Labor relations
- 4th ed.
- Boston Homewood 1989
- 495 p.
The fourth edition of Labor Relations: Development, Structure, Pro cess follows the publication of the first edition by one decade. During this decade, the practice of labor relations has changed radically. Mem bership in labor unions has declined markedly. Unions, for the first time since the 1930s, have agreed to major economic concessions. Pattern bargaining has eroded substantially. At the same time, public sector unions have gained members and held their own in economic settlements.
During the 1980s, labor unions and collective bargaining have become a topic of increasing research interest. Major efforts have yielded increasing amounts of information about the influence of unions on economic outcomes of employees and organizations. These are perhaps best represented in Richard Freeman and James Medoff's What Do Unions Do! Additional work has been done to explore the adaptation of organizations and unions to the changing economic en vironment of the 1980s, culminating in the publication of The Trans formation of American Industrial Relations by Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz, and Robert McKersie. This edition, like the last, benefits sub stantially by the burgeoning research in labor relations.
Major changes in this edition include an examination of the role of political action committees of unions, additional evidence on the in creasingly contentious area of union organizing, the effects of unions on the economic performance of organizations and employee out comes, new models and evidence related to union-management coop eration, and models and evidence related to grievance processing and contract administration. Additionally, evolutionary changes and in creased inclusion of evidence related to the effects of labor relations have been added.