Industrial Democracy in America. The Ambiguous Promise

Lichtenstein, Nelson; Harris, Howell John

doi:10.1177/030981689806500119

Cited by 15 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…Students of labor and labor movements, perhaps since Karl Marx, have argued that labor rights are chimerical under capitalism (see Markovits ). Therefore, nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century socialists, social democrats, and labor reformers, while not always seeing eye to eye, agreed that if workers were to have any rights at all, they needed to be self‐organized and to build their own source of social power (Lichtenstein and Harris , 4; see, e.g., Webb and Webb [1847] ). Self‐organized workers should contribute to an “autonomous” system of law separate from that of the then‐existing common or civil law, which kept workers subordinated (Bogg et al , 2).…”

Section: Organizations Their Environments and The Promise Of Romentioning

confidence: 99%

The Labor Judge Unleashed: Rule of Law and Labor Rights in “Neoliberal” Chile

Marzán¹

2018

Law soc. inq.

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Hoping to improve labor justice, some Latin American countries have reformed their labor courts without necessarily buttressing working‐class power. Class power theories make us skeptical of these state‐centric strategies for labor rights. Will the “rule‐of‐law” reforms work? This article reports ethnographic evidence collected by the author in the Chilean labor courts during 2009–2010, and secondary sources. It compares contemporary labor courts, reformed but in an otherwise “neoliberal” context, with the unreformed labor courts of the “socialist” years (1970–1972) to gauge the efficacy of rule‐of‐law reforms. Results show that despite the neoliberal context, the labor courts were more responsive to workers' claims than under socialism. Rule of law and procedural rules matter for effective labor rights.

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Section: Organizations Their Environments and The Promise Of Romentioning

confidence: 99%

The Labor Judge Unleashed: Rule of Law and Labor Rights in “Neoliberal” Chile

Marzán¹

2018

Law soc. inq.

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“…Joint labour-management arrangements were advocated most notably by Morris Cooke, Frederick Taylor's ghost writer (i.e. the actual author of The Principles of Scientific Management), as the Taylor movement (particularly after Taylor's death) attempted to extend Taylor's 'mental revolution' by engaging union support (Cooke and Murray, 1940;Derber, 1970;Wrege and Stotka, 1978;Lichtenstein and Harris, 1993;McCartin, 1998;Summers, 2000;Bruce and Nyland, 2011;Nyland et al, 2014). Works councils were judged especially effective when considering technical aspects of production and were a key development in the emergence of codetermination in Europe.…”

Section: Employee Participation and Representationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industrial democracy and corporate governance: two discourses of reform in liberal-market economies

Mees¹

2017

IJCG

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Industrial democracy and corporate governance are intertwined discourses. In present-day use, however, the two expressions seem to represent as different perspectives as two related discursive traditions could become. At a time when calls have emerged for the intersection of the two narratives to be revisited, how the separation of these two related discourses occurred historically and what that separation has entailed seems of particular importance. The received corporate governance approach has become so dominant that it appears to have assumed the status of an ideology -an established way of thinking about the governance of corporations that is largely just assumed (rather than argued) in much financial and legal discourse. Seeking to understand why mainstream corporate governance scholarship has failed to engage with the historically key issue of industrial democratisation is the main purpose of this paper.

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“…Ideally the research and historical records would be further searched in order to provide discriminating pro and con empirical evidence on these competing claims and perspectives; however, space constraints preclude doing so here. Readers can, nonetheless, find accounts of company unions that were ineffectual or union avoidance devices in Ozanne (1967), Schacht (1985), and Nelson (1993). Accounts that find company unions had a positive effect on productivity, wages and hours, conditions, and workers' treatment include Fairris (1997), Pencavel (2003), and Rees (2007).…”

Section: Radical Framementioning

confidence: 99%

Experience with Company Unions and their Treatment under the Wagner Act: A Four Frames of Reference Analysis

Kaufman

2015

Industrial Relations

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This paper reexamines American experience with company unions (also known as nonunion employee representation plans) before they were banned by the Wagner Act (1935). For the half‐century following the passage of the act, labor historians and industrial relations scholars painted a bleak portrait of company unions as anti‐union sham organizations. Since the 1980s, additional research has documented a more positive side; similarly, concern has grown that the Wagner Act's ban is stifling legitimate employee participation programs. This paper brings new theoretical and empirical evidence to both historical and legal parts of this debate, including examination of company unions through individualist, unitarist, pluralist, and radical frames; demonstration that the pluralists’ view of company unions was more diverse and positive than conventionally portrayed; presentation of new historical evidence and testimony on the company union experience; and a substantially revisionist assessment of the merits of the Wagner Act's ban. In particular, the conclusion is that, given any reasonable weighting of the four frames, the company union ban is overly restrictive and should be modified so companies can implement the positive side of nonunion employee committees but not the negative. The paper ends by noting that the unbalanced and narrowly critical treatment of company unions in the mainline industrial relations tradition is a case study of the field's perhaps fatal post–World War II core intellectual‐normative contradiction—professed inclusiveness of all frames of employment relations but, in practice, attention to and preference for a narrow union‐centric version of one frame.

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Industrial Democracy in America. The Ambiguous Promise

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

The Labor Judge Unleashed: Rule of Law and Labor Rights in “Neoliberal” Chile

The Labor Judge Unleashed: Rule of Law and Labor Rights in “Neoliberal” Chile

Industrial democracy and corporate governance: two discourses of reform in liberal-market economies

Experience with Company Unions and their Treatment under the Wagner Act: A Four Frames of Reference Analysis

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