Labor Relations Commons^™

Deregulation And Restructuring In Telecommunications Services In The United States And Germany, Rosemary Batt, Owen Darbishire

Rosemary Batt

[Excerpt] Because of the slower pace of reform, however, Telekom also stands to learn from the mistakes made in the United States, where deregulation has led to increased inequality among consumers and workers. For consumers, the restructuring has benefited businesses because they no longer pay rates that subsidize universal residential service. Both business and high-end retail customers can take advantage of falling prices for long-distance calling, high-speed networks, or enhanced features such as voice messaging. For lower-income consumers, however, the basic costs of local service have risen, and these consumers are less likely to be able to take advantage of …

Industrial Relations And The Reorganization Of Work In West Germany: Lessons For The U.S., Lowell Turner

Lowell Turner

[Excerpt] Some have suggested that to compete in the new world economy we must not only adopt Japanese production practices but also abandon Western traditions of independent unionism. When U.S. trade unionists naturally resist, they are criticized as "adversarial." My argument is that U.S. managers do not need to break the unions or to transform them into subordinate enterprise unions in order to gain the benefits of new work organization. Rather than looking only to Japan for ways to get us out of our current competitive predicament, we should also look to Europe. A particularly useful example is West Germany, …

Unions, Markets, And Democracy In Latin America, Maria Lorena Cook

Maria Lorena Cook

[Excerpt] In the 1990s scholars of Latin America moved from a concern with democratization to a focus on the implementation of market economic reforms. With this shift, the appreciation of labor unions' value to society was lost. Whereas earlier analyses of democratic transitions recognized organized labor's important role in bringing an end to dictatorships, later studies of market reform viewed labor organizations as either obstacles to be overcome, "losers" to be compensated, or simply irrelevant.

Perhaps more important than scholarship's neglect of labor unions is the neglect that is reflected in policies toward labor in the region. Economic and labor …

Relaciones Industriales En America Del Norte: Sindicalismo Y Sector Automotriz En Los Estados Unidos [Industrial Relations In North America: Unions And The Auto Sector In The United States], Maria Lorena Cook

Maria Lorena Cook

[Excerpt] Este trabajo empieza por describir algunas de las tendencias generates de cambio que se han generado en los mercados de trabajo y en las relaciones industriales a nivel nacional en los Estados Unidos a raiz de los procesos de globalizacion en los ultimos anos, tomando como ejemplo el caso del sector automotriz. Tambien se consideran algunas de las respuestas y estrategias de los sindicatos norteamericanos frente a estos cambios: las de la AFL-CIO a nivel central, y las del sindicato del sector automotriz, el United Automobile Workers, o UAW. Los cambios que se han generado en los ultimos anos …

Unauthorized Migration And Border “Control”: Three Regional Views, Maria Cook

Maria Lorena Cook

This is a revised transcript of a talk given at the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, on February 29, 2008.