Showing titles in Labour & Industrial Relations

Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.  

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today, most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy - particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America's cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization.

In Sweatshop Capital, Beth Robinson examines the brutal sweatshop labor conditions that produced American consumer goods from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, as well as the labor and social movements that contested them. Arguing that sweatshop labor is a persistent feature of capitalism, she shows how manufacturers used both their influence in government and their mobility to sidestep US labor laws, maximize profits, and perpetuate abuses.

Fashion is political. From the red carpets of the Met Gala to online fast fashion, clothes tell a story of inequality, racism and climate crisis. In The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, Tansy E. Hoskins unpicks the threads of capitalist industry to reveal the truth about our clothes.

The forgotten history of the UK's anti-racist campaigners are finally brought to life in this comprehensive account of modern British history, told through ten moments The United Kingdom is currently a hellscape for Black and Brown people. To be fair, things have never been great. Black and...

In Programmed Inequality, Marie Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, labor problems grew into structural ones, and gender discrimination caused the nation's largest computer user to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole.

In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker - have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital economy.

The Quiet Before is a grand panorama, stretching from the 17th-century correspondence that jump-started the scientific revolution to the groundswell of the Chartists, the liberation movement on the Gold Coast and the underground network of samizdat publications in Soviet Russia - even the encrypted apps used by epidemiologists fighting the pandemic in the shadow of an inept administration. Beckerman shows that defining social movements - from decolonisation to feminism - thrive when they are given the time and space to gestate.

The story of a disillusioned generation that set out to reclaim its dignity and take on corporate America. This program is read by award-winning narrator André Santana. In recent years, young college grads have faced an alarming reality: crushing debt, unemployment, and jobs below their...

The Hard Work of Hope takes you into the heady days of 1960s and 1970s activism, chronicling the hopes and strategies of the young people who created the movements that rocked the country. Michael Ansara was on the front lines. In this fascinating memoir, he traces an arc of discovery: from the hope and moral clarity of the Civil Rights Movement to the ten-year struggle to end the war in Vietnam, with its sit-ins, marches, confrontations, and antiwar riots.

A business lives, dies, and thrives on its talent. Whether it’s W-2 employees, freelancers, gig workers, AI bots, or a mix of all of the above, every business has to get its workforce right if it wants to remain at the top of its industry. Any company with the right people with the right skills in the right place at the right time will have the ultimate edge over its competitors. And that means few areas deserve as much priority as workforce planning and talent management.

From mechanical looms to the combustion engine to the first computers, new technologies have always provoked panic about workers being replaced by machines. For centuries, such fears have been misplaced, and many economists maintain that they remain so today. But as Daniel Susskind demonstrates, this time really is different. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence mean that all kinds of jobs are increasingly at risk.

Erfolg hat, wer vertraut und kooperiert Fußballteams sind erfolgreicher, wenn jeder Spieler zusätzliche Laufwege in Kauf nimmt, um Fehler anderer auszubügeln. Forscherteams bringen ihre Projekte eher zu?einem guten Ende, wenn alle Beteiligten einander vertrauen. Kooperationen sind...

 In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protesters bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was underway - Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story of when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was forever changed. 

In Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Catherine Higgs traces the early-twentieth-century journey of the Englishman Joseph Burtt to the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe - the chocolate islands - through Angola and Mozambique, and finally to British Southern Africa. Burtt had been hired by the chocolate firm Cadbury Brothers Limited to determine if the cocoa it was buying from the islands had been harvested by slave laborers forcibly recruited from Angola, an allegation that became one of the grand scandals of the early colonial era.

A timely, in-depth, and vital exploration of the American labor movement and its critical place in our society and politics, from acclaimed labor reporter Hamilton Nolan. Inequality is America’s biggest problem. Unions are the single strongest tool that working people have to fix it. Organized...

Longlisted for the 2022 Indie Book Awards. Longlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. Chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ in The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian Book Review. In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy...

As World War II wound down in 1945 and the cold war heated up, the skilled trades that made up the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) began a tumultuous strike at the major Hollywood studios. This turmoil escalated further when the studios retaliated by locking out CSU in 1946. This labor unrest unleashed a fury of Red-baiting that allowed studio moguls to crush the union and seize control of the production process, with far-reaching consequences.

When the local iron mine began hiring women in 1975, Lois Jenson, a single mother on welfare, didn't think twice about accepting the grueling but well-paid job. What she hadn't considered was that she was entering a male-dominated society that fiercely resisted the inclusion of women, a prejudice born out in the brutal harassment of every female miner.

Today's ways of working are not working - even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. "Flexible" work policies and corporate lip service about "work-life balance" don't come close to fixing the problem.