Economic-union Books

"Intellectual Property And Competition Law: The Innovation Nexua" by Gustavo Ghidini (Professor of Intellectual Property and Competition Law, Luiss Guido Carli University, Rome, Italy) provides a persuasively presented descriptive analysis of a distinctively European perspective on intellectual property law and its relationship to competition law. Professor Ghidini expertly presents the evolution of intellectual property laws and its contemporary manifestations with respect to the expansion copyright law in technological fields and the inevitably conflict with patent law, the attempt at creating monopolies (such as in biotechnology), and so much more. A seminal work of impressive and articulate scholarship, "Intellectual Property And Competition Law" should be considered mandatory reading for students and researchers in the field of intellectual property rights and a very strongly recommended addition to academic library "International Economics" and "Judicial Studies" reference collections.

Brilliant style, unbelievable deep insight - almost as good as the books of Dr. Driever

John Quincy Adams blends history and biography in presenting a new study of the statecraft and life of John Quincy Adams, policy-maker in the early American republic. It's recommended reading for high school and college undergraduate students, as well as any non-specialist general radeing studying early American history and politics.

This is one of the best books on the American labor movement to come along in years. Written largely by academics in some of the top institutions of higher education, the book covers everything from the right to form unions to collective bargaining issues to law. The final three chapters are out-of-the-box think-pieces which rank alongide Charles Morris' "The Blue Eagle At Work" and Ellen Dannin's "Taking Back the Workers' Law" in their audacity and insight.

Some sections of the book, while excellent, largely recap work published elsewhere and in greater detail. For example, James Gross' chapter on "worker rights are human rights," Gangaram Singh and Ellen Dannin's chapter on legal strategies to "reclaim" the NLRB, and Charles Morris' chapter on members-only bargaining are examples. Nevertheless, for individuals who do not wish to read book-length treatments of these authors' works, these chapters are terrific.

Donald Wasserman, formerly the director of research and collective bargaining with AFSCME and former head of the Federal Labor Relations Authority, provides a superb chapter on public sector collective bargaining. It is a welcome and much-needed contribution to the labor literature, and should be required reading for any public sector labor negotiator (on both sides of the table).

Juravich, Bronfenbrenner and Hckey's chapter, which discusses the results of first contracts, is a major contribution to the literature. Not only does it provide one of the first surveys of what first union contracts are able to achieve, but the authors suggest a thought-provoking strategy (the corporate or "comprehensive" campaign, applied to the post-organizing/collective bargaining effort) which is sure to generate much discussion among union members and leaders. The chapter is a loud alarm bell for labor leaders and negotiators, showing just how far anti-union employers have gone to undermine first contract negotiations in addition to basic rights of organizing.

Eaton and Kriesky's chapter on union efforts to achieve neutrality and card check organizing agreements comes as the NLRB is actively considering restricting or even banning such agreements. The chapter analyzes management-side views regarding union efforts to achieve "N/CC" agreements, why employers agree to them, and what motivates employers to resist. The chapter provides some extremely interesting findings, which should give every union corporate campaigner pause before embarking on an "economic pressure only" campaign.

Jayne Zanglein's chapter on pension fund activism, the final of the books 14 chapters, also provides valuable insight into new ways of pressuring employers to be good community citizens. The author provides specific legal and strategic guidance to union pension trustees that are eye-opening in their inventiveness.

This book is superb. I'm not quite sure why anyone would pay $100 or more for it (as some re-sellers want) when new copies are available from the Upjohn Institute for $22.

But the book is nevertheless worth that much -- and more -- for the valuable research, insight and advice it offers.

If American labor history during the second half of the twentieth century had high priests, it is safe to call David Brody one of them. Among students of union-management relations, working class life and culture, and the place of the state in industrial labor relations from the end of the nineteenth century to the close of the second world, coming to terms with his understandings of how the Steel industry in the United States operated is an absolute necessity. His 1969 publication Labor in Crisis: The Steel Strike of 1919, is a more fleshed out treatment of the American Federation of Labor's failed attempt to force union recognition upon the steel industry, which he dealt with in the closing chapter of his path breaking 1960 study Steelworkers in America: The Non-Union Era. Labor in Crisis asks a two deceptively simple question that can only justly be answered with varying levels of complexity: First, why did the events of 1919 play out as they did? Second, what mechanisms fell in to place less than two decades later that allowed the Steel Workers Organizing Committee to gain a contract with the United States Steel Corporation without a fight?

Brody begins his explanation of the dramatic events of 1919 more than a quarter of a century before in Homestead, Pennsylvania during the violent and ultimately losing strike which the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers waged against Carnegie Steel in 1892. Beyond simply treating the strike at Homestead as a touchstone that ex-plains the negligible place which labor unions would have for most of the next forty-five years by explaining how the lost strike represented a shift in power materially in the owners favor, he goes deeply into the mindsets of the so-called "practical" men of steel: Andrew Carnegie, Henry C. Frick, Charles Schwab. Though Carnegie was dead, Frick was dying, and only Schwab was still highly active in the industry as head of Bethlehem Steel by that time, all left a powerful mark upon the whole industry.

The lessons they took away from their experiences in dealing with the hyper-competitive steel market of late nine-teenth century America was that only management, unhindered by any contractual obligations to its workforce, could hope to cope with vicissitudes of the market and remain profitable. Coupled with technological advancement and the massive immigration of unskilled labor from Southern and Eastern Europe to Steel towns throughout the Midwest, the trade unions of the time were in no position to keep management from any of their prerogatives. Though Brody points out that there was long a finance capital side to the Steel industry that was nowhere near as hostile to organized labor as those involved in the practical making of it, they were decidedly junior partners.

With the onset of the Great War, and especially with the United States entrance into it during the (somewhat) pro-labor Wilson administration, organized labor and workers in general, found the situation in the Steel industry very much altered. With the Federal government insisting upon labor peace and forcing recognition of workers' shop committees down the throats of companies who wanted military contracts, various unions were able to easily gain control of these outlets for bargaining about wages and conditions of employment. Had the war lasted longer, postulates Brody, a great many of the changes that were made in the Steel industry during the Great Depression and World War II may very well have been achieved in next few years, or even months. As fate had it, the war ended in November 1918, and all major and, nearly all minor, companies in the industry began taking extremely hard lines against known and suspected activists and sympathizers. Over the next ten months high levels of organizing and varying levels of repression would take place in Steel towns throughout the country, and the trade unionists who were organizing that labor force would feel them-selves compelled to call for a strike that they almost to a man felt they could not win.

As Brody explains the Strike in September of 1919, the event broke down as two different conflicts; one fought publicly and another fought privately. Within the public space, you had the Steel industry most publicly represented in the person of Elbert Gary, the grandfatherly and exceedingly polite head of the United States Steel Corporation, who framed the issue of the strike as a question of whom would actually manage the industry. His pronouncements about the strike and the industry were more widely covered than any other steel mans'. On the labor side, three people tended to crop up as representing workers. Samuel Gompers, long time head of the American Federation of Labor; John Fitzpatrick, head of the Chicago Federation of Labor and acting Chairman of the committee overseeing organization of steel workers; and finally William Z. Foster, Secretary Treasurer of the CFL and the committee responsible for organizing steel workers and an utterly brilliant union tactician and strategist. Though Foster had the least real decision making power of the three, the fact that he was formerly a member of the much feared Industrial Workers of the World and was unrepentant in his radicalism during a post-war red scare made him a lightning rod for criticism--Foster would soon join the American Communist Party and, by the end of World War II, be head of it.

The private side of the conflict occurred in the streets of Steel towns throughout the country. More than a dozen strikers were killed, and civil rights and liberties violations were recorded throughout the country. The situation could only be described as industrial warfare. Throughout Western Pennsylvania, but also in Gary, Indiana and Lackawanna, New York insurgency against entrenched power of both political and industrial nature took place with the most violent consequences, and sometimes even short term political change--Lackawanna, New York elected its one and only Socialist Mayor in November 1919, and Buffalo steel workers put a Socialist on the Common Council. Mostly though, the private war on organized labor and their own workforce led to a demoralization of most of the workers involved in the strike, and showed to what lengths organized capital and often the state were willing to go to assert their power.

Brody's postscript dealing with the anti-climactic organization of the industry, beginning in 1937, illuminates the strike even more by showing just how much the industry had changed by the Great Depression. Without going into great detail, nearly all the circumstances that had made Steel impenetrable to organized labor after World War I had changed drastically in the 1920's and even more so in the thirties with the onset of the Great Depression and New Deal legislation. In many ways the strike in 1919 was the last major strike against an industry that had its formative experiences in the nineteenth century before that guard retired or died. Brody shows with great clarity that the game had changed radically and abruptly. This is a perfectly reasonable explanation.

The book was in " As new " conditions. Furthermore, I was surprised at how quick the item was delivered. If I have the opportunity to purchase another item from this seller, I will do it without hesitation.

An extraordinary work of labor, social, economic, and political history. Thank you Steven Fraser, for an exquisitely detailed, penetrating, expansive, and sophisticated analysis of an inspiring person and his times. Bravo.

Gotta Read It!!

Ohly and Spence have produced a very useful guide to a complicated but important area of the law. The authors examine the important jurisprudence in the area with insight and flair. They have distilled the important points and demonstrated a number of flaws in various European directives or proposals.

Neil Harding's "Leninism" is sure to be a classic for a long time to come. Harding, who holds the chair in political theory at the University of Wales, is a specialist in Lenin's political thought, and with this book has given a remarkably crisp, clear and insightful overview of Lenin's views and their development, as well as their upsides and their downsides.

The book is not biographical, but content-based, so it first traces Lenin's thoughts in their theoretical development: from the early years of his education, to his activities in the early Party, the revolution of 1905, the analysis of imperialism, and so on. It is described how Lenin's faith in the advanced socialist position of the Western European parties and their leaders was wholly shattered by the SPD and SFIO's support of the imperialist World War, and how this led him to conclude that instead of being behind Kautsky and others in terms of theory, he was in fact the only one still adhering to it. Harding further describes how Lenin sought the explanation of this phenomenon in the ignorance of dialectics on the one hand, and the superexploitation of the colonies on the other hand, the profits from which fattened the working class to bribe them into reformism.

Harding shows us how Lenin builds the party's program in exile, and how he stands alone in the radical nature of his April Theses when he returns and subsequently how Lenin succeeds in creating another revolution. The experiences of civil war, famine, foreign invasions, collapse of industry and infrastructure and so forth bring Lenin to militarize the Party and the state, and Harding describes Lenin's increasing hostility to dissent, ending in the infamous "Ban on Factions" in the early 1920s. But Harding also pays proper attention to the Nationalities Question, the creation of "Dialectical Materialism", and last but not least, the relationship between Leninism and Stalinism.

Harding's analysis is fair but fiercely critical, and he does not hesitate to accuse Lenin of many errors and flaws. Harding convincingly shows how Lenin's early sense of betrayal by the Western socialists was a definite step in his formation of a party that is rigorously opposed to moderation and reformism, and how the subsequent problems with managing a state under siege as well as Lenin's own theoretical dismissal of the importance of debate about politics (Lenin is quoted many times as stating that the less debate, the better the politics) combine to cause a deadly recipe for tyranny. Although Harding in my view overstates the continuities between Marx and Lenin as well as between Lenin and Stalin, this is perhaps a matter of nuance; Harding does an excellent job of explaining the way Lenin made Stalin's power grab possible, both in terms of protecting him personally and in terms of Party organization and suppression of all avenues of dissent and counterweight. Of course he also doesn't neglect to mention Lenin's reconsideration of these tactics in the last months of his life, where he sends out letters imploring Party leaders to remove Stalin from his post and to reform the Party organization. Unfortunately, the recipients of these letters were Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky, and none of them did anything about it - and within twenty years, all three would be dead by Stalin's orders.

Overall, this is a concise, to-the-point, and admirably well-written book on Lenin's theory, its strengths and particularly its faults, and it deserves a wide reading among anyone interested in politics or history. I recommend to read this in combination with Lewin's Lenin's Last Struggle (Ann Arbor Paperbacks for the Study of Russian and Soviet History and Politics), which gives a more positive supplement to this book.