Labor Relations

The government constantly attacks unions, CEOs devote endless time and resources to undermining them, and many unions themselves are stuck in the past. Despite this, inspiring work is happening all the time, from fast food strikes and climate change campaigning to the modernization of unions for the digital age. Speaking to academics, experts and grassroots organizers from TUC, UNISON, ACORN, IWGB and more, Eve Livingston explores how young workers are organizing to demand fair workplaces, and reimagines what an inclusive union movement that represents us all might look like.

David Ranney’s vivid memoir describes his work experiences between 1976 and 1982 in the factories of Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana. The audiobook opens with a detailed description of what it was like to live and work in one of the heaviest industrial concentrations in the world. The author takes the listener on a walk through the heart of the South Side, Chicago, observing the noise, heavy traffic, the 24-hour restaurants and bars, the rich diversity of people on the streets at all hours of the day and night, and the smell of the highly polluted air.

When health care workers call a Code White, it’s an emergency response for a violent incident: a call for help. But it’s one that goes unanswered in hospitals, clinics, and long-term care homes across the country. Code White exposes a shocking epidemic of violence that’s hidden in plain sight, one in which workers are battered, assaulted, and demeaned, but carry on in silence, with little recourse. Researchers Margaret M. Keith and James T. Brophy lay bare the stories of over one hundred nurses and personal support workers, aides and porters, clerical workers and cleaners.

In the 1950s manufacturing generated nearly 30 percent of US income. Over the past 55 years that share has gradually declined to less than 12 percent at the same time that real estate, finance, and Wall Street trading have grown. While manufacturing's share of the US economy shrinks, it expands in countries such as China and Germany that have a strong industrial policy.

You can't have a healthy economy with an unhealthy work force. Work Less proposes ways to reduce work hours and keep workers happier, healthier, and more productive.

Revolting Indolence makes a case for laziness as an aesthetic-political strategy for countering the oppressive logics of cisheteronormative racial capitalism. Focusing on ways in which queer and trans Latinx people demonstrate the unwillingness of their participation in "productivist" ethics and allied respectability politics, Marcos Gonsalez argues that slacking off, lounging, daydreaming, and partying are liberatory practices.

Britain’s last deep coalmine closed in 2015, yet just fifty years ago the mining industry was a juggernaut, employing over 250,000 workers. Combining new personal interviews with extensive archival research, Emily P. Webber illuminates the extraordinary history of the industry once considered the backbone of Britain.

In an era when people live longer and want (or need) to work past the traditional retirement age, the Vita Needle Company of Needham, Massachusetts, provides inspiration and important lessons about the value of older workers. Vita Needle is a family-owned factory that was founded in 1932 and makes needles, stainless steel tubing and pipes, and custom fabricated parts. As part of its unusual business model, the company seeks out older workers; the median age of the employees is seventy-four.

Thirty years ago, the best-selling "letter to the government", Work in America, was published to national acclaim, including front-page coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. It sounded an alarm about worker dissatisfaction and the effects on the nation as a whole.

Linda Chavez, President George W. Bush’s original choice for Secretary of Labor and a former union official, is one of the foremost authorities on America’s labor unions. Now, in the explosive new book Betrayal, she and fellow union expert Daniel Gray expose the corrupt bargain between the labor movement and the Democratic Party.

L'icône militant queer Océan donne la parole aux travailleur.se.s du sexe qui ont souvent été ignoré.e.s, marginalisé.e.s et victimisé.e.s par la société. Elles disent le stigmate, la marginalisation, la précarité, les violences systémiques mais aussi les ressources et l'empowerment. Pour elles, l'intime est résistance. Publication originale en mars 2020.

What have jobs really been like for the past 40 years and what do the workers themselves say about them? In What Workers Say, Roberta Iversen shows that for employees in labor market industries—like manufacturing, construction, printing—as well as those in service-producing jobs, like clerical work, healthcare, food service, retail, and automotive—jobs are often discriminatory, are sometimes dangerous and exploitive, and seldom utilize people’s full range of capabilities. Most importantly, they fail to provide any real opportunity for advancement.

Millions of Black South African workers struggled against apartheid to redeem employment and production from a history of abuse, insecurity, and racial despotism. Almost two decades later, however, the prospects of a dignified life of wage-earning work remain unattainable for most South Africans. Through extensive archival and ethnographic research, Franco Barchiesi documents and interrogates this important dilemma in the country's democratic transition.

*Wage-Labour and Capital* by Karl Marx is a foundational text in Marxist economic theory that explores the exploitative dynamics of capitalist societies. Originally delivered as a series of lectures, the work delves into the relationship between wage laborers and capitalists, emphasizing how workers sell their labor power for wages that merely sustain their existence, while the capitalists appropriate the surplus value created by the workers.

In this urgently important book, Zelnick looks past the good intentions to how affirmative action really works in such areas as voting rights, employment, minority set-asides, mortgage and insurance regulation, and education. Zelnick traces how affirmative action was first sold as a short-term program designed to expand employer awareness of qualified minority job applicants, but instead has become a coercive network of race-conscious laws, regulations, quotas, preferences, and entitlement programs - in short, an assault on the very value of equality of opportunity it was supposed to promote.

La vita di un sindacalista può essere aspra, perchè deve mediare tra interessi che si contrastano e che spesso si violentano. Ma un sindacalista può anche leggere il suo lavoro come l'esatto prodotto di una legge tanto perfetta da essere divina: la legge della reincarnazione. Grazie a questa Legge ogni individuo e ogni collettività vivono soltanto ciò che gli serve per superare se stessi

In How to Use the Invisible Hand within an Industrial Organization, Christian Parker—industrial anthropologist, airliner technician, and MBA—presents a visionary blueprint for modern business leaders. Inspired by Adam Smith’s revolutionary “invisible hand” concept, Parker reimagines the internal workings of corporations as micro-economies that can self-regulate and thrive through market-driven principles.

¿De qué hablamos cuando decimos renta básica? ¿Significa lo mismo para izquierdas y derechas? ¿Es acaso viable? ¿Cómo influyen los debates feministas en ella? La asociación Basic Income Earth Network aporta la siguiente definición para la renta básica: "asignación monetaria, individual, incondicional y universal". Daniel Raventós explora en este audiolibro las grandes cuestiones en torno a esta propuesta y cuenta con la colaboración de grandes expertos y expertas para acabar ofreciendo un ensayo donde intervienen la filosofía, la política y la economía.

In 2016, Marvin Rees was elected as Mayor of Bristol, the first time a major European city had elected a mayor of Black African heritage. Re-elected in 2021, his eight-year tenure has taken the city through everything from Brexit to Covid, the cost of living crisis to the fall of the Colston statue.

"Lavoro: cambia tutto." Quante volte lo abbiamo sentito dire sulla scia delle grandi trasformazioni che hanno investito il mondo produttivo. Eppure in Italia le dinamiche del rapporto lavorativo restano ancorate a vecchi concetti padronali, anche quando non di padroni/proprietari si parla ma di capi, capetti, manager e direttori delle risorse umane, che della mentalità e dei comportamenti padronali hanno preso tutto il peggio.