Trade unions have repeatedly been challenged by neoliberal programmes implemented within Member States of theEuropean Union (EU) and at the European level. The twentyseven country chapters at the core of this book chart the features of the neoliberal challenge in the EU Member States and the...

"An original analysis of the relationship between slavery and the labor movement in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the rise of the labor movement in the late nineteenth century, why were American workers unable to organize inclusive trade unions like those formed by...

"The history of labor is inextricably linked with the history of the United States, and today, undergraduate students are seeing a new chapter in labor history unfold before them, with wages stagnating, inequality growing, and unions taking on renewed importance in the workplace. While labor...

The debates as to whether trade unions should be viewed as social movements is longstanding. We propose that unions are the organisational forms of the labour movement and that despite declining membership, unions remain influential social, economic, and political actors in liberal democratic...

This chapter examines the concept and evolution of Social Movement Unionism (SMU), exploring how unions increasingly engage beyond traditional labour concerns to advocate for broader socio-political changes. SMU emerged as a response to the limitations of conventional unionism, aligning union...

This chapter explains, and provides an overview of, the concept of trade union ‘revitalisation’, sometimes referred to as ‘renewal’, focusing on the ‘servicing’ and ‘organising’ models of trade unionism. The question of revitalisation attracted considerable attention in an era of...

"Description: Following World War II, women living in small towns and farms all across the Midwest, woke every morning, packed their lunches, and headed out for a long day of work in a nearby factory. Many of these women never envisioned themselves as industrial workers, but the political and...

"One of New York City's most powerful unions, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, AFL-CIO, represents almost 40,000 workers. Shaun Richman's history places the labor organization within the context of American industrial and craft unionism and reveals how it came to influence politics and...

Although frequently considered an independent and opposing force to capital, modern labor unions face many of the same pressures as businesses. Using a novel sample of union financial statements, we document that unions behave like corporations in a variety of ways. Unions often have...

This paper applies principles from evolutionary biology to the study of unions. We show that unions which maximize the present discounted wages of current members will be displaced in evolutionary competition by unions with more moderate wage policies that allow their firms to live longer. This...