The article analyses the effects of the financial and economic crisis on the structures and activities of the European Works Councils (EWCs) at Honda and Toyota, which until 2007–8 were categorized as non-efficient representation bodies. A theoretical concept is introduced to measure activation and to analyse the factors explaining change/stability. In the empirical part, the EWCs are analysed using data from expert interviews. Both EWCs have undergone different activation ‘paths’, which partly lead to a restructuring of the bodies and the implementation of new co-ordination processes. Yet the basic logic was retained because of cultural and power related aspects.

Using individual-level data from the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce, we quantify how workers' job satisfaction levels correlate with five schedule-based workplace flexibilities. The data permit us to control for numerous variables that might otherwise explain variation in the probability of job satisfaction, including, but not limited to, income, benefits, stress, depression, job control and individual preferences over flexibilities. Conditional on this control set, we find that workplace flexibilities correlate with an 8.1 per cent increase in job satisfaction. The relationship between job satisfaction and workplace flexibilities prevails through several sensitivity analyses, bias assessments and a propensity score matching analysis. We also explore how job satisfaction, union membership and workplace flexibilities intermix; we find that workplace flexibilities may function as a partial substitute for union membership.

Using a comprehensive longitudinal dataset of prime-age Dutch workers over the period 1980–2000, we examine how a previously held job with a fixed-term contract influences both the likelihood and the duration of a future spell of unemployment. Analyses show that Dutch workers with fixed-term contracts experience higher risks of future unemployment and have no shorter spells of unemployment compared to workers with regular contracts. Results also reveal that swifter employment re-entries among men with fixed-term contracts can be explained by their job search efforts before unemployment. Our study (partly) invalidates theoretical positions that claim that fixed-term contracts foster employment security by shortening unemployment durations; suggesting that fixed-term contracts are a short-term blessing that could end, for some workers, in a recurrent unemployment trap.

We examine the Greek public–private wage differential before the debt crisis to evaluate the prospective impact of the recent public sector pay cuts. We find a large public premium which persists after controlling for individual and job characteristics. For men, much of this is accounted for by self-selection into the sector that rewards better their characteristics, while for women it is largely driven by sectoral differences in returns. We attribute these effects to more egalitarian pay structures in the public sector and to demand problems in the private sector. The recent policy measures only partially change this situation, as wage deflation extends to the private sector, preserving public premia for the low paid.

Immigration has risen substantially in many European economies, with far-reaching if still uncertain implications for labour markets and industrial relations. This article investigates such implications, focusing on employment flexibility, involving both ‘external flexibility’ (fixed-term or temporary agency and/or involuntary part-time work) and ‘internal flexibility’ (overtime and/or balancing-time accounts). The article identifies reasons why immigration should generally increase the incidence of such flexibility, and why external flexibility should rise more than internal flexibility. The article supports these claims using a dataset of establishments in 16 European countries.

Using data from interviews and collective agreements in five European countries, this article analyses the relationship between collective bargaining and the minimum wage. In a context of changing minimum wage policy and competing government objectives, the findings illuminate how pay bargaining strategies of trade unions and employers shape the pay equity effects of minimum wage policy. Two general forms are identified: direct responses to a changing national minimum wage, and responses to the absence or weakness of a national minimum wage. The article explains how particular intersections of minimum wage policy and collective bargaining, together with country and sector contingencies, shape the form of pay bargaining and pay equity outcomes.

This article contrasts the flexibility of Chinese and Indian urban hospitals and the security of nurses. The study draws on a survey of 55 urban hospitals, and finds that national context generates different flexibility–security outcomes even when workers with similar skills are considered. Our findings support claims that China is constructing a flexibility–security regime that aims to promote both security and flexibility, and that India remains attached to employer-based social protection, but challenges the claim that economic growth is higher in China because India's employers have relatively less capacity to utilize labour-time as they wish.

Although part-time employment often appears as a substandard form of employment, evidence that part-time employees are less satisfied than full-time employees is ambiguous. To shed more light on this puzzle, I test an extended discrepancy theory framework using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The results help explain previous inconsistent findings: Part-time employment increases the chances of being underemployed while it reduces the likelihood of working more hours than preferred, and the negative effects of both types of working time mismatches on job satisfaction are similar in size. Furthermore, the importance attributed to family roles mitigates the negative effect of part-time employment on job satisfaction.

Ireland is experiencing the worst recession since the foundation of the state, and the effects on the labour market have been dramatic. This article explores the impact of recession for those still in employment by examining work pressure, using two large, nationally representative workplace surveys from 2003 (boom) and 2009 (recession). We find a significant increase in work pressure between 2003 and 2009. Staff reductions and company reorganization are both associated with increased work pressure, as is current job insecurity. Other job changes, like large pay cuts, increases in responsibility and monitoring are also associated with increased work pressure. We argue that negative organizational and job changes in the previous two years play an important role in accounting for the rise in work pressure.

In recent years, developments in intergovernmental organizations and transnational private governance organizations have created new opportunities and constraints for the promotion of global labour-standards governance by civil society organizations (CSOs). This article describes how European CSOs (including trade union organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)) respond to these developments. It argues that European civil society is witnessing a threefold shift in priorities of labour-standards advocacy: from pushing regulatory approaches to organizational capacity building; from corporate responsibility strategies focused on compliance to strategies focused on transparency; and from fair labour standards within the sustainable development agenda to a host of other issues. The overall result is that labour-standards advocacy in general and private labour governance in particular are receiving less attention from European CSOs.

Academic interest in Global Framework Agreements (GFAs) has grown considerably over the past several years, but the focus has largely been limited to comparing their various clauses and provisions. More recent research has centred on case studies of their implementation. In this article, we move beyond an exclusive analysis of GFAs to a broader conceptualization of steps towards globalizing labour relations, in which GFAs are fundamental. In our heuristic model, a GFA is the negotiated result of interest representation. A GFA creates an arena for the pursuit of global labour relations by defining the content, selecting the actors, delineating the processes and setting the boundaries of labour–management interaction. As a political space undergoing institutionalization, all of these dimensions of arenas are still contested. Although the structural boundaries are fuzzy at the periphery, such arenas reach beyond the organizational entities of the signatory transnational corporation (TNC) to encompass the global production network (GPN). Furthermore, we show how Global Union Federations (GUFs) and their member unions operating in regard to particular GPNs have begun building Transnational Union Networks (TUNs). Using two very different case studies, we argue that structural contingencies and strategic choices intertwine to bring about divergent TUN trajectories: one favouring a limited company-specific internal approach, the other a broader, GUF-led union-building approach. As exemplified by these findings, TUNs in our construction of an arena linking key elements of transnational labour relations are still ‘work in progress’. Our concluding hypotheses reflect this contingency and the need for further research.

The perception is that formal representation is increasingly common in UK Employment Tribunals (ETs), as case volumes and complexity increase. We investigate the nature of representation in UK ETs using the 2003 and 2008 Survey of Employment Tribunal Applications (SETA). The results suggest that between 2003 and 2008, the extent of formal claimant representation declined. The majority of employers and claimants are either heavily represented or have little/no representation, and there is little evidence that claimant representation is a response to employer representation at least at the level of individual claims. Overall, however, it would seem that some of the ‘accessible, informal and inexpensive’ characteristics envisaged by Donovan continue to apply only to cases within certain jurisdictions.

We posit that traditional employment relations theories that focus on individual firms embedded in distinct national institutional contexts are no longer adequate for the analysis of employment relations in a globalized era where production and services are increasingly coordinated across countries and firms. Building on global value chain theory, we introduce a configurational framework that explicitly addresses the employment relations implications of the interconnections within and between firms in the global economy. We argue that different value chain configurations will evidence different employment relations patterns, and we validate our framework by applying it to the study of three contemporary global issues. In sum, the framework permits a shift in the focus of employment relations scholarship away from the individual firm to the global networks in which they belong, and hence provides a new theoretical lens for the analysis of employment relations in the global economy.

Much has been written about the relocation of services jobs away from OECD nations by offshoring. But what happens to those who remain employed at workplaces where offshoring has been carried out? Based on survey and interview data of UK insurance and banking staff, this article explores employees' subjective understandings of the impacts of offshoring. The article brings together literature on Global Commodity Chains and Labour Process Theory, as it expands the focus of research on offshoring from macro/meso discussions of globalization and firm strategy into more micro-level analysis of employee interpretations of workplace change. The data indicate a collapse in morale and work dignity for UK financial services workers and suggest that offshoring is not associated with a rise in skill levels of surviving jobs. Many staff reported a climate of detachment and cynicism after offshoring. Detachment and disaffection applies to employees' feelings towards their employer and their union, and is discussed as a paradoxical by-product of the growing incorporation of services work into Global Commodity Chains or Global Production Networks.

The article examines the impact of executive ownership and other ownership and governance factors on employment change after takeovers. Drawing on a dataset of 235 takeovers, the results show that there is a reduction in employment in just over 50 per cent of the sample. Higher levels of executive share ownership are associated with lower probabilities of employee layoffs post-takeover, and there is a positive relationship between executive ownership and employment growth. The effect of executive options on employment change is generally insignificant, as are the effects of other features of ownership and governance. The evidence suggests that executives with higher levels of ownership tend to mount takeovers of better-performing firms and to implement takeovers aimed at growth.

Attempts to regulate labour standards in multinational companies face clear difficulties, not least because companies themselves may not have the executive power to enforce terms throughout complex and fragmented subcontracting structures. In the case of international framework agreements (IFAs), this might suggest a fundamental weakness. Taking our example from the South African construction industry, this article presents an IFA in the context of both employer and union strategy. We demonstrate that a two-track approach exists: highly interventionist approach to quality-critical issues compared with labour-related issues. On this basis, we suggest that, far from being over-hyped, IFAs have yet to be taken seriously enough.

Drawing on questionnaire-based survey data and web-based data, this article examines the introduction of virtual branch websites within 12 branches of UNISON. The article situates e-communications within a union communications strategy from the perspective of union members and shows how the virtual branch websites contribute to aspects of union renewal including organization and participation, union democracy and the conduct of industrial disputes.

An increasing share of the economy is organized around financial capitalism, where capital market actors actively manage their claims on wealth creation and distribution to maximize shareholder value. Drawing on four case studies of private equity buyouts, we challenge agency theory interpretations that they are ‘welfare neutral’ and show that an alternative source of shareholder value is breach of trust and implicit contracts. We show why management and employment relations scholars need to investigate the mechanisms of financial capitalism to provide a more accurate analysis of the emergence of new forms of class relations and to help us move beyond the limits of the varieties of capitalism approach to comparative institutional analysis.

One of the key factors in the success of labour federations is to have affiliate unions who actively participate and support their work. This article examines the catalysts behind union involvement with central labour bodies and presents an analysis of the organizational motivations for engagement. The article uses comparative case study analysis to examine affiliate union commitment in the United States to the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations' state federations, area labour federations and central labour councils. Union leadership, along with contextual, interpretative and organizational factors, was found to influence the level of affiliate union involvement in central labour bodies.

Recent research on regulation and governance suggests that a mixture of public and private interventions is necessary to improve working conditions and environmental standards within global supply chains. Yet less attention has been directed to how these different forms of regulation interact in practice. The form of these interactions is investigated through a contextualized comparison of suppliers producing for Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's leading global electronics firms. Using a unique dataset describing Hewlett-Packard's supplier audits over time, coupled with qualitative fieldwork at a matched pair of suppliers in Mexico and the Czech Republic, this study shows how private and public regulation can interact in different ways — sometimes as complements; other times as substitutes — depending upon both the national contexts and the specific issues being addressed. Results from our analysis show that private interventions do not exist within a vacuum, but rather these efforts to enforce labour and environmental standards are affected by state and non-governmental actors.

Two contrasting views tend to dominate the literature on the impact of recessions on employment. One view is that recessions amount to a ‘critical conjuncture’ for work and employment systems, a time when firms try to transform radically existing employment models. The alternative perspective is that firms, constrained mostly by the forces of path dependency, seek to adjust to the immediate or short-term pressures of the recession but otherwise maintain the established way of organizing the employment relationship. The purpose of this article is to contribute to this literature by reporting the findings of a major study of the effects of the recession on work and employment in firms based in Ireland. The main finding to emerge from the study is that firms mostly have made improvised adaptations in response to the crisis and have shied away from far-reaching transformational strategies.

Processes of transnationalization of industrial relations have been redrawing and increasing the complexity of the industrial relations map, adding new levels, actors and institutions, and creating new horizontal and vertical relationships and interdependencies. To capture these changes, we propose a multi-governance perspective enriched by due attention to power relations. We then apply this perspective to analyse the evolution of European social dialogue (ESD), showing that the conventional reading of ESD moving from dependency to autonomy is a false one: negotiated regulation emanating from the ESD rests on two-directional relations, between the European and national levels involving autonomy and dependency at the same time. It also involves differing forms of horizontal interdependency between private actors and the public authorities. To show its wider applicability, we also briefly relate this approach to International Framework Agreements and European Works Council agreements.

This article explores the role of framing in mobilizing and transforming narrative resources. It draws on in-depth studies of two different workplace unions within the same multinational company in Canada. We conducted interviews with managers and trade unionists at different levels over a number of years of observation. Each of these workplace unions mobilizes new repertoires of action to enhance its capacity to act. Yet they differ considerably in their capacity to renew their narrative resources. Whereas one of the workplace unions still relies on an exclusive and restrictive narrative, the other union has evolved towards a more encompassing and inclusive narrative. This article argues that strategic capabilities are a key variable in understanding the processes through which narrative resources change and are mobilized.

Strategic human resource management literature emphasizes the potential of pay to secure strategically desirable employee outcomes for the employer. Strategic pay, in contrast with pluralist models of pay determination, assumes an absence of collective bargaining constraints. This article analyses the process of determination of non-unionized managerial, professional and technical pay in seven leading consumer goods firms that claim to use pay as a strategic tool. It demonstrates that implemented pay practice is often remote from what is aspired to strategically. Despite the absence of collective bargaining constraints, there remain unavoidable obstacles to the ability of management to implement pay systems aligned to strategic goals. These constraints impose fundamental limitations on the use of pay as a strategic tool.

This article draws on ethnographic studies of three call centres in a single, medium-sized insurance company to explore how employees responded differently to similar techniques of managerial control. Considering recent discussions of compromise in the workplace, we identify a response to control that sits between implacable resistance and supine acquiescence. We style this collusion and distinguish it from other states of compromise, such as collaboration and co-operation. Drawing on the work of Edwards et al., we argue that a dynamic and politically sophisticated collusive compromise can exist between parties whose control and developmental concerns are in conflict. From this position, we extend existing theories of compromise: (a) to accommodate different permutations of control and developmental concerns; and (b) to predict when collaboration, co-operation and collusion are likely to occur under ostensibly similar conditions of managerial control.

In this article, we examine the role of institutional context, organizational structures and trade union strategies in tempering membership decline in the number of trade unions in Poland. Empirical data include membership statistics collected for NSZZ Solidarność and 54 affiliates of two other largest trade union confederations (OPZZ and FZZ) supplemented by semi-structured interviews with union leaders. In a decentralized collective bargaining system in Poland, a centralized trade union confederation (NSZZ Solidarność) can more easily shift resources to efficiently organize workers than decentralized confederations, OPZZ and FZZ, whose development is mostly driven by competing trade unions representing narrower occupational groups. In conclusion, this observation is put in a broader context of the debates about trade union renewal in Eastern Europe.

This article concerns union formation among female garment workers in Bangalore, in the southern state of Karnataka, India. It analyses a case where a category of workers dismissed by established national unions as impossible to organize came to form their own women's movement and thence their own union. The case highlights the crucial role of a sustained, flexible approach towards organizing at the micro level, in the mobilization of vulnerable workers employed in highly competitive labour markets.

This article provides new evidence on the effect of changes in employment protection on worker absence. We use novel multi-organization data to examine changes in worker absence as workers move from temporary to permanent employment contracts. We demonstrate a robust positive effect of employment protection on sickness absence. It has also been suggested that the impact of employment protection on absence and effort is due to a fear of dismissal. We also provide evidence that suggests that temporary workers' absence is influenced by incentives to attain jobs with protection that is unrelated to threat of dismissal. This has not been considered in earlier research. This channel of employment protection effects has important policy implications.

This article investigates the effectiveness of an employment programme exclusively run by a private sector firm in order to find out whether such a programme can be beneficial to both the participating individuals and the private firm. To answer these questions, we use a unique dataset on a private employment programme covering 23 years of operations and data on 1,000 participating unemployed individuals. Using conservative estimates, we show that a private employment programme is more effective in reintegrating the unemployed than public efforts, while providing tangible benefits to the firm.

What do the recent trends in German economic development convey about the trajectory of change? Has liberalization prepared the German economy to deal with new challenges? What effects will liberalization have on the co-ordinating capacities of economic institutions? This article argues that co-ordination and liberalization are two sides of the same coin in the process of corporate restructuring in the face of economic shocks. Firms seek labour co-operation in the face of tighter competitive pressures and exploit institutional advantages of co-ordination. However, tighter co-operation with core workers sharpened insider–outsider divisions and were built upon service sector cost cutting through liberalization. The combination of plant-level restructuring and social policy change forms a trajectory of institutional adjustment of forming complementary economic segments which work under different rules. The process is driven by producer coalitions of export-oriented firms and core workers’ representatives, rather than by firms per se.

The publication of John Kelly's Rethinking Industrial Relations in 1998 spawned a growing interest among researchers in exploring how social movement (SM) theory can be used to inform union research, particularly in the context of revitalization/renewal debates. Our starting proposition is that this approach can be extended through an engagement with the larger corpus of SM theory. We focus in particular on the ‘collective action frame’ concept. Drawing on examples used by SM scholars, we illustrate how these concepts can be used to extend and enrich union theory and pose new questions concerning the role of unions.

The decline of collective industrial relations has shifted the focus of industrial relations research to the study of individual employment disputes. In this article, we investigate whether employer-initiated workplace voice is associated with improved resolution of individual complaints or grievances workers make against employers. We find that our measure of workplace voice is associated with less serious problems, more informal methods of dispute resolution, more satisfactory outcomes for workers and lower quit rates. However, these findings need to be set against generally low rates of satisfactory dispute resolution for all employees in our sample.

Most scholars conclude that the introduction of one member, one vote (OMOV) into the electoral college that chooses the Labour leader demonstrates a new, reduced role for the party's affiliated trade unions. This article examines the adoption of OMOV by Labour. It looks at discussions in the Labour party–trade union review group that moulded the decision to adopt OMOV during 1992–1993. Drawing on the full breakdown of results, it goes on to examine the outcome of the 1994 leadership contest. The distribution of votes, union by union, indicates that, contrary to the conventional view, trade union leaderships retained the capacity to shape the pattern of voting through their ability to nominate candidates. The article concludes that the introduction of OMOV did not reduce the role of trade union leaderships in Labour's internal affairs in the manner that many scholars have concluded to be the case.

This study examines the relationship between union membership and (i) the incidence of training, (ii) the degree to which training is transferable to firms other than the one providing the training and (iii) the degree to which workers perceive that training improves job performance. Using data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, I find that union members are more likely to receive employer-sponsored training than their non-union counterparts. I also find that male union members are more likely than non-members to report that training improved job performance. Union membership was not related to transferability of skills between employers.

Based on extensive field research in China during 2005–2010, this article aims to explore the determinants of unionization in the Chinese context. We find that managerial strategies toward union organizing and functioning have been critical in determining unionization outcomes in Chinese enterprises. While various environment pressures may impose critical constraints on these strategies, managerial industrial relations ideologies are central in shaping these strategies when environment pressures barely exist or are bearable by management. Our study makes the first effort in exploring industrial relations ideologies in China and contributes to better understanding of unionization in the Chinese workplace.

This article explores the initial reasons for union joining of women who became union leaders in the UK and the USA by drawing on concepts from mobilization theory and the literature on women and unions. The comparative study demonstrates similarities and differences in early mobilization influences on UK and US women with respect to family, ideology, instrumentality and injustice. Informed by the women and unions literature, the article critiques mobilization theorists for failing to problematize the term ‘injustice’ and underplaying the importance of ideology which are shown to be gendered and racialized and located in time and place.

This article is an empirical study of slope heterogeneity in job satisfaction. It provides evidence from the generalized ordered probit models that different job characteristics tend to have different distributional impacts on the overall job satisfaction. For instance, standard models tend to significantly underestimate the effects of monthly salary and hours worked at generating the ‘highly’ satisfied workers, while lowering the incidence of the ‘very dissatisfied’ workers. Although our results should be viewed as illustrative, we provide discussions of their potential implications for employers and on how they could help with the design of employment contracts.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb are commonly cited as the founders of the British field of industrial relations. Are they, however, if the field is centred not on study of unions and collective bargaining but rather on the entire employment relationship? A ‘qualified yes’ answer is given; however, getting there involves major revision to the conventional historiography of the field. To illustrate, the article presents a traditional and revised family tree of British industrial relations. Numerous insights and implications follow.

This article draws on investigations of worker response to two factory closures to develop recent discussions around mobilization theory. With many shared characteristics between the factories, both located in the garment manufacturing sector, and with similar workforces and union organization, certain key distinguishing features between the two provide insights into why worker protest became effectively mobilized and sustained in one case but failed to materialize in the other. The findings point to the value of assigning greater weight in studies of worker mobilization to the impact of prior existing social structures within a population, and the interaction between that population, its leaders and wider society.

In France, in 2009–2010, on several occasions, managers announcing redundancies were held hostage by workers. Public opinion polls show widespread support for the ‘bossnappers’, while the State did not taken action against them. Employing the insights of new institutionalism and social movement theory, this article explains the legitimization of such radical, illegal action through the notion of a permissive ideational environment resulting from a tradition of trade union militancy, pre-existing concerns over globalization and more recent fears of, and government and trade union responses to, globalization and the current economic crisis.

The International Trade Union Confederation was founded in 2006, consisting primarily of former affiliates of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labour (although its creation was not formally a merger). I show how changes in the ideologies and identities of both confederations helped to overcome years of mutual antagonism and paved the way for unification. I consider the unification process in the broader perspective of the literature on trade union mergers but stress the need to focus on the role of ideas in such structural changes. The conclusion considers the problems the new confederation faces in developing a common set of ideas and a clear identity out of the separate orientations of its forerunners.

This study examines mobilizing mechanisms using a British community organization and a British trade union as exemplars. Although there has been substantial work on union revitalization on the one hand, and the emergence of alternative, community organizations on the other, no study has compared the challenges these organizations face in encouraging member mobilization. The findings illustrate how the trade union engages in a service-driven culture, cultivating instrumental commitment between the members and the union. The community organization, in contrast, engages in a relational culture and exemplifies a form of social commitment between the members and the group. As a result, different types of commitment and organizational cultures help explain why sustained member mobilization within a trade union is harder to achieve than within a community organization.

In tracing the changing perceptions of members in banking of trade union workplace organization between 1999 and 2008, this article illustrates a pattern of decline in terms of the coverage and performance of workplace organization. Contrary to the claims made by proponents of partnership arrangements, merger involvement and organizing, these strategies were not sufficient to arrest the decline in workplace organization. In consequence, members remained reliant on trade union full-time officers for support.

Drawing upon Marsden's typology of employment systems, this article explores how the indeterminacy of the employment relationship is enacted and resolved in relation to the healthcare assistant (HCA), a key work role in the delivery of nursing care in a hospital setting. It suggests that the regulation of task allocation within nursing assumes a hybrid form, requiring further analysis of the influences shaping the HCA role. Based on multi-method hospital case studies, the article distinguishes different types of HCA, explaining their emergence by reference to the interaction between organizational structure and personal agency. The article illustrates the value of Marsden's framework, and by addressing its limits in a healthcare setting seeks to develop a deeper understanding of task allocation in different workplace employment systems.

The introduction of market mechanisms matters for industrial relations. In the German hospital sector, national liberalization policies have put immense pressure on local management and worker representatives and led to the growth of a low-wage sector. In case studies of eight hospitals, we find some locales where market making has led to union revitalization and mobilization, but this effect varies. Using an eight-way comparison, we infer a configuration of three aspects of the local political economy — labour markets, politics and co-determination rules — that together provide a well-fitting explanation for both variation and change.

This article examines the determinants of working excessive hours, defined as working in excess of 60 hours per week or for more than six consecutive days, in Chinese and Thai supply chain factories. We use a matched employer–employee dataset collected from 15 Chinese and Thai footwear and sporting apparel supply chain factories, which supply international brands. Matched employer–employee data allow us to examine the effect of worker and firm characteristics on hours worked. We find that in addition to the demographic and human capital characteristics of workers, firm-level characteristics and worker awareness of how to refuse overtime are important in explaining variation in hours worked.

Many peak unions are in crisis, their traditional reliance on economic or political exchange with employers and the state undermined through falling union membership and the collapse of national bargaining systems. New methods, chiefly as agents of mobilization, and new sources of power, including community organizations, are often advanced as solutions. In Australia, where trade unions faced a fundamental and immediate threat from a national government after an election in 2004, the ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign signalled a shift in peak union strategy. Although this campaign unseated the government in 2007, its legacy is unclear: reviving the power of peak unions and conceptualizing the means to do so remain difficult.

Drawing on evidence from longitudinal case studies in 25 organizations, this article examines whether information and consultation (I&C) bodies established in the context of the UK's Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations 2004 have been the vehicle for effective consultation, based on objective criteria. Assessed against the regulations' default provisions that require I&C concerning strategic business issues and major organizational change, a substantial minority of participating organizations were categorized as ‘active consulters’, while a majority were ‘communicators’. The differing trajectories of I&C primarily reflected internal organizational dynamics, particularly management's approach to consultation. Beyond providing the catalyst for managerial moves to introduce I&C, the influence of the statutory framework proved largely peripheral.

This article deploys comparative historical data on 14 OECD countries to examine the significance of predominant union structure for the impact of union strength on the (medium-term) growth in hourly labour productivity in manufacturing. The analysis shows that where craft and general unionism predominates, union strength has a deleterious impact on productivity growth. Where enterprise unionism predominates, union strength is irrelevant. However, where industrial unionism predominates, union strength promotes productivity growth. These effects exist independently of established economic influences on aggregate productivity growth. The findings are interpreted as displaying the importance of the character of the governance that unions provide for their productivity impact.

Using Belgian linked employer–employee data, we examine how collective bargaining arrangements affect the relationship between firms' profitability and individual wages via rent-sharing. In industries where agreements are usually renegotiated at firm-level (‘decentralized industries’) wages and firm-level profits are positively correlated regardless of the type of collective wage agreement by which the workers are covered (industry or firm). On the other hand, where firm-level wage renegotiation is less common (‘centralized industries’), wages are only significantly related to firms' profitability for workers covered by a firm-level collective agreement. Thus, industry-wide contracts that are not complemented by a firm-level collective agreement suppress the impact of firm profits on workers' wages in centralized industries.

The wage curve postulates that the wage level is a decreasing function of the regional unemployment rate. In testing this hypothesis, most studies have not taken into account that differences in the institutional framework may have an impact on the existence (or the slope) of a wage curve. Using a large-scale linked employer–employee dataset for Western Germany, this article provides a first direct test of the relevance of different bargaining regimes (and of works councils) for the existence of a wage curve. In pooled regressions for the period 1998 to 2006, as well as in worker-level or plant-level fixed-effects estimations, we obtain evidence for a wage curve for plants with a collective bargaining agreement at firm level. The point estimates for this group of plants are close to the −0.1 elasticity of wages with respect to unemployment postulated by Blanchflower and Oswald. In this regime, we also find that works councils dampen the adjustment of wages to the regional unemployment situation. In the other regimes of plants that either do not make use of collective contracts or apply sectoral agreements, we do not find a wage curve.

This article analyzes the effect of firm-level contracting on the wage structure in the Greek private sector. Using a matched employer–employee dataset for 2006, unconditional quantile regressions and relevant decomposition methods, we identify a wage premium associated with firm-level contracting, which follows a hump-shaped profile across the wage distribution. Further, the wage differential between workers under firm-level and broader-level collective agreements can be primarily attributed to the differences in the regime-specific wage setting structure, for those below the median of the unconditional wage distribution, and to differences in worker and firm-specific characteristics for those in the upper tail.

Recent evidence from the USA suggests that people engaged in occupations involving providing care for others, such as childcare and teaching, suffer a wage penalty. After taking into account job and individual characteristics such as level of education and work experience, people in these occupations in the American study earned about 6 per cent less than their peers in other types of occupation. However, we do not yet know if people working in similar occupations in other countries also suffer the same degree of disadvantage. The issue is important because, despite the perception that people in caring jobs place a relatively low weight on the level of remuneration when making career decisions, a number of studies have shown clear evidence of an association between pay and the propensity to give up working in a caring occupation. There are implications too for social inequality as many caring jobs are done by women and associated wage penalties could contribute to the persistent gender gap in pay. This study compares and contrasts the predictions of neoclassical economics, cultural feminist theory and social closure theory.

Data are taken from 17 waves of the British Household Panel Survey and include a total of 23,773 individuals, giving 110,677 person-year observations. These data are analysed using multi-level linear regression. The results show clear evidence of a statistically significant wage penalty associated with working in some caring occupations. Those occupations requiring lower levels of educational qualification, such as nursing assistants and auxiliaries, are particularly hard-hit by the wage penalty. On the other hand, some occupations, such as medicine and teaching, have fared better than comparable non-caring occupations over the same period. We discuss the implications of these results for the gender gap in pay, poverty, social inequality and the future supply of caring workers.

We provide an in-depth analysis of gender differences in performance pay in China based on a unique dataset — the Life Histories and Social Change in Contemporary China — that provides information on the different components of pay including performance pay and base pay as well as a wide array of pay determining characteristic. The share of performance pay is documented and its determinants, including gender, analysed. Particular attention is paid to gender differences in the different dimensions of performance pay: the probability of receiving it; the magnitude conditional upon receiving it; and their product being the overall unconditional magnitude. Gender differences in these dimensions are decomposed into components due to male–female differences in the endowments of characteristics that explain these dimensions of pay, and gender differences that arise even when men and women have the same endowments of such characteristics with the later component, often taken to reflect discrimination.

About one-fifth of Canadian employees are in jobs that are vulnerable to service offshoring. Despite this figure, both theory and our empirical evidence (based on a variety of methodologies and datasets) suggest that the offshoring of business services is not likely to lead to large adverse employment effects. We also conclude that existing active labour market adjustment policies (e.g. increased labour market information, job search, mobility and training) developed for other adjustment pressures such as technological change and free-trade in goods are just as appropriate (perhaps even more so) to deal with the consequences of service offshoring.

We use a macro-econometric forecasting model to simulate the impact on the Canadian economy of a hypothetical increase in immigration. Our simulations generally yield positive impacts on such factors as real gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP per capita, aggregate demand, investment, productivity, and government expenditures, taxes and especially net government balances, with essentially no impact on unemployment. This is generally buttressed by conclusions reached in the existing literature. Our analysis suggests that concern should be with respect to immigrants themselves, as they are having an increasingly difficult time assimilating into the Canadian labour market, and new immigrants are increasingly falling into poverty.