Bread on the Waters: A History of TGWU Education 1922–2000 – John Fisher

• Date: 01 January 2007
• Author: Joe England
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2338.2007.00437_4.x
• Published date: 01 January 2007

© 2007 The Author(s)

Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Rd, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and Main St., Malden,

MA 02148, USA.

Industrial Relations Journal

38:1, 89– 100

ISSN 0019-8692

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Book reviews

The Global Evolution of Industrial Relations: Events, Ideas and the IIRA

Bruce E. Kaufman

International Labour Office, Geneva, 2004, xxv

+

631 pp., £42.95

The International Industrial Relations Association (IIRA), though a part of the

International Labour Organization’s activity, is hardly a name resonating in many

households, even in those of its members. Its regular global and regional congresses

are often grand affairs, in attractive capital cities and which provide academics with

some respite from the relentless pursuit of publications to ensure professional survival.

But the organisation remains, essentially, a club, extremely useful to those looking to

build and develop global, personal networks. Its misfortune is that it was born at the

time, in 1966, when industrial relations was a burgeoning discipline propelled by the

policy significance of its subject. Then, organised labour had a real seat at the bar-

gaining table, and although it was steadily losing its way in the USA, it was thriving

in Canada and most European countries, including Britain, as well as, mostly, confi-

dently asserting itself in the wider Anglophone world. But within a decade, the world

was turned upside down. Right-wing governments, of which Britain led the pioneering

pack, progressively attacked the latent power of organised labour, even as far as

denying them the rights long enshrined in ILO conventions. The USA, under Ronald

Reagan, was Margaret Thatcher’s ideological saddlemate in this process, their example

influencing governments even more to the right of their own. The world of mass

unionisation and collective bargaining endorsed by the state began to disappear,

reverting to the levels of pre-war days.

So the IIRA lost its carrying tide of events and developments, which might just

have given it some notice in some households. But in its own quiet, reserved, orthodox

way it survived. It no longer had academic members of real policy influence, although

a few spoke out against the manifest injustices, amounting even to an abuse of human

rights, of the virtually untrammelled power of governments—ably abetted by multi-

national corporations—to roll back the long-established freedoms to bargain and, if

necessary, strike. Democracy could only enter the workplace if employers allowed it

to, and if they did it was required to know its place and behave itself.

It is therefore no surprise to read that Bruce Kaufman, an unusually busy American

academic of some note, was reluctant to accept the invitation from the IIRA to write

its history. The officers saw it as a short book (75–125 pages). It was also a relatively

unknown organisation, a little more than 30 years old. That page limit, and its promise

of a not too onerous project, helped to sway him plus the project’s relationship to his

current and well-received writings on the ill health, even near-death, of US industrial

relations. Another factor was the prospect of regular research visits with his wife to