Labor Relations: Striking a Balance


Labor Relations: Striking a Balance, 2025 release John W. Budd McGraw Hill, ©2025 ISBN10: 1266552154 ISBN13: 9781266552151 Loose-Leaf / Digital / Rental Winner (1st ed.) -- 2005 "Texty" Textbook Excellence Award ! Updated 2025 release now available ! Why study labor relations? Click here to read my answer

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An award-winning labor relations textbook for undergraduates and graduates...

This textbook presents labor relations as a system for striking a balance between the employment relationship goals of efficiency, equity, and voice, and between the rights of labor and management. It is important to examine these goals to discover what motivates contemporary U.S. labor relations processes, and to evaluate whether these processes remain effective today. What are the differing assumptions (such as whether labor markets are competitive) that underlie alternative mechanisms for achieving efficiency, equity, and voice? Why is a balance important? These questions provide the framework for analyzing the existing processes-especially organizing, bargaining, dispute resolution, and contract administration--as well as the major issues facing these processes--particularly the changing nature of work and technology in the context of globalization and financialization. Another recurring theme is that the current processes are one option for balancing workplace objectives and rights, but that this system is under fire from many directions. The book therefore concludes with chapters to promote reflection on the strengths and weaknesses of the current system and the possibilities for reform. This material includes a comparative examination of labor relations systems from other countries and a consideration of varied U.S. reform proposals that include changes in union and corporate behavior as well as public policies.

NEW TO THE 2025 RELEASE

The first six editions of Labor Relations: Striking a Balance were well received by instructors and students alike. In fact, the first edition was recognized with a Texty excellence award from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association for the best textbook in accounting, business, economics, and management in 2005. The 2025 release continues to refine and update rather than overhaul the successful approach of the earlier editions. This edition's revisions have been significantly shaped by the watershed events of 2020: the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning movement. New forms of worker activism and a re-working of union strategies have been incorporated in key places in the text. Concerns with racial justice are now recognized in the text in fuller ways than previously, including in both historical and contemporary contexts. New boxes highlighting the words of African American labor organizers Lucy Parsons, Ben Fletcher, and Moranda Smith have been added, and Chapter 4 now includes a new section on the National Labor Relations Act's potential perpetuation of racial injustice. An overview of important labor relations themes in Africa has been added to Chapter 12, and these are illustrated with the cases of Tunisia and Zimbabwe, along with an accompanying new box on racial capitalism. Changes in National Labor Relations Board doctrine by the Trump-appointed and Biden-appointed boards have also been updated in the relevant chapters, including rulings relating to compensatory damages, no solicitation rules, employee use of company e-mail systems, and bargaining orders. Relatedly, new policy reform proposals, such as those for sector bargaining or an increasing scale of voice options, have also been added. New key terms include managerialism, advocacy, mobilization, deep organizing, algorithmic management, and racial capitalism. Updated statistics, tables, and references appear throughout the text.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: Foundations

Chapter 1: Contemporary Labor Relations: Objectives, Practices, and Challenges

Chapter 2: Labor Unions: Good or Bad?

Part II: The U.S. New Deal Industrial Relations System

Chapter 3: Historical Development

Chapter 4: Labor Law

Chapter 5: Labor and Management: Strategies, Structures, and Constraints

Chapter 6: Union Organizing

Chapter 7: Bargaining

Chapter 8: Impasse, Strikes, and Dispute Resolution

Chapter 9 Contract Clauses and Their Administration

Part III: Issues for the 21st Century

Chapter 10: The Evolving Nature of Work

Chapter 11: Globalization and Financialization

Part IV: Reflection

Chapter 12: Comparative Labor Relations

Chapter 13: What Should Labor Relations Do?

Appendices

The National Labor Relations Act
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
A Sample NLRB Decision
Collective Bargaining Simulation: The Zinnia and Service Workers Local H-56

KEY FEATURES

Extensive supporting pedagogical materials, including case studies, active learning exercises, visual aids, and labor law and grievance discussion cases (with extensive teaching notes). Each chapter also includes two online exploration exercises integrated into the flow of the text to help learners engage with the material.

An accompanying bargaining simulation helps students experience the collective bargaining process by renegotiating a hotel's union contract. The simulation is structured around websites for the hotel and the union at www.thezinnia.com.

A rich intellectual framework for understanding both the current labor relations system and possible alternatives. This framework focuses on three conceptual elements: the objectives of the employment relationship (efficiency, equity, and voice), the objectives of labor relations (striking a balance), and differing views of labor markets and conflict.

Comprehensive, even-handed coverage of the New Deal industrial relations system--including history, law, and all of the major labor relations processes--as well as current issues (workplace flexibility, labor-management partnerships, the fissured workplace, algorithmic management, globalization, and financialization) and multiple alternative directions for union strategies, corporate behavior, and labor law. Engaging historical and contemporary examples are used to illustrate many issues. These examples are drawn from a wide variety of industries, occupations, and demographic groups.

Contemporary management and union strategic issues integrated throughout the text, including integrative bargaining, workplace flexibility, work teams, leadership, change management, the deep organizing model of union representation, and social movement unionism. Nonunion applications appear in every chapter, and practical pieces of advice are included in multiple places.

Discussion of whether workers' rights are human rights. Moreover, the clash between property rights and labor rights is highlighted as a central conflict in labor relations. This theme is used to increase the understanding of the legal doctrines that underlie the labor relations processes by seeking to balance these competing rights.

A serious treatment of ethics integrated throughout the text. Unlike any other labor relations textbook, major ethical theories and principles are discussed (chapter 5). Many chapters ask students to apply these principles to important labor relations issues.

Consideration of racial (in)justice in the context of labor relations, including the historical practices of labor unions and corporations, questions of whether labor law perpetuated racial injustice, African unions' struggles against colonialism, and the idea of racial capitalism.

Separate chapters on globalization/financialization and comparative labor relations systems. The comparative chapter discusses labor relations in a range of diverse countries, including Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, Tunisia, and Zimbabwe, along with the debate over convergence of policies and practices. The globalization and financialization chapter is unique among labor relations textbooks and explores the pros and cons of globalization, debates over free or fair trade, the use of corporate codes of conduct and the International Labour Organization to promote workers' rights, transnational union collaboration, issues for international managers, multiple dimensions of financialization, and ethical concerns.

Issues specific to public sector labor relations integrated throughout the text rather than relegated to a special topics chapter.

Explicit discussions of four schools of thought on the employment relationship--neoliberalism, human resource management, pluralist industrial relations, and critical industrial relations-and the importance of these different perspectives in understanding conflicting views of labor unions and labor policies, with an extension to understanding different perspectives on identity-based discrimination.

Inclusion of diverse scholarship on labor relations incorporated throughout the text to promote a broad understanding of the subject, and to create an engaging, interesting book for the reader that draws on many disciplines and perspectives.

Appendices include the full text of the National Labor Relations Act, the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a sample NLRB decision.

December 19, 2025