BiblioVault - Books about Industrial Relations

Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl

Regimes of Production and Industrial Relations in China

Boy Lüthje, Siqi Luo, and Hao Zhang

Campus Verlag, 2013

A unique account of labor relations in the modern Chinese economy, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl brings together more than thirty in-depth case studies of key multinational, Chinese, and overseas Chinese enterprises in the automotive, electronic, and garment industries. Analyzing the regimes of production and their segmentations in the context of global and national production networks, the authors discuss Chinese and international industrial relations theory and labor sociology and explore the perspectives of collective bargaining, trade union reform, and democratic workplace representation in China.

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Globalisation and Industrial Relations

The Pharmaceutical Industry in Germany and the United Kingdom

Luitpold Rampeltshammer

Campus Verlag, 2008

Although many books have been written about the economic impact of globalization on Europe, none has focused exclusively on the pharmaceutical industry. To fill this gap in scholarship, Globalization and Industrial Relations offers a full account of how open markets have affected drug companies, their employees, and consumers alike.

Using the examples of Germany and the United Kingdom as case studies, this volume uses a careful theoretical background and broad empirical analysis to evaluate the current state of industrial relations in the pharmaceutical industry. Globalisation and Industrial Relations addresses how companies in the pharmaceutical industry deal with the challenges from globalization in respect to collective bargaining and workplace representation. A complete analysis of industrial relations in the drug manufacturing industry in a changing world, this volume also forecasts different trajectories for the systems of industrial relations in Germany and the United Kingdom.

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Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation

Emerson P. Schmidt

University of Minnesota Press, 1937

Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation was first published in 1937. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In the present era of industrial warfare and violence, this book points a "middle way" in employer-employee relations. It describes the remarkable achievement of the Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway, and Motor Coach Employees of America, which for nearly fifty years has used the machinery of arbitration to settle all labor disputes without resort to strikes. Herein also is probably the first attempt to measure on a nation-wide scale the influence of a union in raising wages and reducing hours.

But this is much more than the story of a successful union. It is a complete history of urban transportation in the United States — the first such history to be written. It deals with technological, financial, and regulatory, as well as labor, aspects. The characteristics of transportation work and the type of men attracted to it are carefully analyzed, and there is a chapter devoted to the late nineteenth century conditions which gave birth to unionism.

This readable study will be of particular interest to owners, managers, and employees of local transportation systems, to investment bankers and investors, regulatory commissions and city aldermen, public mediators and arbitrators of labor disputes, and students of economic history.

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Labor Economics and Industrial Relations

Markets and Institutions

Clark Kerr and Paul D. Staudohar

Harvard University Press, 1994

In twenty-three original essays this book reviews the course of labor economics over the more than two centuries since the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. It fully examines the contending theories, changing environmental contexts, evolving issues, and varied policies affecting labor’s participation in the economy.

While the intellectual framework of the book looks partly to the past—explaining the labor factor in classical and neoclassical systems—its emphasis is on contemporary problems that will figure prominently in future developments, such as the operation of internal labor markets, dispute resolution, concession bargaining, equal employment opportunity, and individual labor contracting.

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Works Councils

Consultation, Representation, and Cooperation in Industrial Relations

Edited by Joel Rogers and Wolfgang Streeck

University of Chicago Press, 1995

As the influence of labor unions declines in many industrialized nations, particularly the United States, the influence of workers has decreased. Because of the need for greater involvement of workers in changing production systems, as well as frustration with existing structures of workplace regulation, the search has begun for new ways of providing a voice for workers outside the traditional collective bargaining relationship.

Works councils—institutionalized bodies for representative communication between an employer and employees in a single workplace—are rare in the Anglo-American world, but are well-established in other industrialized countries. The contributors to this volume survey the history, structure, and functions of works councils in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Canada, and the United States. Special attention is paid to the relations between works councils and unions and collective bargaining, works councils and management, and the role and interest of governments in works councils. On the basis of extensive comparative data from other Western countries, the book demonstrates powerfully that well-designed works councils may be more effective than labor unions at solving management-labor problems.

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