Heroic Defeats : The Politics of Job Loss

A comparative investigation of how unions and firms interact when economic circumstances demand substantial job loss. Using simple game theory to generate testable propositions about when these situations will result in industrial conflict, the work illustrates the theory in a range of situations between 1950 and 1985 in Japan, Italy, and Britain. Additionally, the author shows how the theory explains why strikes over job loss almost never occur in postwar unionized firms in the United States.