Sell Out
Sell Out is a generalist imprint with strong commercial catalog.
View Rights PortalSell Out Kids is a series of our imprint Sell Out, for children and YA titles.
View Rights PortalThis is the first ever book to analyse outsourcing - contracting out public services to private business interests. It is an unacknowledged revolution in the British economy, and it has happened quietly, but it is creating powerful new corporate interests, transforming the organisation of government at all levels, and is simultaneously enriching a new business elite and creating numerous fiascos in the delivery of public services. What links the brutal treatment of asylum-seeking detainees, the disciplining of welfare benefit claimants, the profits effortlessly earned by the privatised rail companies, and the fiasco of the management of security at the 2012 Olympics? In a word: outsourcing. This book, by the renowned research team at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change in Manchester, is the first to combine 'follow the money' research with accessibility for the engaged citizen, and the first to balance critique with practical suggestions for policy reform.
Im Mittelpunkt der neunten Ausgabe des Jahrbuch Menschenrechte steht die Diskussion über das staatliche Gewaltmonopol und die Menschenrechtsverantwortung von Unternehmen. Darf ein Staat seine Macht, seine Exekutive an private Gesellschaften abgeben? Welche Rolle spielen Söldnerheere oder private Sicherheitsfirmen in Gewaltkonflikten? Welche Auswirkungen hat diese Form des Outsourcings auf die Verwirklichung der Menschenrechte? Namhafte Wissenschaftler, Journalisten und Menschenrechtsverteidiger diskutieren im Jahrbuch Konzeptionen, wie Menschenrechte weltweit zu verwirklichen sind.
Worker protests in post-communist Romania and Ukraine is a book about strategies of trade unions confronting employers in difficult conditions. The book's main idea is to study why and how successful forms of workers' interest representation could emerge in a hostile context. The post-communist context makes it difficult for workers and trade unions to mobilise, pose threats to employers, and break out of their political isolation, but even under such harsh conditions strategy matters for defending workers' rights and living standards. The cases studied in this book are 18 conflict episodes at 10 privatised plants in the Romanian steel industry and Ukraine's civil machine-building sector in the 2000s. This book should be relevant for anyone taking interest in how and to what extent workers can reassert their influence over the conditions of production in regions and economic sectors characterised by disinvestment (of which outsourcing and 'lean' methods of production are instances).
As the tragedy of the Grenfell tower fire has slowly revealed a shadowy background of outsourcing, private finance initiatives and a council turning a blind eye to health and safety concerns, many questions need answers. Stuart Hodkinson has those answers. He has worked for the last decade with residents groups in council regeneration projects across London. As residents have been shifted out of 60s and 70s social housing to make way for higher rent paying newcomers, they have been promised a higher quality of housing. Councils have passed the responsibility for this housing to private consortia who amazingly have been allowed to self-regulate on quality and safety. Residents have been ignored for years on this and only now are we hearing the truth. Stuart will weave together his research on PFIs, regulation and resident action to tell the whole story of how Grenfell happened and how this could easily have happened in multiple locations across the country.
The author reveals structural problems and offers solutions – an urgently necessary book, not least with a view to the acute shortage of skilled workers 450,000 migrant workers toll on German construction sites, work in sometimes inhumane conditions in meat factories or as truck drivers, and let’s not forget the hordes of cleaners in German hotels and companies. They are systematically exploited and cheated out of their wages. Sascha Lübbe exposes the octopus-like network of partly criminal companies in a shadowy world where the boundary between the legal and the illegal is blurred. In his evocative book with interviews with those aff ected, he reveals how a parallel system has established itself in the German working world, but also how those affected resist.
The situation in our society is precarious. The ecological shocks are omnipresent. The mere continuation of our lifestyles fixated on expansion and self-development has long since reached its limits. As if intoxicated by ourselves, we consume our world voraciously and without restraint. We need moderation and frugality that lead us out of the ecological and social dead ends and hold both the individual and Politics to account. We are by no means powerless and are perfectly capable of leading a life that offers prospects for a humane future. However, our idea of freedom needs urgent correction. For this endeavour to succeed, we need the courage to face reality and the willingness, in a spirit of solidarity, to say goodbye to a false life and join the alliance of renunciation and freedom. Then we will be free – differently and better.