Bøger udgivet af ILR Press

What Work Means goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good life. Dispelling the notion of Americans as mere workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These findings challenge laborist views of waged work as central to a good life as well as post-work theories that treat work solely as exploitative and soul-crushing. Drawing upon the evocative stories of unemployed Americans from a wide range of occupations, from day laborers to corporate managers, both immigrant and native-born, Strauss explores how diverse Americans think about the place of work in a good life, gendered meanings of breadwinning, accepting financial support from family, friends, and the state, and what the ever-elusive American dream means to them. By considering how post-Fordist unemployment experiences diverge from joblessness earlier, What Work Means paves the way for a historically and culturally informed discussion of work meanings in a future of teleworking, greater automation, and increasing nonstandard employment.

The UAW's Southern Gamble is the first in-depth assessment of the United Auto Workers' efforts to organize foreign vehicle plants (Daimler-Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Volkswagen) in the American South since 1989, an era when union membership declined precipitously. Stephen J. Silvia chronicles transnational union cooperation between the UAW and its counterparts in Brazil, France, Germany, and Japan and documents the development of employer strategies that have proven increasingly effective at thwarting unionization.Silvia shows that when organizing, unions must now fight on three fronts: at the worksite; in the corporate boardroom; and in the political realm. The UAW's Southern Gamble makes clear that the UAW's failed campaigns in the South can teach hard-won lessons about challenging the structural and legal roadblocks to union participation and effectively organizing workers within and beyond the auto industry.

Much of the hoopla surrounding quality circles, teams, and high-performance work systems has been based on anecdotes and very thin evidence. It has not been established that those employee involvement strategies amount to anything more than another series of management fads or ruses designed to get more out of workers without giving them anything in return. This revelatory book, written by some of the skeptics, lays some of the suspicion to rest.Based on their visits to 44 plants and surveys of more than 4,000 employees, Eileen Appelbaum, Thomas Bailey, Peter Berg, and Arne L. Kalleberg concluded that companies are indeed more successful when managers share knowledge and power with workers and when workers assume increased responsibility and discretion.The study of steel, apparel, and medical electronics and imaging plants revealed much. In self-directed teams, workers were able to eliminate bottlenecks and coordinate the work process. In task forces created to improve quality, they communicated with individuals outside their own work groups and were able to solve problems. Expensive equipment in steel mills operated with fewer interruptions, turnaround and labor costs were cut in apparel factories, and costly inventories of components and medical equipment were reduced.And what did the employees think? The worker survey showed that jobs in participatory work systems often provide more challenging tasks and more opportunities for creativity. Employees in apparel had higher hourly earnings; those in steel had both higher hourly earnings and higher job satisfaction. Workers in more participatory settings were no more likely than others to report heavy workloads or excessive demands on their time. They were, however, less likely to report involuntary overtime or conflict with co-workers, and were more likely to be satisfied with their surroundings. Manufacturing Advantage provides the best assessment available of the effectiveness of high-performance work systems. Freestanding chapters near the end of the book provide full documentation of research data without interrupting the narrative flow.

The Welfare and Retirement Fund of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) is widely acknowledged as the most innovative effort at group health care in the United States in the twentieth century. Ivana Krajcinovic describes the establishment, operation, and demise of the Fund that brought mining families from the backwater to the forefront of medical care in less than a decade. Krajcinovic analyzes the success of the Fund over nearly three decades in providing high-quality cost-effective care to miners and their families. She also explains the irony of its dismantlement at the very moment when its innovations gained currency among mainstream commercial plans.

Do service-sector workers represent the future of the U.S. labor movement? Mid-twentieth-century union activism transformed manufacturing jobs from backbreaking, low-wage work into careers that allowed workers to buy homes and send their kids to college. Some union activists insist that there is no reason why service-sector workers cannot follow that same path. In If We Can Win Here, Fran Quigley tells the stories of janitors, fry cooks, and health care aides trying to fight their way to middle-class incomes in Indianapolis. He also chronicles the struggles of the union organizers with whom the workers have made common cause.The service-sector workers of Indianapolis mirror the city's demographics: they are white, African American, and Latino. In contrast, the union organizers are mostly white and younger than the workers they help rally. Quigley chronicles these allies' setbacks, victories, bonds, and conflicts while placing their journey in the broader context of the global economy and labor history. As one Indiana-based organizer says of the struggle being waged in a state that has earned a reputation as antiunion: "If we can win here, we can win anywhere." The outcome of the battle of Indianapolis may foretell the fate of workers across the United States.

Medical competence is a hot topic surrounded by much controversy about how to define competency, how to teach it, and how to measure it. While some debate the pros and cons of competence-based medical education and others explain how to achieve various competencies, the authors of the seven chapters in The Question of Competence offer something very different. They critique the very notion of competence itself and attend to how it has shaped what we pay attention to--and what we ignore--in the education and assessment of medical trainees. Two leading figures in the field of medical education, Brian D. Hodges and Lorelei Lingard, drew together colleagues from the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands to explore competency from different perspectives, in order to spark thoughtful discussion and debate on the subject. The critical analyses included in the book's chapters cover the role of emotion, the implications of teamwork, interprofessional frameworks, the construction of expertise, new directions for assessment, models of self-regulation, and the concept of mindful practice. The authors juxtapose the idea of competence with other highly valued ideas in medical education such as emotion, cognition and teamwork, drawing new insights about their intersections and implications for one another.