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The International Mayor provides a quick but precise overview of mayors and their cities around the world. As the Fiscal Austerity and Urban Innovation (FAUI) Project is unique in its extensive coverage, so is this report.

Over the past few decades, the Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS) has become one of the most controversial and politicized divisions of the Department of Labor. Republic and Democratic Administrations have adopted starkly different practices concerning both the allocation of resources and the focus of regulatory activities at the division. These differences have been brought into sharp focus during the Bush II and Obama Administrations. Under the Bush Administration, funding for OLMS increased significantly, and the DOL revised union financial reporting requirements, imposing a more onerous burden on unions in the name of promoting transparency and accountability. Section 1 of this paper provides a summary and analysis of the most significant changes and innovations at the OLMS under the Obama Administration. Section 2 of the paper provides a detailed summary of the Bush era reforms and their fate under the Obama OLMS, and an analysis of the impact of these reforms in the area of increasing union transparency and accountability. It argues that the Bush reforms did little or nothing to achieve greater accountability and may instead have been motivated largely by a desire to impose a more onerous administrative burden on reporting unions.

This chapter examines the rise and fall of the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations (Dunlop Commission) in the early 1990s. It uses the events surrounding the Commission to provide an insight into the dynamics of the struggle over federal labor law reform. The inability of the Dunlop Commission to get labor and management representatives to agree on proposals for labor law reform demonstrated, yet again, that employer opposition is the greatest obstacle to the protection of organizing rights and modernization of labor law. For the nation's major management associations, labor law reform is a life and death issue, and nothing is more important to them than defeating revisions to the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) intended to strengthen organizing rights. The failure of labor law reform in the 1990s also demonstrated that the labor movement would never win reform by means of an “inside the beltway” legislative campaign – designed to push reform through the US Senate – because the principal employer organizations would always exercise more influence in Congress. Instead, unions must engage with public opinion, and convince union and nonunion members about the importance of reform. Thus far, however, they lack an effective language with which to do this.

For over thirty years, one of the most overt forms of employer opposition to unionization has been anti-union campaigns conducted by union avoidance consultants. As a result, both union and employer associations have attempted to influence the provisions of the LMRDA that cover consultant activities. This article provides the first comprehensive historical analysis of the LMRDA's reporting and disclosure requirements covering employers and consultants. The first section examines consultant reporting policy from the late 1950s to the late 1970s, a period when unions filed relatively few complaints and the DOL initiated few investigations, but the consultant industry expanded significantly. Section two examines developments in the 1980s – the period of greatest congressional and judicial activity on consultant reporting since the 1950s. The final section looks at post-1980s events and examines why organized labor has persisted with its campaign to reform government policy on consultant reporting, despite its inability to make progress on the issue over the past four decades.

Partnerships for public mental health are common. At a national and regional level, partnerships are frequently developed in order to co‐ordinate programmes to deliver public health outcomes, such as tackling stigma (see me, 2010) or promoting recovery (Elament, 2010; Scottish Recovery Network, 2010). At a European level, public mental health partnerships commonly exist to enhance learning and knowledge exchanges commonly between countries. While these partnerships are valuable, there is an increasing recognition that public mental health programmes must be embedded, shaped and realised at a regional level. Thus regions are not ‘implementers’ of national public mental health policy, but instead should be recognised and empowered to inform policy and practice. This approach was taken in Scotland when the national programme for mental health was renewed through a highly devolved and participatory consultation process and publication of Towards a Mentally Flourishing Scotland (Scottish Government, 2009). Against this backdrop, we examine a different model of partnership working; regional‐level international collaborations. This case study explores 'FINLAN': a collaboration between Lanarkshire Mental Health Improvement Group in Scotland and The South Ostrobothnia Project in Finland.

Volume 13 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains eight papers that deal with a variety of industrial relations topics. The first chapter, by Stephen Hills and Teresa Schoellner, analyzes the influence of the creation in 1999 of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on the deregulation of part-time work in each of the 13 EMU member nations. The second chapter, by Cynthia Gramm and John Schnell, provides a systematic review and analysis of the effects of flexible staffing arrangements (e.g. temporary employment) on individuals working under such arrangements, regular employees in the same organizations, organizational performance, and macroeconomic outcomes. The third chapter, by Alexander Colvin, analyzes the adoption, structure, and function of peer review and arbitration type dispute resolution procedures, respectively, for nonunion employees in two different business units of the TRW company. The fourth chapter, by Sue Fernie and David Metcalf, nicely complements the Colvin paper by examining the uses and implications for employee voice, conflict resolution, and fairness at work of ombuds arrangements in four British enterprises.

Volume 15 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains 10 papers, four of which deal with human resource management and six with unionization. Six of the papers were originally presented in “Best Papers” sessions at the 57th and 58th annual meetings of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA). In keeping with AILR's global perspective and global sourcing of leading research, the studies contained in these papers draw on data from the United Kingdom, France, Asia, Canada, and the United States.

The campaign for striker replacement legislation, which began in the late 1980s and had effectively ended by the mid-1990s, was the most important political battle over labor legislation since the defeat of the Labor Law Reform Bill in 1978. Striker replacement was the AFL-CIO’s top legislative priority in the early 1990s and, coming quickly after the passage of NAFTA, which labor had opposed, the defeat of its campaign solidified organized labor’s reputation for failure in legislative battles. As yet, however, the political campaign for striker replacement legislation has attracted surprisingly little attention from industrial relations scholars.

Volume 20 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains seven chapters that deal with important aspects of employment relationships in a variety of industries, countries, and research contexts. The first three papers, each of which analyzes the effects of an exogenous variable (e.g., fiscal adversity, globalization, and new technology) on labor–management relations, have specific industry/sector settings, namely, public schools (primary education), civil aviation, and nursing homes (health care), respectively. The first and third of these chapters are set in the United States, the second in Britain. The next four chapters, each of which analyzes the effects of enacted or contemplated legislation on specific aspects of labor–management relations and workplace dispute resolution, are set in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, respectively. The research designs featured in these papers include quasiexperimental, case studies, interviews, surveys, and simultaneous equation modeling.