5th Edition of John Budd’s Labor Relations Textbook Now Available

The fifth edition of Professor John Budd’s book Labor Relations: Striking a Balance (McGraw-Hill), has just been published. The first edition of the book was the winner of the 2005 “Texty” textbook excellence award from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association.

The textbook presents labor relations as a system for striking a balance between the employment relationship goals of efficiency, equity, and voice, and between the rights of labor and management. It is important to examine these goals to discover what motivates contemporary U.S. labor relations processes, and to evaluate whether these processes remain effective in the 21st century.

The fifth edition continues to refine and update rather than overhaul the successful approach of the earlier editions. The particular emphases of the revisions for the fifth edition are engagement with new events, pressures, and ideas as well as removal of unnecessary details and additional clarity of specific topics.

In various places in this new edition, issues raised by the Fight for $15 movement, alt-labor initiatives, protests over proposals to change public sector bargaining laws, debates over right-to-work laws, and new NLRB policies and rulings are incorporated.

Budd holds the Industrial Relations Land Grant Chair and is the chair of the Department of Work and Organizations at the Carlson School.