In this lively study, Rachel Sherman goes behind the scenes in two urban luxury hotels to give a nuanced picture of the workers who care for and cater to wealthy guests by providing seemingly unlimited personal attention. Drawing on in-depth interviews and extended ethnographic research in a range of hotel jobs, including concierge, bellperson, and housekeeper, Sherman gives an insightful analysis of what exactly luxury service consists of, how managers organize its production, and how workers and guests negotiate the inequality between them. She finds that workers employ a variety of practices to assert a powerful sense of self, including playing games, comparing themselves to other workers and guests, and forming meaningful and reciprocal relations with guests. Through their contact with hotel staff, guests learn how to behave in the luxury environment and come to see themselves as deserving of luxury consumption. These practices, Sherman argues, help make class inequality seem normal, something to be taken for granted. Throughout, "Class Acts" sheds new light on the complex relationship between class and service work, an increasingly relevant topic in light of the growing economic inequality in the United States that underlies luxury consumption.

Over the past thirty-five years the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the largest social movements in Latin America, has become famous globally for its success in occupying land, winning land rights, and developing alternative economic enterprises for over a million landless workers. The movement has also linked education reform to its vision for agrarian reform by developing pedagogical practices for schools that foster activism, direct democracy, and collective forms of work.
In Occupying Schools, Occupying Land, Rebecca Tarlau explores how MST activists have pressured municipalities, states, and the federal government to implement their educational program in public schools and universities, affecting hundreds of thousands of students. Contrary to the belief that movements cannot engage the state without demobilizing, Tarlau shows how educational institutions can help movements recruit new activists, diversify their membership, increase technical knowledge, and garner political power. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic field work, Tarlau documents how the MST operates in different regions working at times with or through the state, at other times outside it and despite it. She argues that activists are most effective using contentious co-governance, combining disruption and public protest with institutional pressure to defend and further their goals.
Through an examination of the potentials, constraints, failures, and contradictions of the MST's educational struggle, Occupying Schools, Occupying Land offers insights into the ways education can promote social change, the interactions between social movements and states, and the barriers and possibilities for similar reforms in democratic contexts throughout the world.

Often considered irredeemably conservative, the US working class actually has a rich history of revolt. Rebel Rank and File uncovers the hidden story of insurgency from below against employers and union bureaucrats in the late 1960s and 1970s.

In City Trenches, Ira Katznelson looks at an important phenomenon of the sixties—the resurgence of community activism—and explains its sources, challenges, and failure. Katznelson argues that the American working class perceives workplace politics and community politics as separate and distinct spheres, a perception that defeats attempts to address grievances or raise demands that break the rules of local politics or of bread-and-butter unionism. He supports his thesis with an absorbing case study of Washington Heights-Inwood, a multiethnic working-class community in Manhattan.

Can authoritarian regimes use democratic institutions to strengthen and solidify their rule? The Chinese government has legislated some of the most protective workplace laws in the world and opened up the judicial system to adjudicate workplace conflict, emboldening China's workers to use these laws. This book examines these patterns of legal mobilization, showing which workers are likely to avail themselves of these new protections and find them effective. Gallagher finds that workers with high levels of education are far more likely to claim these new rights and be satisfied with the results. However, many others, left disappointed with the large gap between law on the books and law in reality, reject the courtroom for the streets. Using workers' narratives, surveys, and case studies of protests, Gallagher argues that China's half-hearted attempt at rule of law construction undermines the stability of authoritarian rule. New workplace rights fuel workers' rising expectations, but a dysfunctional legal system drives many workers to more extreme options, including strikes, demonstrations and violence.

In Getting the Goods, Edna Bonacich and Jake B. Wilson focus on the Southern California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach—which together receive 40 percent of the nearly $2 trillion worth of goods imported annually to the United States—to examine the impact of the logistics revolution on workers in transportation and distribution. Built around the invention of shipping containers and communications technology, the logistics revolution has enabled giant retailers like Walmart and Target to sell cheap consumer products made using low-wage labor in developing countries. The goods are shipped through an efficient, low-cost, intermodal freight system, in which containers are moved from factories in Asia to distribution centers across the United States without ever being opened.
Bonacich and Wilson follow the flow of imports from Asian factories, exploring the roles of importers, container shipping companies, the ports, railroad and trucking companies, and warehouses. At each stage, Getting the Goods raises important questions about how the logistics revolution affects logistics workers. Drawing extensively on interviews with workers and managers at all levels of the supply chain, on industry reports, and on economic data, Bonacich and Wilson find that, in general, conditions have deteriorated for workers. But they also discover that changes in the system of production and distribution provide new strategic opportunities for labor to gain power. A much-needed corrective to both uncritical celebrations of containerization and the global economy and pessimistic predictions about the future of the U.S. labor movement, Getting the Goods will become required reading for scholars and students in sociology, political economy, and labor studies.

In the early 1980s, many observers, argued that powerful organized economic interests and social democratic parties created successful mixed economies promoting economic growth, full employment, and a modicum of social equality. The present book assembles scholars with formidable expertise in the study of advanced capitalist politics and political economy to reexamine this account from the vantage point of the second half of the 1990s. The authors find that the conventional wisdom no longer adequately reflects the political and economic realities. Advanced democracies have responded in path-dependent fashion to such novel challenges as technological change, intensifying international competition, new social conflict, and the erosion of established patterns of political mobilization. The book rejects, however, the currently widespread expectation that 'internationalization' makes all democracies converge on similar political and economic institutions and power relations. Diversity among capitalist democracies persists, though in a different fashion than in the 'Golden Age' of rapid economic growth after World War II.

To address contemporary issues, industrial relations as a field of study will have to take an increasingly international and comparative dimension. Accordingly, Employment Relations in a Changing World Economy looks at the critical role employment relations play in firm performance and industry competitiveness worldwide. The essays employ a common framework to examine changes in the employment practices of eleven OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Austria, and Japan. They constitute the first phase in a large ongoing project at the Center for Industrial Performance at MIT to update our understanding of comparative industrial relations and human resource policies.The authors, scholars in economics, political science, sociology, industrial relations and law, first identify a representative set of employment practices and then look at the outcomes of those practices and the changes they are undergoing across different national settings. By collaborating, the contributors seek to clarify the dynamics of employment relations across the world today, and to set the terms of reference for a new generation of international-comparative employment research.

The exceptional weakness of the American labor movement has often been attributed to the successful resistance of American employers to unionization and collective bargaining. However, the ideology deployed against labor's efforts to organize at the grassroots level has received less attention. In Citizen Employers, Jeffrey Haydu compares the very different employer attitudes and experiences that guided labor-capital relations in two American cities, Cincinnati and San Francisco, in the period between the Civil War and World War I. His account puts these attitudes and experiences into the larger framework of capitalist class formation and businessmen's collective identities.
Cincinnati and San Francisco saw dramatically different developments in businessmen's class alignments, civic identities, and approach to unions. In Cincinnati, manufacturing and commercial interests joined together in a variety of civic organizations and business clubs. These organizations helped members overcome their conflicts and identify their interests with the good of the municipal community. That pervasive ideology of "business citizenship" provided much of the rationale for opposing unions. In sharp contrast, San Francisco's businessmen remained divided among themselves, opted to side with white labor against the Chinese, and advocated treating both unions and business organizations as legitimate units of economic and municipal governance.
Citizen Employers closely examines the reasons why these two bourgeoisies, located in comparable cities in the same country at the same time, differed so radically in their degree of unity and in their attitudes toward labor unions, and how their views would ultimately converge and harden against labor by the 1920s. With its nuanced depiction of civic ideology and class formation and its application of social movement theory to economic elites, this book offers a new way to look at employer attitudes toward unions and collective bargaining. That new approach, Haydu argues, is equally applicable to understanding challenges facing the American labor movement today.

In this gripping ethnography, Jeffrey J. Sallaz goes behind the scenes of the global casino industry to investigate the radically different worlds of work and leisure he found in identically designed casinos in the United States and South Africa. Seamlessly weaving political and economic history with his own personal experience, Sallaz provides a riveting account of two years spent working among both countries' casino dealers, pit bosses, and politicians. While the popular imagination sees the Nevada casino as a hedonistic world of consumption, "The Labor of Luck" shows that the 'Vegas experience' is made possible only through a variety of systems regulating labor, capital, and consumers, and that because of these complex dynamics, the Vegas casino cannot be seamlessly picked up and replicated elsewhere. Sallaz's fresh and path-breaking approach reveals how neo-liberal versus post-colonial forms of governance produce divergent worlds at the tables, and how politics, profits, and pleasure have come together to shape everyday life in the new economy.

This book takes a comparative look at China's labor pains and the reforms taking shape in their wake. Some recent developments in China - rising strike levels, a surge of union organizing, and a raft of reforms - seem to echo the American New Deal experience. But even as China's leaders hope to replicate the prosperity and stability that flowed from the New Deal labor reforms, they are irrevocably opposed to the independent trade unions that were the central actors in both spurring and carrying out those reforms. In China the specter of an independent labor movement both drives and constrains every facet of China's labor policy, both its reforms and its use of repression. If China's workers get their New Deal, it will be a New Deal with "Chinese characteristics," very unlike what workers in the West achieved in the mid-20th century.

Antisystemic Movements is an eloquent and concise history of popular resistance and class struggle by the leading exponents of the “world-systems” perspective on capitalism. Basing itself on an analysis of resistance movements since the emergence of capitalism, it shows that while some early forms were successful in their own terms, ultimately they did not impede the consolidation of the modern capitalist world-system.
The authors argue that although capitalism generated resistance right from the beginning as it displaced populations, despoiled resources and established global exploitation, until about 1848 the capitalist world-system could crush or outflank an opposition which was dispersed, localized and lacking in organization and continuity. From the mid-nineteenth century down to recent times, more adequately organized social and national movements set some limits on capital accumulation, but generally remained confined in their effectiveness to the terrain of the nation-state. Indeed, paradoxically, the successes of the “old” social movements helped to boost the power and legitimacy of states while failing to remove the sources of class conflict or to grapple with the consequences of interstate competition.
Taking the year 1968 as a symbolic turning-point, the authors argue that “new” antisystemic movements have arisen which challenge the logic of the capitalist world-system more centrally than ever before. These new movements have a different ethnic and gender composition and different ways of organizing, while their key inspirations show an increasing ability to cross national boundaries. The authors suggest that the new assertiveness of the south, the development of class struggle in the east and the emergence of rainbow coalitions in different world zones might hold out the promise of a future socialist world-system.

Long known as the world's factory, China is the largest manufacturing economy ever seen, accounting for more than 10% of global exports. China is also, of course, home to the largest workforce on the planet, the crucial element behind its staggering economic success. But who are China s workers who keep the machine running, and how is the labor process changing under economic reform?
Pun Ngai, a leading expert in factory labor in China, charts the rise of China as a world workshop and the emergence of a new labor force in the context of the post-socialist transformations of the last three decades. The book analyzes the role of the state and transnational interests in creating a new migrant workforce deprived of many rights and social protection. As China increases its output of high-value, high-tech products, particularly for its own growing domestic market of middle-class consumers, workers are increasingly voicing their discontent through strikes and protest, creating new challenges for the Party-State and the global division of labor.
Blending theory, politics, and real-world examples, this book will be an invaluable guide for upper-level students and non-specialists interested in China s economy and Chinese politics and society.

"Employment Relations" is widely taught in business schools around the world. Increasingly however more emphasis is being placed on the comparative and international dimensions of the relations between employers and workers. It is becoming ever more important to comprehend today’s work and employment issues alongside a knowledge of the dynamics between global financial and product markets, global production chains, national and international employment actors and institutions and the ways in which these relationships play out in different national contexts.
This textbook is the first to present a cross-section of country studies, including all four BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China alongside integrative thematic chapters covering all the important topics needed to excel in this field. The textbook also benefits from the editors' and contributors' experience as leading scholars in Employment Relations.
The book is an ideal resource for students on advanced undergraduate and postgraduate comparative programmes across areas such as Employment Relations, Human Resource Management, Political Economy, Labour Politics, Industrial and Economic Sociology, Regulation and Social Policy.

Behind China’s growing economic and political power is a vast underworld of marginalized social groups. In this powerful and timely book, Wanning Sun focuses on the country’s hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers, who embody China's most intractable problems of inequality. Drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork, the author argues that despite the critical role their labor has played in enabling and sustaining the country’s remarkable economic growth, workers and peasants have become the nation’s “subalterns.”
Sun focuses especially on the role of media and culture in negotiating the unequal relationships that exist between various social groups. She shows that in the face of the harsh reality of injustice and discrimination, China’s rural migrants engage in media and cultural practices that are at once both mundane and profound—invariably imbued with hope and dignity, and motivated by the dream of a better life. Exploring the cultural politics of inequality in post-Mao China, this engaging and compelling book will be essential reading for all concerned with the increasing centrality of media and the cultural politics of representation in our highly digitalized and mediated world.