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Where and how can we determine that class struggle has resulted in a provisional "armistice" in favour of labour, if the latter has been achieved through a re-composition of capital - via new legal arrangements and acceptance of a profit oriented labour process - and, thus, is still forced to sell its labour power at its value if it wants to reproduce itself in the "world market"? Ovetz, Robert Workers' Inquiry and Global Class Struggle, London: Pluto Press, 2020; 288 pp.: ISBN: 9780745340869, £19.99 Unruly, zealous and creative are the class struggles presented in this recalcitrant book. It is through and only through class struggle that capital and labour transform and "consolidate nodes of class power" while, and in falling short from social revolution, their inherent antagonism prevails. [Extracted from the article]

Capitalism Contested: The New Deal and Its Legacies Two contributors, K. Sabeel Rahman and Jason Scott Smith, show their debt to U.S. historiography's liberal traditions by championing the words and actions of Progressive Era and New Deal reformers. "Corporate reformers of the New Deal era", Lichtenstein maintains, "wanted a labor movement, first to serve as a Keynesian mechanism whereby aggregate demand might be enhanced without an even greater dependence on government spending and pubic employment projects" (p. 185). [Extracted from the article]

Cole has accomplished the rather remarkable feat of collecting probably every available scrap on Fletcher. This is true despite the recent proliferation of alleged alternatives to National Labor Relations Board unionism such as worker centers, legislative campaigns like "Fight For $15", and non-profit workers' groups such as Athena at Amazon or Rideshare Drivers United. Cole poignantly comments that "Fletcher's name and the union he helped lead definitely have been forgotten - perhaps more accurately "disappeared" by those who cannot imagine or oppose the vision espoused by Fletcher and other Wobblies" (p. 60). [Extracted from the article]

Rules exist to help the organization function, but rules are experienced by individuals so rules inherently influence individual behaviors. She discusses how most rules serve a purpose and most people comply with those rules, but there is also overcompliance with rules, using rules maliciously, and maladaptive rule following and rule rigidity. [Extracted from the article]

They also suggest a means for addressing the serious workplace issues and mistreatment that the prison workers urged Hatton to highlight, or the ways in which college athletes and graduate student workers are already organizing for more rights. Hatton's central argument is that employers' coercive power is seen most clearly in their relationship toward workers who are not always understood as "rights-bearing" workers deserving of employment rights at work. Hatton's central argument is that employers' coercive power is seen most clearly in their relationship towards workers who are not always understood as "rights-bearing" workers deserving of employment rights at work. [Extracted from the article]

First, Wood shows how the new flexible despotism regime undermines the legacies of the old hegemonic regime and its stable compromise equilibrium between capital and labour interests. This book addresses the important problem of the transformations of workplace regimes in the 21st century, postulating the emergence of a new flexible despotism regime in low-end service workplaces. Here Wood identifies the practice of "flexible scheduling", which gives managers a powerful mechanism to discipline workers by controlling their schedules without necessarily having to lay off. [Extracted from the article]

A review of the book "Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry," by Jason Schreier, is presented.

In February 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist launched an armed rebellion in Nepal, a landlocked country surrounded by China and India. Consequently, anthropological analyses of the Maoist revolution in empowering Nepal's marginalized communities have become a recurring theme in Nepal studies. Shadowing freed Kamaiyas working at a brick kiln factory, Hoffmann illustrates the ways in which the Maoist movement altered labor regimes in the region. [Extracted from the article]

Book Review: The Sweatshop Regime: Labouring Bodies, Exploitation, and Garments Made in India. Breaking with analyses of the sweatshop that focus on shop floor dynamics between management and labor, Alessandra Mezzadri makes a convincing argument to conceive the sweatshop as a regime. For example, Mezzadri strongly qualifies any notion of the sweatshop representing a one-way Western import and, instead, emphasizes the multiple "lords of the sweatshop" (p. 4). [Extracted from the article]

Book Review: Disrupting Deportability: Transnational Workers Organize. Workers who participate in TMWPs, and particularly those workers who expect to return to the same workplace year to year, also labor under this threat. In sum, Vosko shows how policy becomes personal and how collective action through collective agreements enlivens what deportability deadens - workers' power and workers' dignity. [Extracted from the article]

For watchers of India's labor scene, the key question is: What role, if any, did labor policies and practices play in the post-reform period? It is clear from several chapters that unions and the laws that empower unions are unlikely champions for the 90% of workers who toil in informal employment arrangements. To make workers prosperous and to convert their consumer spending into an engine for economic growth, they would need to reduce informality, increase worker skills (a topic covered only slightly in the book), and trigger a shift to more value-added goods and services. [Extracted from the article]

Chapters two to six examine how worker resistance exerts pressure on authorities; what distinct regional modes of control are generated; and, finally, whether any national trends can be identified. Whether they can be understood to be representative of China as a whole is in doubt, however, given that both the PRD and YRD are the most developed regions, ranking top in China for attracting migrant workers. In this compelling book, Manfred Elfstrom portrays a uniquely comprehensive and vivid picture of dynamic changes in contemporary industrial relations in China. [Extracted from the article]

Professor Blackett does not gloss over the challenges in treating domestic work like any other work while addressing the specificity of the domestic work in the private home. Professor Blackett's book, I Everyday Transgressions, i tackles this invisibility head on and provides a much-needed conceptual framing that lays bare the inequities faced by domestic workers and the transnational movement for change. We cannot simply apply industrial workplace models to the domestic work relationship but at the same time, domestic workers must be treated as any other worker. [Extracted from the article]

There's a brilliant moment - one of many - in Seb Franklin's new book, that turns the cyberlibertarian term "digital native" inside out. As Franklin luminously demonstrates, in this way capitalism appears systemic and inevitable, its value operating abstractly or separately from its material or analog sources. The Digitally Disposed: Racial Capitalism and the Informatics of Value: Seb Franklin, 2021 Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, Electronic Mediations 61 280 pp., ISBN 10 1517907152, £20.99 (pbk). [Extracted from the article]

First is Andreas's claim that Mao was self-contradictory or indecisive and that this caused great problems not just for the Party but for the industrial working class as he moved from one meddling intervention to another. Andreas argues on page 10 that "I will examine the evolution of industrial relations in China from 1949 to the present", rather than engaging with debates over industrial relations. This explains Mao's relationship with the urban working class and his focus on political over economic interests and on mobilizing the working class against a stultifying Party structure. [Extracted from the article]

Bieler situates the processes of water privatization as part of a larger drive towards the commodification of public services and social reproduction following the restructuring of the capitalist regime of accumulation after the 1970s. The approval of a 2009 law by a right-wing government mandating the privatization of local water services triggered a counter-reaction by a broad coalition of social movements and trade unions. Indeed, the strong and continued commodifying pressures exercised by the EU's new economic governance regime, which emerged after the 2008 economic crisis (Erne, 2015; Szabó, 2019), act as a countervailing force to movements opposing water privatization. [Extracted from the article]

Andrew Taylor's valuable book, the latest entry in MUP's "New Perspectives on the Right" series, examines the relationship between the Conservative party and trade unionism from the late nineteenth century to the Thatcherite reforms of the 1980s. Despite party enmity to industrial militancy and union support for Labour politics, an enhanced union role in governance prompted by the necessities of the First World War was accepted by most Conservatives. Taylor reveals the negligible impact of bodies such as the interwar Labour Sub-Committee on the party's approach to industrial relations. [Extracted from the article]

From this perspective, I A Field in Flux i offers readers like myself, who have come of age lauding these hugely influential works in industrial relations, a rare opportunity to peek behind the curtain to reveal how they were developed. As I read Bob's stories, I was struck by how similar my own experiences in industrial relations were to those described in the book, even though my journey began two generations later. A second is to document Bob's own journey within the field, which interweaves travels through the elite industrial relations institutions in the United States with an intimate account of Bob's involvement in some of the most challenging political and industrial relations-related moments facing this country. [Extracted from the article]

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy: by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle, Oakland CA, University of California Press, 2019, 288 pp., £25.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-520-30056-9 / £85.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-520-30055-2 The monumental changes brought on by the rise of the sharing economy demand attention by those studying inequality, technology, and the ever-mounting risk shift onto American workers. In a way, Ravenelle's expert discussion of how bad the sharing economy treats workers leaves one wanting a more radical prescription for the low wage workers, sharing economy or not, given the pervasive injustices she documents. [Extracted from the article]

Homestead Steel Mill - The Final Ten Years: USWA Local 1397 and the Fight for Union Democracy By Stout, Mike. Unfortunately, Stout's career as a crane operator and then highly skilled union grievance handler was cut short by the collapse of the steel industry and closure of Homestead Works in the late 1980s. During my own stint as a Pittsburgh-based volunteer for Ed Sadlowski's campaign for the USW presidency in 1976-1977, I met some of the Homestead workers profiled in Stout's book. [Extracted from the article]

The cases and the mass strikes described by each of these can be seen as part of a global working-class reaction to global trends of increasing exploitation and precarization of work and more in general to the ever-present reactivity of workers to changes in the form of capital exploitation. The first is that strikes, even in their variant as mass strikes, have historically been associated with that part of the working class deriving its collective power by the possibility of withdrawing from work. Strikes can help build power and organization, especially when nonworkplace issues are framed in and when the strikes reach the national political level, and can as well provide a fertile soil for the consolidation of new informal groups challenging and revitalizing existing trade unions. [Extracted from the article]

Greenhouse shows how the NLRA, once the institutional basis of labor's power, was gradually captured by corporate interests, generating a morass of obstacles to unionization in an agency designed to facilitate it. Instead, Greenhouse judiciously culls insights from selected scholarship in labor history and industrial relations, supplemented in later chapters with material from his own reporting (and occasionally that of other journalists) over the past few decades. Greenhouse offers no easy answers, but he asks all the right questions and offers an expert guide through the treacherous labor landscape, not only in the workplace itself but in the equally crucial arenas of politics and public policy. [Extracted from the article]

Book Review: Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America's Port. Blue and Green: The Drive for Justice at America's Port. Neither side has been entirely successful, which is hardly surprising given both the ambition of the campaigns - a clean port and the reclassification of truck drivers as employees - and the combined forces aligned against them, stretching all the way from the local to the global. [Extracted from the article]

The policies adopted by unions in response to immigrant workers are determined by what the authors refer to as I logics of action i , which are developed over a union's life course and are shaped by environmental and institutional factors. The subsequent chapters showcase the nationally distinctive "logics" of union action, and the resultant strategies the unions have developed to engage and incorporate immigrant workers. Similarly, the authors choose to focus on cases in which the union has actively engaged with immigrants, excluding cases in which unions have been largely inactive or even pursued hostile action toward immigrant workers. [Extracted from the article]

This article reviews the book "The Global Evolution of Industrial Relations: Events, Ideas, and the IIRA," by Bruce E. Kaufman.

This article reviews the book "The Global Evolution of Industrial Relations: Events, Ideas, and the IIRA," by Bruce E. Kaufman.