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The purpose of this chapter is to develop a model of union reform that may help to revitalize the labor movement. Our model presents a path using democracy and militancy to overcome union oligarchy to build stronger unions and a stronger broader movement. We develop a new model of union revitalization by expanding the Voss and Sherman (2000) model from our own experiences and a review of past union revitalization efforts. Democratic and militant strategies are a key to successful reform efforts. Entrenched union leaders tend to oppose such efforts. Reformers must adequately overcome entrenched leader responses to succeed in reforming their unions. We have developed a new conceptual model of union revitalization. Our model should be tested further through in-depth case studies and analysis of reform efforts which have failed or succeeded. Our model presents strategies and tactics for labor activists to revitalize their unions and the labor movement. We present a new model of union revitalization that looks at both internal and external union revitalization. This chapter accumulates evidence across reform efforts throughout the modern history of unions. This comparative and contrasting analysis of the evidence from these efforts is a unique contribution to the field. Further, the resulting model from this review presents a unique focus on the strategies and tactics of reform efforts as well as the interaction between union reform efforts and entrenched leaders. This model provides a path for both future research and practical revitalization efforts.

This paper argues that structural and institutional reforms imposed by the military regime and accepted by the Concertación impose substantial impediments to collective action among Chile's popular sectors. In particular, labor market and social welfare policies exacerbate social stratification, deprive the public of vital resources, reinforce workers’ vulnerability to market forces and undermine social trust. These dynamics and the state structures that perpetuate them indicate the state's role in either facilitating or impeding collective action among subordinate segments of the population. They further suggest the negative impact neoliberalism has on the quality of democracy by constraining popular participation.

The July 2, 2000, electoral victory of Vicente Fox of the opposition National Action Party (PAN) as president of Mexico marked an historic turning point in that country’s political development. The ouster from power of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) after seventy-one years promised to rupture the long-time alliance between organized labor, the state, and the PRI. A transition to a democratic political regime would create new opportunities for the struggling independent labor movement in Mexico. More importantly, a political transition would make possible for the first time a shift away from an authoritarian-corporatist system of industrial relations toward a democratic model of labor governance.

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.

This paper summarises the institutional arrangements and prerequisites for a new social partnership, necessary for the successful completion of labour market reform in western Germany. It does this by drawing on key policies and proposals highlighted and explored in the papers of this special issue. The paper elaborates further on these issues by outlining the importance of the labour market and its institutions in the German social market economy before turning to the case for reform. The paper addresses both micro and macroeconomic themes, including international experiences of labour market reform, employment and social policies, insider‐outsider and institutionally determined unemployment, the German system of collective bargaining and the importance of tripartite corporatist agreements. The paper concludes that reform in the German labour market should proceed through rather than against the existing institutions of social partnership, possibly with a new role for government in strengthening incentives for both unions and employers to act in a socially responsible way.

Teacher unions’ departures from industrial organizing are documented in a series of case studies and collections on reform-minded locals’ practices and contracts (see Johnson & Kardos, 2001; Kerchner & Koppich, 1993). Recently, investigators have collected data on union locals that belong to the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), a group of NEA and AFT locals. For example, William Harju (2003), retired executive director of the San Diego Teachers Association, visited most of the TURN locals (working from a document collection schedule and case study format similar to the one in Kerchner & Koppich, 1993). Kerchner and Koppich, in recent unpublished work, visited Minneapolis, Columbus, and Rochester and made additional inquiries by telephone interview.¹ TURN locals by no means represent the totality of union reform, and no encyclopedia of union reforms in the United States exists, but TURN locals are certainly among those with the longest experience and most extensive reforms.

Employment law reform enforced in Estonia in mid-2009 provides a good opportunity to examine the outcomes of employment protection legislation (EPL). The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the effects of the reduction in EPL on labour reallocation.

The author exploits the micro-data of the Labour Force Survey to estimate the probabilities of one-year worker flows with probit models, and uses a difference in differences (DID) approach to identify the effects of the EPL reform.

The author finds that the reduction in EPL seems to have increased the probability of transitions out of employment. At the same time, she does not find any significant effect of this reform on the probability of flows into employment. The evaluation also gives evidence of a lowered probability of job-to-job transitions resulting from the reduction in EPL.

In this paper, the DID estimation is conducted by using Lithuanians as the control group for Estonians. However, it should be noted that this approach assumes strong similarities between these countries in order to obtain reliable estimates.

The findings of this paper raise the possibility that the reduction in EPL alone may not have been sufficient for achieving a better reallocation of labour and this is important to consider in the context of further developments in other labour market institutions.

The two East Asian developmental states of Japan and South Korea share very similar familialistic male breadwinner welfare regimes. However, in the recent years, both countries have made significant social policy reforms that are gradually modulating their familialistic male breadwinner welfare regimes. Both countries have extended public support for the family and women by provisioning, regulating, and coordinating childcare, elder care, and work‐family reconciliation programs. At the same time, labour market deregulation reforms have also made employment more insecure, and created greater pressures on women to seek and maintain paid work outside the home. The purpose of this paper is to compare recent social policy reforms in Japan and Korea and discuss their implications for welfare state changes and gender equality. More specifically, it asks whether this signals the end of the old developmental state paradigm and a shift to a more gender equal policy regime.

To answer this question, the paper examines recent social policy reforms in conjunction with economic and labour market policy reforms that have also been introduced since 1990.

The analysis of social and economic policy reforms in Japan and South Korea shows a combination of both progressive and instrumentalist motivations behind social care expansions in these countries. Social care reforms in both countries were responses to the evident need for more welfare and gender equality determined by the structural and ideational changes that were taking place. But they were also a remodelling of the earlier developmental state policy framework. Indeed, social care expansions were not merely timely family friendly social policies that aimed to address new social risks; they were also important complements to the employment policy reforms that were being introduced at the same time. By investing in the family, the Japanese and Korean governments sought to mobilize women's human capital, encourage higher fertility, and facilitate job creation in social welfare and care services.

This paper shows how Japanese and South Korean developmental states might be changing and remodelling themselves in the recent decades, and how new social policies are evolving in close coordination with economic and labor market policy reforms.

The growing incidence of precarious employment across many sectors is a serious challenge for a developing country like India. Neo-liberal arguments justify precarity as essential for the development of the free market economy and advocate realigning human resource practices with an ever-changing business environment and labor cost conditions. This chapter seeks to identify the determinants and dynamics surrounding precarity of workers engaged in temporary employment in India. It uses the unique Employment and Unemployment Survey data set published by the National Sample Survey Organisation of Government of India for two time periods 2009–2010 (66th Round) and 2011–2012 (68th Round) to bring out the dimensions of precarity and identify the determinants (both micro- and macro-levels) of participation in temporary employment. We find that precarious employment is most likely to affect the young, women, non-union members, those belonging to minority and socially deprived communities with low land holding and low educational status. Precarious employment is also most pronounced in states where labor-intensive industries are exposed to global import competition and where labor laws are rigid. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for the economic and social policies that Indian governments have adopted in recent years.