INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL最新文献

To investigate whether platform work can grow even in political economies with an adverse institutional environment, we examine Germany as a least likely case. We assess what constrains the growth of platform work in Germany as well as whether existing economic and social institutions adapt to it. We find that platform work is being accommodated in the German political economy, but in a very limited space. The most important institution constraining platform work is social insurance, especially by increasing pressure to rein in bogus self-employment. Government has so far not seen a need to intervene with new regulation. Within the space that has been carved out for platform work, the traditional institutions of German social partnership are adapting to accommodate and monitor it. Overall, the main actors in the German political economy have a watchful eye on platform work but deal with the phenomenon in a characteristically consensual way.

Despite nearly three decades of ostensibly pro-employer economic reforms in India, trade union membership and density in India appear to have risen. Although similar trends have been reported and investigated in other emerging economies such as China and South Africa, the union revival thesis in India is yet to be fully explored. Using large-scale official survey data from 1993–1994 to 2011–2012 and primary data collected through 56 interviews with key stakeholders, this paper investigates the patterns of union membership growth in India. Findings indicate varying degrees of growth in union membership across all industrial sectors and employment types. We draw upon theoretical insights from economic theories of union growth, comparative politics and social movement unionism to explain union membership growth in India.

The article examines the extent of labour violation in the UK hotel industry and identifies the challenges and difficulties that workers face to defend their employment rights. Drawing on interview material and documents, the article identifies the factors that weaken workers' capacities to bring forward complaints and discusses the organisational, institutional and individual factors making silence dominant in the sector. This multifaceted analysis demonstrates different layers of vulnerability that create a very unfavourable environment for the promotion of employment rights in a context of heightened levels of fear. We contribute to the existing studies by demonstrating that for precarious and insecure workers in particular, the UK model of individual employment rights has ‘no substance’. Our findings highlight that it jeopardises not only the enforcement of rights but also workers' ability to acquire comprehensive knowledge and awareness of them.

This research draws on four macroeconomic approaches to examine survey data, in order to understand how the US public justifies their positions on the US minimum wage. Using data collected from the 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, survey responses are coded to understand the public's justifications for minimum wage in the United States. Findings show that respondents had myriad justifications for the minimum wage beyond economic justifications. Moreover, the justifications that people use to support their minimum wage positions seem to be more patterned with political than economic variables. Discussions about the minimum wage in the United States have tended to prioritise the minimum wage's effects on economic variables, but more recent theories consider the social and political implications of minimum wage policies. Policymakers and scholars should keep the political and social character of the minimum wage in the United States in mind, especially during contemporary rare moments of political institutional unity that allow for major shifts in minimum wage policy.

The paper examines if the ‘Investors in People’ (IiP) organisational accreditation scheme promoted worker training and organisational performance in Britain using a panel of organisations. DID matching estimators relating to both employee- and employer-assessed training outcomes revealed that IiP status promoted workforce training, but only for private sector organisations. Conversely, losing the status was not found to have a significant training link. On organisational performance, the estimates revealed that gaining (losing) the status had a significant positive (negative) link with managers' perceptions of organisational performance in both sectors. Public sector organisations are reported to have a relative strength in workforce training, which appears to explain the lack of significant training link. The sector may thus require a different scheme to promote workforce training further.

Through a case study of the UK hospitality and catering sector, this article explores the limits of employment law as a means of protecting workers from ill or unfair treatment. Finding microbreaches of the law to be common practice in the sector—akin to industry norms or ‘custom and practice’—it considers the routinisation of these microbreaches as an instance of conflict between formal legal rules and social norms. The conflict is problematic because it means that workers are less likely to perceive breach of their legal rights as an injustice worthy of challenge. The industry norms observed have been formed under the influence of an asymmetrical distribution of information and power, including organisational control over the labour process. If employment law is to be made effective, a realignment of legal rules with social norms is needed and, at the same time, the correction of this asymmetry.

Union-civil alliances have garnered scholarly and practitioner attention in many nations. Drawing on extensive documentary evidence, this qualitative study examines the rationales for this, focusing on coalitions involving New Zealand's peak labour body and its affiliates around climate change and workplace issues. Laclau and Mouffe's (2001) seminal political theory on radical democracy frames a critical reading of social movement unionism and union-civil alliances as an effort to build new hegemony against dominant neo-liberal discourses and practices. Emergent themes suggest a degree of change by the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and affiliates in their emphasis of wage and conditions vis-à-vis wider issues, and developing alternative forms of representation and solidarities involving unions. However, early initiatives seem unlikely to gain more traction other than via a radicalised democratic approach involving multi-interest approaches, their urgency underscored by irreversible environmental imperatives.

The present work set out to study the evolution of Portuguese trade unionism, by articulating the different cycles of economic growth of the country and their respective political economies with the impacts on the development of its power resources. The study is divided into four parts: first, it gives an overview of the economy, labour relations and trade unionism; the second part analyses the process of asymmetric European integration and the implementation of the austerity policies (2011–2015); the third part studies the political cycle between 2015 and 2019, the so-called Contraption; finally, some preliminary considerations are advanced.

In recent years, individual and company bargaining have increasingly supplanted sector and country collective bargaining leading to increasingly heterogeneous and perforated, that is, hybrid, national collective bargaining systems. Little is known about the relative effects of these different systems. In this paper, the authors derive and test a comprehensive categorization of collective bargaining systems and argue that different systems are associated with different production functions and therefore have different effects on labour productivity. The hypotheses are tested using representative workplace-level data for all member states of the European Union. It is found that the performance of coordinated sector collective bargaining systems is higher than for all other forms of collective and individual bargaining. Policy implications of the results are discussed as these results challenge attempts to reform collective bargaining in Europe.

The paper examines whether workplace gender dynamics contributed to the decline of unions. To this end, it reviews relevant literature and proposes three hypotheses, which it then tests using alternative empirical analyses and data from Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) and British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS). The results from employee-level analysis reveal that, compared with women, (i) men were significantly less likely to have never been union members and (ii) they were also significantly more likely to have been union members in the past. In addition, workplace-level analysis using WERS reveals that there is an inverse link between union membership and the share of women in workplaces, which is also found to have a non-linear form. The paper ponders if unions may need to encompass broader agenda than those informed by the median voter to improve their fate.