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This article reviews the book, "A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike: Women Needleworkers in America," edited by Joan M. Jensen & Sue Davidson.

This article reviews the book, "Capitalist Democracy in Britain," by Ralph Miliband.

This article reviews the book, "Conflict or Compromise? The Future of Public Sector Industrial Relations," edited by Mark Thompson and Gene Swimmer.

This article reviews the book, "The Elements of Industrial Relations," by Jack Barbash.

Considering rates of return on capital, sales and assets, the evidence primarily but not unambigously supports a negative effect of unions on profitability. Whether this occurs only through effects on wages and labour productivity or through other channels as well is unclear.

During the 1920s and early 1930s the struggle for industrial unionism in the Canadian auto industry was predominantly organized and led by Communist Party members. They, however, had little success with workers whose enjoyment of unusually high industrial wages was tempered by the knowledge that they themselves were almost as replaceable and interchangeable as the parts they assembled. An upswing of industrial militancy in the 1928-9 boom suggested that "Fordism" was not immutable, but any possibility of establishing a "red" auto union disappeared with the arrival of the Depression. Nevertheless, during the grimmest crisis years, Communists kept the idea of industrial unionism alive, and in semi-clandestine conditions built a network of union activists. The formation of the CIO and UAW gave this group the opportunity to turn their aspirations into reality.

This article reviews the book, "The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling," by Jay Winter, edited.

This article reviews the books, "A Passion for Excellence. The Leadership Difference," by Tom Peters and Nancy Austin, and "Reinventing the Corporation. Transforming Your Job and Your Company for the New Information Society," by John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene.

This article reviews the book, "Cheats at Work. An Anthropology of Workplace Crime," by Gerald Mars.

This article reviews the book, "Group Process. An Introduction to Group Dynamics," 3rd ed., by Joseph Luft.

This article reviews the book, "The American Samurai. Blending American and Japanese Managerial Practices," by Jon P. Alstom.

This article reviews the book, "Work, Employment and Unemployment. Perspectives on Work and Society," by Kenneth Thompson.

This article reviews the book, "Workplace Democraticization: Its Internal Dynamics," by Paul Bernstein.

This article reviews the book, "Parliament vs. People," by Philip Resnick.

Presents work poetry including "Carlo's First Born," "White Wall," "Unlike Napoleon," "First Job," and "Mid-Season Strike."

Labour unrest and demands for social reform during and immediately after World War I prompted most provincial governments in Canada to enact limited minimum wage statutes, aplicable only to female wage-earners in specified industries. Minimum wage boards issued separate wage orders for each industry, after consultation with representative employers and employees. The standard for the minimum wage was decent subsistence for a single woman with no dependants and no need to save for sickness, layoffs, or old age. The Ontario Minimum Wage Board, established in 1920, insisted that if a minimum wage was a real minimum, employers did not object to paying it, or to cooperating with the board. To insure employer cooperation, the board provided employers with ample opportunity to present their views, but generally accepted employers' views over those of labour. Minimum wage statutes were justified not on the basis of a wage-earner's right to a fair wage, but on women's special needs as the mothers of the future generation; the Ontario Minimum Wage Board expressed a similar attitude towards women in its administration of the Ontario Act.

Although the provincial Workmen's Association, founded in Springhill, Nova Scotia, in 1879, represented the greatest achievement of maritime workers in the nineteenth century, historians, guided by the records and recollections left by Robert Drummond and the union's demise in the massive strikes of 1909-11, have generally considered it as a highly conservative union, wedded to a conciliatory approach to management and reluctant to use the strike weapon. This article suggests, in contrast, that the PWA was never personified by Drummond and that the union was a remarkably decentralized body. Until 1885 it was a loose federation of craft lodges; from 1886 to 1890 it was a slightly more unified quasi-independent political and industrial movement; and from 1891 to 1897 it was a movement split between highly militant mainland lodges and more accommodating lodges in Cape Breton. This diversity within the union not only meant that highly militant and relatively quiescent lodges coexisted within it, but that there were equally striking ideological tensions, within both the "official philosophy" of the union as enunciated by Drummond, and within the "vernacular philosophy" of the rank and file. An overemphasis on Drummond's vision of "class harmony" has led historians to slight his zeal for radical democratic change and working-class independence; a corresponding preoccupation with the sources composed by Drummond — virtually all the sources usually cited in studies of the union — has obscured the less articulate, less developed, and far more important "vernacular" outlook of the rank-and-file miners, who fought tenaciously and even violently for working-class independence. Moreover, static appraisals of these tendencies at both the upper and lower levels of the union miss crucial shifts within them over time: a shift from a heavily-qualified paternalism to an explicitly political critique of industrial and political autocracy in the mid-1880s, and a shift to a drastic polarization between progressive militants and Liberal Party traditionalists in the mid-1890s. Except for the period 1895-7, in which the leadership was coopted by the Liberal Party, the PWA on both its upper and lower levels was serious about its pursuit of working-class political independence, and its lobbying achieved a record of political and social reforms unparalleled in nineteenth-century Canada. As a participant in some of Canada's largest nineteenth-century labour wars, and as an important force for the winning of working-class political rights, the PWA deserves to be remembered as one of the most successful and militant social movements in the maritime provinces.

...This article explores the mentality of the coal miners in the two distinct coalfields of Cumberland county from 1873 to 1927, the period in which they flourished within industrial capitalism. ...[It] does not attempt a full description of the intricate social history of these coalfields, nor to analyze their remarkable legacies of labour activism and workers' control. It focuses, instead, on the coal miners' underlying outlook. It seeks first to establish the basic structures of coal mining and suggest the strategic implications of these structures for coal miners. It then documents the emergence of a distinctive mining outlook, first by looking at the theme of the collective traditions of pit boys, and then by analyzing the outlook of inde­pendence of the colliers. It finally explores the ramifications of this mining out­look for society, taking as its theme the impact of pit deaths on the community. Its focus is on the "elementary forms of mining life", and this emphasis may allow us to come away from the study of one small group of coal miners with new questions for regional coal-mining history. --From author's introduction

This article reviews the book, "Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading; Popular Writing," by Ken Worpole.

This article reviews the book, "Beatrice and Sidney Webb: Fabian Socialists," by Lisanne Radice.