Nsw Advances With Labor

By the middle of the first decade of the 20th Century the Labor Party in New South Wales (the Political Labor League) had become the official Opposition in the NSW Parliament. Its leaders were confident that it could win office within a short space of time. They were right; Labor won the 1910 State election, although only narrowly. This volume charts the preparation for that responsibility, with detailed policies for winning office and governing being spelled out. It was a confident party preparing to accept the responsibilities of power. Tensions became evident as there seemed to be conflict between the Federal and State parties especially about the transfer of industrial relations power to the Commonwealth. Members of the extra-parliamentary organization, especially the Australian Workers' Union, were becoming impatient at the MPs insistence on moderating their demands for the sake of gaining office. By 1911, with Labor in office but not effectively in power, this impatience was threatening the unity of the party and the Government. See Labor Pains Series link, to the right, for details of other Volumes. A NSW Sesquicentenary of Responsible Government publication.

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about "American exceptionalism" is untenable. Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar. Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.

With issues such as immigration and globalization triggering social and legislative adjustments in all major legal systems, labor and employment law is particularly susceptible to change. In this special issue of the Comparative Law Year book of International Business, practitioners who are specialized in labor and employment law provide reports on developments in national systems such as Australia, Canada, Chile, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, and New Zealand and examine selected issues in the Czech Republic (termination of employment), Latvia (transfer of undertakings), the United States (ranging from sexual harassment in the work place and the ability of partners and share holders to sue employers to employee dress code), and Ukraine (hiring and dismissal procedures).