Industrial decline, rationalization and equal pay: The Bedaux strike at Rover automobile company

Downs, Laura Lee

doi:10.1080/03071029008567756

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Historical studies have established that craft unions in the UK fought hard against the inclusion of women (Cockburn, 1983) and supported the stratification of the labour force that maintained women as a class apart (Downs, 1995). Unions defended the preservation of separate pay grades for men and women and were not supportive of equal pay demands, not only because they undermined the struggle for a "family wage" (Rose, 1988) but also in response to employers' strategies of lowering labour costs by hiring women or introducing new technology and more intensive forms of work organization (Downs, 1990). While general unions organizing large numbers of low-skilled workers were more ambivalent towards women and tried to recruit them, they were also reluctant to support equal pay demands and defended the maintenance of separate collective bargaining (Savage, 1988).…”

Section: -1980: Grass-roots Movements Begin To Break Down Trade Umentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the variations of unions' litigation strategies to promote equal pay: reflection on the British case

Guillaume¹

2015

Cambridge Journal of Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: -1980: Grass-roots Movements Begin To Break Down Trade Umentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the variations of unions' litigation strategies to promote equal pay: reflection on the British case

Guillaume¹

2015

Cambridge Journal of Economics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…As argued by Bergholz (1999), managers' contracting of an unknown outsider to accomplish results in the organization may create anxiety and skepticism within the client organization. Several studies show that consultant-supported change projects may trigger critical reactions within the client organization towards consultants and their ideas, inflicting self-protective behavior by the client's peers, subordinates and superiors (Downs, 1990;Egolf, 1985;Kipping, 2000). Employees might refuse cooperation, hide information, express cynicism, etc.…”

Section: The Challenged Client Of Management Consulting Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constructing the legitimate buyer of management consulting services

Bäcklund¹,

Werr

2008

Journal of Organizational Change Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose -Hiring management consultants as external support in organizational change is in the literature described as a socially and emotionally stressful activity for managers. Management consultants need to deal with these threatening aspects of their service. This paper aims to explore the subject positions management consultants offer managers in their self-presentations on the World Wide Web. Design/methodology/approach -The paper studies the self-presentations on the www of four large management consultancies -Accenture, BCG, KPMG, and McKinsey & Co. Using a Foucault inspired discourse analytical framework, we analyze the subject positions offered to client-managers in these self-presentations and how these subject positions relate to the management regimes of bureaucracy and post-bureaucracy. Findings -The study identifies two different discursive practices -one normalizing practice, constructing the use of management consultants as a natural aspect of management and a second practice rationalizing the use of management consultants, providing arguments aimed at reducing the pressures on the manager. The normalizing discourse which draws on a post-bureaucratic regime was found in Accenture and KPMG. The rationalizing discourse was found in McKinsey and BCG and draws on the bureaucratic regime. Originality/value -This work highlights how consultants deal with the pressures their presence puts on managers. It illustrates how managerial truth regimes contribute to shaping the conditions for management consulting and the consultant-client relationship.

show abstract

“…7 To explain the ambivalent and contradictory nature of interwar trade union politics, this study goes beyond existing research, which has only studied the phenomenon on an international, 8 national, 9 or local level. 10 It argues that in order to capture the complexity of trade union politics regarding gender and rationalization, analysis must include a further axis of differentiation beside gender and skill-that of scale. Without contradicting existing findings, the present article complicates them by arguing that a multiscale approach allows for a deeper understanding of trade union politics and helps us see how conflicting gender policies of organized labor were negotiated on and between different scales.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Renegotiating Skills, Wages, and the Right to Work: On the Gender of Labor Activism around Rationalization in the Bulgarian Tobacco Industry in the Early 1930s

Masheva

2024

Inter. Labor Working-Class Hist.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Starting from the early 1930s, structural changes in the Bulgarian tobacco industry, prompted by the advent of the world economic crisis and German economic expansionism into Southeastern Europe, led to a deep restructuring of the labor processes, known in the terminology of the time as rationalization, in the Bulgarian tobacco industry. The introduction of the tonga rationalization technology had a deskilling and deeply gendered effect on the industry, making a significant number of skilled male workers redundant, disproportionately decreasing average male wages and leading, in turn, to a further feminization of an already majority-female workforce. The introduction of the new system provoked a strong response from the organized labor movement, which used a variety of tactics to fight against the new technology: from strikes to petitions to tripartite negotiations. Organized labor's reaction was deeply gendered, an aspect that only becomes truly visible if, in addition to gender and skill, we employ the analytical lens of scale. By following trade union policies on the local, national, and international levels, the article goes beyond the carefully crafted gender-neutral language in official documents to reveal tensions between the conservative attitudes of rank-and-file activists and the official trade union agenda. This is especially evident in communist labor politics, where Bulgarian trade union policies on the local and national levels provoked an intervention on the part of the Profintern between 1930 and 1931. The movement's internal contradictions resulted in a polyvalent, ambiguous, and non-linear trade union policy formed through the clash of and negotiations between local activists’ conservative notions of gendered work and family roles and the radical gender program of international communism.

show abstract

Industrial decline, rationalization and equal pay: The Bedaux strike at Rover automobile company

Cited by 8 publications

References 2 publications

Understanding the variations of unions' litigation strategies to promote equal pay: reflection on the British case

Understanding the variations of unions' litigation strategies to promote equal pay: reflection on the British case

Constructing the legitimate buyer of management consulting services

Renegotiating Skills, Wages, and the Right to Work: On the Gender of Labor Activism around Rationalization in the Bulgarian Tobacco Industry in the Early 1930s

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About