referencebooks

Labor Guide to Labor Law, Fourth Edition

By Bruce Feldacker.

Published by Prentice Hall, 2000.

This is a 7" by 9.5" hardbound book running to 652 pages including the index and appendix, plus a long table of contents, a preface, and sections titled "About the Fourth Edition" and "Explanation of Legal Case and Statutory Citations."

The preface explains that this book aims to fulfill a previously unmet need for a text on labor law from the labor, rather than the management, perspective, for use in labor studies programs. It's intended to be used as a textbook, but it works well as a reference book due to its handy divisions into chapters and subchapters for various areas of labor law. The chapters are as follows:

1. Federal Regulation of Labor-Management Relations: A Statutory and Structural Overview
   
2. The Collective Bargaining Unit and Representation Elections
   
3. Union Organizing Rights and Election Campaigns
   
4. Protection of the Employee's Right to Union Representation
   
5. The Duty to Bargain
   
6. Strikes, Striker Rights, and Lockouts
   
7. Picketing, Boycotts, and Related Activity
   
8. Union Regulation of Work and the Antitrust Laws: Hot Cargo Agreements, Jurisdictional Disputes, and Featherbedding
   
9. Enforcement of Collective Bargaining Agreements and the Duty to Arbitrate
   
10. Union Membership and Union Security
    
11. Rights and Responsibilities of Union Members
    
12. The Duty of Fair Representation
    
13. Equal Employment Opportunity
    
14. Federal-State Relationships in Labor Relations
    

The text explains the law through reference to the statutes (included in the appendix) and detailed but not overly-long discussion of NLRB decisions. The explanations of the law are necessarily involved, since the law is complex, but they are clearly written, without much legal jargon.

The book only covers Federal law. State laws also govern labor relations, but are not included in this text, which is understandable. If you want to contribute to decisionmaking in a union at a level that requires detailed knowledge of labor law you also need a resource that covers the law in your state.

This seems to be a very well done book that fills an important need.

Historical Dictionary of Organized Labor, 2nd Edition

By James C. Docherty

Published by Scarecrow Press, 2004. From the series Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements.

This is a hardbound book of 5.5" by 8.5", running 439 pages with appendices, plus preferatory materials.

The sections of the book include a graph of world membership in labor unions worldwide (very surprising in the picture it paints of a growing labor movement), a preface, a list of abbreviations and acronyms, a chronology of the labor movement, a graph showing U.S. labor union membership by geography, an introduction, the dictionary itself, a list of internet sites, a glossary of terms, a list of the leaders of the International Federation of Trade Unions from 1901 to 1945, a list of the General Secretaries of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions from 1949 to 2003, a list of the affiliates of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions in 2001, and historical statistics of labor union membership.

The dictionary itself is the book's main course. Its entries are typically a quarter of a page to a page in length, with a few running longer than that. Covered are nations, labor unions and related organizations, individuals, labor laws, and topical entries like "Right to Work Laws," "Full-Time/Part-Time Employment," "Syndicalism," and "One Big Union."

As the title indicates, it is a historical dictionary, and not a dictionary of the contemporary labor movement and its strategies. This is not a flaw, just something to keep in mind when using the book.

The book's true international scope is welcome.

All told this is a very valuable and handy resource in a relatively small package.

St. James Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide

Neil Schlager, Editor, with additional credit to Schlager Group.

Published by Thomson Gale on their St. James Press imprint, 2004.

This is a hardbound, two-volume set measuring 8.5" by 11" and running to a total of 1217 pages including the index, plus extensive preferatory material.

The editor's note is very informative about the content of the encyclopedia, so I hope you don't mind if I copy a lot of it here:

"...Our aim is to provide a scholarly, encyclopedic treatment of the labor movement during the last 200 years. The encyclopedia covers 300 key events in labor history, from the struggle to abolish slavery both in the British Empire and the United States during the 1800's; to the rise of trade unions later in the century; to the often violent clashes between labor and management in the early twentieth century; and to the onset of globalization toward the end of the twentieth century. Throughout the encyclopedia, events are placed in the context of the labor movement as a whole and related to societal change and development worldwide.

"...Two-thirds of the articles focus on U.S. labor history and one-third are devoted to international history. Because of this distribution, international events in particular were chosen for their relevance to larger social movements and their impact on development of the labor movement in a country or region...

Each labor history event includes an entry title, location and date; a synopsis of the event; an in-depth discussion of the event and its impact; biographical notes on key players; a bibliography of sources used to compile the entry and a list of additional resources. In addition, each entry has a chronology of world history events so that the reader can place the event in its historical context more easily.

Additionally, the encyclopedia has two long introductions, one a discussion of international labor history and the other discussing U.S. labor history. There is also a glossary of labor terms, a general chronology of world history and labor history events, a reading list of English-language sources devoted to labor history, and a subject index. The encyclopedia has about 350 photographic illustrations and about 50 sidebars providing information on related subjects of interest.

Opening the first volume at random I find myself in the middle of the article on the Fair Employment Practice Committee. This entry runs four and a half pages and has small photos of FDR and Philip Randolph. The depth of the discussion in this entry is rather impressive. It is written in language that doesn't require much prior familiarity with the vocabulary of labor relations.

The most obvious weakness of this encyclopedia is the disjuncture between the title, which advertises it as an international encyclopedia, and its actual primary focus on U.S. labor history. There is nothing wrong with a U.S. and British-centric encyclopedia of labor history, but it should be titled appropriately. The title of this one seems to show a desire to be a truly international encyclopedia that gives equal coverage to labor history in all parts of the world, but such a thing is more difficult to produce given the requirement of enlisting a complete group of international labor scholars and coordinating their work. I hope to see such a thing some day soon though. (Another obstacle may be the traditional nationalism of the labor movement itself.) Nevertheless, it must be admitted that this encyclopedia has more in it of an international nature than one is used to seeing.

Like any work in an area where scholars debate issues with political implications, this one must be used with an eye to its point of view and an awareness that the contributors have their own political perspectives that can come through in their entries, and that the publisher may have imposed its own politics as well. For example, some lovers of labor history may be quite irritated to find that the entry titled "Labor Day Established" makes no mention of the importance of May 1st - not Samuel Gomper's call for that day to be a great day of labor demonstration and non-work, not the Second Socialist International's adoption of that day as the International Labor Day in 1889 (which it still is), following Gompers' call, and not U.S. labor's eventual switch to a day in September to avoid being associated with the international communist movement. It also leaves out the fact that early "celebrations" of labor day were often occasions for strikes and rallies rather than picnics and parades. There are no entries in the encyclopedia for either "May Day" or "International Labor Day." The entry on the Haymarket Riot makes no mention of its ultimate commemoration in the International Labor Day. This is a significant, telling, and very irritating ommission that shows that this encyclopedia suppresses the radical history of the labor movement, also showing one specific example of how it is less international than it could and should be.

As long as its biases are understood, however, this work can be very useful.