Crosby takes the view that re-regulation of industrial relations in the employer’s interests is not good news for workers.
By M Crosby
The Federation Press, 2005
$39.95
Author Michael Crosby takes the view that re-regulation of industrial relations in the employer’s interests is not good news for workers.
Whether you agree with him or not, what he has to say about the trade union movement in Australia is valid. Unionism in this country has a long and mostly proud history, and as a system it has played a key role in protecting and improving the wages and working conditions of Australian workers.
However, as Power At Work: Rebuilding the Australian Union Movement points out, trade unions are facing what is probably their toughest challenge –falling memberships amid sustained political attack. Crosby asks how the movement can rebuild itself so as to play its role in the modern, deregulated, globalised world. In formulating his industrial relations strategy, Crosby claims that since 1995 the union movement has changed fundamentally.
Whether or not you have any experience of this once powerful movement, this is a timely book that will help explain unionism and its future. It aims to help unions organise, and almost reinvent, themselves into effective expressions of the collective power of workers. Everyone else would be well advised to take note.
