COLLECTIVEBARGAINING IN THEPRIVATESECTOR
Edited by Paul F. Clark, John T. Delaney and Ann C. Frost. Industrial Relations Research Association, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, 2002, iv + 380 pp., US$29.95 (paperback)
One hallmark of industrial relations scholarship is grounding employment research in the institutional reality of how labour markets and trade unions work in practice. This edited volume, therefore, presents detailed descriptions of US unionism and collective bargaining in eight industries—airlines, autos, health care, hotels and casinos, newspapers, professional sports, telecommunications and trucking—written by 13 academics who are specialists in each industry. It is impossible for any single volume to cover all industries in detail and the editors have done a nice job of collecting diverse industries that represent a variety of private sector experiences. Most of these chapters focus on developments over the past 20 years and this collection provides a high-quality snapshot of the state of US industrial relations two decades after the start of the concession bargaining era, and in the immediate shadow of the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, albeit limited to the private sector.
Nearly all of the chapters begin with a description of the particular industry— its organisational structure, the nature of competition, major occupations, the primary companies and unions and the significant environmental trends over the last two decades or so. Unsurprisingly, a common theme is a significant increase in the competitive environment in each of the eight industries. Another recurring theme is de-unionisation, especially in trucking, newspapers and autos, though this theme is not universal because unionisation rates in airlines and professional sports are relatively stable. Many of the chapters also raise important issues about the obsolescence of US labour law, such as the exclusion of nurses as supervisors (chapter 3, by Paul F Clark) and of truck drivers as owner–operators (chapter 8, by Michael Belzer) – and of the traditional election-based organising process. Against this backdrop, the chapters review recent bargaining outcomes, changes in bargaining structure, strikes and organising drives. Though uneven in places, a strength of this volume is this common coverage across the eight chapters.
The volume effectively reveals the unique pressures, strategies, and outcomes in each industry. In particular, the common theme of increased competitiveness is frequently rooted in different reasons in different industries. These include globalisation, technological change, deregulation, and other changes in public policies. Harry Katz, John Paul MacDuffie, and Frits Pil effectively describe the industrial relations ramifications of the expansion of competition in the auto assembly industry as Japanese and European automakers continue to open non-union plants in the US (chapter 2). Howard Stanger uniquely shows
how collective bargaining in the newspaper industry has been dramatically affected not only by technological developments, but also by changes in the ownership structure of newspapers brought on by tax law changes (chapter 5). In contrast, deregulation is a key theme in airlines (chapter 1, by Nancy Brown Johnson), telecommunications (chapter 7, by Jeffrey Keefe and Rosemary Batt), and trucking (chapter 8, by Michael Belzer).
The occupational contrasts within some industries are also very useful: nurses compared to doctors in the health care industry (chapter 3), pilots, flight attendants and mechanics in the airline industry (chapter 1), casino dealers versus other hospitality workers in the chapter by C. Jeffrey Waddoups and Vincent Eade (chapter 4), and athletes in baseball, football, basketball and hockey in the professional sports chapter by James Dworkin and Richard Posthuma (chapter 6). Johnson also provides a nice overview of the special issues for collective bargaining under the Railway Labor Act (chapter 1) and Belzer demonstrates the importance of internal union politics on industrial relations outcomes (chapter 8). Airlines, and hotels and casinos, were among the private sector industries hardest hit by the effects of September 11, 2001 and these two chapters appropriately conclude with a discussion of the implications for industrial relations.
Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector concludes with two chapters that are both titled ‘Practitioner Commentary’. After the rich descriptions of con-temporary events in the eight industries, these last two chapters are disappoint-ing. While certainly thought-provoking in isolation, neither of these two chapters directly comments upon the eight industry case studies. The volume would have been strengthened by concluding commentaries that integrated the previous chapters, perhaps from public sector and international perspectives. The alpha-betical order of the chapters further works against comparisons or integration. Collective bargaining in airlines and trucking has responded to deregulation in very different ways, and these contrasts would be more accessible if the chapters followed each other rather than being chapters one and eight, respectively. Similarly, industrial relations in both newspapers and telecommunications is being critically shaped by technological changes and industry consolidation, but these two chapters are interrupted by the professional sports chapter in which very different issues are central. Lastly, inter-industry comparisons would have been facilitated if the profiles of the eight industries contained a common statistical portrait of the current state of collective bargaining. For example, some of the chapters use Current Population Survey data to report union density rates, but the entire volume would benefit from using this data source to consistently report the same information for the same time periods for each industry.
of unions. Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector is consequently a valuable resource for scholars, students, practitioners and policy-makers wanting to learn about the contemporary state of US private sector industrial relations in the eight industries described. This volume will also have enduring value for scholars and practitioners in future years who can use it to look back and see what US industrial relations was like at the start of the new millennium.
UNIVERSITY OFMINNESOTA JOHNBUDD
INDUSTRIALRELATIONS ANDEUROPEANINTEGRATION: TRANS- AND
SUPRANATIONALDEVELOPMENTS ANDPROSPECTS
Edited by Berndt Keller and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003, x + 182 pp., £45 (hardback)
The 1990s was the decade of the European Union (EU); a time when the Community came of age, not just economically, but in terms of developing the previously-neglected ‘social dimension’. The single European Market was created, and ultimately gave birth to the common currency. The Maastricht and Amsterdam Treaties strengthened competencies over the social and employment field and provided for the involvement of trade unions and employer represent-atives in policy making. A number of important directives appeared regulating employment and providing for the creation of European Works Councils (EWCs). And the declaration at the Lisbon European Council of March 2000 of ‘a new strategic goal’ to ‘strengthen employment, economic reform and social cohesion’ showed that the long-awaited European Employment Strategy (EES) had finally arrived. It therefore comes as no surprise that there has been an explosion of interest within both academic and practitioner circles concerning the ‘Europeanisation’ of industrial relations. One consequence, not without irony, has been the splintering of scholarship in the field, as research has proceeded in increasingly specialised directions. This book brings together leading authorities on cross-border and European-level industrial relations to review and assess the major developments.
Each chapter of the book stands alone, but it is perhaps best read as a whole to understand the unfolding and sometimes contradictory nature of the Europeanisation phenomenon. Following a brief introduction, three chapters follow on institutional developments. Chapters two and three examine the international ‘social dialogue’; first at multisector level then at each sector level. Chapter four focuses on developments at (multinational) company level in the form of EWCs. The next three chapters look at major policy initiatives— implications of the Euro, trade union co-ordination efforts and the arrival of the EES—followed by a summary and conclusion by the editors. Each chapter merits some comment, however briefly, in turn.
of arriving at some form of consensus between not just management and labour but also within the respective international constituencies of the two sides is clearly shown, as is the important role of the Commission (and lurking behind it, national governments). Difficulties reflect fundamental disagreements over ‘deregulation versus worker security’, and the ‘fading shadow of the law’, together with the effects of EU enlargement, makes the future rather bleak. Falkner concludes that institutional self-interest will perpetuate a ‘corporatist policy community’ at this level, facilitating consultation of the social partners rather than co-decision making. If this is saddening to some, Berndt Keller shows why prospects for the social dialogue at sector level are even dimmer. Employers are not interested in breathing life into international systems of regulation and, even if they were, the practicalities of inadequate resources and securing mandates would handicap the process. The Commission remains reluctant to intervene at sectoral level, not least because of problems reconciling different interests across its Directorate Generals. The result is little to show for the transfer of power to the social partners and ‘regulatory minimalism’ by default. A more likely conduit for the Europeanisation of industrial relations is the establishment of EWCs. Torsten Müller and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer guide us through the most relevant contributions of the burgeoning literature on the subject. As well as setting out the historical development of the directive, they develop a typology of EWCs based on their ‘capacity to act’. They argue that the way the legislation was framed allowed it to successfully account for diversity and thereby to promote a form of Europeanisation ‘from below’, an iterative process with ‘horizontal’ (procedural) and ‘vertical’ (substantive) dynamics. The EWC story is, therefore, not one of ‘neo-voluntarism’, as some commentators have maintained, but should be regarded more accurately as ‘regulated self-regulation’.
The next chapter, by Franz Traxler, examines the impact of economic and monetary union (EMU) on collective bargaining. Arguably, EMU is a fundamentally neo-liberal project. Not only is monetarism institutionalised by design, but also the very removal of the option of competitive currency devaluations, with international labour mobility very weak, shifts the focus of economic corrections onto labour markets and employment. The risk of ‘social dumping’ through national deregulation and defensive collective bargaining is therefore high. Traxler analyses the institutional development and performance outcomes of national collective bargaining systems under EMU. He shows that the interaction between wage and monetary policy, and its outcomes, depends on the governance of industrial relations systems, or whether bargaining is coordinated or not. The overall picture has been institutional continuity (and therefore diversity) as well as the common adoption of a more competitive wage policy. The result is a convergence of the rate of pay growth to decreasing levels, far behind the rate of growth of productivity.
practical problems, not least of which is their voluntary nature. This means there is no compliance mechanism in the face of the very real and subversive pressures of competitive corporatism at a national level and the decentralisation of collective bargaining within firms and sectors. Schulten suggests that one way to rectify lack of progress is to adopt the approach of the EU’s so-called ‘open method of co-ordination’ (OMC), involving a virtuous circle of guidelines, action plans, benchmarking, monitoring and evaluation. The OMC originated with the EES in the 1990s, and the tensions, potential and limits of both are analysed by Janine Goetschy in the penultimate chapter of the book. Seen by many as coming a poor second to the traditional community method, Goetschy emphasises the iterative and inclusive nature of the process, which means it can avoid the logjam that has so often beset the road to ‘hard’ regulation. With the prospect of further EU expansion eastwards, this is no mean selling point.
In their concluding chapter the editors discuss the main dimensions and trends in the Europeanisation of industrial relations, summarising the key contributions of the preceding chapters. Europeanisation is defined as ‘the development of a coherent, horizontally and vertically connected—and to certain degrees integrated—‘European’ system of industrial relations’ (page 172). Some may take issue with this, seeing the process of Europeanisation more in terms of the impact of European integration on industrial relations within particular countries. However, in this case, the subtitle of the book is an essential guide to its content, and the editors acknowledge that it should be read alongside other texts. With that in mind, this book consistently provides valuable empirical and analytical insights into the debate, as each chapter summarises the key developments, engages the literature and draws out the theoretical implications.
The book is a timely review of some of the major challenges facing industrial relations in the EU as it enters a new epoch defined by enlargement and a new constitution—if ‘too timely’ in the sense that for many aspects it is still ‘too early to say’. Nevertheless, the book’s constituency should extend beyond the ‘Europhiles’ of industrial relations. For a discipline often rebuked for its aridity of theory, the Europeanisation of industrial relations has invoked fruitful theoretical debates over the nature of multilevel governance, interest represent-ation and integrrepresent-ation, notably by engaging political science scholarship. This is made clear by this book. Drawing on theory as well as empirical evidence, the chapters show both individually and collectively that the Europeanisation of industrial relations does not necessarily involve harmonisation or convergence, but takes different forms and may be based on different modes of regulation. It is essentially a multilevel, multispeed process which, as the editors point out, is less ambitious than some would like, but a lot more realistic. There are wider lessons here for anyone interested in how industrial relations ‘systems’ are constituted and evolve.
INDUSTRIALREDUNDANCIES: A COMPARATIVEANALYSIS OF THE
CHEMICAL ANDCLOTHINGINDUSTRIES IN THE UK ANDITALY
By Lidia Greco. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002, xii + 215 pp., £39.95 (hardback)
This dense and thoughtful book offers both more and less than its title suggests. Less, because its focus is at regional scale, not national, as it examines Teesside in England’s north-east and Brindisi in Italy’s heel; more, because it offers a thorough critique of neo-liberal orthodoxies about restructuring while melding economics, industrial relations and human geography. The book sets out to examine particular industries and spaces against the backdrop of generalised restructuring, relocation and reorganisation of work. That is, it is concerned with the changes that have been central concerns for many communities and have been central issues for policy-makers and academic researchers for a generation or so in Europe and, of course, Australia.
The book opens with a succinct statement of purpose: the book is ‘about industrial and employment change over space’ (page ix). It aims to adopt an institutionalist perspective that challenges the orthodoxies of labour market analysis while situating its argument geographically and moving beyond the all too familiar terrain of debates about labour market rigidities and flexibility. It is the dominance of the ‘wage rigidity’ argument with which Greco is particularly concerned, arguing, as many Australian critics would feel, that a straight line can be plotted from neo-classical economists to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and then to policy-making at the national scale. Thereafter, the book has a detailed exposition of ways of theorising restructuring and unemployment, from the neo-classicists, through Keynes, Hobson, Marx, and the ‘insitutionalists’, with a nod to the diverse insights of some sociology. Much of this will be familiar enough to readers of this journal. Indeed they will find, as did this reviewer, that the conceptualisation of labour markets through the lens of the institutionalists (notably Commons) might have led into a fuller discussion of the key texts of industrial relations themselves.
What will be—or in my view should be—of interest to such readers, however, is the insistence, following writers like Doreen Massey, Jamie Peck and others in human geography, is that ‘geography matters’ in the making and remaking of regions, industries and employment relations. As Greco puts it, a shift from market centred analysis points us away from accepting claims to ‘convergence’ within or between these spaces and to the complexity of process and outcome— and to ‘geographical specificity’ (page 6). This is not to privilege the local. As others have previously said, so here: that institutional forms are both locally specific and embedded into wider (national and international) institutional contexts.
of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and of weak union structures, but it is also the story of how paternalism, embedded at least as much in the community as in the workplace, shaped management strategy. In this case, the company eschewed compulsory redundancies and offered some more or less imaginative business deals on Teesside. In Brindisi, the chemical industry’s restructuring has been interconstitutive of new class relations in part tied to the remaking of Europe through the European Union. Here union presence has been important—not as defender of jobs but as a facilitator of change in a localised neo-corporatist arrangement.
That restructuring is not economic alone but social and geographic as well is fully argued here. Perhaps my chief concern is that more might have been made of this argument and that still more might have been done to synthesise the argument. Fully to point to the complexity of change, I would have liked more on space—to speak to the unconverted admittedly—and more on the internal dynamics of labour organisations, precisely the kind of work that industrial rela-tions scholars and labour historians have done. As the author does say, making the employment relationship central to the analysis of change and understanding institutions afresh might lead to ‘a more collective and, therefore, more demo-cratic . . . way of solving labour problems’ (page 179). Finally, and in part to achieve this, I would have liked more on the gendered construction of work and societies in these industries and regions, something demonstrably important in the work of some of the authors on whom Greco has drawn. Nonetheless, this complex and forceful argument has much to offer us.
UNIVERSITY OFSYDNEY BRADONELLEM
LAYING THEFOUNDATIONS OFINDUSTRIALJUSTICE: THEPRESIDENTS OF THEINDUSTRIALRELATIONSCOMMISSION OFNSW 1902–1998
Edited by Greg Patmore. Federation Press, Sydney, 2003, x + 309 pp., $49.50 (paperback)
For more than a century, Australia has made use of state sponsored institutions, generically known as industrial tribunals, to regulate relationships between employers and workers/unions. On 30 April 1902, the Court of Arbitration of NSW was created. In 1926 it became the Industrial Commission of NSW. Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice aims ‘to mark the centenary’ of this institution. The book comprises a general historical chapter on industrial relations in NSW, and nine case studies of each of the tribunal’s Presidents, beginning with the appointment of Henry Emanuel Cohen in 1902, culminating with the retirement of William Kenneth Fisher in 1998.
A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press; Dabscheck B [1983] Arbitrator at Work: Sir William Raymond Kelly and the Regulation of Australian Industrial Relations. Sydney: Allen and Unwin; Larmour C [1985] Labor Judge: The Life and Times of Judge Alfred William Foster. Sydney: Hale and Iremonger; and Rickard J [1984] H.B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge. Sydney: Allen and Unwin), and one of Albert Bathurst Piddington of the NSW tribunal (Graham M [1995] A.B. Piddington: The Last Radical Liberal. Sydney: UNSW Press).
In 1954, Mark Perlman, a young American, on the initial steps of an illustrious career, published Judges in Industry: A Study of Labour Arbitration in Australia (1954, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). For what it is worth, the reviewer regards it as the most insightful work into the operation of Australian industrial relations. Perlman, in essence, was concerned with a single question: ‘Why is it that the parties accept the intervention of “outsiders”, state sponsored third parties in the conduct of their affairs?’ In tackling this question he developed different analytical terms and categories, to capture different types of tribunal behaviour, and provided various case studies in testing/illustrating these theoretical insights. While his research wandered over the broad range of Australian industrial relations experience, it was clearly focused on deriving an understanding of the workings and operation of industrial tribunals.
In 1980 the reviewer and Jane Romeyn, in separate contributions, extended and elaborated upon Perlman’s analytical categories (Dabscheck B [1980] The Australian System of Industrial Relations: An Analytical Model. Journal of Industrial RelationsJune; and Romeyn J [1980] Towards a Motivational Theory of Arbitration in Australia. Journal of Industrial RelationsJune). Romeyn’s work has been ignored by the editor and contributors to this volume. In 1983 the reviewer applied theories of regulation, a literature primarily developed in North America, to the operation of the federal tribunal. Various theories, ranging from regulators being subservient to, or ‘captured’ by special interest groups, to tribunals being ‘independent’ and ‘activist’ were tested against Australian experience. An activist model of tribunal regulation was developed: ‘Regulators are activist when they seek to impose their own solutions to regu-lation onto . . . special interest groups . . . . They will attempt to convince the parties of the wisdom and necessity of following their solutions in responding to the many and varied problems associated with regulation . . . industrial tribunals . . . balance the expectations of the parties with their interpretation of what the problems of the moment require’ (Dabscheck, Arbitrator at Work, pp. 14–15).
case studies of the respective Presidents, focus on their work and approach as industrial relations regulators?
Patmore also misquotes or misrepresents the notion of ‘activist regulation’ developed by the reviewer. He claims I said activist regulation is where ‘industrial tribunals are involved in a “balancing act” where they have to balance the competing claims and expectations of the parties’ (page 3). See above for how the activist arbitration was actually defined. Patmore’s characterisation is in fact the antithesis of activist regulation. It is a situation where regulators are ‘passive’, being unable to supplant the parties as the independent variable in decision making processes.
The dismissal of Perlman’s pioneering scholarship, ignorance of the work of Romeyn, and the misunderstanding of the notion of ‘activist regulation’ is sympto-matic of an approach to scholarship that is simply not interested in theoretical discourse and debate. The book, with its presentation of nine descriptive studies, is concerned with biographical details of persons who were once Presidents of the NSW tribunal, represents a regression, rather than a progression, into scholarship concerning the operation of Australian industrial tribunals.
This only begins to scratch the surface of problems associated with this book. It constitutes a general work on labour history rather than a history of the operation and work of an industrial relations tribunal. Patmore has a lengthy general chapter which provides an account of major industrial relations develop-ments which have occurred since the latter part of the nineteenth century. The material is descriptive, devoid of any theoretical or conceptual schema, often falls—as do many of the case study chapters—between the stools of chronology and theme, and makes for uninteresting reading. It is doubtful if anyone will feel the need to read the opening chapter from go to whoa. The material presented provides little more than a backdrop to the environment in which the NSW tribunal has operated.
Patmore has provided little information on the operation of the tribunal as an institution. Industrial tribunals, like all institutions, operate in a more or less hostile environment. Perlman, in Judges in Industry, noted how the federal tribunal had ‘been attacked on two flanks’ (page 33): the judicial and the political. The NSW tribunal, and for that matter, those of other states experience similar problems. However, the nature of the political constraint is different from that of the federal body. State tribunals do not have the constitutional protection afforded, or that was once afforded, to the federal tribunal by Section 51, placitum xxxv. They are more susceptible and vulnerable to political interference by governments than the federal tribunal. Moreover, state tribunals are always subject to their jurisdiction being eaten away and subsumed by the federal tribunal. Rather than provide a general background chapter, Patmore should have provided an institutional history of the NSW tribunal, how it had changed its structure and operation in responding to the different environmental pressures which have constituted its milieu.
Excise Tariff Act 1906 (Cwlth) which enabled Henry Bournes Higgins to determine the basic wage in the famous Harvester case of 1907 (2 CAR 1). In addition, he is unaware of the Factories Act Amendment Act 1906 (SA), which empowered the South Australian Court of Industrial Appeals ‘to secure a living wage’ (section 51; see also the 1908 decision of Justice Gordon in the Brushmakers
case, 4 SAIR X1).
The bulk of this volume comprises nine cases studies of the Presidents of the tribunal. They were presumably chosen because of the leadership functions they performed responding to the external and internal problems associated with the tribunal’s operation. With two major exceptions, the case studies are exercises in, or excuses, for presenting material concerned with labour history, at these respective times/periods rather than concerned with the operation of the tribunal. Moreover, when information is provided concerning the tribunal, it is in the nature of a quick summary of major cases and events which occurred, rather than an examination of the general philosophical, jurisprudential approach, of the respective Presidents. The chapters on George Stephenson Beeby and Albert Bathurst Piddington provide barely more than a few pages on their respective periods as President. We are told that Stanley Cassin Taylor was a most unpresi-dential President, in that for the last eight years of his stewardship [sic] he did not attend weekly judges’ meetings (page 199). This begs the question of: ‘How did the tribunal manage to function and who performed the functions of leadership and co-ordination?’—information that is apparently of no interest.
The best chapters are on Charles Gilbert Heydon (by Andrew Frazer) and William Kenneth Fisher (by John Shields). Both authors focus directly on the careers of the two as industrial relations regulators and the respective approaches they employed in discharging their functions and responding to the various problems they encountered.
Patmore claims that the ‘advantage of a comparative bibliographical approach [in examining nine Presidents] is that it overcomes the objection to individual biographies that they deal with the exceptional and limit the possibilities for generalisation’ (page 2). This may be correct. In the case of this volume, however, this sentiment has a very hollow ring. The authors of the case study chapters, with two possible exceptions, have not attempted to discuss the style and jurisprudential approaches of the respective Presidents to industrial relations regulation. All we know is that they all handed down ‘important’ decisions. Given the lack of a theoretical orientation of the editor and his authors it is impossible for comparisons to be conducted and/or generalisations to be made.
developed in responding to such pressures, including an assessment of their success or otherwise, and the capital they bequeathed to their successor. Such an approach would have provided a richer, more insightful and interesting understanding of the role of this industrial relations tribunal.
Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice is designed ‘to mark the centenary of the Commission’. It mainly consists of cases studies of the first nine Presidents of the NSW tribunal. The other men and women who have served on it should have received recognition. Their names and brief biographical information, of only a few lines, could have been included, if only in an appendix. They deserved better.
Overall, this is a disappointing book. It constitutes a descriptive account of persons from the upper end of town who have figured in the workings of industrial relations in NSW. The editor and contributors (with two exceptions) were uninterested or unprepared to squarely focus on problems confronting the operation of an industrial tribunal. The book lacks a firm editorial hand and would benefit from a heavy dose of copy editing. Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice
represents a lost opportunity.
UNIVERSITY OFNEWSOUTHWALES BRAHAMDABSCHECK
CHILDLABOR: ANAMERICANHISTORY
By Hugh D Hindman. M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York, 2002, xi + 431 pp., US$29.95 (paperback)
As this book reminds us, child labour is an enduring issue, not confined to the past. The salience of child labour is one reason why Hindman’s book appeals. The study offers, as sound history should, insights provided by analysis of the past to improve understandings of the present.
However, it is more than just contemporary relevance that makes this study so attractive. Child Labor offers many riches. Following a brief foreword, the book divides into three parts. Part one addresses ‘The child labor problem’, setting the scene for the next section. Part two forms the backbone of the book. It captures and explains child labour in the US in the early decades of the 20th century. This section of the book is properly the largest, drawing extensively from original sources. Part three shifts consideration of child labour to the present, considering the issue in contemporary US and succinctly relating the book’s findings to what the author calls ‘global child labour’.
In the first part, ‘The child labor problem’, Hindman contextualises the scene for the book. He argues that child labour was construed as a problem in several ways as the US witnessed the post-civil war industrialisation boom. As industrial-isation extended and intensified, child labour raised (for various groups) social, economic and moral concerns. The chapter on ‘Child Labor Reform’ details many attempts and setbacks around child labour and related limiting legislation. It con-cludes with the upholding of the first enduring child labour law in 1941 (the
dissimilar to that of late colonial and early 20th century NSW. Both jurisdictions accepted legislation circumscribing and preventing most child labour only when the significant employment of children had well and truly waned. And both jurisdictions allowed de facto and de jure exemptions, in keeping with common practice and patterns.
The core of the book (Part two) presents child labour as the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC) considered it, analysed through major industries and occupational sectors. Hindman uses the NCLC’s vast material well, cognisant of limitations and supplementing the research base wherever possible. His illumin-ative note on evidence, though perhaps better placed earlier in the book, enhances this careful treatment by further informing the reader about use of the book’s main sources. The NCLC’s investigation reports comprised over 400 documents. A feature of the second part of this book is the extensive use of Lewis Hines’ photographs of child labour. Hines was an investigator with the NCLC, supple-menting his written reports with photographs. For those unable to view the collection housed in the Library of Congress, the selection of photographs repro-duced in the book are of great interest. They are also extremely powerful. Several decades later these images of young children (many of whom we would now view as of ‘pre-school’ age) working are evocative, even wrenching. These photographs illustrate child labour in the US in the first decades of the 20th century. Yet their power is such that they also reinforce the need to reduce and circumscribe contemporary child labour, giving greater affect to what could seem rather dry statistics and tables.
In Part three, Hindman provides a view of contemporary patterns in the US and notes dramatic changes since the early 20th century. He notes that most ‘employee style’ labour undertaken by children in the US today is in jobs, such as babysitting and yardwork, that may well ‘have positive effects on future endeavours whether at work or at school’. While corresponding material on children’s work in Australia is not yet available, various reports utilising the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth suggest similar patterns with juvenile labour. This labour is in most cases no longer a marker of poverty or other discrimination. Rather, juvenile labour is mostly limited and serves to encour-age further positive employment outcomes.
leads the reader to, after testing and laying aside other definitions, including ‘work detrimental to children’) is ‘industrial employment of children’.
However, preferring this definition and underpinning it with other consider-ations, including those noted above, precludes Hindman from analysing child labour by use of a spectrum. Yet other studies of the ‘work’ aspect of child labour reveal that very many children, including those who are not poor or otherwise disadvantaged, do undertake labour, and much of it is not problematic. Commonly it is the extent or degree of child labour that makes it problematic rather than the very fact of performance by children. It is salutary to remember that this is not so for all forms of child labour; any form of child sex work, for example, should be seen as problematic and exploitative. Yet for more common forms of children’s work, such as childminding or domestic chores, it is the extent, rather than the nature of the work that problematises it. Hindman’s choice of definition in effect precludes such analysis. This weakens and stymies his overall argument.
Having dealt with definitions the author also considers the wider issue of global child labour. This section of the book is perhaps the most compelling as, one by one, the author works through and discounts various arguments that could be interpreted as favouring child labour. While not all readers may agree with Hindman’s perspectives, his thorough marshalling and discussion of the arguments is impressive.
Despite Hindman’s attention to global child labour issues in the book’s third section, some may feel that other parts are overly ‘North American-centric’. This concern is most applicable to the introduction and early chapters. Some of these could be enhanced by further reference to related history. While antipodean historians are long accustomed to ignorance and neglect by northern hemisphere counterparts, more exceptional is the author’s restraint with respect to recent European studies. While it is not possible to address all histories, there are a number of these widely regarded as seminal works and their omission is surprising and disappointing. This is not just a question of professional courtesy or display. The inclusion of the arguments of others may have finessed Hindman’s analysis.
THESMITHFAMILY MAREEMURRAY
UNDERSTANDINGWORK ANDEMPLOYMENT: INDUSTRIALRELATIONS INTRANSITION
Edited by Peter Ackers and Adrian Wilkinson. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003, xvi + 366 pp., $69.95 (paperback)
increasingly important task in an uncertain world’. The book is divided into three parts. The first section (the major part) deals with the disciplines conventionally associated with industrial relations, in the form of sociology, econ-omics, human resource management, history, psychology, labour law, politics and geography. These chapters demonstrate that industrial relations is largely positivist, concerned with identifying workplace issues and/or providing regu-lations or strategies to help the vulnerable in the labour market. The second section deals with the influence of different disciplines in three geographical areas (North America, Australia and continental Europe). In the final section, the book makes a major effort to deal with ‘future issues and arguments’. These include consumer capitalism, trade unions, women, Marxism, postmodernism, and a discussion of future trends in employment systems. Among these issues, the postmodern challenge to the fundamental epistemological basis of industrial relations has important implications for the future of the subject as an academic discipline. Consequently, John Eldridge’s critique of postmodernism titled ‘Post-Modernism and Industrial Relations’ is the primary focus of this review.
His chapter follows in the tradition of Kelly’s leftist analysis of postmodern thinking (see Kelly J [1998] Rethinking Industrial Relations. London: Routledge). Eldridge doesn’t just present the literature, he shapes it to propose a view of post-modernism and, in doing so, explains why it is fundamentally problematic for industrial relations. It’s an intellectually exciting chapter, written with complete mastery, clarity and some humour. On finishing it, I immediately re-read it. That left me still wanting more.
For industrial relations, postmodernism is particularly difficult to comprehend because its concern is for cultural forms with no reference to an underlying infra-structure. Jean-Francois Lyotard has previously argued that the influence of the production process was superseded in the ‘post industrial age’ by the impact of new technology (see The Postmodern Condition. Paris, 1979). Knowledge, in the form of identities or meanings, is constructed from language material by flexible networks of language games (ibid, p. 17) or their set of language rules. These are always in constant flux. The games or narratives replace the broad units of analysis so familiar in industrial relations, like class and skill, which are no longer relevant in the ‘post-industrial’ age. Eldridge does an excellent job of explaining Lyotard’s basic ideas about these language games. Lyotard rejected (or became incredulous of) the liberal and Marxist games, which he termed meta-narratives. He argued that, by the 1950s, a transformation had occurred in science, literature, the arts, and so on, resulting in a splintering or ‘crisis of narratives’. In each of the many discrete areas of social life there was an associated language game in the form of a ‘mode of discourse, each with its own generated rules that constitute learning’.
knowledge, so Lyotard’s solution was that the public be given free access to memory and data banks. In this way, language games are non-zero-sum and characterised by free information.
Having set out these themes, Eldridge briefly ponders on some fine points of internal inconsistency in Lyotard’s arguments. But his main thrust is to produce literature that critiques postmodernism from a leftist perspective, characterising it as emerging from the forces of the right and unequivocally acting in their interests. According to Eldridge, postmodernism has a clear relationship with capital. It is not just located as the cultural form of what it describes as late capitalism, ‘it accommodates all its tendencies’ while disparaging it. He presents a range of arguments to support his proposition. For example, the postmodern view of the fiction of all actions and the arbitrariness of language ‘means that nothing can be done about anything’. In addition, ‘what occurs is that the coercive and economic restraints in society are understated and the conceptual ones overvalued’, while attempts to provide ‘documented and testable accounts of anything’ are abandoned.
If Eldridge and those authors he draws on are correct in their allegations, then postmodernism unequivocally functions in the interests of capital. From a leftist perspective, postmodernism is a bourgeois ideology, a critique presented within neo-liberalism for the purpose of preserving it, a new way of eliciting Gramsci’s ‘spontaneous consent’ in the hybrid of capitalist society that has emerged in the last few decades. Correspondingly, however, Lyotard viewed the meta-narratives that underpin industrial relations as being firmly ground in a previous age. His language (post-industrial, late capitalism) firmly consigns the subject to the past, along with its concerns and concepts. For postmodernists, industrial relations is not part of the modern era. Even the subject’s inductive qualitative work involves its same misguided search for reality.
However, the jury is still out regarding these competing claims, but in the meantime, the danger is that postmodern management may be seen as a natural descendant of industrial relations, associated with studies of subordinate discourse. Nike, sweatshops, workplace sabotage, refugees, call centres—the ad hoc grist of the postmodernists—are ‘hot topics’ that fuel the imagination far more than collective bargaining issues and industrial tribunals. Moreover, postmodernism consciously seeks to colonise. Lyotard viewed the players in the positivist game as ‘terrorist’: ‘the dominant discourse that seeks to violently suppress . . . the oppositional subordinate discourse’. He maintained that there must be a ‘no holds barred attitude’ on the part of postmodernists. Industrial relations scholars shift uneasily, derided as cloth cap intellectuals, with a subject matter and epistemology ground in a lost age. Uncertain and confused, they conduct a fumbling defence, grasping at half-understood terminology: boundaries and space, local knowledge, indeterminacy.
to identify the reality of the workplace in order to investigate and help remedy the unfairness inherent in a production system where most workers have no influence over hiring, firing, remuneration, and control issues. While post-modernists obfuscate the simplicity of this continuing injustice and denigrate the search for reality, industrial relations seeks to identify and clarify the complex-ities of the global market where labour is deliberately divided and fragmented. The main danger of the take-over of industrial relations by postmodernism, in its guise as a critical approach, is the neutralisation of such leftist intellectual commentary.
What is our response to Eldridge’s timely warning? He says that ‘forewarned is forearmed’ and maintains that ‘a consideration of some of the issues arising from postmodern perspectives could prove useful’ to industrial relations. Certainly, an unwise response is to take on the blinkered mantle of the neo-classicals. In particular, a refusal to acknowledge the richness of the long ethno-graphic tradition of industrial relations, common in some positivist circles, is unacceptable and a denial of the subject’s roots. Exciting qualitative work is carried out in postmodern management and discourse analysis as a method in its own right, should be seriously considered and incorporated into a subject that has a strong tradition of qualitative investigations of the disadvantaged. Quantitative work must also keep its place in this broad church. In this way, the high ground, both moral and intellectual, can be reclaimed. Otherwise, the danger is that industrial relations will lose itself in ‘the vast clouds of language material constituting a society’ (The Postmodern Condition, page 64).
Overall, I think that this is a brave book (although it would benefit from less frequent use of the word ‘paradigm’). This is an attempt to start defining rigorously the discipline of industrial relations at a time when its relevance is being challenged. I have some criticisms that arise from its character as a compendium. There are too many chapters and several of them are far too brief. The overall structure lacks some cohesion. For example, major sections are not explicitly linked and many of the chapters appear as separate essays. Moreover, I have no idea why comparative issues are considered and how the countries were chosen. This is a pity as these are three very good papers. I have some favourite chapters including Herod, Peck and Wells’ chapter on the contribution of geography, and also Lansbury and Michelson’s piece on Australia. It is pleasing to see that Australian and New Zealand industrial relations scholars play a central role in developing the discipline. Furthermore, although most of the chapters are summaries of existing literature, Heery and Edwards both construct taxonomies in the expert way that we have come to expect from each. This book attempts to develop theoretical and epistemological foundations for the rich empiricism of industrial relations. Within this broad theme, the main achievement for me was its demonstration of the challenge of postmodernism to industrial relations. Eldridge’s chapter is exemplary, and Ackers and Wilkinson are to be congratulated for editing a book that takes steps in this new direction.
