This annotated bibliography of New Zealand trade union literature includes human resources, labour studies and social history. It is more complete and up to date than Bert Roth's (1970, reprinted 1977) bibliography, and much of the material does not appear in Austin Bagnall's 'New Zealand National Bibliography'. Other than trade unions themselves, political and union activists, social historians, students and book researchers will find 'Words at Work' a valuable resource. Even a cursory glance at the wealth of literature, covering 130 years, recorded here shows a broad range of diverse activity across many occupational groupings, windmills that have been tilted at and often bent, the indefatigable nature of worker organisation and action, and the striving for progress in areas of life beyond the industrial.

The Employment Contracts Act (1991), a key component of the structural reforms that have taken place in New Zealand since 1984, is discussed internationally as a model for designing new labour laws. The Act repudiated collective action and bargaining, rejecting almost a century of practice, and transformed unions and workplace relations. In this volume, an American lawyer who has spent several visits to New Zealand studying labour issues, tells how the ECA was passed, analyzes its performance as labour law, a matter of widespread disagreement, and explores its economic, social and legal impact.

'Marginalised' workers of the late twentieth century were those last hired in times of plenty and first fired in times of recession. Often women, Maori, or people from the Pacifc, they were frequently unemployed, and marginalised within the union movement as well as the labour force. WORKERS IN THE MARGINS tells the story of these workers in the tumultuous years of post-war New Zealand. These were years characterised by massive changes in the workforce, as it expanded to accommodate a growing urban Maori population and an increasing desire for women to enter paid work. The world of trade unions and employment conflicts, such as the 1951 waterfront lockout, was vigorous and challenging. As free market policies deregulated the labour market and splintered the union movement toward the end of the century, Te Roopu Rawakore o Aotearoa, the national unemployed and beneficiaries' movement, gave a new voice to 'workers in the margins'. The people of this history come to life through oral histories - from the poet (and boilermaker) Hone Tuwhare building a palisade at Orakei through to activists Sue Bradford and Jane Stevens working with the unemployed in the 1980s and '90s. Their experiences speak to the lives of many workers of the early twenty-first century.

Excerpt from New Zealand Department of Labour: Its Organization and Work Registrar of Industrial Unions, was placed in charge. Two months afterwards he was joined by Mr. James Mackay, now Chief Inspector of Factories and Deputy Registrar. The Department was instituted by the late Hon. John Ballance, then Premier of New Zealand, for the purpose of trying to meet the unem ployed difficulty, which was at that time in pressing existence in all the larger towns. The attempt was made to bring the work and the worker together, by appointing agents all over the colony, who should not only continually report on the labour condition of their districts, but give active assistance by forwarding workers on their way to employ ment. Cc-operative works on roads and railways were also started by the Government to absorb the overplus of labour not required by private employers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.