Tired of contentious negotiations that hobble school systems with strikes and compromise pacts, school leaders are questioning the traditional adversarial approach to bargaining. As the experiences of Boston and Cincinnati show, principled or collaborative negotiation can turn adversaries into allies. A sidebar outlines joint training requirements…

Negotiations are slated for one-third of workers covered by major agreements. Those scheduled for bargaining are almost evenly split between state and local government and private industry. (Author)

Describes how teachers' evaluation of unions is constructed by historical, organizational, and social features of teachers' work and varies markedly across schools and districts. Presents the contrasting views of teachers in two comprehensive California high schools and considers the consequences of these evaluations for unions' recent strategy…

Includes "Labor History, Industrial Relations, and the Crisis of American Labor" (Brody); "Reckoning with Company Unions: The Case of Thompson Products, 1934-1964" (Jacoby); "Managers and Nonunion Workers in the Rubber Industry: Union Avoidance Strategies in the 1930s" (Nelson); and "'Light Manufacturing': The…

Melville's "Bartleby" and "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maidens" provide insights into workplace literacy on the following issues: existential nature of literacy, empowerment versus compliance, class and gender exploitation, and the use of literacy as a tool to label, control, and delimit people and their…

Includes "Struggle against Unemployment" (Godfrey); "Measuring Informal Sector Employment in Pakistan" (Bekkers, Stoffers); "Major Changes Underway in China's Industrial Relations" (Zhu); "Reflections on Role of African Employers' Organizations in Tripartism and Social Dialogue" (Etukudo); and…

Discusses why it is difficult to sustain employee involvement (EI) processes and examines strategies for renewing EI efforts that appear to be fading. (JOW)

Discusses the position of Asian America labor history as a field of study that, as yet, does not exist within Asian American studies or labor history, but which has the potential to "decenter nationalist narratives and deflect the institutional imperative." (SLD)

Looks at Australia's Training Reform Agenda and discusses the extent of training provisions in bargaining agreements, the demographic profile of those covered by agreements, and the quality of training included in agreements. (JOW)

Analyzes the reasons for decline of union representation to 9% of private sector workers. Suggests that workplace conditions and labor legislation designed to foster collective voice also sustain the individual system of representation, which is consistent with the philosophy of an open society. (SK)

Involvement of employees and unions in workplace decision-making has a long history in Australian industrial relations. The mechanism for employee involvement in workplace change was originally set out in the Termination Change and Redundancy (TCR) clause in Australian awards in 1984. It continues to operate under Enterprise Bargaining Agreements…

Using matched employer-employee data from ten African countries, we examine the relationship between wages, worker supervision, and labor productivity in manufacturing. Wages increase with firm size for both production workers and supervisors. We develop a two-tier model of supervision that can account for this stylized fact and we fit the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to argue that foundational terms in work-learning research, specifically "learning", "work", and "workplace", are inherently complex and contested as the same as their scope has expanded in different fields to elide various conceptual categories and theoretical positions. Yet…

This document contains the proceedings from a one-day symposium designed to illuminate the history of the labor movement in Florida. The proceedings are organized into two parts: Part 1 "Topics in Florida Labor History" features "Labor History in Florida: What Do We Know? Where Do We Go?" (R. Zieger); "Workers' Culture and…

Describes a hypothetical situation in a textile manufacturing plant and presents three alternative letters prepared by management for possible distribution to the plant's employees. Three guest commentators discuss the probable impact of the different letters and comment on the advisability of communicating with plant employees in such a manner.…