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Labor Relations Commons

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Alexander Colvin

Labor and Employment Law

Labor unions

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Labor Relations

[Review Of The Book Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism And The Public Workplace], Alexander Colvin May 2012

[Review Of The Book Success While Others Fail: Social Movement Unionism And The Public Workplace], Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

[Excerpt] In this splendid book, Paul Johnston applies his broad understanding of contemporary social theory to an analysis of a series of carefully matched field research cases to achieve genuine theoretical insights. His analysis addresses such fundamental issues as the nature of public sector unionism—its goals and the weapons it uses to achieve them, the ways it differs from private sector unionism—and the dynamics of social movement unionism. This work is an important contribution to the resurgent body of inductive theory development in industrial relations research that has emerged in recent years.


[Review Of The Book Unions And Workplace Change In Canada], Alexander Colvin May 2012

[Review Of The Book Unions And Workplace Change In Canada], Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

[Excerpt] Some leading unions in Canada are notable for the diversity of their responses to workplace change. These unions' policies and strategies, which range from the Steelworkers' (USWA) bold experiment in employee ownership and co-determination at Algoma Steel to the Autoworkers' (CAW) activist response to the pressures of the Japanese production and management systems at the CAMI auto plant, have produced significant variation in change processes and outcomes. This range of activity by Canadian unions in response to workplace change provides a fertile area for study by industrial relations researchers, as well as important challenges for policy makers and practitioners …


[Review Of The Book What Do Unions Do? A Twenty-Year Perspective], Alexander Colvin May 2012

[Review Of The Book What Do Unions Do? A Twenty-Year Perspective], Alexander Colvin

Alexander Colvin

[Excerpt] The 1984 publication of Richard Freeman and James Medoff’s What Do Unions Do? was a landmark event in research on labor unions. It challenged existing negative economic conceptions of the role of unions by presenting a two-faced model of unionism in which the negative monopoly face of unions was counter-balanced by a positive collective voice face. For those in the labor movement, this book became a powerful source of academic support for their value to society and the economy. Among academics, WDUD was equally influential, as it encouraged a renewed, more data-intensive and methodologically sophisticated approach to research on …