It is because of this crisis that the AFL-CIO asked us to research the current state of organizing in manufacturing and make recommendations for strategies that would be effective at taking on and winning against the large multinational corporations that dominate the manufacturing sector. This report summarizes the findings from our research. The first section, Part I, examines changes that have occurred in manufacturing industries over the last five years in employment, union membership, union density, workforce demographics, and trade and investment relative to changes in other sectors and industries. Part II presents summary data for all NLRB elections in the last five years, comparing changes in certification election activity and outcomes in manufacturing industries relative to changes in other sectors and industries. In this section we also analyze NLRB election activity in the context of the changes in employment, union density, workforce demographics, and trade and investment summarized in Part I.

Given the particular pressure to contain rising workers’ compensation costs—and the burden that these costs represent for the construction industry— ADR procedures are one of the most important advantages of unionized construction and, in particular, Project Labor Agreements [PLAs]. The negotiated alternative procedures, subject to Workers’ Compensation Board [WCB] approval, use an expedited and non-adversarial process that can potentially save considerable project time and costs.

This report focuses on the state of passenger air service in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula [U.P.]. The U.P. is among the most geographically remote areas in the eastern half of the United States. The region’s economic, social, and cultural institutions are increasingly related to a global marketplace. These depend, in varying degrees, on access to the national and global transportation network. Scheduled, commercial passenger air service is especially critical for this area too distant from passenger rail, without adequate commercial bus service, with few four-lane highways and very limited connection to the Interstate Highway system.

Trade and labour market policies are continuously being discussed and reformulated. Strangely enough, much of this debate takes place in the absence of clearly-articulated goals. The reasons, it would seem, are twofold. On the one hand, for some analysts, the goals (e.g. freer trade, workers' rights) are held to be self-evident. On the other hand, the goals are themselves sometimes hard to pinpoint. When does "free trade" give way to "fair trade"? When does the pursuit of one labour standard (e.g. free collective bargaining) take precedence over another (e.g. full employment)?

This first report, by renowned worker rights researcher Lance Compa, takes a hard look at Mexico’s century-long fight for independent, democratic trade unions and social justice. Compa puts Mexico’s labor law and practice to the test against international worker rights standards reflected in International Labor Organization conventions and the ILO’s 1998 Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work.

In February 1996, the Council of Ministers called for this report following ministerial consultations initiated by Mexico on a plant closing that occurred in the United States during a union organizing campaign. This is the first special report by the Secretariat under Article 14 of the NAALC, which provides for special reports on "any matter as the Council may request."

The text has the double intention that I’ve tried to capture in the title: to bring people up to date with the matters that the study of employment relations deals with and to explain why they matter. Trade unions and collective bargaining certainly feature – collective bargaining remains the dominant way of settling the pay and conditions of employment of employees in many EU countries; the same is true of the six million or so public sector employees in the UK. Employment relations is far from being just about trade unions and collective bargaining, however. It is also about work organisation – the nature and extent of managerial hierarchies and control structures, which have profound implications for health, personal development and a country's social capital stock; personnel policies and practices, which are critical not just for business performance, but also income levels, life chances, the family (the duration, distribution and flexibility of working time are especially important here) and the development of human and social capital (reflecting not just the nature and extent of continuing vocational training but also the opportunities for on-the-job learning and personal development); and the decisions of government and the judiciary (reflecting the state’s role as ‘guarantor of the employment relationship’). It is no exaggeration to say that many of the objectives policy makers subscribe to – ending child poverty, enhancing the quality of family life, improving health, increasing social mobility and building a knowledge economy – depend to a very large extent on the quality of employment relations.

[Excerpt] This report offers the first findings of a unique comparative research project on women in union leadership in the UK and the USA. It is the first study that seeks to systematically investigate the experiences of women in union leadership in two countries using the same research methodologies and carried out by an American/British research team.