Trade unions Books

‘A damn hilarious read.’ Nazeem Hussain‘A true barbarian.’ Andrew BoltOur world is in chaos lol. And no, Australian Millennials, it’s not your imagination: things are especially f**ked for us.Millions of Baby Boomers got beach houses, free education,...

Comprehensive and up-to-date coverage of labor management relations with a substantial portion devoted to economic issues and analysis in the labor field.

Told with great intimacy and compassion, The Bootleg Coal Rebellion uncovers a long-buried history of resistance and resilience among depression-era miners in Pennsylvania, who sunk their own mines on company grounds and fought police, bankers, coal...

Providing fresh insights from the archival record, Who governs Britain? revisits the 1970-74 Conservative government to explain why the Party tried and failed to reform the system of industrial relations. Designed to tackle Britain's strike problem and...

Progressive theorists and activists insist that contemporary capitalism is deeply flawed from a normative point of view. However, most accept the liberal egalitarian thesis that the serious shortcomings of market societies could be overcome with proper...

Noting that standard accounts of U.S. history often pay little attention to the working class, labor historian Paul Le Blanc presents a colorful, fact-filled history that concentrates on the struggles and achievements of that often-neglected laboring...

Since the 1980s, the world's working class has been under continual assault by the forces of neoliberalism and imperialism. In response, new labor movements have emerged across the Global South-from Brazil and South Africa to Indonesia and Pakistan...

"Joe Hill's influence is everywhere. Without Joe Hill, there's no Woody Guthrie, no Dylan, no Springsteen, no Clash, no Public Enemy, no Minor Threat, no System ofa Down, no Rage Against the Machine."-Tom Morello, from the forewordRadical songwriter and...

Labor Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century sets as its task to assess the validity, in light of current economic development, of the epistemology structuring different historical interpretations that see unfree labor as incompatible with capitalism...

Pre-eminent among historians of labor history." Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.The textbook history of the 1920s is a story of Prohibition, flappers, and unbounded prosperity. For millions of industrial workers, however, the roaring twenties" looked very...

Bob Crow was the most high-profile and militant union leader of his generation. This biography focuses on his leadership of the RMT union, examining and exposing a number of popular myths created about him by political opponents. Using the schema of his...

The sociology of unemployment is an analysis of the experience and governance of unemployment. By considering unemployment as more than just the absence of work; the book explores unemployment as a distinctive experience created by the welfare state.Each...

Labour migration has become one of the hot topics in Europe, especially since 2000 with the shift from restriction to managed migration. This book provides an authoritative account of policy change over labour migration in Europe during this new era of...

A lark for the sake of their country tells the tale of the upper and middle-class 'volunteers' in the 1926 General Strike in Great Britain. With behaviour derived from their play traditions - the larks, rags, fancy dress parties, and treasure hunts that...

In March 1946 Winston Churchill warned the world about the 'Iron Curtain' that had descended across Europe and behind which now lay, he said, the eight capitals of the ancient states of central and Eastern Europe. In fact, one of these eight, Vienna,...

This book provides a detailed investigation and comparison of the trade unions of five EU member states: Austria, Britain, France, Germany and Sweden, and their positions on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Several European-level trade union...

This book explores the role of trade unions as products of, and agents for, democracy. The crisis facing established democratic institutions in advanced societies has been widely noted. In response, there has been increasing interest in the role of civil...

An eye-opening account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, showing how the strike-and the violent backlash that ensued-reveal the genesis of modern policing. In the early years of the twentieth century, in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania,...

The essential anthology on the most effective ways to organize a labor movement for environmental justice, from leading organizers in the field The corporate elite have long pitted climate and labor movements against each other through a "jobs vs. the...

A global account of the grassroots environmental movements on the frontlines of the climate crisis.Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities - among the most...

An essential record from the Second International, assembled by Under the Socialist Banner. At its height, the Second (Socialist) International (1889-1914) represented the majority of organized workers in the world, with the revolutionary goal of...

Before the Golden Age of comic books, there was Mr. Block: a bumbling, boss-loving, anti-union blockhead, brought to life over a hundred years ago by subversive cartoonist Ernest Riebe.A dedicated labour activist and member of the Industrial Workers of...

Work is a joke. Laughing at it is political.Humor, Groucho Marx asserted, is 'reason gone mad.' For Walter Benjamin, laughter was 'the most revolutionary emotion.' In a moment when great numbers of people are...

Trade unions worldwide face a powerful paradox at this critical juncture: collective organisations for workers are urgently needed and yet there are serious pressures undercutting the legitimate role of trade unions. The aim of this book is to examine...

'Compelling, inspiring, and radiant.' -FOREWORD "Excels in showing the camaraderie of the 'Ghost Girls.'-PUBLISHERS WEEKLY "Will keep readers engaged in these women's stories from the first...

President Trump has torn up the TTIP and TPP. Britain is distancing itself from the European Union. Does this means that corporate globalisation is in retreat? Privatized Planet exposes the truth about 'free trade' in this new era of...

In this fully updated new edition, the authors lift the lid on blacklisting. They detail the historic court victory for construction workers in the UK and the ongoing Pitchford public inquiry into undercover policing. It links developments in the UK with...

Revised edition of a landmark bookAt the height of the building boom in the 1970s, a remarkable campaign stopped billions of dollars worth of indiscriminate development that was turning Australian cities into concrete jungles. Enraging employers and...

"Len tells his story as only he can: forthright, confident and witty. What emerges is a hard-hitting assessment of dramatic times, and a message of hope for the future." -Jeremy CorbynLen McCluskey is the standout trade unionist of his era. Head of the...

Mikhail Tomsky (1880-1936) was one of the most important and influential leaders of the early Soviet Union.This first English-language biography of Tomsky reveals his central role in all the key developments in early Soviet history, including the stormy...

In Co-operative Struggles, Denise Kasparian expands the theoretical horizons regarding labour unrest by proposing new categories to make visible and conceptualize conflicts in the new worker co-operativism of the twenty-first century.After the depletion...

Farewell to Work? presents the large process of capital's productive restructuring, triggered in the 1970s-a process with tendencies to both intellectualize labour power and increase the levels of the working class' precariousness on a global scale. This...

A much-needed, Marxist economic account of service and retail work, as well as the political alternatives.In Service Workers in the Era of Monopoly Capital, Fabian van Onzen uses Marxist theory to analyse the process by which service and retail workers...

In The Weight of the Printed Word, Steve Wright explores the creation and use of documents as a key dimension in the activities of Italian workerists during the 1960s and 1970s. From leaflets and newspapers to books, internal documents and workers'...

Bryan D. Palmer reinterprets the history of labour and the left in the United States during the 1930s through a discussion of the emergence of Trotskyism in the most advanced capitalist country in the world. Focussing on James P. Cannon, the founder of...

It is often remarked that critical - and especially Marxist - state theory began to lose its central place in the study of comparative politics in the 1980s. Ironically, this shift occurred just as neoliberal policies were transforming the social form...

This ground-breaking history of the General Jewish Labour Bund in migration investigates how the organisation transformed itself from a revolutionary protagonist in early twentieth-century Russia to a socialist institution of secular Jewish life and...

A key contribution to post-war Marxist thinking, finally back in print.Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Intellectual and Manual Labour is one of the major texts of post-war Marxist theory. A tremendous influence on the central figures of the Frankfurt School, with...

Revisiting Gramsci's Notebooks offers a rich collection of historical, philosophical, and political studies addressing the thought of Antonio Gramsci, one of the most significant intellectuals of the twentieth century. Based on thorough analyses of...

We are now witnessing the build-out of society's first foundationally new infrastructure in nearly a century: the Cloud. It is an ecosystem of information-digital hardware, at the heart of which resides massive warehouse-scale datacenters unlike anything...

Fiercely intelligent, fantastically transgressive, Working It is an intimate portrait of the lives of sex workers. A polyphonic story of triumph, survival, and solidarity this collection showcases the vastly different experiences and interests of those...

A sweeping history of revolutionary struggle and unbreakable alliances, Revolutionary Affinities takes readers from the Paris Commune to the Occupy movement, and through the heart of bloody fratricidal struggles to paint a vivid picture of the greatest...

History is not made by kings, politicians, or a few rich individuals-it is made by all of us. From the temples of ancient Egypt to spacecraft orbiting Earth, workers and ordinary people everywhere have walked out, sat down, risen up, and fought back...