The eighteen essays in this volume concentrate on the issues surrounding workers' participation, the area of industrial relations uppermost in Marco Biagi's thinking at the time of his assassination in March 2002. The trend toward ever greater employee involvement in managerial decisionmaking has been growing in Europe for over a decade, to a significant extent as a result of Biagi's work. From the start, he clearly discerned that the key to quality of work was worker participation. This book stands not merely as a homage, but as evidence that Biagi's assassination will not affect the progress he was making. In what amounts to an integrated series of recommendations for further European legislation on workers' participation in industrial relations, the authors analyse and evaluate the following: experience gained from implementation of the European Works Council Directive and the European Company Statute Directive; implications of the new Directive on Information/Consultation in National Undertakings and of the European Forum on the Financial Participation of Workers; and experience in a variety of national contexts, including those of Japan, Italy, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Poland, and Slovenia. In the final analysis, employee involvement--when it is a genuine commitment on the part of all stakeholders--is seen as a sharing of cultural values that successfully reconciles efficiency and social justice. Those who believe this is a goal worth achieving, for reasons both economic and social, will recognize in this book an immensely valuable contribution.

This collective volume on quality of work in the European Union offers a comprehensive analysis on the current situation of the tensions between work and welfare in Europe, with a special emphasis on employment-related issues. The volume tackles a crucial aspect of employment policies, namely the strengthening of the quality dimension in the decisions taken by policy-makers to foster the performance of the labour market and to combine this orientation with the demands of workers for welfare, protection and a better reconciliation of work and family life. Quality of work has been on the agenda of policy-makers, practitioners and academics for the last few years, promoting a wide debate. The book provides a contribution to this debate and takes into consideration a range of issues associated with the analysis of work quality from an innovative perspective. Relevant subtopics including a conceptual and political analysis of work quality, wage differentials and in-work poverty, gender issues or workers' direct and indirect representation in the firm and its relation with work quality are addressed.

Examining the debate on quality of jobs in Europe, this book focuses on the work-life balance-a central element of the EU agenda. It addresses tensions between work and private life, examining job quality, job security, working conditions and time-use patterns of individuals and households as well as institutional contexts.

A remarkable development in the sociology of work in recent years has been the explosion of brilliant cross-national and cross-cultural studies in Europe examining the conditions of labor against the background of different economic systems, and differences within each of the major free market, mixed welfare, and planned economic systems that dot the European landscape. In Vienna and Budapest in particular, a group of intellectual workers have gotten together for what can only be described as breakthrough studies in the conditions and purposes of work in post-industrial society. The question of new forms of work organization focuses on job satisfaction, participatory democracy in the work place, levels of productivity, and issues of health and safety in the occupational environment. That these elements are important have long been known. But what this collection of studies emphasizes is the specific mix that produced specific outcomes. It does not shy away from dangerous and tough questions: worker control and control of workers, political participation in contexts of authoritarian regimes, and personal rewards in contexts that once frowned upon private acquisition of capital. The volume is rich in empirical studies and draws the theoretical implications that can and already have had vast policy consequences for workers in the modern " context. Issues relating to job rotation, enrichment, enlargement and autonomy, and others related to new forms of organization starting with the shop floor and extending throughout the management of the enterprise as a whole are dealt with candidly. The social character of labor, long frowned upon as a mechanism for evading bread-and-butter issues, is now recognized, East and West, as a dimension of concern that is growing precisely as the size and character of the labor sector is diminishing. This is must reading for those interested in new forms of social and policy synthesis, and ways of meliorating competing claims of different sectors in modern societies.

Intense globalization, rapidly changing workplaces and family patterns have renewed the international interest in quality of life. This book examines different institutional arrangements, work-place conditions and gendered work and care that affect the conditions for achieving quality of work and life in European countries.