This series publishes monographs and edited collections on the history, present condition and possible future role of organised labour around the world. Multidisciplinary in approach, geographically and chronologically diverse, this series is dedicated to the study of trade unionism and the undeniably significant role it has played in modern society.

"Analyzes the development of the movement for agrarian reform in Brazil, and attempts to explain the major moments of change in its growth trajectory, from the late 1970s to 2006"--Provided by publisher.

Institutional bypass is a reform strategy that creates alternative institutional regimes to give citizens a choice of service provider and create a form of competition between the dominant institution and the institutional bypass. While novel in the academic literature, the concept captures practices already being used in developing countries. In this illuminating book, Mariana Mota Prado and Michael J. Trebilcock explore the strengths and limits of this strategy with detailed case studies, showing how citizen preferences provide a benchmark against which future reform initiatives can be evaluated, and in this way change the dynamics of the reform process. While not a 'silver bullet' to the challenge of institutional reform, institutional bypasses add to the portfolio of strategies to promote development. This work should be read by development researchers, scholars, policymakers, and anyone else seeking options on how to promote change and implement reforms in developing countries around the world.

Along with the fast growing economy, the term “BRICs” was coined to represent the newly emerging countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China. The enhanced economy in these countries has largely improved people's life; at the same time, it has also strongly influenced the transformation of social structure, norms and values. However, as the world's attention centers on their economic development at the micro level, the social changes at the micro level have often been neglected, and a specific comparative study of these four countries is even more rare.This handbook's contributing authors are leading sociologists in the four countries. They fill the gap in existing literature and examine specifically the changes in each society from the perspective of social stratification, with topics covering the main social classes, the inequality of education and income, and the different styles of consumption as well as the class consciousness and values. Under every topic, it gathers articles from authors of each country. Such a comparative study could not only help us achieve a better understanding of the economic growth and social development in these countries, but also lead us to unveil the mystery of how these emerging powers with dramatic differences in history, geography, culture, language, religion and politics could share a common will and take joint action. In general, the handbook takes a unique perspective to show readers that it is the profound social structural changes in these countries that determine their future, and to a large extent, will shape the socio-economic landscape of the future world.

From workers' wages to presidential elections, labor unions once exerted tremendous clout in American life. In the immediate post-World War II era, one in three workers belonged to a union. The fraction now is close to one in five, and just one in ten in the private sector. The only thing big about Big Labor today is the scope of its problems. While many studies have explained the causes of this decline, What Unions No Longer Do shows the broad repercussions of labor's collapse for the American economy and polity. Organized labor was not just a minor player during the middle decades of the twentieth century, Jake Rosenfeld asserts. For generations it was the core institution fighting for economic and political equality in the United States. Unions leveraged their bargaining power to deliver benefits to workers while shaping cultural understandings of fairness in the workplace. What Unions No Longer Do details the consequences of labor's decline, including poorer working conditions, less economic assimilation for immigrants, and wage stagnation among African-Americans. In short, unions are no longer instrumental in combating inequality in our economy and our politics, resulting in a sharp decline in the prospects of American workers and their families.

This book analyses the conflicts that emerged from the Brazilian labour movement’s active participation in a rapidly changing political environment, particularly in the context of the coming to power of a party with strong roots in the labour movement. While the close relations with the Workers' Party (PT) have shaped the labour movement’s political agenda, its trajectory cannot be understood solely with reference to that party’s electoral fortunes. Through a study of the political trajectory of the Brazilian labour movement over the last three decades, the author explores the conditions under which the labour movement has developed militant and moderate strategies.

This book aims to reconstruct the role played by left movements and organizations in Brazil from their process of renewal in the 1980s as they fought against the civil-military dictatorship, going through the Workers' Party's governments in the 2000s, until the Party’s dramatic defeat with a parliamentary coup in 2016. Henceforth, there have been attacks on social and political rights that severely affect the lower classes and reverted progressive policies on various issues. Through a historical reconstruction, this book analyzes how different left movements and organizations contributed to the democratization of Brazilian society, and how their contradictions contributed to the actual conservative turn. The essays also focus the development of Brazilian Left in the light of socialist politics and especially Marxism, both in terms of political organizations and theory. In this sense, the essays in this collection represent an effort to rethink some aspects of the history of the Brazilian left and how it can reorganize itself after the conservative turn.