Workers and Capital produced new methods of analysis and a new vocabulary for thousands of militants, helping to inform the new forms of workplace, youth and community struggles. Concepts like 'neocapitalism', 'class composition', 'mass-worker', 'the plan of capital', 'workers' inquiry' and 'co-research' became an established part of the Italian Left's political lexicon. Over five decades since it was first published, Workers and Capital has been a key text in the history of the international workers' movement, yet only now appears in English translation for the first time. Far from simply an artefact of the intense political conflicts of the 1960s, Tronti's work offers extraordinary tools for understanding the powerful shifts in the nature of work and class composition in recent decades.
Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics)
by Manfred ElfstromStrikes, protests, and riots by Chinese workers have been rising over the past decade. The state has addressed a number of grievances, yet has also come down increasingly hard on civil society groups pushing for reform. Why are these two seemingly clashing developments occurring simultaneously? Manfred Elfstrom uses extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis to examine both the causes and consequences of protest. The book adopts a holistic approach, encompassing national trends in worker–state relations, local policymaking processes and the dilemmas of individual officials and activists. Instead of taking sides in the old debate over whether non-democracies like China's are on the verge of collapse or have instead found ways of maintaining their power indefinitely, it explores the daily evolution of autocratic rule. While providing a uniquely comprehensive picture of change in China, this important study proposes a new model of bottom-up change within authoritarian systems more generally.
Workers and Trade Unions for Climate Solidarity: Tackling climate change in a neoliberal world (Routledge Studies in Climate, Work and Society)
by Paul HamptonThis book is a theoretically rich and empirically grounded account of UK trade union engagement with climate change over the last three decades. It offers a rigorous critique of the mainstream neoliberal and ecological modernisation approaches, extending the concepts of Marxist social and employment relations theory to the climate realm. The book applies insights from employment relations to the political economy of climate change, developing a model for understanding trade union behaviour over climate matters. The strong interdisciplinary approach draws together lessons from both physical and social science, providing an original empirical investigation into the climate politics of the UK trade union movement from high level officials down to workplace climate representatives, from issues of climate jobs to workers’ climate action. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in environmental politics, climate change and environmental sociology.
Workers' Democracy in China's Transition from State Socialism (East Asia: History, Politics, Sociology and Culture)
by Stephen E. PhilionThis fascinating book is among the first to examine state workers’ protests against privatization in China. Philion discusses how Chinese state enterprise workers have engaged a discourse of ‘workers democracy’ in the process of struggle with the new social relations of work that are engendered by privatization oriented policies in China today. By the 1990s, this discourse was being deployed by the state in an effort to minimize the social obligations of the Party and enterprise to state workers and to win the latter over to faith in markets. Philion reveals that Chinese workers have recently engaged this discourse in order to do something they never envisioned having to do: fight for what Chinese state socialism had always promised them as the ‘masters of the factory’, namely the right to a job and basic social security.
The Workers' Festival
by Craig Heron Steve PenfoldFor most Canadians today, Labour Day is the last gasp of summer fun: the final long weekend before returning to the everyday routine of work or school. But over its century-long history, there was much more to the September holiday than just having a day off.In The Workers' Festival, Craig Heron and Steve Penfold examine the complicated history of Labour Day from its origins as a spectacle of skilled workers in the 1880s through its declaration as a national statutory holiday in 1894 to its reinvention through the twentieth century. The holiday's inventors hoped to blend labour solidarity, community celebration, and increased leisure time by organizing parades, picnics, speeches, and other forms of respectable leisure. As the holiday has evolved, so too have the rituals, with trade unionists embracing new forms of parading, negotiating, and bargaining, and other social groups re-shaping it and making it their own. Heron and Penfold also examine how Labour Day's monopoly as the workers' holiday has been challenged since its founding, with alternative festivals arising such as May Day and International Women's Day.The Workers' Festival ranges widely into many key themes of labour history - union politics and rivalries, radical movements, religion (Catholic and Protestant), race and gender, and consumerism/leisure - as well as cultural history - public celebration/urban procession, urban space and communication, and popular culture. From St. John's to Victoria, the authors follow the century-long development of the holiday in all its varied forms.
Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (Working Class in American History)
by Leon Fink Joseph A. McCartin Joan SangsterSeeking to historicize today's "Great Recession," this volume of essays uses examples from North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia to situate the current economic crisis and its impact on workers in the context of previous abrupt shifts in the modern-day capitalist marketplace. Contributors argue that factors such as race, sex, and state intervention have mediated both the effect of economic depressions on workers' lives and workers' responses to those depressions. Further, the direction of influence between politics and economic upheaval, as well as between workers and the welfare state, has often shifted with time, location, and circumstance. These principles inform a concluding examination of today's "Great Recession": its historical distinctiveness, its connection to neoliberalism, and its attendant expressions of worker status and agency around the world. Ultimately, the essays in this volume push us toward a rethinking of the relationship between capital and labor, the waged and unwaged, and the employed and jobless. Contributors are Sven Beckert, Sean Cadigan, Leon Fink, Alvin Finkel, Wendy Goldman, Gaetan Heroux, Joseph A. McCartin, David Montgomery, Edward Montgomery, Melanie Nolan, Bryan D. Palmer, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Joan Sangster, Judith Stein, Hilary Wainright, and Lu Zhang.
Workers of All Colors Unite: Race and the Origins of American Socialism (Working Class in American History)
by Lorenzo CostagutaAs the United States transformed into an industrial superpower, American socialists faced the vexing question of how to approach race. Lorenzo Costaguta balances intellectual and institutional history to illuminate the clash between two major points of view. On one side, white supremacists believed labor should accept and apply the ascendant tenets of scientific theories of race. But others stood with International Workingmen’s Association leaders J. P. McDonnell and F. A. Sorge in rejecting the idea that racial and ethnic division influenced worker-employer relations, arguing instead that class played the preeminent role. Costaguta charts the socialist movement’s journey through the conflict and down a path that ultimately abandoned scientific racism in favor of an internationalist class-focused and racial-conscious American socialism. As he shows, the shift relied on a strong immigrant influence personified by the cosmopolitan Marxist thinker and future IWW cofounder Daniel De Leon. The class-focused movement that emerged became American socialism’s most common approach to race in the twentieth century and beyond.
Workers of the World, Enjoy!: Aesthetic Politics from Revolutionary Syndicalism to the Global Justice Movement
by Kenneth H. Tucker Jr.The aesthetic politics of social movements turn public life into a public stage, where mutual displays of performance often trump rational debate, and urban streets become sites of festivals and carnival. In his penetrating new book,Workers of the World, Enjoy!, Kenneth Tucker provides a new model for understanding social change in our image-saturated and aesthetically charged world. As emotional and artistic images inform our perceptions and evaluation of politics, art and performance often provide new and creative ways of understanding self and society. Spanning the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries,Workers of the World, Enjoy!uses examples from major social movements that have dramatically changed the dominant capitalist society--often in the name of labor. Tucker investigates how class and culture develop as he raises questions about what it means for public life and social movements when politics and drama come together. Tucker catalogues how aesthetic politics influences social movements--from French Revolutionary syndicalism and fascism to the selling of the President and the street theater of the contemporary global justice movement. He also discusses the work of political theorists including Jurgen Habermas, Jeffrey Alexander, and Nancy Fraser to critique the ways public sphere has been studied.
Workers' Participation And Self-management In Developing Countries
by Janez PrasnikarDrawing on his background as an economist and a specialist on the Yugoslav system of workers' self-management, Janez Prasnikar analyzes an extraordinary amount of dispersed information on the experience with workers' participation in thirteen developing countries.
Workers, Power and Society: Power Resource Theory in Contemporary Capitalism (Routledge Research in Employment Relations)
by Jens Arnholtz Bjarke RefslundThe book addresses how power and power resources remain important analytically as well as empirically dimensions for analysing contemporary capitalism. It provides a theoretical framework for studying, understanding, and explaining changes in the world of work and how that leads to changes in contemporary capitalist societies. Changes in the world of work are closely related to increasing inequality, growing social unrest, and societal polarisation. Hence the book seeks to deepen our understanding of how developments in the sphere of work have implication far beyond the direct impact on workers. The book focuses on how workers and unions utilise their various power resources to off-set the power advantage of employers and capital in the sphere of labour politics, which have crucial linkages with both cultural life, politics, and the market. Although workers’ and unions’ power and influence have been declining almost universally across the world, the argument in the book is that they still hold power resources that can challenge and sometimes alter outcomes in another direction than what employers and capital wants. Hence the theory can help understand the possibilities that workers and unions still have and how these resources affect the outcomes of the labour-capital struggle. A core contribution of the book is that it develops theoretical propositions about power resource theory, provides clear definitions of the core concepts as well as apply the power resource theory to a range of new or emerging topic fields like global value chains, minimum wages, and migrant workers.
Workers, Unions, and Global Capitalism: Lessons from India
by Rohini HensmanWhile it's easy to blame globalization for shrinking job opportunities, dangerous declines in labor standards, and a host of related discontents, the "flattening" of the world has also created unprecedented opportunities for worker organization. By expanding employment in developing countries, especially for women, globalization has formed a basis for stronger workers' rights, even in remote sites of production. Using India's labor movement as a model, Rohini Hensman charts the successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, of the struggle for workers' rights and organization in a rich and varied nation. As Indian products gain wider acceptance in global markets, the disparities in employment conditions and union rights between such regions as the European Union and India's vast informal sector are exposed, raising the issue of globalization's implications for labor. Hensman's study examines the unique pattern of "employees' unionism," which emerged in Bombay in the 1950s, before considering union responses to recent developments, especially the drive to form a national federation of independent unions. A key issue is how far unions can resist protectionist impulses and press for stronger global standards, along with the mechanisms to enforce them. After thoroughly unpacking this example, Hensman zooms out to trace the parameters of a global labor agenda, calling for a revival of trade unionism, the elimination of informal labor, and reductions in military spending to favor funding for comprehensive welfare and social security systems.
Workers' Voice, HRM Practice, and Leadership in the Public Sector: Multidimensional Well-Being at Work
by Nicole CvenkelMuch is talked and written about well-being in the workplace, but many wonder whether 'putting people first' is just a facade and that were it not for employment legislation, union representation and the high profile of human rights issues, employers would regard employees as a necessary burdensome financial evil, as in days gone by. Some scholarly research has focused on the reactions of employees to the quality of working life and well-being at work and much of this suggests high levels of dissatisfaction, disaffection and disengagement. In Workers' Voice, HRM Practice, and Leadership in the Public Sector: Multidimensional Well-Being at Work, Nicole Cvenkel avers that whilst it is known that public sector employees are even less satisfied than those in the private sector, there has been very little research into the effects of working life experiences on employee well-being in public sector organisations. There is even some doubt about whether a well-being philosophy that can be applied in the private sector can readily be extended to the public sector. The push towards New Public Management (NPM) means organisations continue to undergo significant reform processes around efficiency, costs and public service delivery. All these changes place additional demands on public sector employees who are at times also subject to intensive scrutiny by stakeholder groups, who may regard the recourse to well-being initiatives as a poor use of public funds. The author has researched in the UK local government sector and that is the setting for the debate in this book, about whether and how an employee well-being ideology can be successfully promoted and maintained in an NPM environment, given continuous reform and expenditure reduction. In a local government case organisation, the author has researched, limited resources, reduction in budgets, redundancies, increased workloads, lack of trust, and the existence of a 'controlled' working environment were all found to be central to a climate of bullying and unfairness. Although the organisation was committed to the adoption of HRM 'best practice' and initiatives geared towards promoting employees well-being, employees still believed they were being bullied and treated unfairly. It was found that different perspectives on the psychological contract, fairness, and bullying at work were highlighted by managerial and non-managerial employees. The author's conclusions contribute to a clearer understanding than hitherto of workers' voice in relation to work, leader-member exchanges, and well-being in the public sector and she offers a model depicting employees' understanding of what their quality of working life, line manager’s leadership and well-being should be, that might be used by organisational leaders, researchers, policy makers, Human Resources managers and other practitioners and consultants, to move towards a more holistic, multidimensional, well-being at work paradigm.
Workers without Borders: Posted Work and Precarity in the EU
by Ines WagnerHow the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A 2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner’s Workers without Borders, about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong employers’ associations and trade unions allow for the establishment and maintenance of such a precarious labor market segment?Wagner introduces an overlooked piece of the puzzle: re-regulatory politics at the workplace level. She interrogates the position of the posted worker in contemporary European labour markets and the implications of and regulations for this position in industrial relations, social policy and justice in Europe. Workers without Borders concentrates on how local actors implement European rules and opportunities to analyze the balance of power induced by the EU around policy issues.Wagner examines the particularities of posted worker dynamics at the workplace level, in German meatpacking facilities and on construction sites, to reveal the problems and promises of European Union governance as regulating social justice. Using a bottom-up approach through in-depth interviews with posted migrant workers and administrators involved in the posting process, Workers without Borders shows that strong labor-market regulation via independent collective bargaining institutions at the workplace level is crucial to effective labor rights in marginal workplaces. Wagner identifies structures of access and denial to labor rights for temporary intra-EU migrant workers and the problems contained within this system for the EU more broadly.