A manifesto for the workplace feminist that moved Oscar winner Jane Fonda to exclaim “Please, please, please. All working women must read this book!” Enough about “breaking the glass ceiling.” Here are blueprints for a redesign of the entire building, ground up, to benefit women and men—as well as the bottom line. In Taking on the Big Boys, longtime labor activist Ellen Bravo explores workplace environments in both business and government. She recounts women’s testimonies from offices, assembly lines, hospitals, and schools, unmasking the patronizing, trivializing, and minimizing tactics employed by “the big boys” and their surrogates, such as portraying feminism as women against men, and dismissing demands for pay equity, family leave, and flex time as outrageous. Also included are practical tips on everything from dealing with a sexual harasser to getting family members to share chores—and build equal relationships. In this “smart, kind, funny, and very effective” Gold Medal Winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award for Women’s Issues, Bravo argues for feminism as a system of beliefs, laws, and practices that value women and work associated with women, while detailing activist strategies to achieve a society where everybody—women and men—reach their potential (Gloria Steinem, feminist icon).

This book presents a vision for farreaching economic change in America connected to practical grassroots steps. It points to an economic system in which corporate success merges with the long-term welfare of the workers and the general population. The author examines the continued reality of social democracy in Europe and what lessons can be learned for the U.S. He demonstrates how progressive economic change is already being fought for by labor and community groups throughout America in such efforts as the Living Wage Movement and the emerging battle against sprawl. And he provides a wealth of concrete examples, tools, and ideas that everyone can use to organize for economic and social justice in their own communities.

From Widgits to Digits is about the changing nature of the employment relationship and its implications for labor and employment law. For most of the twentieth century, employers fostered long-term employment relationships through the use of implicit promises of job security, well-defined hierarchical job ladders, and longevity-based wage and benefit schemes. Today's employers no longer value longevity or seek to encourage long-term attachment between the employee and the firm. Instead employers seek flexibility in their employment relationships. As a result, employees now operate as free agents in a boundaryless workplace, in which they move across departmental lines within firms, and across firm borders, throughout their working lives. Today's challenge is to find a means to provide workers with continuity in wages, on-going training opportunities, sustainable and transferable skills, unambiguous ownership of their human capital, portable benefits, and an infrastructure of support structures to enable them to weather career transitions.

The realities of globalization have produced a surprising reversal in the focus and strategies of labor movements around the world. After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States. Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly "unorganizable," labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods. Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of "symbolic leverage" that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.

In recent decades, the prevailing response to the problem of unacceptable labour market outcomes in both Europe and North America - national regulation of labour standards and labour relations, coupled with collective bargaining - has come under increasing pressure from the economic and technological forces associated with globalisation. As those forces have shifted power away from national governments and labour unions and toward capital, the appropriate institutional locus of labour regulation has become hotly contested. There have been efforts to move the locus of regulation downward to smaller units of governance, including firms themselves, upward to larger units such as regional federations and international organizations, and outward to non-governmental organizations and civil society. In this volume, labour relations scholars from North America and Europe examine the efficacy of these emerging forms of labour regulation, their democratic legitimacy, the goals and values underlying them, and the appropriate direction of reform.