Routledge Studies in Employment and Work Relations in Context – serie

The book provides a collection of cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary research-based chapters on work, workers and the regulation and management of workplace health and safety. Featuring research from Australia, Europe and North America, the chapters traverse important historical examples and place important, emerging contemporary trends, like work in the gig economy, into wider international and historical perspectives. The authors are leading authorities in their fields.The book contributes to advancing our knowledge – empirical and theoretical – of the ways in which labour market dynamics, management strategies, state regulation and public policy, and union organisation affect outcomes for workers. It features in-depth exploration of, and reflection on, some of the major labour market challenges facing workers, and analysis of strengths and weaknesses of responses to those challenges, whether via management, state regulation or collective employee voice. The chapters highlight shifts in in/equality of outcomes; access to security and flexibility at work; genuine access to workplace voice and decision-making; and the implications of different avenues and mechanisms for regulating work and employment.The text is aimed at researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students in work and organisational studies, industrial/employment relations and human resource management, workplace (or occupational) health and safety, employment law, and labour history. It will also be of particular interest to policy makers and practitioners working in the field of workplace health and safety.

Trade Unions and Regions: Better Work, Experimentation, and Regional Governance is about the place of workers and their unions in the modern world. It addresses current challenges for unions working in regions and the experiments that may take place at this level of governance. The book addresses pressing questions concerned with the conditions for better work and a humane society. The focus is on the capacities of unions to address questions relating to regional governance, in both supranational and sub-national regions. It examines workers and their unions in a variety of contexts: multinationals, industries, workplaces, and communities. The authors address the experiments that can be initiated by unions, governments, or employers and the ways in which collective organisations engage to address these matters in regional contexts. The analysis takes as a starting point the fracturing and divisions evident in various regions, in Australia, Canada, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and USA. The contributors propose novel analyses with lessons for unions. It should be of interest to union activists and leaders, political parties, governments, and those who make decisions in and about regions. Researchers and students of labour markets, political mobilisation, and employment relations will take the analyses further.

This book provides thoughtful insights into the development in work, organisations and employment relations in the last 50 years. In a semi-autobiographical approach, the author reflects on important contributions by other scholars, practitioners, and policy makers to work and employment relations.The book covers a variety of themes which have been the subject of research undertaken by the author over his career and explores these themes over a period of time with examples drawn from various countries. It also emphasises that countries and regions cannot be understood in isolation from each other. The author seeks to convey the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences in order to interpret changes in work, organisations and employment relations.Drawing on the author’s rich experience and research, the book is engaging and accessible to anyone who wishes to learn more about the rapidly changing workplace and employment relations.

Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1851-1880 provides a new perspective on how and why workers organise, and what shapes that organisation.The author’s 2018 Origins of Worker Mobilisation examined the beginning of worker organisation, arguing inequality at work, and regulatory subordination of labour, drove worker resistance, initially by informal organization that slowly transitioned to formal organisation. This new volume analyses worker mobilisation in the period 1851-1880, drawing data from a unique relational database recording every instance of organisation. It assesses not only the types of organization formed, but also the issues and objectives upon which mobilisation was founded. It examines the relationship between formal and informal organisation, including their respective influences in reshaping working conditions and the life-circumstances of working communities. It relates the examination of worker mobilisation to both historical and contemporary contexts and examines mobilisation by different categories of labour. The book identifies important effects of mobilisation on economic inequality, hours of work (including the eight-hour day and the beginnings of the weekend) and the development of democracy.It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of social mobilisation, social and economic history, industrial relations, labour regulation, labour history, and employment relations.

The book provides a collection of cutting-edge, multi-disciplinary research-based chapters on work, workers and the regulation and management of workplace health and safety. Featuring research from Australia, Europe and North America, the chapters traverse important historical examples and place important, emerging contemporary trends, like work in the gig economy, into wider international and historical perspectives. The authors are leading authorities in their fields.The book contributes to advancing our knowledge – empirical and theoretical – of the ways in which labour market dynamics, management strategies, state regulation and public policy, and union organisation affect outcomes for workers. It features in-depth exploration of, and reflection on, some of the major labour market challenges facing workers, and analysis of strengths and weaknesses of responses to those challenges, whether via management, state regulation or collective employee voice. The chapters highlight shifts in in/equality of outcomes; access to security and flexibility at work; genuine access to workplace voice and decision-making; and the implications of different avenues and mechanisms for regulating work and employment.The text is aimed at researchers, undergraduate and postgraduate students in work and organisational studies, industrial/employment relations and human resource management, workplace (or occupational) health and safety, employment law, and labour history. It will also be of particular interest to policy makers and practitioners working in the field of workplace health and safety.

This book provides thoughtful insights into the development in work, organisations and employment relations in the last 50 years. In a semi-autobiographical approach, the author reflects on important contributions by other scholars, practitioners, and policy makers to work and employment relations.The book covers a variety of themes which have been the subject of research undertaken by the author over his career and explores these themes over a period of time with examples drawn from various countries. It also emphasises that countries and regions cannot be understood in isolation from each other. The author seeks to convey the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries in the social sciences in order to interpret changes in work, organisations and employment relations.Drawing on the author’s rich experience and research, the book is engaging and accessible to anyone who wishes to learn more about the rapidly changing workplace and employment relations.

This book brings together perspectives from sociology, political science, gender studies, and history to produce new ways of analysing wildfire preparedness and policy in Australia. Drawing on data from hundreds of interviews with residents, volunteers and emergency services professionals living and working in wildfire-prone areas, the authors focus on issues of power and inequality, the contested nature of community and the relationship between citizens and the state.The book questions not only existing policy approaches, but also the central concepts on which they are founded. In doing so, the aim is to create a more conceptually robust and academically contextualised discussion about the limitations of current wildfire policy approaches in Australia and to provide further evidence of the need for disaster studies to engage with a variety of social science approaches.Wildfire and Power: Policy and Practice will be of most interest to higher degree by research students, other academics and policy makers examining the evolving patterns and politics of work, employment, management and industrial relations as well as those involved in emergency and disaster management service delivery. It would be most suited to academic and public libraries as well as organisations in the field of emergency and disaster management.

There are 60 million health care workers globally and most of this workforce consists of nurses, as they are key providers of primary health care. Historically, the global nurse occupation has been predominately female and segregated along gendered, racialised and classed hierarchies. In the last decade, new actors have emerged in the management of health care human resources, specifically from the corporate sector, which has created new interactions, networks, and organisational practices. This book urgently calls for the reconceptualisation in the theoretical framing of the globalised nurse occupation from International Human Resource Management (IHRM) to Transnational Human Resource Management (THRM). Specifically, the book draws on critical human resource management literature and transnational feminist theories to frame the strategies and practices used to manage nurses across geographical sites of knowledge production and power, which centralise on how and by whom nurses are managed. In its current managerial form, the author argues that the nurses are constructed and produced as resources to be packaged for clients in public and private organisations.

Contesting Inequality and Worker Mobilisation: Australia 1851-1880 provides a new perspective on how and why workers organise, and what shapes that organisation.The author’s 2018 Origins of Worker Mobilisation examined the beginning of worker organisation, arguing inequality at work, and regulatory subordination of labour, drove worker resistance, initially by informal organization that slowly transitioned to formal organisation. This new volume analyses worker mobilisation in the period 1851-1880, drawing data from a unique relational database recording every instance of organisation. It assesses not only the types of organization formed, but also the issues and objectives upon which mobilisation was founded. It examines the relationship between formal and informal organisation, including their respective influences in reshaping working conditions and the life-circumstances of working communities. It relates the examination of worker mobilisation to both historical and contemporary contexts and examines mobilisation by different categories of labour. The book identifies important effects of mobilisation on economic inequality, hours of work (including the eight-hour day and the beginnings of the weekend) and the development of democracy.It will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in the fields of social mobilisation, social and economic history, industrial relations, labour regulation, labour history, and employment relations.

This is a book on how and why workers come together. Almost coincident with its inception, worker organisation is a central and enduring element of capitalism. In the 19th and 20th centuries’ mobilisation by workers played a substantial role in reshaping critical elements of these societies in Europe, North America, Australasia and elsewhere including the introduction of minimum labour standards (living wage rates, maximum hours etc), workplace safety and compensation laws and the rise of welfare state more generally. Notwithstanding setbacks in recent decades, worker organisation represents a pivotal countervailing force to moderate the excesses of capitalism and is likely to become even more influential as the social consequences of rising global inequality become more manifest. Indeed, instability and periodic shifts in the respective influence of capital and labour are endemic to capitalism. As formal institutions have declined in some countries or unions outlawed and severely repressed in others, there has been growing recognition of informal strike activity by workers and wider alliances between unions and community organisations in others. While such developments are seen as new they aren’t. Indeed, understanding of worker organisation is often ahistorical and even those understandings informed by historical research are, this book will argue, in need of revision.This book provides a new perspective on and new insights into how and why workers organise, and what shapes this organisation. The Origins of Worker Mobilisation will be key reading for scholars, academics and policy makers the fields of industrial relations, HRM, labour economics, labour history and related disciplines.

Employment relations within the health sector have undergone radical reform over recent years. This book is an important new study that examines the responses of managers and workers to these different reforms, at both national and local level.Bringing together analyses of both employment relations and public sector management, the book focuses on understanding why certain initiatives have been adopted, how managers have responded to them and the consequences of the HR modernisation agenda. Topics covered include:HR strategy and structure at the workplaceemployee involvement and union influencepay modernisationmanagement of work.Featuring detailed case study research in three NHS trusts, the book illustrates precisely how government policies are implemented in the workplace and in doing so offers a unique insight into the sector's changing work environment. A comprehensive study of atopical area, this book will be of interest to students and academics in health service management, human resource management and employment relations.

Globalisation, State and Labour combines a new theoretical approach with comparative analysis – ensuring that it will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with the globalization debate, the future of the state, and organized labour.It shows how although the world is undergoing enormous changes involving politics, the economy and society, the position and place of the state, and the significance of state policy in this process, is heavily contested. Presenting a timely opportunity to review and re-assess the modern state with regards to labour, the essays included in this text, written by leading researchers in the area, develop a new theoretical framework that puts work, workers and their organizations at the heart of analyzing state restructuring. Using major studies from four countries (UK, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand), the contributors challenge many preconceptions regarding globalization and labour organization - including the notions that the state is being marginalized by the processes of globalization, and that the trade unions are becoming irrelevant.

Sexuality is arguably the most under-researched of all diversity areas in work organizations. This book brings together and relates stories of minority sexual identity from six organizations drawn from three different industry sectors: the Emergency Services, the Civil Service and the Banking sector. Here sexual minorities freely recount stories of their own workplace experiences. Three main themes emerge from the data: silence, disclosure and response. Issues of voice and silence are particularly pertinent for those who are not part of the dominant heterosexual discourse; issues of disclosure are highly important for sexual minorities for whom coming out is a major defining moment; and, highly unusually, in this book readers get an insight into how people respond to sexual minorities, as other employees' reactions to stories are related too. This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding discursive construction of identity in the workplace, as experienced by sexual minorities andprovides a snapshot of minority working lives at the beginning of the 21st century. This is an extremely well written, highly innovative, timely and engaging book which as well as human resources management, it will also be of interest to scholars in other areas such as sociology and general business and management.

All phases of education from pre-school to post-compulsory, in virtually all parts of the world, have experienced unprecedented reform and restructuring in recent years. Restructuring has largely been driven by a global agenda that has promoted the development of human capital as the key to economic competitiveness in the global market.This book adopts an inter-disciplinary approach drawing not only on education research but also from the fields of industrial sociology, management studies and labour process theory to locate the reform agenda within a wider picture relating to teachers, their professional identities and their experience of work. In doing so the book draws on critical perspectives that seek to challenge orthodox policy discourses relating to remodelling. Illustrating of how education policy is shaped by discourses within the wider socio-political environment and how unionization and inter-organizational bargaining between unions exerts a decisive, but often ignored, influence on policy development at both a State and institutional level, this book is a must read for anyone researching or studying employment relations.

In recent decades, trade unions have suffered major reversals and experienced declining memberships. Transnational corporations and state-owned multi-nationals have increasingly implemented deteriorating terms and conditions of employment, with vulnerable and insecure job contracts. In this context, there has been a wide-ranging debate about the form of trade unionism, the bases for collective organization and struggle and the future of trade unionism. This book addresses these questions both theoretically, in relation to debates, as well as substantively via a series of selected studies. It is a must read for all those studying industrial relations, human resource management, the sociology of work and employment, economic sociology, economic and labor geography and business studies in general.

The last decade has given rise to a strong public discourse in most highly industrialized economies about the importance of a skilled workforce as a key response to the competitive dynamic fostered by economic globalisation. The challenge for different training regimes is twofold: attracting young people into the vocational training system while continuing to train workers already in employment. Yet, on the whole, most countries and their training systems have failed to reach those goals. How can we explain this contradiction? Why is vocational training seen to be an "old" institution? Why does vocational training not seem to be easily adapted to the realities of the 21st century? This book seeks to respond to these important questions. It does so through an in-depth comparative analysis of the vocational training systems in ten different countries: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, the United Kingdom and the USA.

Regional trade agreements have expanded exponentially over the past decade, and have become a significant, if controversial, factor in the expanse of economic globalization. Social Regionalism in the Global Economy attempts to take a fresh, interdisciplinary approach to addressing labour regulation by drawing upon insights from industrial relations, comparative capitalism, and new governance schools of thought. It stands for the proposition that an interdisciplinary study of regional regulation holds the potential to offer a fuller account of social regionalism. Its focus is to consider how institutions and labour market actors reconstruct and renegotiate regulatory space in a changing economic environment characterized by regional impulses. It argues that there is a dynamic interplay between institutions and actors of social regulation. This interplay occurs at many levels. The book therefore maps both how actors shape institutions as well as how institutions shape social actors’ ability to affect regulatory processes.The editors bring together leading international specialists willing to move beyond textual analyses of regional agreements to offer alternative accounts of regional integration. The work emphasizes that institutional context and social actors at multiple governance levels are integral to the progressive construction and regulation of regional space. It further contributes to the literature by combining insights from overlooked regional entities in transition and developing countries with original analyses from the European Union and the NAFTA. These aims will be achieved by combining original research that is empirically grounded with theoretically informed analysis.

This book examines countries that have tried, with varying degrees of success, to use legislative strategies to encourage and support collective bargaining, including Australia’s Fair Work Act. It is the first major study of the operation and impact of the new collective bargaining framework introduced under the Fair Work Act, combining theoretical and practical perspectives. In addition, a number of comparative pieces provide rich insights into the Australian legislation’s adaptation of concepts from overseas collective bargaining systems – including good faith bargaining, and majority employee support as the basis for establishing bargaining rights. Contributors to this volume are all leading labor law, industrial relations, and human resource management scholars from Australia, and from Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

Unfree labor has not disappeared from advanced capitalist economies. In this sense the debates among and between Marxist and orthodox economic historians about the incompatibility of capitalism and unfree labor are moot: the International Labour Organisation has identified forced, coerced, and unfree labor as a contemporary issue of global concern. Previously hidden forms of unfree labor have emerged in parallel with several other well-documented trends affecting labor conditions, rights, and modes of regulation. These evolving types of unfree labor include the increasing normalization of contingent work (and, by extension, the undermining of the standard contract of employment), and an increase in labor intermediation. The normative, political, and numerical rise of temporary employment agencies in many countries in the last three decades is indicative of these trends.It is in the context of this rapidly changing landscape that this book consolidates and expands on research designed to understand new institutions for work in the global era. This edited collection provides a theoretical and empirical exploration of the links between unfree labor, intermediation, and modes of regulation, with particular focus on the evolving institutional forms and political-economic contexts that have been implicated in, and shaped by, the ascendency of temp agencies. What is distinctive about this collection is this bi-focal lens: it makes a substantial theoretical contribution by linking disparate literatures on, and debates about, the co-evolution of contingent work and unfree labor, new forms of labor intermediation, and different regulatory approaches; but it further lays the foundation for this theory in a series of empirically rich and geographically diverse case studies. This integrative approach is grounded in a cross-national comparative framework, using this approach as the basis for assessing how, and to what extent, temporary agency work can be considered unfree wage labor

Sexuality is arguably the most under-researched of all diversity areas in work organizations. This book brings together and relates stories of minority sexual identity from six organizations drawn from three different industry sectors: the Emergency Services, the Civil Service and the Banking sector. Here sexual minorities freely recount stories of their own workplace experiences. Three main themes emerge from the data: silence, disclosure and response. Issues of voice and silence are particularly pertinent for those who are not part of the dominant heterosexual discourse; issues of disclosure are highly important for sexual minorities for whom coming out is a major defining moment; and, highly unusually, in this book readers get an insight into how people respond to sexual minorities, as other employees' reactions to stories are related too. This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding discursive construction of identity in the workplace, as experienced by sexual minorities andprovides a snapshot of minority working lives at the beginning of the 21st century. This is an extremely well written, highly innovative, timely and engaging book which as well as human resources management, it will also be of interest to scholars in other areas such as sociology and general business and management.

Transnational trade union action has expanded significantly over the last few decades and has taken a variety of shapes and trajectories. This book is concerned with understanding the spatial extension of trade union action, and in particular the development of new forms of collective mobilization, network-building, and forms of regulation that bridge local and transnational issues. Through the work of leading international specialists, this collection of essays examines the process and dynamic of transnational trade union action and provides analytical and conceptual tools to understand these developments. The research presented here emphasizes that the direction of transnational solidarity remains contested, subject to experimentation and negotiation, and includes studies of often overlooked developments in transition and developing countries with original analyses from the European Union and NAFTA areas. Providing a fresh examination of transnational solidarity, this volume offers neither a romantic or overly optimistic narrative of a borderless unionism, nor does it fall into a fatalistic or pessimistic account of international union solidarity. Through original research conducted at different levels, this book disentangles the processes and dynamics of institution building and challenges the conventional national based forms of unionism that prevailed in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Public services throughout Europe have undergone dramatic restructuring processes in recent years in connection with liberalization and privatization. While evaluations of the successes of public services have focused on prices and efficiency, much less attention has been paid to the impacts of liberalization and privatization on employment, labor relations, and working conditions. This book addresses this gap by illustrating the ways in which liberalization has contributed to increasing private and foreign ownership of public services, the decentralization of labor relations has amplified pressure on wages, and decreasing employment numbers and increasing workloads have improved productivity partly at the cost of service quality. Examining diverse public-service sectors including network industries, public transportation, and hospitals, and using international case studies, Privatization of Public Services covers a wide range of aspects of service provision, with particular emphasis on companies and workers. The result is a unique picture of the changes created by the liberalization processes in Europe.

The worldwide expansion of the tourism industry creates many encounters between global agents and local forces, yet the host-guest interaction is rarely considered from the point of view of the experience of work. This study documents and discusses such a global-local encounter, based on fieldwork carried out in hotels in Barbados and Malta. Insight is drawn from a review of such issues as recruitment, promotion, redundancy, discipline, security, communication, expertise, total quality management iniatives, trade unionism and industrial action.

This study focuses on working-class women, catering and cleaning workers, and the way their interests were presented in trade unions. It argues that there is an institutional bias within trade unions which precludes the full representation of women's interests. Based on empirical research into two trade unions in the National Health Service, the book stresses the importance of how women's work is structured, in order to investigate the role of trade unions in challenging or reproducing inequalities.

This text is an exploration of the interplay between employment and domestic relations within a specific group of young women, which includes single working women without children and working mothers. It is based on actual experiences, as related in interviews, and uses longitudianl data to chart the experience of young adult women living a contradiction between work and family. The text also employs social theory to interpret interview data showing the interdependence of young women as active agents, and the constraints and opportunities of the social structure. The main conclusion is that the social structuring of women as primarily mothers who also work is falling away, but that it is left to individuals to work their way through the contradictory system facing them.

Restructuring in the Service Industries: Management Reform and Workplace Relations in the UK Service Sector. An examination of the complex process of transformation in work organization, technology and labour and product markets that has occurred. The analysis moves between a broad appreciation of structural developments within the economies of the advanced industrial nations, and an in-depth study of enterprise and workplace. It is divided into four parts. The first part reviews the theoretical issues and debates raised by the growth of service industries and employment in the advanced industrial countries. Parts Two and Three are case studies of two service sectors - financial services and the National Health Service. Part Four relates the evidence to a broader appreciation of developments in management/workforce relations occurring in the service sector.

This book is an appraisal of current offshore industrial relations, and safety regulations instituted after the 1988 Alpha disaster in the North Sea. This text discusses the oil industry's attempts to contain subsequent, unwelcome regulatory interference, and examines the fraught history of trade unionism in the offshore industry, the conflict over health and safety, and the sometimes brutal struggle over union rights as the workforce attempted to achieve a collective voice in the reshaping of the safety and production environment. The authors conclude that, as yet, offshore safety has been little, or not at all, improved.

Focusing on the work and labour history of shipyard workers in the Royal Dockyards, this text examines the question of state employment and the specific characteristics of that pattern of industrial relations. It encompasses discussions of the nature of work and resistance to forms of authority. Particular forms of control are available to the employer which are absent from the experience of the private sector. In addition, the state is often under pressure to act as a model employer, and this can lead to tensions between this objective and the need for financial constraint and public surveillance of the uses of taxation.

This book is an appraisal of current offshore industrial relations, and safety regulations instituted after the 1988 Alpha disaster in the North Sea. This text discusses the oil industry's attempts to contain subsequent, unwelcome regulatory interference, and examines the fraught history of trade unionism in the offshore industry, the conflict over health and safety, and the sometimes brutal struggle over union rights as the workforce attempted to achieve a collective voice in the reshaping of the safety and production environment. The authors conclude that, as yet, offshore safety has been little, or not at all, improved.