During recent decades, labour market participation among older workers in the Netherlands has increased significantly. Postponing workers’ labour market withdrawal potentially makes their retirement patterns more uncertain and less predictable. This article uses Dutch register data to analyse de-standardisation and differentiation of retirement trajectories of men and women born between 1940 and 1946 for the age bracket of 59–65 (N = 12,843). The results indicate that retirement trajectories of men have become more homogeneous, whereas those of women somewhat more heterogeneous. Simultaneously, retirement patterns of both men and women became more complex from one birth year to another.
This study examines and theorizes the effects of task challenge on skill utilization, affective wellbeing and intrapreneurial behaviour among civil servants through a real-life challenging assignment, which was part of a unique Dutch and Flemish bottom-up organized event called ‘Train Your Colleague’. Results of a short-term longitudinal study indicate that, as expected, task challenge is positively related to skill utilization and intrapreneurial behaviour but, unexpectedly, not to affective wellbeing. These results suggest that challenging assignments may be important tools to enhance employees’ skill utilization and intrapreneurial behaviour at the workplace. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
The purpose of this article is to explore how a group of managers construct their reality, more specifically what it means to work as a manager in a municipal organization. The empirical data for the study were obtained from a Swedish medium-sized municipality and the study takes as its research approach grounded theory, as developed by Glaser and Strauss. Consequently, the empirical data formed the basis for the research, which takes a multi-methodical and theory-generating approach. The methods used in the study include the use of a questionnaire study, interviews in focus groups, observations, reflective work diaries, and the creation of feedback sessions. The result shows that the managers work in an organization where conflicting and competing value systems act together. These can be interpreted as environmental factors and external bounds on a structural societal level, which cannot be influenced. A point of analysis is that these factors and external bounds to a high degree permeate the manager’s workday and can therefore be seen as a plausible explanation for the boundless nature of the managerial task. For most of the managers of the study, this was expressed as uncertainty as to how to define and interpret goals and as to what the managerial role includes with regard to areas of responsibility. It is interesting to ask, however, whether these conditions are not characteristic of the role of managers and work life in general. The results also show that the substantive theory of the study was not judged to be valid for the municipal companies. These managers do not express as ambivalent an approach to competing value systems as the managers in other sections of the municipality do. Nor do they appear to question their professional knowledge, the work content or managership. Another empirical important finding is that the managers believe that the organizational conditions limit ability to carry out the manager task, but that, despite this, they indicate, paradoxically, that they like their work and the social work environment.
This article contributes to ‘sociology of professions’ theory through the study of changes that occurred in US airline pilots’ work. Findings reveal that airline pilots are quasi-professional experts who developed specialized skills based on talent and experience which allowed them to work autonomously and enjoy a correspondingly high sense of trust and prestige for which they were often well compensated. However, results of this study suggest high labour costs and weak professional communities leave quasi-professional experts vulnerable to managerial cost-cutting and work intensification agendas, particularly during periods of merger, downsizing and other forms of industry restructuring. Findings signal a deprofessionalization of some elite fields in which experts’ specialized skills become devalued and the industry-specific nature of their expertise reduces career options and job mobility. Although the present study identifies this trend in aviation, recent changes in a wide range of industries from healthcare to high-tech portend applicability in a variety of domains.
Against the background that corporatism is on the decline in recent decades, one could expect that the representativeness of employer and business associations is also declining. In this article it is argued and shown that, contrary to this expectation, this decline is not observable for employer and business associations. So the question arises as to whether employer and business associations are simply relics of a different era with no longer any purpose. Using a cross-national approach it is shown that by adapting their organizational structure as well as their activities to the changing needs of business, employer and business organizations are as ‘strong’ and active nowadays as ever.
This research concerns the labour–management relationship at Nordic-owned industrial enterprises in Russia. The analysis draws upon case study data from four unionized factories in the northwest region of Russia that represent different union–management (U-M) relationships representing varying degrees of confrontation and cooperation. Although the long-run dynamics of the U-M relationship at all the factories is heading for partnership (‘dancing’), short-term dynamics may contain periods of antagonism (‘boxing’). There is little indication of a Nordic-type ‘healthy combination’ of recurring dialogue between boxing and dancing at the factories. Moreover, the managements have set limitations in the action allowed and the scope for partnership, and there are discrepancies in the cultural and identity dimensions of ‘dancing’ at the factories. The findings support the hybridization approach to the IR model transfer of multinational companies as Nordic employers seek to escape standards that are in place in their home IR regimes.
This article provides new analytical insight into migrant labour by examining a newly emergent low-margin sector, hand car washes (HCWs). The sector is co-created by pressures from above in the form of economic restructuring and from below by employers and migrants who diffuse fluid and flexible low-wage employment. The diffusion of HCWs demonstrates how exploitative privatized employment generates autonomous economic growth in the unregulated economy. The formal and informal economies are however interlinked and overlapping within and beyond the labour process. Locally, HCWs have the potential to become the established car wash sector, putting regulated outlets in a state of uncertainty as informalization in employment if not business practice becomes the norm.
Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) practices are increasingly being viewed as an improved way of resolving workplace conflict. Much of the empirical literature focuses on the spread of ADR amongst US organizations with little evidence of such approaches having crossed the Atlantic. This article presents new survey evidence that examines the extent to which ADR has been adopted as a strategy to resolve different forms of conflict by Welsh firms in the UK. The factors that impact upon the diffusion of ADR are also analysed. The article finds that in contrast to earlier research, ADR is widespread amongst Welsh firms, irrespective of how broadly ADR is defined. The presence of institutional actors such as specialist HR managers and recognized trade unions are found to be positively associated with more private forms of ADR.
Employers, workers and governments all have a stake in improving intrinsic job quality since it can help to raise worker well-being and lower the social costs of ill-health. This article provides a unique insight into factors triggering changes to two key aspects of intrinsic job quality – the skills used and developed at work, and the pressures under which work is carried out. Using a rare two-wave panel dataset, the article assesses whether three predicted determinants – namely employee involvement, teamworking and computerisation – are good or bad for these aspects of intrinsic job quality.
Drawing on recent incentive theory and the growing use of multiple incentives by firms, this article examines the effects of combining incentives on workplace labour productivity. Utilizing data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey, the article explores whether multiple incentives are more effective than single incentives. It is found that the productivity effects of individualized incentives are enhanced by profit sharing though not by collective payment by result schemes (PBR). Profit sharing also enhances the effect of collective PBR, and it is found that two group incentives are more effective than a single individual incentive. However there are limits on the number of incentive schemes that can be combined effectively. The effects of mixed incentives tend to be greater in workplaces with worker discretion and task variety, thereby providing support for a contingency perspective.
This study investigates patterns of seasonal variation in hours worked by women employed in home-based industrial production in Sweden in the early 20th century. Previous studies often describe workers in this type of production as the most flexible segment of industrial workers, and highly dependent on seasonal fluctuations in supply and demand. However, few have studied this empirically. This study relies on data from interviews with home-based workers. Principal component analysis is used to identify seasonal patterns and OLS regressions to identify the factors driving these fluctuations. The results show surprisingly stable patterns in hours worked, most women worked 8–10 hours per day all year. Thus, while home-based workers were flexible in the sense that they all worked on piece-work contracts and provided their own means of production and place of work, their work was not essentially irregular or largely fluctuating by supply- or demand-driven seasonal variations.
This article investigates unemployed adolescents’ success in re-employment programmes. It proposes that not being in employment, education, or training indicates a setback in the achievement of important life goals, which affects mental health and success in re-employment programmes. Adolescents who are more affected by the experience of unemployment will be even less likely to succeed. An analysis of longitudinal archival records of 300 adolescents in a Youth Guarantee apprenticeship scheme confirms the expectations. Adolescents who were more vulnerable during unemployment and who had a worse relationship with their parents when starting the apprenticeship were more likely to drop out within the first year. The effect of age was moderated by relationship quality. The results show that taking the prior experience of not being in employment, education and training into account can offer a new understanding for the success of re-employment programmes. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
Public sector industrial relations in Denmark are normally perceived as relatively consensual, and as a ‘model employer’ country with a strong collective bargaining tradition it is one of the countries where unilateral regulation could be least expected. However, in 2013, a lockout without any prior strike or strike-warning in the bargaining area for primary and lower secondary education only, came to an end through legislative intervention. The article includes three main arguments. First, the government and the public employers took these drastic steps because various factors created a rare ‘window of opportunity’ for them. Second, the reason a Norwegian industrial conflict in 2014 with a very similar point of departure ended very differently was first and foremost that the Norwegian process was not embedded in politics and policy reform to the same extent as the Danish process. Third, the Danish case shows that Denmark might not have escaped the trend towards unilateralism seen across Europe.
Dualization theory posits that certain institutions cause dualization in the labour market, yet how institutions deepen the subjective insecurity divide between insiders and outsiders has not been examined. This article examines this question using data from 23 European countries in 2008/2009. Results show that the subjective employment insecurity divide between permanent and temporary workers varies significantly across different countries. Corporatist countries, with stronger unions, have larger subjective insecurity divides between permanent and temporary workers. However, this is because permanent workers feel more secure in these countries rather than because temporary workers are more exposed to feelings of insecurity.
The purpose of this article is to analyse how tipping practices are given meaning and acted upon by customers and employees. Though the concept of moral economy, the article traces the ideas of rights and entitlement that are embedded in tipping. The findings indicate that customers and workers enjoy tipping. The tension between them arises from customers’ use of the tip as a mediator of individual feeling and workers’ emphasis on the tip as an economic income and on the collective processes of service production. Workers use the practice of pooling tips to reduce the economic risk and the processes of individualisation. These strategies are defined as weapons of the poor as they are developed in circumstances of economical vulnerability. The focus is on 24 in-depth interviews with customers and employees. This article offers new insights into the moral economy of tipping and the ways in which it affects the forms of resistance available to workers.
The role of occupational health and safety representatives is changing. A study in 60 Danish enterprises indicates that representation, and especially negotiation on behalf of colleagues, has diminished. The work environment is mainstreamed in many enterprises and is rarely an area of conflict. The role of OHS representatives has accordingly changed to focus on solving specific problems in the workplace as an integrated part of daily operations. Both management and colleagues consider the OHS representatives as a resource that can be utilized to manage the work environment. The consequences of this development for the employees may be a stronger joint management–employee effort to improve the work environment, but also management domination and an accordingly weaker employee voice in some companies.
This article focuses on school-leavers who enter employment with a temporary contract in the European context, and examines their probabilities to shift to standard employment or unemployment, and their chances of occupational mobility afterwards. The authors argue that two institutional dimensions of insider–outsider segmentation drive the career progression after a flexible entry: the gap between the regulation of permanent and temporary contracts and the degree of unionization. The analyses show that a disproportionate protection of permanent compared to temporary contracts increases the probability of remaining on a fixed-term contract, whereas the degree of unionization slightly decreases the chance of moving to jobs with higher or lower socio-economic status. Finally, a shift to permanent employment after a fixed-term entry is more often associated with occupational upward mobility in strongly rather than weakly unionized labour markets.
This qualitative case study compares labour and management risk perceptions of offshore helicopter transportation and worker participation in general and in two specific safety issues: survival suits and night flights. Verbatim transcripts of the parties’ testimony in a public inquiry into a fatal helicopter crash in 2009 were analysed with supplementary documentation. A persistent but shifting perceptual gap was found with limited worker and union involvement despite the accuracy of their perceptions. Potential explanations for this overall pattern focus on the social construction of risk: fateful moments, power differentiation, safety management systems, and balancing of production, safety and corporate reputation.
Grounded in self-determination theory (SDT), this research builds a motivation profile typology of contingent workers in the contact center industry, compares outsourcer (OW) and temporary agency workers’ (TAW) profiles, and differentiates their human resources practices (HRP) perceptions and affective commitment. The hypotheses were tested in a sample of 2078 Portuguese contingent workers, through several statistical procedures, including latent profile analysis. Six profiles were identified. As expected, OW were mostly in the more intrinsic profiles, whereas TAW were in the more extrinsic ones. However, the contingent employment format did not moderate the relationship between motivation, HRP perceptions, and affective commitment.
While most previous studies focus on the monopoly aspect of works council introductions, this article explores the collective voice face of introductions and investigates workers’ decision as an exit–voice consideration. Using a large linked employer–employee dataset from Germany, the present study finds that council introductions are more likely if workers have high plant-specific human capital or earn high wages. These results are consistent with exit–voice considerations as well as with attempts to protect an existing distribution of rents. Redoing the analysis for plants in which the protection of rents against management decisions is less relevant yields similar results supporting a voice interpretation.
This article considers the issues associated with the use of quota systems for the employment of workers with a disability. It examines the use and experiences of such quotas in Italy, Russia and the United Kingdom. Italy has a long established quota system for the employment of such workers, whilst the modern Russian system is a more recent innovation. In contrast, the UK abandoned quotas in the 1990s. The article draws on the experiences of the three countries to consider generally whether the use of quotas is an acceptable means of encouraging employers to take on disabled workers, or necessary to achieve this objective.
The broadening of the anti-discrimination legislation and the growing use of litigation have put pressure on organizations to respond to the law by elaborating formal rules and, in the case of France, negotiating collective agreements on union rights. This article addresses the issue of union victimization by investigating the various organizational responses to anti-discrimination law. By focusing on in-depth case studies over a long period of time, it offers new insights into the processes whereby law is internalized and how they interact with litigation over time, and also highlights the active, contested and changing role of HR professionals and trade unionists in the shaping of organizational responses.
Since 1970 Article 18 provided important employment protection for workers in larger firms in Italy. Its core aspect (i.e. reinstatement in the case of unfair dismissal) was recently overturned by the Jobs Act for employees hired after its approval. To explain Article 18’s abolition, the authors assess the explicative power of (1) stronger exogenous pressures from economic international institutions, and (2) weaker endogenous pressures from unions and business organizations. Documentary analyses and semi-structured interviews with key informants reveal that while these two forces are critical, they tend to ‘read off’ the state policy decision making role, which, the authors argue, is central to explaining the overturning of Article 18.
The aim of this study is to examine job insecurity from a multilevel perspective and to investigate the roles of two types of job insecurity – job insecurity climate and individual job insecurity – for work-related attitudes and health outcomes. It further explores the role of the workgroup – as a social context – in shaping job insecurity perceptions. Data were collected from white-collar employees in a Swedish organization, with 126 participants nested in 18 groups. The results show that 19% of the variance in job insecurity climate perceptions, and none of the variance in individual job insecurity perceptions, could be attributed to group membership. Further, compared to other members of their group, those perceiving a stronger job insecurity climate reported lower levels of negative self-rated health and higher burnout scores. These results imply that the workgroup is an important social context for job insecurity climate perceptions.
This article explores empirically the economic validity of the relatively limited approach to the regulation of employment protection pursued in the UK over the last three decades and within the European Union more recently. It does so by comparing the UK’s manufacturing labour productivity performance with those of three countries – France, Germany and Sweden – that possess more stringent employment protection laws. The findings reveal that while productivity growth in the UK was superior to France and Sweden, it was lower than in Germany. More generally, the study’s findings fail to support the existence of a straightforward negative relationship between regulatory stringency and productivity growth.
For the past decade the European Commission has urged EU member states to pursue ‘flexicurity’ policies aimed at achieving employment growth and social inclusion. However, the economic crisis and turn to austerity across the EU has presented the flexicurity model with a substantial challenge. This article argues that since 2008 labour policies across the EU have exhibited shared tendencies, but support for measures that might contribute to the achievement of the security aspects of flexicurity has been substantially weakened. In developing this argument, the article presents findings from a cluster analysis and detailed investigations of labour policies in EU member countries. The article also discusses the implications of the findings for comparative institutional analysis. It highlights differences in the approaches of countries that are commonly treated as members of the same institutional family, as well as similarities in the policies adopted by countries commonly associated with different ‘varieties’ of capitalism.
The article considers the strategies of trade unions towards the representation of call centre workers. Using a comparative case study, it examines the divergent union responses to the growth of contingent labour by looking at the telecommunications industries in Italy and Greece. Although the trade unions in Italy pursued inclusive strategies embracing the call centre workers and negotiating the restructuring of the whole sector, the unions in Greece followed a policy of exclusion leaving call centre workers outside representation and negotiating their internal restructuring. The article argues that the different union identities, and the diverse power resources and internal organizational politics help explain the variation in the trade unions’ strategic responses.
Most research on outsourcing looks at cost-driven, resource-based or transformational motives to understand outsourcing decisions at the company-level. This article brings in the workers’ perspective, which is a topic that has not been the focus of attention of most previous studies. The article takes cross-national data for 18,264 companies in 18 European economies to examine the role of worker power on outsourcing decisions. According to the results from multilevel logistic analysis and contrary to the authors’ expectations, worker power relates to a higher likelihood of outsourcing. This article concludes with some thoughts on this finding and presents some directions for future research.
This article uses framing theory to examine how activists and trade unions have framed labour’s political agenda in Malaysia. A polity grounded in ethnicity continues to hinder the formation of cross-ethnic collective worker identities and labour politics. However, inclusive popular democratising movements have strengthened in recent years, providing a favourable context for greater emphasis on non-ethnic political action by trade unions. The latter have shifted in this direction, adopting elements of the popular movement’s ‘human rights’ internationalism. Thus, the democratic movement’s frame has influenced that of the trade unions, with implications for framing theory.
Little is known about variation in the efficacy of financial participation across countries. This article examines the relationship between two types of financial participation (profit-sharing and employee share-ownership) and labour productivity across 29 European countries using a representative workplace survey. Consistent with theoretical expectations, profit-sharing is associated with superior labour productivity when it is open to all employees, whilst the evidence for employee share-ownership is more mixed. Analysis reveals considerable variation in the efficacy of both schemes across Europe. Country-level collective bargaining coverage has the greatest explanatory power in accounting for cross-country variation in efficacy. In countries with higher levels of collective bargaining coverage, profit-sharing performs less well, whereas employee share-ownership performs better, relative to countries with lower collective bargaining coverage. These findings shed light on the comparative dimension of the financial participation–labour productivity link.
This article shows that professional skill level of employees is a key factor in the formation of employee responses to subcontracted forms of employment. In addition, the proportion of employees hired through temporary staffing arrangements compared to the core workers determines the employees’ capacity for collective action. This article uses observational and interview data from a public university hospital, where both skilled health care professionals and janitorial workers are hired through temporary staffing arrangements. The findings reveal that skilled health care professionals develop more individualistic responses to cope with the subcontracting practices, and the co-employment of subcontracted and permanent workers undermines solidarity among them. Lacking the professional skills and positioned at the bottom of the hospital hierarchy, janitorial workers opt for collective action against the hospital administration. Finally, the analysis of counter-responses of the hospital administration points to the dynamic nature of workplace relations, and the capacity of employers to reshape the responses of workers.
This article reviews the 510-day strike by women irregular workers in the South Korean retail industry, and analyses factors which made a group of women irregular workers, whose employment conditions render them the most marginal employees, to sustain a lengthy struggle despite financial and family pressures. This article argues there are three factors behind the struggle: first their desire to address the employment discrimination and inhumane treatment they faced at work; second their belief that the struggle was larger than just their immediate demands; and third the solidarity and support they received from both the union and full-time colleagues and from the broader community.
This article reports on a study of trade union involvement in the Sydney Alliance – a broad-based community coalition organising for the ‘common good’. The article explores three main issues: the factors motivating unions to get involved in community-based organising; whether unions have the resources and capabilities to maintain long-term involvement with organisations outside the labour movement; and whether or not engagement creates the potential for rethinking union organising. Findings suggest that taking part in the Sydney Alliance has created opportunities for unions to reflect and act upon internal organisational change to facilitate revitalisation and member participation; to improve the public image of unions and their engagement with civil society networks; and to counteract the loss of political influence with the Labor Party. At the same time, union contribution to the coalition has also proved difficult to sustain, in the main because of the lack of strategic capability of unions.
This article investigates how ethnicity, gender and other characteristics affect low-paid workers’ perceptions of their employability in London’s labour market, examining self-efficacy, ethnic and dual labour market theories. The authors find that perceptions vary considerably, both between genders and ethnicities and in the extent to which they are ‘justified’ by human capital attributes. Optimism varies between genders and ethnic groups but individuals’ perceptions vary to an even greater extent within genders and ethnic groups. Hence, individual-level ‘self-determination’ explanations of these perceptions appear to have greatest explanatory power in this specific context, although ethnic theories also have utility.
The aim of this article is to study the relevance of the division of labour to the formation of organizational trust. Trust is defined as a phenomenon related to the resources available to a person in a given social position, a social position which in turn is related to the division of labour. It is argued that work externalization constitutes a division of labour, and that differing access to resources for internal and external workers explains variations in trust. The theoretical propositions are tested in a quantitative analysis of 711 external workers and internal employees in a Swedish organization. The results lend partial support to the theory. External employees are found to be less likely have strong trust in their co-workers. The relationship is mediated by perceptions of shared norms in the organization.
Despite agreement on the negative effects of job insecurity, more knowledge needs to be generated on the health effects in terms of burnout and depressive symptoms and for whom job insecurity has these negative effects. The present study aims to investigate the associations between job insecurity and burnout and depressive symptoms respectively, by studying the moderation influences of performance-based self-esteem (PBSE), a form of contingent self-esteem. A population-based sample with 4145 twins was used. The results showed that job insecurity was significantly associated with both burnout and depressive symptoms, and that PBSE acted as a moderator, so that the associations were stronger for individuals with high PBSE than for individuals with low PBSE. The study contributes by including a personality characteristic to gain more knowledge about the mechanisms of job insecurity on mental ill-health, and by illustrating that job insecurity has an impact on severe health outcomes in terms of burnout and depressive symptoms.
This article critically examines the literature dealing with the British Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Regulations (2004). It is argued that notwithstanding significant academic interest, the implications of the legislation for employees, trade unions and managers remain under-explored and inadequately theorised. Outlining the principal deficiencies the article suggests scholars could derive much inspiration from the voluminous output relating to both the (sister) European Works Council (EWC) Directive and the continental works council format. The absence of research dealing with the interconnectedness of the ICE and EWC Regulations is similarly highlighted. It is suggested that researchers might usefully import the concept of ‘institutional complementarity’ to extend knowledge of the synergies potentially derived from the operation of both pan-European (EWC) and national (ICE) fora in those organisations where such bodies coexist.
The transposition of the 2002/14/EC Directive, establishing a general framework for information and consultation (I&C), has proven contentious in largely voluntarist systems of employment regulation. Receiving particular criticism is the employee ‘opt-in’ mechanism as a means to access I&C rights. For non-union employees in particular, the ability and potential to negotiate rights for I&C is widely seen to be problematic. This article uniquely examines the opt-in mechanism in the context of non-unionism, considering how non-union employers respond to non-union employees invoking their legislative rights to I&C. Drawing upon a case study conducted over four years in a large non-union multinational, the evidence shows how the opt-in and negotiation process function to the advantage of the employer rather than the intended regulatory impact to advance employee rights.
This article brings the neglected topic of small professional unions into the women and unions literature. In addition to an overview of women’s representation and gender equality strategies in small professional UK unions, it offers a contextually grounded analysis of barriers and enablers of women’s participation in Napo – the union representing professional workers in the probation service. The article identifies several enablers: healthy levels of women’s representation over a long period of time; presence and longevity of gender equality strategies; a strong occupational identity; occupational values that complement those of unionism. However, a highly pressured work environment and hostile industrial relations climate create lived insecurities, work–life imbalance and time poverty, which have constrained women professionals’ union participation.
This article investigates the effects of crisis-related collective bargaining on different contractual groups of workers. Comparing four workplaces of two multinationals in Germany and Belgium in the recent economic crisis, the authors observe that Belgian unions could protect some temporary workers’ jobs and when the crisis endured, the jobs and working conditions of the permanent workforces. In contrast, temporary jobs in the German workplaces were not protected and later on, the works councils had to concede on the permanent workers’ working conditions to safeguard their jobs. This is explained by the intersection of institutional and firm-level differences which interacted to offer (or not) resources to unions to enforce protection.
By particularly stressing the weaker labour market attachment of workers with non-standard contracts, this article contributes to the rather unexplored issue of mainly non-union-related reasons for leaving trade unions. Germany has been selected as a case study because German unions experienced a steady decline in membership, while at the same time non-standard employment arrangements increased considerably and more so than the European average. Using the German Socio-Economic Panel data, the authors construct a labour market attachment variable capturing different degrees of attachment. Their analysis shows the impact of labour market attachment and firm-level characteristics on union leaving and points especially to important differences across gender.
Many traditional regions are undergoing change and transformation as industries restructure. The development of ‘green economies’ and the transition to a low-carbon economy offers areas experiencing industrial decline an opportunity to innovate around policies for regeneration. In this process, there is a necessary emphasis on skills development and the creation of decent jobs, but institutional context mediates such processes in different places in different ways. This article argues that an effective transition policy is more likely to emerge where a mutually reciprocal relationship is developed between the state qua government and the social groups that comprise the region, including employers and workers and their representatives. Utilising a ‘varieties of capitalism’ typology in relation to areas of industrial decline in Germany and the UK, the article illustrates the ways in which transition policies are elaborated and implemented, with an explicit focus on decent job creation.
High-involvement models of working are associated with high levels of worker influence over the work process, identified through worker perceptions of their jobs and working environment. This article reviews what is known about the conditions that foster the adoption of such models. Drawing on studies of worker participation in management since the 1950s, the article seeks to understand what explains the dispersion of high-involvement work processes in the private sector. In terms of understanding the potential for worker involvement in decision-making, the article argues that it is important to analyse the way in which managers develop production systems in firms. A range of conditions in manufacturing and in services are then discussed. While economic incentives are critical, the ongoing existence of societal differences, including a pronounced ‘Nordic effect’, suggests that economically unattractive environments do not necessarily lack opportunities to enhance worker well-being through greater involvement.
This article reports the difficult path of developing works councils as new institutions of employee participation in Polish industrial relations and the atmosphere among the social partners surrounding this process. Analysis shows that the Europeanization of legislation on indirect employee participation does not always translate into effective functioning of participatory institutions in practice. Despite the fact that the initially reluctant attitude of trade unions and employers towards works councils has become more positive in Poland, the role of these institutions in Polish industrial relations remains negligible. The amendment to the Act on Informing and Consulting Employees of 2009 has led to a reduction in the already small presence of works councils in Polish enterprises to a marginal level of about 2%.
Although there have been many studies of low skilled call centre operators, research on professional workers in call centres is less common and cross-national research on such operations even rarer. This article compares the labour process experiences of tele-nurses – registered nurses in call centre settings – across three countries: the UK, Australia and Sweden. Using cross-national, comparative ethnographies, through a system, society and dominance (SSD) approach, the article explores the common problems tele-nurses face as well as distinctive societal differences in the ways in which this branch of e-health care is being established. The outcomes reveal both societal diversity and mounting pressures towards a globalizing conformity between the three countries with regard to the working practices of tele-nursing. The findings have important implications for whether or not a professional project can be developed around tele-health care.
The article addresses the shifting patterns of atypical employment across the regions of Greece, severely hit by the 2009 crisis. Changes are depicted by NUTS-II level data for the pre- and post-crisis periods of 2005–2009 and 2009–2011. A regional categorization is suggested, as different forms of atypical employment, namely part-time, temporary, solo self-employment and family work, have expanded unevenly across space. The authors argue that different patterns are related to regional specialization and industrial structures differently affected by the crisis. Established forms of atypical employment have been shaken, while new highly precarious ones have been boosted. Moreover, regulatory reforms for higher labour flexibilization have also defined the emergent atypical employment patterns in Greece. The article points out that in the Greek labour market, already marked by high flexibility and poor job security and social benefits, recent regulatory reforms increasing flexibilization have deteriorated labour and devalued atypical employment.
This article examines compulsory reduced working time (CRWT) in five Belarusian factories, to assess its impact on employment relationships and evaluate arguments about ‘Soviet legacies’ and labour ‘patience’. Local use of CRWT increased between 2001 and 2012, and took a form more inimical to worker interests, thereby differing from official macro statistics. Managers expressed discontent at being pushed by state policy to use CRWT, but used it as a disciplinary tool. Workers perceived worsening work relationships and threats of collective response were in evidence. Arguments about ‘Soviet legacies’ and labour’s ‘patience’ therefore currently appear inappropriate.
Internationalization of organizations has been a threat for (national) industrial relations. This study compares three cases to test the influence of works councils on decision-making in multinational companies (MNCs), going through reorganizations. The authors argue it is important to take account of internal factors in the subsidiary, namely the power capabilities and interests of the actors involved. They study these by looking at the network partners of works councils and aligned interests of local management and works council. The findings show that aligned interests form an important prerequisite for positive management attitude, trust and informal relations, positively affecting reorganizations in subsidiaries of MNCs.
The aim of this article is to examine the explanatory forces of power resources and institutional factors on whistle blowing activity, its effectiveness and reactions. The authors analyse survey material of 6000 Norwegian employees across sectors and industries, and find that individual power resources have little impact, but the organizational power resources of positions, and institutional factors matter. Departing from a Norwegian labour market model, this is a result that encourages continued focus on codetermination, democracy and openness.
At the end of the Third Way and no sense of its future, social democrats look to Sweden for inspiration. However, Swedish social democracy is in no better condition. Scholarship is starting to grasp the broad outlines of the movement’s difficulties. Providing greater depth, this article employs the Social Systems of Innovation and Production approach to analyse Swedish social democracy’s current condition by historicising its current policy dilemmas in relation to the public pension system, once the jewel in the crown of the Rehn–Meidner model and the push for economic and industrial democracy, now the constraining legacy of financialisation.
The coincidence between trends in the decline of workers’ health and the increasing practice of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) seems a paradox. Using data from the French Employment Survey 2005, in this article the authors develop an index of responsible prevention by combining a score of severity of working conditions with a score of risk prevention at the workplace. The authors then explore the influence of this variable on the propensity to stop working for medical reasons. The results show that prevention increases workers’ health status and suggest the existence of an optimal level of social CSR expenditure.
The General Motors (GM) case stands out for its transnational employee cooperation. During the crisis the ‘national turn’ of union politics seems to have eroded solidarity and mutual trust relations. In this article the authors suggest disentangling the behaviour of labour representatives and their attitudes, identities and feelings to develop a more sophisticated perspective on labour transnationalism. Concepts of sociological neo-institutionalism and empirical evidence from two automobile companies (GM/Opel and Volkswagen) in Germany, the UK and Poland are used to investigate the conditions under which transnational solidarity occurs and prevails. The authors conclude that solidarity in both companies has not come to an end and contributes to repertoires of contention in future labour conflicts.
The approach in this article is to study leadership activities from the shop-floor workers’ perspectives during the implementation of a Lean-inspired production concept – an angle of approach that corresponds to a need for a deeper knowledge of the interactions between organizational structures and the physical work environment. The empirical findings are from a national R&D program called the Production Leap and collected through different methods: semi-structured interviews carried out at eight manufacturing companies, the open-ended part of a longitudinal survey, and participative observations. Lean leadership practices at these companies do not enable the possibilities of developing the technical systems or work relationships between the managers and the shop-floor workers. Instead, they provide the means and activities to circumvent coordination problems and create a feeling of participation. The results here indicate that leadership activities and coordination of work do not, as it is sometimes argued by the proponents of Lean, ‘turn the pyramid’ of power upside down. One reason for this is the lack of social structures in the organization.
Previous quantitative studies have established a link between precarious work and occupational health and safety (OHS). Using an ethnographically informed qualitative approach, this article investigates the workplace experiences of different types of precarious workers, in particular those who are directly-employed temporary workers and those who are engaged through an agency. Drawing on the work of Andrew Hopkins, the article finds cultural practices that lead to worsened OHS experiences for those who are engaged through an agency. These experiences include inadequate safety training, poor quality personal protective equipment and a lack of clarity of supervisory roles.
Although the effects of work autonomy (WA) and employee involvement (EI) have been largely studied, their determinants, especially at the macro/institutional level, have attracted much less attention. To better understand (a) the extent to which WA and EI are distinct constructs and (b) the factors that explain their respective levels, this article uses the 2010 European Working Conditions Survey to build sound indexes of WA and EI, provide a picture of the level of both constructs in 33 European countries and analyse their predictors through a multilevel structural model. The results show that WA and EI differ in what concerns their macro-level but not micro-level predictors. Whereas union density and generalized trust strongly influence EI, only generalized trust impacts WA. Documenting that generalized trust as a macro-social trait is powerfully associated with organizational choices is a key contribution of the article.
This article investigates a case of successful union organizing in one automotive assembly plant in Romania. The authors argue that in order to explain why the union succeeds in defending workers’ rights there is a need to consider both structural and agency aspects that condition labor’s capacity to effectively defend their interests. The findings show that the union at the Romanian plant has made use of a diverse repertoire of protest activities in order to defend its worker constituency. The authors also discuss why as of late protests are less and less used by the union in response to the shifting economic and political environment in which the plant is embedded. They argue that a closer look at the strategy of the Romanian union and the path it has taken in the past decade provides a better understanding of the conditions for union success in an economic, legal, and political environment that has become increasingly hostile toward organized labor. In this sense, the article points to the more general situation unions in Central and Eastern Europe have found themselves in recent years.
UK innovation policy has focused upon scientific and technological innovations, overlooking the workplace and potential contribution of employees. While other countries have developed workplace innovation programmes to address this challenge, the UK remains a laggard. In Scotland, however, ‘skills utilisation’ has received policy attention, with pilot projects exploring how to help organisations make better use of employees’ capabilities. One project, Creating Cultures of Innovation, explores the role of design. This article considers the lessons which are emerging, and asks whether design might contribute to a broad-based innovation policy that brings the workplace back in.
This article develops and examines the idea that internal labour flexibility practices are beneficial for labour productivity and innovation performance of companies. This is tested in two studies using unique company level datasets. In Study 1, results obtained from 377 independent companies revealed that internal labour flexibility practices are positively related to objective labour productivity and its growth in the year following, also when controlled for objective labour productivity and objective external labour flexibility from the year before. In Study 2, results obtained from 4271 companies indicated that internal labour flexibility practices were positively related to product innovation and labour productivity. Findings suggest that internal labour flexibility practices benefit both labour productivity and innovation performance of companies. If innovation and labour productivity are considered key to long-term survival, firms and policymakers should consider internal labour flexibility practices.
Poland has had the highest incidence of temporary employment among the EU countries since 2009. However, due to a lack of proper data, only a few empirical studies have been devoted to analyse the consequences of temporary employment for future career and economic prospects on the Polish labour market. In this study the data from the Social Diagnosis panel study for the years 2009–2013 are used in order to analyse these consequences. The results reveal that although the chances for the temporary employed of finding a permanent job increase and the risk of being unemployed decreases over time, the negative consequences of temporary employment for income and its perceived stability do not seem to diminish.
The present study allows for a more flexible Job Demand–Control model by introducing years of work experience as a contextual factor (i.e. moderator). Building on the processes of adaptation and diminishing returns to learning-by-doing, the authors assumed that the relationships between job demands, job control and strain versus learning decrease with the number of years an individual has been working (i.e. years of work experience). Hypotheses were tested using data from Flemish workers during their first years on the labour market (N = 3158). The authors accounted for unobserved individual heterogeneity by means of panel data techniques. Results revealed that the impact of control on both strain and learning decreased with years of work experience (i.e. main effect). The authors also found a significant three-way interaction effect between demands, control and years of work experience for both strain and learning, in line with their expectations.
This article develops and tests the theory that union activism is related to economic conditions using a nationally representative panel of workers from the UK. Results suggest that a fall in real wages of two percentage points and a three percentage point increase in the unemployment rate are both associated with a one-tenth increase in the probability that a ‘benchmark’ worker will become a union activist (albeit from a low base). This relationship is largely explained by the behaviour of workers in highly unionized sectors.
Drawing on unstructured interviews, the present article examines the motivations behind the migration of workers from Turkey as an under-researched community in Britain. For this, a cross-intersectional approach is developed. Intersectional evidence suggests that motivations are informed by both economic and social factors. In particular, economic ambitions have become considerably variegated in recent years, but added to these are non-economic motivations within spatial, ethnic/religious and gender/sexuality domains as well as human capital considerations. These also give a dynamism to migrants’ motivations. Even so, one should go beyond intersectionality for a fuller account. A sense of ill-treatment back home occasionally turns out to be an inextricable component across both economic and non-economic motivations whilst causing prolonged stays. Unpleasant experiences reported by the majority of participants largely reflect policy deficiencies in Turkey. Addressing them could have potential implications for more sustainable migration controls by encouraging returns and easing the search for a better life abroad.
Eastern and Central European labour migration following the EU enlargement has significant impact on the Nordic labour markets. This article demonstrates, through sector-based case studies in Denmark, how labour migration influences working condition and wages in two sectors that have so far only been sparsely studied: the agriculture and cleaning industries. The high inflow of labour migrants is used by some employers to bypass and undermine the institutionalized class compromise, by employing EU8/2-workers at lower wages and often without collective agreements coverage frequently combined with below average working conditions. This put strains on the Danish agreement-based model of industrial relations, potentially leading to a more segmented labour market as well as replacement of native, mainly low-skilled workers with EU8/2-workers.
Today, there is a widespread suggestion that permanent workers are increasingly subject to precarious working conditions. Due to international competition and declining union density, job qualities of permanent workers are assumed to be under strain. According to proponents of a democratization of risk rationale, low job qualities that were traditionally attached to secondary labour markets are transferred to workers in primary segments of the labour market. In this study, the authors test this theoretical rationale among workers in 11 Western European economies, using two waves of the European Working Conditions Survey. The results do not confirm a democratization of labour market risk. Lower job qualities are highly associated with flexible employment contracts and highlight a clear gap between insiders and outsiders.
The article synthesizes the literature on union commitment and union renewal through employing the concept of union apathy. This is done with a view to analyse the association between union strategies and union apathy, and the association between apathy and willingness to become a union delegate in Norway. To this end, the authors have run multivariate regressions on the YS Employment Outlook Survey. Results show that union strategy is significantly associated with apathy, and that apathetic union members are less willing to work for their union in the capacity of union delegate. The authors conclude that if unions are to counter apathy in an effort at renewal, and to ensure a sufficient pool of potential union delegates, they must mobilize the talents, ideas and energy of their members. Finally, the authors suggest that unions with an ‘organizing’ soul seem better equipped to counter apathy than unions bent on the ‘servicing’ model.
This article seeks to identify whether employee perceptions of job quality are better in instances where an onsite union representative is present. It also seeks to identify whether the relationship between onsite representative presence and job quality is explained by employee perceptions of union collective voice. The analysis, based on a survey of union members in the UK finance sector, demonstrates that employee perceptions of several dimensions of job quality are better where an onsite representative is present, and that this can be explained by the higher perceptions of union collective voice that onsite representatives engender.
German works councils provide a highly developed mechanism for codetermination designed to increase trust and cooperation within firms. This study examines whether or not the functioning of works councils depends on the type of ownership. Comparing domestic- and foreign-owned firms in Germany, the article finds that works councils and managers in foreign-owned firms are less likely to cooperate. The finding fits the notion that the activities of foreign multinational companies can involve tensions with the institutional framework of the host country.
This article evaluates critically the neoliberal perspective that employment in the informal economy is a product of high taxes, public sector corruption and state interference in the free market and that reducing taxes, corruption and the regulatory burden via minimal state intervention is the remedy. Analysing the varying size of the informal economy across 36 developing and transition countries, little or no association is found with higher tax rates, greater levels of corruption and state interference. Instead, employment in the informal economy appears to reduce with higher levels of regulation and state intervention. The theoretical and policy implications are discussed.
This article addresses the question of whether, and to what extent job flexibility is detrimental to mobilization with regard to the willingness to take part in industrial action. The authors examine the influence of job flexibility (‘standard’ versus ‘non-standard’ work) and job instability (changes from one job to another) on employees’ willingness to strike. Based on Dutch survey data it is shown that only minor differences exist between ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ employees in their willingness to participate in a strike. While this study did not establish a major direct effect of job flexibility on strike participation, tests of interaction effects reveal that job flexibility moderates other mobilizing factors, such as union membership and job dissatisfaction. Job instability, on average, has no effect on strike participation.
This article is concerned with whether employees on temporary contracts in Britain report lower well-being than those on permanent contracts, and whether this relationship is mediated by differences in dimensions of job satisfaction. Previous research has identified a well-being gap between permanent and temporary employees but has not addressed what individual and contract specific characteristics contribute to this observed difference. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, the article finds that a large proportion of the difference in self-reported well-being between permanent and temporary employees appears to be explained by differences in satisfaction with job security. Other dimensions of job satisfaction are found to be less important. In fact, after controlling for differences in satisfaction with security, the results suggest that temporary employees report higher psychological well-being and life satisfaction. This indicates that an employment contract characterized by a definite duration lowers individual well-being principally through heightened job insecurity.
This article investigates collective bargaining trends in the German private sector since 2000. Using data from the IAB Establishment Panel and the German Establishment History Panel, it provides both cross-sectional and longitudinal evidence on these developments. It confirms that the hemorrhaging of sectoral bargaining, first observed in the 1980s and 1990s, is ongoing. Furthermore, works councils are also in decline, so that the dual system also displays erosion. For their part, any increases in collective bargaining at firm level have been minimal in recent years, while the behavior of newly-founded and closing establishments does not seem to lie at the root of a burgeoning collective bargaining free sector. Although there are few obvious signs of an organic reversal of the process, some revitalization of the bargaining system from above is implied by the labor policies of the new coalition government.
The president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, stated in an interview that the European Social Model (ESM) is ‘gone’. In the same interview he also underlined the need for structural reform as a precondition for renewed growth in Europe. The main hypothesis of this article is that the simultaneous mentioning of the end of the ESM and the need for structural reform was not a coincidence. Structural reforms as adopted during the crisis are threatening the European Social Model(s). This can also be seen in the growth of poverty and inequality in the crisis countries. The article, furthermore, argues that the shift from the Open Method of Coordination to Economic Governance could increase pressure on other countries to introduce similar reforms, further weakening the ESM.
The article focuses on the case of the largest steel plant in Europe, located in Taranto (Italy), to argue that its current crisis is not simply dictated by technological or managerial failings. Rather, the article contends that its problems stem from a regulatory crisis and, specifically, from the failure of the deregulation model pursued after the industry’s process of privatization. Such a model has hinged upon the logic of a big private firm that, on the one hand, has sought to disembed itself from the socio-institutional context and, on the other, has set and followed its own rules with disruptive effects on the local society and environment, as well as on the plant’s economic viability. Such a model entered a crisis when the other socio-institutional actors started to react to the disastrous situation existing in Taranto. To use Polanyian language, a ‘double movement’ has emerged: disruptive pressures have triggered defensive reactions.
The article analyses local collective bargaining in seven medium-sized manufacturing firms operating in Northern Italy. The goals are to understand, within an international perspective, the degree of development of Italian MEs’ collective bargaining, and its outcomes in the construction of participative industrial relations and innovative forms of work organisation. The analysis highlights a ‘low-decentralised collective bargaining system’, where the concrete regulatory space exerted by company collective contracts is usually limited. Then, industrial relations turn out to be characterised neither by participation nor by conflict, from which come forms of work organisation based on a good quantitative mutual availability, like overtime and related payments, among social actors, but with poor results in terms of more qualitative aspects. Institutions and the prevailing culture of industrial relations turn out to be the main explanatory factors, requiring a more profound reflection on the Italian system of industrial relations.
German studies already have supported the existing positive economic effects of works councils, but failed to explain how these effects are produced. New case study based research from the Netherlands has provided a theory consisting of three channels to create economic impact, also including a set of necessary conditions. This article presents a secondary analysis of this theory with the use of a large data set. This quantitative analysis further supports the theory and contains interesting nuances about how the channels work, in particular about the role of the availability of sufficient works council candidates at elections.
This study focuses on immigrants in Canada and examines their job satisfaction as compared to Canadian-born employees. The authors explore whether high performance work systems (HPWS) affect immigrant employees’ job satisfaction differently than Canadian-born, where HPWS include empowerment, motivation and skill enhancing sub-bundles of practices. The study uses Statistics Canada’s Workplace and Employee Survey, a longitudinal dataset consisting of six years of data from 1999 to 2004 and 49,344 employees. Ordered logistic regression analyses are used to explore causal relationships. The moderation results show that increases in the motivation sub-bundle and increases in overall experience of HPWS practices are related to increases in job satisfaction among immigrants when compared to Canadian-born employees. Immigrants are a segment of the workforce that is understudied in management. This study identifies HPWS bundles that positively affect immigrants’ job satisfaction, suggesting a role for managers to capitalize on job satisfaction improvements ultimately contributing to organizational success.
The article presents the debates on youth unemployment developed in Greece and Ireland by the social actors before and after the outbreak of the economic crisis. The article examines policies of actors (employers, unions, policy bodies) and analyses whether their responses fit within neoliberal, flexicurity or social Europe discourses. It looks at how youth unemployment debates are framed in two different national settings and whether institutional differences affect the convergence towards or divergence from the neoliberal discourse. The article establishes that discourses of Greek social actors are more conflictual than those in Ireland where the history of social partnership is still evident. There is also evidence of changes in policies and discourses pre- and post-crisis.
Investments in human capital can create a hold-up problem whereby both employers and employees exploit the bargaining weaknesses of the other. Employee share ownership (ESO) can mitigate this hold-up problem because it can align interests, develop loyalty, signal good-will and lock in employees. Previous studies have shown positive relationships between company investments in human capital and the use of ESO consistent with this argument but have been unable to identify the direction of causality. Using panel data from the French REPONSE survey, the findings indicate that significant and continuous investments in human capital take place prior to the implementation of ESO.
The aim of this study is to compare the employment relationship of temporary agency and permanent workers in two different sectors analyzing the relationship between human resource practices systems and workers’ affective commitment and the mediating role of work engagement. The hypotheses were tested with multiple group analysis on two samples: from a call center and from two industrial companies. Results confirm that in both the temporary agency and the permanent subsamples in the two sectors workers’ perception of the human resource practices system relates positively with affective commitment toward the organization, and work engagement partially mediates this relationship. Moreover, the study confirms that the relationship between workers’ perception of the human resource practices system and affective commitment was stronger for temporary agency than for permanent workers. However, this moderation occurred only in the manufacturing sector. Contrarily, the relationship between workers’ perception of the human resource practices system and engagement was stronger for permanent workers than for temporary agency workers (TAWs) in this sector and the relationship between this psychological state and affective commitment was also stronger for permanent than for TAWs, in both sectors (call center and manufacturing).
The Israeli doctors’ and social workers’ campaigns of 2011 had many characteristics in common, but very different results. This article asserts that the differences stem from the different modes of privatization in the two sectors which reflect the importance of each sector in the neoliberal capital accumulation regime, which in turn affects the outcome of the workers’ struggles. While neoliberalism may undermine organized labour in general, it has uneven effects, benefiting some workers and undermining others. Thus we should pay attention to how privatization is implemented in different public sectors within the same country to better understand ‘actually existing neoliberalism’.
There is an ongoing debate in business and industrial relations literature regarding the role of social actors in shaping employment policies in multinational companies. However, less attention has been given to how sub-national employment levels are shaped by social actors within multinational companies. This article contributes to that question by investigating the conditions under which social actors engage in the development of regional employment policies, inter-firm employment policies and company-specific policies. Based on four case studies of multinational companies with different subsidiaries in Belgium, the study reveals that social actors shape these employment policies in line with their employment aims where they have access to sub-national resources. Furthermore, high levels of entrepreneurship were found if sub-national resources were available at multiple complementary sub-national levels. The availability of these resources is dependent on the specific historical development of each of these sub-national levels.
This article focuses on profit-sharing and employee share ownership practices, with the aim of analysing the effect of company size and industry on financial participation, as well as the substitution or complementary effect of other direct and indirect participation methods adopted in Estonian private companies. The article uses survey data from more than 900 Estonian companies obtained via telephone interviews in 2011. The results indicate that share ownership is more common in micro enterprises, but contrary to expectations the incidence of employee financial participation is no higher in knowledge intensive sectors. The results also show that financial participation has different complementarities depending on the scheme. It seems that profit-sharing is part of the ‘package’ of employee participation, but this does not apply to employee share ownership. The article challenges the common understanding that certain innovative service sectors and bigger companies are more inclined to adopt employee financial participation; and raises doubts about the presumed development towards a higher degree of financial participation in Eastern European countries.
This study examines trends in labour force participation of older men (55–64 years) in the Netherlands between 1992 and 2009 using Dutch Labour Force Survey data. In this period, the share of early retirees and disability recipients steadily decreased, while labour force participation of Dutch older men increased. The authors characterize these developments both theoretically and empirically in terms of policy reforms, normative change and deindustrialization. More specifically, institutional early retirement arrangements were abolished due to the rising costs associated with the ageing of the Dutch population. Older men, therefore, became more likely to be employed, unemployed or disabled compared to early retired between 1992 and 2009. The authors also find that deindustrialization increases the chances of employment for older men with a university degree. Moreover, a shrinking industry sector is particularly harmful for the lowest educated older men, as their likelihood to be in unemployment increases compared to early retirement.
This article examines the inequalities in the distribution of training which exist in Britain. It does so by using a binomial logit regression model to examine training incidence and an ordered logit regression model to examine training intensity. The investigation uses a matched worker–workplace data set with origins in the 2011 Work and Employment Relations Study. Training inequalities are seen to correlate with both the personal characteristics of the individual and the characteristics of the workplace at which he/she is employed, notably age band, pay grade, tenure and the size of the workplace. However, the training premia which have traditionally accrued to males, graduates, those who have permanent contracts of employment and union members appear to be diminishing if not disappearing.
This article discusses the empowerment of women factory workers in Malaysia through the lens of Kabeer’s Social Relations Approach. The approach offers an institutional analysis of how gender inequality is produced and calls for the overall terms of exchange and cooperation to be shifted in women’s favour. Its application shows that Malaysian women factory workers face significant challenges, due to the character of institutions, and women’s difficulties in adopting and internalising the notion of ‘empowerment’.
The factors that influence wage moderation policies across European countries have been a focus of industrial relations literature for some time. Given the lack of direct market discipline on public sector wages, most existing accounts suggest that the determinants of public sector wages are due to institutional characteristics of the national wage-setting system in question. In this article the authors suggest an alternative ‘functionalist’ explanation of public sector wage determination, with an emphasis on the role of public fiscal constraints and macroeconomic stress. Drawing on new data from 11 EMU countries during the recent economic crisis of 2008–2010 and engaging in a cross-national analysis using Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), the authors demonstrate that the functionalist explanation performs better than the institutionalist one in a crisis period.
Two case studies of the successful use of supply chains to support the effective management of health and safety on constructions sites are analysed to identify the factors supporting this success. The analysis reveals that a combination of external regulatory pressures and an industry structure facilitative of the establishment and implementation of ‘good practice’ played a crucial role in the outcomes achieved. It is concluded therefore that while the findings lend weight to policy initiatives to utilise the power dynamics in supply chains to protect working conditions, they also suggest that surrounding institutional and industrial contexts exert a potentially crucial influence over their effectiveness. Consequently, it is further argued that such initiatives need to be responsively shaped to them.
This article studies conflicts in the Swedish Labour Court that have occurred between trade unions and companies concerning the pay and working conditions for European Union migrant workers in Sweden during the period 2004–2010. During this period, unions and employers entered into disputes over: unions’ rights in Sweden to be consulted when a company uses a subcontractor, the definition of an employee (the issue of ‘bogus self-employment’), the application of Swedish collective bargaining agreements to and for workers active in Sweden, how to determine wages for temporary staffing agency workers, and workers’ rights to join a trade union. The article discusses the conflicts in the context of a widespread concern about ‘social dumping’ in the European Union, and in the context of weakening trade unions and institutional change in labour markets.
The present study investigates to what extent main and interactive effects of overall organizational justice and job characteristics shape employees’ work attitudes (organizational commitment, intention to stay) and health (mental health, somatic health) cross-sectionally and after a period of one year. Questionnaire data from 429 Swedish accountants show that generally both organizational justice and job characteristics had main effects on all outcomes at both time points. Interactions between organizational justice and job characteristics were found for every job characteristic studied (demand, control, support), for both time points but mainly for intention to stay and somatic health. The results show that perceptions of organizational justice and job characteristics can have additive and multiplicative synergetic effects for work attitudes and employee health.
The present study investigated to what extent perception of closure management (informational justice, severance package satisfaction) as well as individual resources and barriers (employability, tenure) were associated with well-being and organizational attitudes during plant closure. This was studied in a sample of 129 Swedish workers in a plant undergoing closure. The results showed that those who felt communication to be fair reported higher well-being and more positive attitudes. Those who were satisfied with the severance package reported lower intention to leave but also felt fewer obligations towards the organization. Those with higher employability reported higher subjective health. The results also indicated that tenure moderated the relation between informational justice and felt obligations, and employability moderated the relation between severance package satisfaction and organizational attitudes. It can be concluded that closure management together with employees’ different resources and barriers are vital for organizational attitudes and well-being during the closedown process.
This article analyses the relation between job insecurity, job satisfaction and organizational commitment among employees of companies working in the tourism sector in Novi Sad, Serbia. The article aims to discover whether and to what extent there is a relation between these three variables, drawing on theoretical approaches and a questionnaire conducted in Novi Sad in 2012/2013 on a sample of 149 respondents in companies involved in tourism (hotels, tourist agencies and restaurants). The results indicate that there are strong positive correlations between organizational commitment and the variables which measure job satisfaction, while job insecurity correlates negatively with the variables which describe job satisfaction and organizational commitment.
Health and well-being interventions are increasingly assessed as complex processes rather than randomized controlled trials. In this study the health and well-being interventions refer to voluntary actions and are not in response to any regulatory requirement. This article looks specifically at managerial commitment to these interventions and at the organizational context in which they occur. Ex-ante study predictions as to the effects of commitment in three organizations were made and then followed up. This commitment was positively associated with employee perceptions of health promotion campaigns. But broader impacts, such as commitment to the organization and a sense of autonomy, were not evident. The explanation lies in wider features of the organization of work: permanent constraints such as job design and shift systems ran against the aims of the health interventions. Relating well-intentioned interventions to such features of organizational life remains a challenge for many organizations.
Based on the gender model and the life context model, the financial and domestic responsibilities and expectations associated with getting a new assignment are tested as potential gender specific moderators of the link between job insecurity and commitment, performance, and depressive moods. In a cross-sectional international questionnaire study of 1981 temporary workers’ three-way interactions between job insecurity, gender, and the moderators were tested. Expectations play a moderating role for women only, intensifying the negative relationship between job insecurity and commitment. Financial responsibility strengthened the negative relationship of job insecurity with commitment, as well as its positive relationship with depressive moods for women and men alike. Domestic responsibility plays a moderating role in the link between job insecurity and depressive moods and performance for women, aggravating depressive moods and reducing performance. For men, domestic responsibility had a buffering effect on the relationship between job insecurity and commitment.
Company-level pacts between the management and the works council are often preferred in comparison to agreements between employers’ association and unions because the former negotiating partners are better informed about the economic situation of a company and have fewer goal conflicts than the latter. Moreover, these company-level pacts might reduce the ‘hold-up’ problems which arise once specialized investment is made. Therefore, this article investigates whether such agreements affect firm-level investment. Based on the IAB Establishment Panel Survey 2001–2010 the study indicates that the adoption of a company-level pact leads to a higher investment rate than in other firms driven by reinvestment. However, the Great Recession has damped this positive influence. From the econometric analysis the article does not detect any increase in investment during the negotiation phase. After the expiration of a company-level pact, lower reinvestment and a small increase in net investment take place.
This article examines two cases of successful efforts by UK trade unions to mobilise contingent workers. The evidence strongly illustrates the explanatory potential of Kelly’s mobilisation theory and deepens understanding of how mobilisation processes work within unions. The findings emphasise the importance of officers and activists in framing collective interests as ‘cultures of solidarity’ (Fantasia, 1988). Solidarity both within groups of contingent workers and between them and the wider union is essential for successful mobilisation. Building solidarities helps these workers overcome their inherently weak position in the labour market; a process that is important to understand in greater detail if we are to understand union revitalisation efforts more widely.
The Mondragon worker-owned and worker-governed cooperatives are an example of the struggle that some alternative work organizations face when dealing with the external pressures of competing in the global economy while at the same time endeavouring to retain their long-held values of workplace democracy. This article analyses the Mondragon cooperative-multinationals with regard to their subsidiaries in China at a time when the cooperatives are undergoing deep internal and external transformations. The study centres on the characteristics of governance and working conditions at the Mondragon subsidiaries in the Kunshan Industrial Park near Shanghai. The article asks whether, from the perspective of China and Chinese workers, there are any substantial differences between the Chinese subsidiaries of Mondragon and those of conventional multinationals. Overall, it concludes that while there are significant challenges inherent in extending the democratic and participative model of the parent cooperatives to their subsidiaries, there are also indications that if the cooperatives can muster the political will to act in accordance with their stated principles, they could potentially become a real if modest force for change in the labour relations of developing economies.
Based upon the interdisciplinary literature on organizational flexibility, the study investigates positive and negative effects of perceived flexibility requirements (PFR) on worker well-being. The authors define PFR as perceived expectations conveyed by the organization to its employees, regarding self-directed behavior related to flexibility and efficiency in organizational practices; their content can refer to (1) task fulfillment, (2) career development, (3) learning, and (4) working time. Based on a heterogeneous sample of N = 931 employees, the authors tested a structural equation model, in which time pressure, work–family conflict, and personal initiative mediated between PFR and strain. Negative effects on well-being were most pronounced for PFR with regard to working time and mediated via time pressure and work–family conflict. PFR related to task fulfillment had both negative and positive effects via time pressure, but also stimulating employee initiative. The other two dimensions of PFR explained only small amounts of additional variance in dependent variables.
The purpose of this article is to investigate how and why the truck manufacturer Scania adapted to the economic downturn between 2008 and 2010 in the manner it did. First, Scania signed a crisis agreement on fewer working hours and lower wages, and, later, it signed an agreement stipulating fewer working hours, but without wage reductions. Both of these agreements were combined with investments in competence development and education as well as with the decision not to give notice to the employees, which was uncommon among Swedish companies. It is claimed that the company wanted to strengthen the competitiveness by integrating the unions and the employees even more in the business. An important prerequisite was the company’s Flexibility Agreement, which allowed the company not to give temporary employees new contracts and to let temporary employees leave the company as soon as their maximum employment period of six months expired.
In recent years a number of UK unions have been considering how to (re)engage with communities in order to rebuild the links that were so important to the origins and development of trade unionism. As such, we have seen parts of the UK union movement investing time and resources into exploring whether community organising can engage new actors and new union members in fighting for workers’ rights and against social injustice more broadly. This article explores the factors behind this ‘new’ turn to community-based organising and outlines the current state of developments in this area; it is based on over 10 years of research into community organising in the UK, working closely with the TUC, affiliate unions and community-based organisations. Findings suggest that the current economic climate and declining power at the point of production, as well as successes by new actors in the employment-relations arena, are driving this current interest and activity in community organising.
Qualitative job insecurity may be associated with less (hindrance effect) and more (challenge effect) organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB). This article disentangles both effects by introducing an intermediate variable. The authors test whether basic need satisfaction explains the hindrance effect (i.e. less intrinsically motivated OCB); and whether there is a remaining, direct positive path to OCB reflecting the challenge effect (i.e. more instrumentally motivated OCB). In addition, they investigate whether these relationships vary with age. Multi-group path analysis on a Belgian sample (N = 3243) of young (18–30 years), prime age (31–49 years) and mature age workers (50 +) reveals that qualitative job insecurity frustrates basic needs across all age groups, but most strongly among mature age workers (i.e. hindrance effect). The authors find a remaining positive path (i.e. challenge effect) that is equally strong across all age groups. In sum, qualitative job insecurity is more hindering than challenging, in particular for older workers.
Trade unions provide a voice in the way firms are run, an input into reward systems and increased security of employment. But these vary with national context. Using transnational survey evidence, this article explores the relative impact of setting, and of unions and collective bargaining, on these issues. It is found that, irrespective of context, organizations are significantly more likely to make use of compulsory redundancies in the absence of unions and collective bargaining. However, in other areas, the impact of unions appeared less pronounced than that of the wider context. The article explores the reasons behind this, and the broader policy implications thereof.
This article enhances our understanding of nurses’ work as they see it, in an exploration of the links between changing work, the labour relations climate, workload, stress, retention and recruitment. Conventionally separate bodies of literature on occupational health and safety, public sector industrial relations and human resource management informed the design and implementation of the study. Interviews with nurses revealed a high level of commitment but also indicated clear links between the labour relations climate, work intensification leading to high stress and poor work–life balance, retention and recruitment. The study concludes that working conditions must be improved to gain a healthy workplace and because wage increases on their own are not enough to make nursing more attractive.
The aim of this study is to reach an understanding as to the impact of and reactions to cultural and value aspects in connection with a changeover from a socio-technically inspired station assembly production model to a Japanese oriented lean production model in a Japanese acquired Swedish plant. Results show that culturally based clashes were common, indicating that not only for mergers and acquisition between Swedish and Japanese companies but also when implementing Japanese oriented lean production models in general, the notions of participation, self-government and equality, on the one hand, and perfection, obedience and respect for authorities, on the other, as basic points of departure must be considered. These notions are indicative of two very different mindsets connected not only to Swedish and Japanese national cultures, but also to the two different production models. These differences have to be taken into consideration in order to successfully implement a new production system and thereby avoid reactions such as organizational misbehaviour and misbehaviour based on cultural unawareness.
This article seeks to explain the cross-national variations in the tendency of employers to under-declare salaries by paying formal employees an undeclared (‘envelope’) wage in addition to their official declared salary. Analysing the prevalence, size and nature of envelope wage payments across 10 East-Central European countries using data from a 2007 Eurobarometer survey, envelope wage payments are found to be less common, smaller and more likely to be for extra work in wealthier, less corrupt and more equal nations with higher levels of taxation, social protection and effective redistribution via social transfers. The theoretical and policy implications are then discussed.
Company based bargaining during the recent economic crisis has been subject to some research, but little is known about how this affects employee relations. This article addresses this literature gap by examining the employee relations in companies highly affected, less affected and not affected by the crisis. It argues that although Danish shop stewards are involved in developing local responses to the crisis, most manage to keep their colleagues onboard, even if decisions concern reduced earnings and dismissals. However, a limit exists to the collaboration: in companies hardest hit by the crisis shop stewards are more likely to find conflicts of interests between management and colleagues stressful and fewer feel respected by colleagues. Therefore, shop stewards’ engagement in local bargaining comes at a cost and may jeopardize their relations with colleagues. The analysis also reveals that shop stewards from time to time have to cooperate and engage in conflicts with management as well as colleagues as part of local bargaining.
Comparing manufacturing, construction and newspapers in Norway, this article analyses how industry and occupational differences affect management–trade union cooperation and union influence during labour adjustments. While manufacturing and construction companies, to some extent, lean on temporary layoff measures and dismissal regulations anchored in national law and in collective agreements, the newspaper cases apply measures outside the scope of dismissal regulations and the general regulatory system. Conditioned by national institutions and regulative constraints the different product market, industry norms, occupational structure and labour market facing the actors in the newspaper companies, the unions there were more influential and other measures such as severance packages were more used.
In the past two decades, trade unions have sought to counter membership decline, initially through a focus on organizing. More recently the union renewal project has prompted a re-examination of whether unions can use different types of inter-union collaboration to build power for workers and the movement. This article examines two examples of such inter-union collaboration, the Transport Unions Federation and the Australian Workers’ Union–Maritime Union of Australia Offshore Alliance. The development of these organizational relationships is important to the trade union movement in Australia and internationally as examples of new forms of external solidarity.
The German Codetermination Law grants workers of establishments with 200 or more employees the right to have a works councillor who is fully exempted from his or her regular job duties while still paid a regular salary. This article analyses theoretically and empirically how this de jure right to exemption translates into de facto practice, and explicitly takes into account the nature of the employment relations participation regime. It is found that the right of exemption has no effect in cooperative employment relations because exemptions are granted even in the absence of legal rights, but does make a difference in adversarial relations when exemptions are only granted above the threshold where legal rights force employers to do so, i.e. legal rights do make a decisive difference in exactly those situations where the legislators’ intent would not be realized without the right to legal enforcement.
Traditional approaches of food security largely draw from neoliberal prescriptions, which focus on supply side issues of improving productivity and efficiency through market mechanisms. Reflections on the oral accounts of 30 migrants from eastern India to the capital city of Gujarat, India, provide two important insights regarding food security related issues. First, in terms of the lived realities of these migrants, traditional approaches of food security are inadequate to address their concerns as they exacerbate their food related vulnerabilities. Second, economic democracy and food sovereignty approaches are more helpful in addressing food related vulnerabilities as these approaches engage more comprehensively with the multidimensional socioeconomic vulnerabilities of the migrants from the perspective of equity and justice.
The present article furthers our understanding of the nascent concept of depersonalized bullying by exploring employee responses to the phenomenon. Through a qualitative enquiry of international-facing call centre agents in India, the major theme of ‘bounded benefits’ captured employees’ response of ambivalence. Valuing their professional identity and material returns while ruing the depersonalized bullying of their oppressive work environment, participants recognized that their gains were limited by but inextricably linked to workplace demands. Perceiving no alternative to the continuity of their benefits, participants emphasized positive aspects of their experiences to reduce their misgivings. In contrast to interpersonal bullying where targets are victimized and undergo severe strain such that they usually exit the employer organization, depersonalized bullying entails a dualistic response where well-being and strain coexist and where approach dimensions compensate for avoidance dimensions such that compromise and trade-off facilitate coping.
In this article several micro-level determinants and the unemployment rate as macro-level determinant of perceived job insecurity are studied among Finnish employees from 1984 to 2008. The main questions are: Is the unemployment rate a significant macro-level determinant in different times, what is the most relevant unit for measuring unemployment – region or industry –, and does the effect of the micro- and macro-level determinants vary over time? The findings suggest that industry-related characteristics are more important than regional characteristics in explaining job insecurity. Perceived job insecurity is explained by micro-level determinants as well as unemployment rate as macro-level determinant. The effects, however, vary over time: the meaning of industry-related characteristics decreases and the meaning of individual-level characteristics increases.
This article is based on two case studies and an empirical body of data that includes more than 100 interviews with union officials in various countries; it examines how collective union action is constructed within cross-border union alliances. Drawing on three lines of analysis, each grounded in a theory of collective action, it shows that, although the parties involved have invested considerable resources, the long-term presence of key players capable of carrying out framing duties can be a decisive factor in the development of collective action. The article also underlines how important it is for the unions involved to define a mobilizing joint project that can help develop a common sense of belonging. The findings in the two cases are uneven, and the article therefore also highlights one of the main weaknesses of cross-border alliances, namely the fact that they are dependent on stable organizational structures in the multinational corporations.
Fears of a ‘race to the bottom’ in labour standards may have been overstated. Nevertheless, using Sweden as a case study, it is argued that the diminished capacity of trade unions to defend labour standards following the Laval judgement of the European Court of Justice, together with a decline in trade union density, a limited remit of enforcement authorities and recent changes to the Swedish labour migration regime, may have detrimental impacts on labour standards, particularly in low-skill low-wage occupations. In combination, these developments are creating new spaces for migrant precariousness within the context of a formerly well-regulated Swedish labour market model.
This study investigates affective experience as a function of unemployment duration in South Africa. The study contrasts two models. The stress reaction model proposes a linear decrease of affective experience as unemployment prolongs. The adaptation model assumes a curvilinear pattern between affective experience and unemployment duration. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) with contrast revealed no differences in affective experience between short-term (N = 101), long-term (N = 152) and very long-term (N = 119) unemployed. The findings do not favour either of the models, yet indicate that unemployment is a severe stressor regardless of its duration. These results underline the need for structural changes (e.g. delivering unemployment benefits, stimulating job creation) in order to overcome the negative affective experiences of the South African unemployed.
This work contributes to research on temporary employment, specifically through an analysis of its effect on firm efficacy. The authors analyze the potential curvilinear (nonlinear) relationship between temporary contracts and organizational outcomes and examine how the proportion of indirect temporary workers – hired through Temporary Help Agencies (THAs) – influences this relationship in a sample of 1597 Spanish manufacturing firms. The analysis finds a negative linear relationship between temporary contracts and labor productivity and a predominantly positive concave downward curve between temporary contracts and gross operating margin. This curvilinear relationship is especially stronger when the proportion of indirect temporary contracts is low, and it is found that the use of temporary contracts has a positive effect on gross operating margin, but this effect becomes negative with overuse. This empirical evidence partially questions the dominant linear view that has been established over the past few decades in the labor flexibility literature at an organizational level.
This study combines two recognized theoretical frameworks in the (un)employment literature – the latent deprivation model and the vitamin model – and aims to better understand the relations between the perceived quality of the psychosocial environment and psychological well-being in older adults. The sample comprised 300 Portuguese adults (aged between 40 and 65), grouped as employed, unemployed engaged in training and unemployed not in training. The employed reported better well-being than the other groups, and the unemployed in training showed lower distress than those who were not. Additionally, features from both frameworks were found to be related to well-being. These findings highlight the merit of taking both theories into account to better understand the well-being of older individuals, and may be useful for the design of interventions aiming to enhance well-being and overcome some of the negative aspects of unemployment.
Pay coordination is a subject of continuing interest in industrial relations, especially achieved through networks and as a feature of social pacts. Yet few empirical studies have examined the issue in a systematic way. This article examines how pay was coordinated to contain second-tier bargaining and pay drift under Irish social partnership at the peak of the Irish economic boom in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Drawing on case studies of collective bargaining in the building construction and pharmaceutical manufacturing sectors, the article examines the relevance of a series of mechanisms of network-based pay coordination in containing second-tier pay bargaining and potential economy-wide pay drift.
The European strategy for growth has a twofold aim: to become an innovative union and to enhance labour flexibility. Yet, few have addressed the question of whether these two strategies are compatible or concurrent. Through a review of the literature, this article addresses this question by focusing on different types of labour flexibility (functional, contractual and financial), and two types of innovation outcomes: employee-driven innovation (EDI) and organizational innovativeness. Using insights from different research traditions, sound evidence is found for a positive relation between different forms of functional flexibility and both EDI and organizational innovation. This is nevertheless not so for contractual and financial flexibility. Indications are found that these types of labour flexibility are potentially negative for both EDI and organizational innovation. Yet, trends in the European labour market and EU backed policies do not focus on enhancing functional flexibility, but rather aim to increase contractual and financial flexibility.
The development of voluntary networks of firms has been proposed as a way of stimulating employer demand for vocational training in more liberal market economies. The emergence of market-based training networks is seen to lead to greater inter-firm cooperation, resource sharing and facilitate employer collective action to address labour market needs. This study examines the evidence for the existence of voluntary training networks in five Australian industries. The study finds that these training networks supply limited amounts of training, most of which is non-formal. These networks are primarily developed for the dissemination of the tacit knowledge and skills needed for the exploitation of new technology. These networks have few linkages to the vocational training system and have a limited capacity to contribute to the development of transferable skills that address employers’ labour market needs.
Employment protections are currently being targeted by European policy makers seeking solutions to persistently high levels of unemployment and weak economic growth. This article argues that labour market deregulation is unlikely to usher in a period of renewed growth in good quality jobs. The findings point to the important role of employment protections in stemming job losses in the initial stages of the economic crisis that began in 2008, although protections have not prevented subsequent heavy job losses in the most distressed economies. The study also finds that involuntary participation in non-standard employment has increased since the crisis and shows that this has resulted in an increased risk of in-work poverty.
Women constitute a clear minority in the field of information and communications technology (ICT) in higher education as well as in the job market. At the same time, this field is expected to have a shortage of qualified people in the future. Do women and men engineering graduates have the same career opportunities? This article problematizes the relationship between higher education in engineering and opportunities on the job market. The results show that men reach higher positions to a greater extent than women, and that women remain in low-qualification jobs to a greater extent than men.
This article employs Labour Force Survey data, using logistic regression modelling, to help rectify the lack of systematic analyses specifically into socioeconomic correlates of migrant workers’ unionisation in Britain. The results provide evidence to assist the development of comprehensive explanations for the obstacles behind migrant workers’ unionisation. The impediments analysed can be considered within what one might call a triple-challenge model comprising of (1) encounter inputs: demographic factors brought into the host society and citizenry rights offered by the host society to migrant workers; (2) accentuated structural factors: workplace characteristics, flexible work and migrant workers’ disproportionate location in less unionised companies with flexible contracts; and (3) knock-on effects: educational and occupational influences along with the impacts of encounter inputs and accentuated structural factors on such influences.
Using Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources (COR) theory as the theoretical framework, this study explored the effectiveness of organizational communication in attenuating the negative effects associated with job insecurity on employee attitudes, behaviors, and physical health. Data were collected from 639 employees in six different companies. As predicted by COR theory, results suggest that high job insecurity is related to lower job satisfaction, more workplace accidents, and more health complaints. However, employees who perceived higher levels of positive organizational communication practices reported fewer negative consequences of job insecurity compared with employees who reported lower levels of organizational communication. Taken together, it is suggested organizations that make a greater effort to communicate with employees may effectively buffer the potentially negative consequences of job insecurity.
This article presents an analysis of the characteristics that are associated with union membership duration using data from the membership registers of the largest Spanish trade union: Comisiones Obreras (CCOO, Workers’ Commissions). Making use of survival analysis techniques, the results indicate that the shortest membership durations and the highest risks of leaving are associated with workers with poor employment conditions, mainly youth and foreigners, as well as those in firms, economic sectors, and territories where the union has a rather weak presence. As workers in these situations represent the majority of both current joining and leaving rates, the article concludes that retention policies should focus on the early stages of union membership.
As the efficacy of the neoliberal model is now in question this is an appropriate moment to consider ‘what kind of regional development and for whom?’, or, as the authors interpret it, what kind of development model would be inclusive and economically and socially sustainable. Current indicators of regional performance are based on growth alone, overlook distribution and so misrepresent the performance of regions in terms of social well-being. An alternative, more inclusive measure of regional development and a gender sensitive variant are calculated for UK regions. On these measures London falls from the top ranked region to a middle rank on the regional development indicator and on the gender sensitive variant falls to the lowest position, arguably better reflecting the experience of life in this region. Optimistically, use of these measures would lead to more inclusive models of development that would render the more contentious social, redistributive policies less necessary.
High levels of gender segregation in Scandinavian labour markets have been referred to as a paradox in view of these countries’ commitment to gender equality and advancements in other areas. The status of gender segregation in these welfare states is addressed here: Are they (still) the most gender segregated? What processes drive (de)segregation? Relatively fast occupational desegregation in recent years has moved Denmark, Norway and Sweden from the group of highly to moderately gender segregated labour markets, and women’s share of management positions is rising. Empirical case studies selected to shed light on (de)segregation processes are discussed in relation to two presently influential theoretical theses – ‘gender essentialism’ and the ‘welfare state paradox’. Findings suggest the existence of gender essentialist ideas, but the weakening of such ideas is likely to be a main driver of desegregation. Findings on the role of the public sector and work–family policy in segregation processes are somewhat conflicting.
Scholars often offer competing accounts of the consequences of workplace teams. Researchers in the empowerment tradition describe autonomy in teams as generating satisfaction and pro-social behaviors. The panopticon approach emphasizes the disciplinary aspect of teamwork – arguing that peer monitoring elicits intense effort and discourages resistance through visibility and normative control. The conflict school highlights variation in experiences of and responses to teamwork, calling particular attention to worker resistance. This study uses mixed methods to investigate these perspectives simultaneously, analyzing content-coded data on 204 work groups. Though evidence supports both empowerment and panopticon theories, especially when used in combination, the conflict perspective emerges as pivotal to understanding not only worker resistance but also consent to empowerment and even panoptic control.
The aim of this article is to show that social benefits may accrue from work environments that support autonomous forms of work. Based on social psychology, economics and philosophy approaches, the authors argue that autonomy is a basic human need which, when satisfied, enhances civic behavior. Using individual data from the EWCS, the article finds evidence of the positive effect of work autonomy on volunteer work and political/trade union activities. Overall, work autonomy has decreased over the last 15 years for all skill levels in the EU, though there are substantial differences between countries. Organizational practices that promote autonomy should be deliberately stimulated if civic participation is to be furthered.
Performance appraisal interviews (PAI) are in a Scandinavian context supposed to be dialogues between equal partners. This implies a focus on the superior and subordinate as conducting a conversation more than an interview, and a focus on development instead of performance. The article seeks to investigate how these ideals are lived up to in the practice of conducting a PAI. On the basis of a corpus of 30 hours of videotaped PAIs and applying a conversation analytical approach, the study shows that interactional symmetries and asymmetries can arise as a consequence of interactional practices that are dynamically negotiated between and agreed upon by the co-participants on a turn-by-turn basis. These symmetries and asymmetries emerge due to the participants’ orientations to institutional and social norms that can intertwine and overlap, thus impeding, postponing or supporting the ideals of PAIs as being dialogues between equal partners.
Studies of workplaces frequently focus on gender, investigating and challenging inequality. In that many studies start with ‘gender’ as a taken-for-granted category, measuring gender differences in organizational life, or interviewing participants to elicit accounts of their employment experiences, they exaggerate and even create stereotypical ‘common knowledge’ about gender. In contrast, this article illustrates a conversation analytic approach which can show if, when and how gender becomes consequentially relevant within any given communicative encounter. Drawing on a large corpus of institutional interaction, the article demonstrates two things: that (1) robust claims about the gendering of social life can be made once those claims are grounded in what people actually do; and (2) systematic patterns in people’s endogenous orientations to gender can be found in communication. Finally, the article showcases a real-world application of conversation analytic work, demonstrating the impact and relevance of such research programmes for understanding everyday gendered social life.
The aim of this article is to investigate how span of control influences seven job demands common amongst operational public sector managers. Self-administrated surveys were collected from 434 managers organized in 37 municipal operations, i.e. management teams in a set of public organizations in Sweden, and complemented with register data. Multilevel analyses were performed and it was shown unfavorable to have a large number of subordinates for the majority of job demands investigated. Furthermore, managers who were members of management teams with a higher average span of control experience some job demands to an even higher extent. Thus, the results of this study demonstrate that span of control is a key upstream component of managers’ job demands and emphasize the value of a reasonable number of subordinates.
This study aims to examine how contract type, perceived mobility and optimism are linked to perceived employability (PE). The pattern of results was investigated first cross-sectionally (n = 1379, Time 1) and then longitudinally with a one-year time lag (n = 803, Time 2) with a sample of Finnish university researchers and teachers. Moderated hierarchical regression analyses showed that perceived mobility was positively associated with PE among permanent workers but not among temporary workers, whereas optimism was positively related to PE among all the workers at both Time 1 and Time 2. In light of these results, it seems that permanent employees especially benefit from perceived mobility in terms of higher PE, whereas optimism is beneficial for all employees’ PE.
In this article it is investigated to what extent flexible employment at labour market entry negatively affects the early career of school-leavers in the Netherlands in the period 1986–2008. Additionally, the question is raised to what extent educational differences exist in this relationship. To answer these questions, Dutch panel data from the OSA Labour Supply Panel are analysed. The results correspond with previous findings from studies on other European countries, supporting the stepping-stone rather than the entrapment hypothesis. A flexible start in the Dutch labour market increases the likelihood of repeated flexible employment and unemployment in the early career, and coincides with less occupational status development and income growth. However, the detrimental effects of flexible employment at labour market entry are only temporary and diminish after some years. Furthermore, no evidence is found for the existence of educational differences in the negative effects of flexible employment at labour market entry.
Democratization beyond the nation-state level has been on the scholarly agenda of international political economists since the early 1990s. Academic debates have generated a mushrooming literature on the ‘democratic deficit’ of global governance. In the field of industrial relations, scholarly interest on the relevance of democracy has translated into a rich body of literature on workplace democracy. Yet, research has been concerned with the national and local levels largely neglecting the transnational dimension. This article discusses the potential of International Framework Agreements (IFAs) to address the democratic deficit of the global governance of labour. In doing so, it borrows notions largely established in the field of international political economy and applies them to an industrial relations problem (i.e. impact of IFAs on the ground) drawing on case-study evidence from three IFAs in the telecoms, energy and apparel sectors. The article examines what accounts for IFAs’ capacity for representation, legitimacy, accountability and transparency.
There is a growing debate between mainstream and critical empowerment theorists; the latter criticize empowerment interventions that could be disempowering when the real power continues to reside with management. To draw upon the tension between these dualistic views, this study investigates whether organizations with formal power structures of collective bargaining as represented by union density and employee representation provide a facilitative social environment for empowerment to grow. Based on two combined sets of secondary data collected for the ETUI in 2006 and EWCS in 2005 from 27 European countries, this study found that countries with a stronger union tradition demonstrated higher workplace empowerment and job satisfaction for individual workers than countries with a weaker union tradition. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
The purpose of this article is to study interaction patterns within a steering group. Most large projects include a group of this kind whose task it is to steer towards set goals and provide the required resources. The origin of the research area lies in the observation that steering groups seem to have difficulties in living up to the expectations of project management and project participants, despite structured working methods such as regular meetings, distribution of responsibility and cooperation with different interested parties. By means of interviews and observations the article attempts to capture interaction patterns in a specific steering group. The study is anchored in theories of power with the purpose of supplying theoretical concepts and analytical tools. The most important conclusion is that the interaction patterns that emerged in the steering group rested on two foundations. The first one was that social relations in the steering group created power that was produced and manifested in different ways. The second one was that the exercise of power affected the action outcome, that is, the results of the actions and consequences for future actions. Another conclusion is that the exercising of the assignment presupposes four premises: the steering group member needs to have a positive approach to the project idea and the set goals, to have knowledge of the assignment, to have a position with the authority to make and carry out strategic decisions of the project, and be able to allocate time for active work and participation in meetings.
Trade unions in the UK have traditionally followed a voluntarist strategy that has preferred collective bargaining and avoided the use of the law wherever possible. The exception to this has been in relation to the pursuit of equal pay between women and men. This article examines this apparent contradiction by examining the ways in which British trade unions have used the equality legislation in the past to secure equal pay through the courts. The article further considers recent legislative changes that, by adopting a reflexive approach, appeared to open up ways for equality bargaining to take place. Unfortunately the conclusion is not a positive one as political conservatism in relation to equality and judicial animosity towards trade unions have secured the status quo, ironically forcing trade unions to continue to use adversarial legal methods to pursue equal pay.
The main research question in this article is how merger integrations are influenced by local industrial relations. These are explored and illuminated by combining perspectives on industrial relations and perspectives on mergers and acquisitions. The M&A field of research has been dominated by organization and management perspectives, and industrial relations are seldom brought into the studies. Studies in the field of industrial relations are mostly concerned with institutional levels. Qualitative data and analyses of four integration processes together with 108 personal interviews are presented. By focusing on industrial relations at local company levels in the integration of merging partners new insights are sought for both fields of research. Local implementations of industrial relations contribute to the explanation of integration outcomes. Merger integration implies the integration of different traditions of union and employee–management collaboration that in essence may merge the collaboration cultures into something new.
Since 1980 debates about the regulation of working time have been characterized by demands for flexibility and deregulation. This article looks at how the regulation of the normal working day has changed during the last 30 years and examines how these regulative changes interplay with new work practices. Based on theories on institutional change the article compares the development in working time regulations in the banking sector in three countries, Norway, Ireland and Sweden. Although the majority of the regulations remain intact, they have become considerably more flexible in all three countries. The normal working day is most weakened in Ireland, but it is also undermined in the two Nordic countries. New rules, practices and ideas result in more unsocial hours working, which increasingly remains uncompensated. These similarities across the countries are uncovered because of a research design that allows for examination of institutional change at a detailed level over a long period of time.
Bridge employment refers to the workforce participation pattern displayed by older workers between their partial retirement and their complete withdrawal from the workforce. Based on Shultz’s (2003) model of antecedents and consequences of bridge employment, this article proposes a set of hypotheses, using SHARE panel data (N = 634) from Wave 1 (2004) and Wave 2 (2006). These data are analyzed via structural equation modeling (SEM), testing both a direct effects model and a partial mediation model. Results show that bridge employment quality partially mediates the influences of T1 antecedents on T2 consequences. The implications of this study are discussed at both the theoretical and practical level.
Focused on a large, diverse branch of the British postal workers’ trade union, workplace union responses to Royal Mail’s employee involvement initiatives are examined through a two-stage longitudinal case study. Royal Mail – the letters section of the British postal service – has carried out a series of managerialist experiments with employee involvement and participation in the last few decades, providing the basis for an important research literature on union and worker responses to new management initiatives, participation and HRM. Findings suggest that these management initiatives and union responses have mutated over time, with an ever-growing gap between management rhetoric associated with employee involvement and increasingly punitive management practice; and with changing but relatively resilient, oppositional workplace union responses. These developments are closely related to the entrenched, confrontational nature of Royal Mail industrial relations that has persisted since the mid-1980s.
In 2010, under pressure from newly unionised rail workers, the multinational mining company Rio Tinto agreed to bargain collectively with a union for the first time in its Australian iron ore operations since 1993. This re-unionisation of part of Rio Tinto was, for unionists, an impressive feat but, in itself, the campaign was familiar enough. What makes this empirically significant is the ‘titanic’ nature of the struggle in this vital sector. Its wider significance lies in a contribution to debate about ‘successful’ campaigns and in highlighting the importance of both national regulation and local context to these outcomes. More broadly still, this successful campaign poses questions about how we relate such episodes to ongoing failures elsewhere.
The article focuses on an analysis of seven cases of the emergence of trade unions in private companies of the greenfield type in Poland before the EU accession in 2004, when the conditions on the labour market in Poland were at their worst. The formation of a trade union is understood as creating a workers’ instrument, designed to equalize the asymmetrical labour relations within the company. Research data are interpreted according to the perspective of Bourdieu’s forms of capital.
The so-called flexicurity approach suggests that security for employees can be successfully combined with flexibility for organizations and companies. This article studies if affective job insecurity (worry about losing one’s job) is compensated for by perceptions of employment security (possibilities of finding an equal or better job) and income security. Data derive from a survey carried out in 2010 among employees in Sweden. The main findings are that cognitive job insecurity (the perceived risk of job loss) increases affective job insecurity, whereas both employment and income security have the opposite effect. Moreover, cognitive job insecurity and employment security interact, implying that the effect of cognitive job insecurity on affective job insecurity is reduced in the presence of employment security but is reinforced in the absence of it. These results are discussed in relation to the flexicurity approach, concluding that flexicurity may be a risky venture for employees.
In recent years established collective bargaining arrangements in some sectors in Germany have been challenged by an upsurge of sectional union activity that has contested the status of industry-level incumbents. Gauging the impact of this development has proved difficult for both observers and insiders, with a range of responses from labour market actors and government. This article explores recent developments and actor responses and locates them in the wider context of the German political economy. It argues that of all these actors trade unions, in particular in organized forms of capitalism, are confronted by strategic dilemmas related to managing the difficult ‘variable geometry’ of mobilization and systemic accommodation.
This empirical research note focuses on the question of whether German works councils are sand or grease in the management of human resources and if the effects differ between three different works council–management relationship types. For this purpose, the author uses survey data from more than 11,000 German firms. The main result is that the effects of works councils on expected HRM (human resource management) problems in German firms are heterogeneous with respect to different aspects of HRM and to differences in works council–management relations. The findings are consistent with rent-protection, rent-sharing and voice functions of works councils.
This article examines the role of management in the system of employee participation. It builds on the premise that management can have a sizeable impact on how employee participation is put into practice. The authors develop a comprehensive index of employee participation implementation and test the relation between management’s attitudes towards employee participation and the implementation of employee participation in a cross-sectional survey among 225 managers in Slovenia, using a mail-solicited web-based questionnaire. The results indicate a positive link between managers’ support for participation and its actual implementation. If managers perceive a positive link between employee participation and corporate performance they will tend to put such participation into practice to a greater extent.
The modern labour market features job insecurity (JI) as an unavoidable stressor. This study considers the influence of personal coping strategies by combining the conservation of resources with spillover theory. Do coping strategies buffer the negative effects of JI on well-being (work engagement, marital satisfaction and emotional energy at work and home)? A cybernetic coping scale distinguishes five coping strategies and a survey of 2764 Finnish employees reveals that changing the situation and symptom reduction buffer the negative effect of JI on emotional energy at work and home, respectively. Devaluation and accommodation have buffering tendencies in relation to work engagement and marital satisfaction. Thus, more engaged coping strategies reduce the negative effects of JI on employee well-being. Employees who use disengaged coping (i.e. avoidance) instead are less likely to remain engaged at work, such that frequent use of avoidance coping strengthens the negative relationship between JI and employee well-being.
Ireland’s selective system of collective agreed minimum wages has come under significant pressure in recent years. A new fast-food employer body took a constitutional challenge against the system of Joint Labour Committees (JLCs) and this was strengthened by the discourse on the negative effects of minimum wages as Ireland’s economic crisis worsened. Taking a historical institutional approach, the article examines the critical juncture for the JLC system and the factors which led to the subsequent government decision to retain but reform the system. The article argues that the improved enforcement of minimum wages was a key factor in the employers’ push for abolition of the system but that the legacy of a collapsed social partnership system prevented the system’s abolition.
The combination of the changes in the US hospital industry and resulting pressures on the workforce with the relative immobility of hospitals has led to the growth of unions in this industry while unions are losing members in most other industries. Drawing on theoretical work that places changing work experience as a major factor in pro-union behaviour, the article examines how the rise of competition among private hospital systems has led hospital managements to adopt ‘lean production’ methods borrowed from manufacturing. The consequent pressures on the workforce have encouraged workers to join unions. These same forces have shaped the content of collective bargaining and divergent styles of unionism. As the transformation of hospitals are a piece of the broader neoliberal era in which they occur, this analysis should be applicable to certain other industries as well.
The growth of offshored services has brought about an important flux of jobs from developed towards developing countries. In this context, outsourced call centres, with their complex insertion of services across countries and organisations, demonstrate a high potential to create jobs, thus influencing the labour markets of a particular country. However, there are some doubts about the quality, longevity and working conditions that these jobs afford. This article uses the conceptual background of global value chains and global networks in order to analyse the impact of outsourcing and offshoring call centre activities on the employment practices, organisation, management and quality of jobs in the receiving economy of Argentina.
German employment relations are characterized by a distinct dual system. First, working conditions and wages are determined by industry-level collective bargaining agreements. Second, on the establishment-level, the works council is responsible for employer–employee negotiations. However, since the mid-1980s, an increasing number of areas of regulation have been transferred from the industry- to the establishment-level using so-called opening clauses. The analysis in this article relies on rich German establishment data and reveals new insights into the institutional machinery of wage bargaining. While the existence of such clauses is related to higher wages, their application results in wage cuts of roughly the same size. The results also suggest that works councils, on average, are able to prevent the negative wage effects of opening clauses.
Drawing on interviews, this article investigates change and continuity induced by greater diversity among pension trustees in terms of trustees’ involvement in boardroom activities in the UK. Utilizing Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, the authors demonstrate the agency of trustees, and how greater diversity among trustees changes the boardroom decision-making process. However, the authors also reveal forms of continuity by reproduction of educational, corporate and social values within a boardroom context. The findings challenge the assumption that greater diversity may radically transform organizations.
This article examines whether the downward trajectory in strike activity in nine Western European economies has continued over recent years. In doing so, it considers the nature of the dominant forms of extant strike activity and how these relate to systems of collective bargaining and political exchange. The main findings are three-fold. First, while there has been a general decline in aggregate strike activity, this has often been punctuated by sharp peaks. Second, the dominant nature of the strike activity, especially the sharp peaks, has become increasingly concerned with mounting demonstrative collective mobilizations in the political, rather than industrial, arena. Consequently, much strike activity is increasingly being deployed as a tool of political leverage with governments rather than as a tool of industrial leverage with (private sector) employers. Third, official data on strikes are becoming increasingly unreliable as they contain ever more significant exclusions, raising not so much the prospect of an end to quiescence but an over-estimation of the extent of decline.
The aim of this study is to analyse the content of the industrial relations system concerning employment protection and how the development relates to the Swedish model. Has it changed fundamentally between 1995 and 2012 and have those changes meant that the regime has changed too, or have they been in line with the model, and the model thus malleable? How have changes been made politically acceptable? Have the economic crises of the 1990s and the 21st century paved the way? Judging from the evidence, there have been comparatively few changes to employment security in Sweden and the changes made have either been in line with the model, or if not, made in times of severe crises which made it possible for social democrats and trade unionists to argue for the changes, and made in a way that was in line with the model, i.e. mutual agreements.
In recent years many European countries have experienced a substantial growth in immigrants working in the labour market. Empirical data on their work experiences are, however, relatively scarce. Based on a survey of immigrants this article focuses on the expectations, perceptions of unfairness and outcomes of relatively recent immigrants in the workplace in Ireland. Using organizational justice and relative deprivation theory, a theoretical model was developed predicting a set of associations between expectations arising from particular reference groups, fairness at work, met expectations and outcomes. Overall, the model highlights the central importance of fairness in the workplace for met expectations and personal outcomes. This research assists in building a picture of the workplace experiences of these new immigrants, which is useful for both national and organizational policy-makers.
How capital openness influences the wage-setting process is a topic that has been discussed extensively in the literature on European industrial relations. One well-known hypothesis asserts that high capital openness induces employers to de-coordinate the wage-setting process, if wage costs have been under poor control. This article provides a critical review of the hypothesis, arguing that it holds only if governments can provide flexible accommodating policies for employers during the period of institutional transition. If such policy options are not available, which is true when governments are committed to European monetary integration, the hypothesis does not hold. This claim is tested with a Boolean qualitative analysis of 11 European countries, focusing on the periods from the 1970s to early 2000s.
This article reports on an empirical enquiry undertaken in India’s ITES-BPO (offshoring-outsourcing) sector to ascertain the presence of workplace bullying, the influence of sociocultural factors, the nature of bullying categories and the availability and use of extra-organizational redressal options. Survey data, gathered through structured interviews incorporating the Work Harassment Scale, conducted with 1036 respondents located in six cities, showed that 44.3% of the sample experienced bullying, with 19.7% reporting moderate and severe levels. In keeping with India’s hierarchical society, superiors emerged as the predominant source of bullying, displaying task-focused behaviours. Yet, the presence of ‘cross-level co-bullying’ where a personal focus was emphasized points to the role of identity-based affiliations intrinsic to India’s ethos. Key informant data, gathered through unstructured interviews with lawyers/legal activists, labour commissioners and trade unionists/labour activists and thematically analysed, underscored the influence of professional self-identity, career interests and a dysfunctional judicial system in targets’ choice of extra-organizational options.
Employee control over the work schedule and work method has long been considered an important quality of work and has received attention in different social science disciplines. Oftentimes the research has focused on the implications of control rather than variability in employee control. The current study constructs a conceptual framework of employee work control determinants. Relying on previous theoretical and empirical research, the framework outlines plausible explanations for selecting and interpreting both organization-level and employee-level determinants. Using a nationally representative linked study of organizations and their employees, the article tests the proposed theoretical model. The study shows that there are significant differences in employee work control that could be explained only by taking into account both employee-level and organization-level determinants. It was found that job design and characteristics, skills and competencies and managerial practices explain variance in both employee work schedule control and work method control.
A great deal of attention has been devoted recently to the study of the ethical context in organizations. This article refines the concept of socio-moral climate (SCM) and its impact on organizational socialization towards ethics-related behavioural orientations. The authors expand on previous research by focusing also on specific pre-occupational socialization experiences. The empirical research was conducted in northern Italy. Employees from small and medium-sized enterprises with different levels of structurally anchored organizational democracy were surveyed with standardized questionnaire scales. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between structurally anchored organizational democracy, SMC and employees’ attitudes pertaining to prosocial work behaviours, solidarity at work, democratic engagement orientation and organizational commitment. Controlling for pre-occupational socialization experiences, the results provide evidence for a substantial socialization potential linked to structurally anchored organizational democracy and a favourable work environment in terms of SMC.
Based on a respondent driven sampling survey with 500 Polish migrant workers in Denmark, this article argues that specific labour market institutions and sector differences need to be taken into account when explaining the working conditions of migrant workers. Comparing the working conditions of Polish and Danish workers, it is shown that labour market institutional arrangements provide a better explanation for the differences found between the two groups than differences in individual characteristics of the migrants and the Danish workforce. In addition, the article argues that factors such as institutionalized wage variability within sectors and the decentralized regulation of working conditions are important when assessing the potential implication of migrant workers in the labour market.
This article investigates impacts of supply chain occupational health and safety initiatives, utilizing the case of Oil Majors’ involvement in inspecting/regulating shipboard health and safety. It reveals that while supply chain pressure has made a contribution in improving ship safety, seafarers are denied participation in the management of occupational health and safety. Instead, Oil Majors effectively pass their pressure through ship managers down to seafarers and force them to silently comply. Among the consequences are work intensification and fatigue leading to a skewed impact on seafarers’ health and safety. This article suggests that supply chain pressure cannot be an adequate substitute for what an organized workforce can achieve through effective participation in the management of workplace health and safety.