Labor Relations: Striking a Balance

Product Description
Budd presents labor relations as a system for balancing employment relationship goals (efficiency, equity, and voice) and the rights of labor and management. By weaving these themes with the importance of alternative perspectives on the nature of employment relationship throughout the text, students can learn not only how the traditional labor relations processes work, but also why these processes exist and how to evaluate whether they are working. In this way, students can develop a deeper understanding of labor relations that will help them successfully navigate a contemporary labor relations system that faces severe pressures requiring new strategies, policies, and practices.
About the Author
John W. Budd is a professor in the Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, where he holds the Industrial Relations Land Grant Chair. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Colgate University and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University. Professor Budd has taught labor relations to undergraduates, professional master’s students, and Ph.D. candidates and has received multiple departmental teaching awards as well as an excellence in education award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA). He has served on LERA’s education committee and executive board and has published journal articles about teaching labor relations. Professor Budd’s main research interests are in industrial relations, especially labor relations. He is the author of The Thought of Work (Cornell University Press) Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice (Cornell University Press), and Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives: Bringing Workplace Law and Public Policy into Focus (with Stephen Befort, Stanford University Press) and the coeditor of The Ethics of Human Resources and Industrial Relations (with James Scoville, Labor and Employment Relations Association). He has also published numerous articles in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations, the Journal of Labor Economics, the British Journal of Industrial Relations, the Journal of Industrial Relations, Labor Studies Journal, and other journals and edited volumes. He is a LERA Fellow and serves on the editorial boards of the British Journal of Industrial Relations, ILR Review, Human Resource Management Journal, and Labour and Industry. Professor Budd has been the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies and has also served as director of graduate studies for Minnesota’s graduate program in human resources and industrial relations, one of the oldest and largest such graduate programs in the United States. He also has a monthly blog called “Whither Work?”