INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL最新文献

Despite widely-reported ethnicity disparities in pay and occupational attainment, little is known about how different ethnic groups fare in job control—a crucial component of job quality with significant implications for well-being and health. Drawing on two large-scale representative datasets in the United Kingdom (1992–2022), we find that workers from all Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) groups conditionally report significantly lower job control than their White British counterparts, although heterogeneity exists depending on the BAME group in question. Ethnicity penalties are also most pronounced for foreign-born workers. Despite a slow trend towards convergence, ethnicity disparities have remained significant over the last three decades. We further show that disparities are largely unexplained by compositional factors such as pay and occupation, demonstrating ethnicity penalties in job control. By linking ethnicity to job control, this study contributes to the growing research on BAME workers in the labour market, as well as the literatures on job quality and multisegmented labour markets.

Private sector unionization drives have recently increased after decades of decline. Previous research largely focused on predictors of unionization internal to firms. In this study, we use historical data from 1986 to 2017 in Alabama to show that racial distribution in the surrounding county also influences the likelihood of successful unionization votes.

This article analyses the role of immigration policy as a distinct source of skills supply in liberal market economies. It draws upon interviews with representatives of employer associations and trade unions in the Australian construction and hospitality industries to identify how labour market actors make sense of the function of immigration policy. Rather than ‘complementing’ or ‘undermining’ training and other domestic labour market institutions, as is often assumed, immigration policy can serve to remedy the systemic failures of these institutions to supply skills in the short term. However, overreliance on immigration can disincentivise reform of the labour market institutions necessary to generate adequate skills supply in the long term. The findings suggest the need to reconceptualise the function of immigration policy in terms of its distinct rather than equivalent functions to labour market institutions.

We explore changes in the Ontario Labour Relations Board and the Ministry of Labour's Dispute Resolution Services over time. The core purpose of these public dispute resolution agencies in Canada has not changed since their creation, even amidst legislative fragmentation and consolidation, different governing parties, periods of public sector austerity, changing patterns of unionization and evolving court decisions.

This paper charts the development of Acas over the last two decades as it responds to the changing context of British employment relations. While dispute resolution services have evolved to focus on individual disputes, Acas has remained true to its pluralist roots through its training and advisory services that continue to promote ‘good employment relations’.

The United States possesses a highly fragmented and decentralized set of mechanisms addressing work-related conflicts and disputes. There are consequential differences in how workplace conflicts are resolved across the following settings—union and nonunion or collective and individual, public and private sectors, traditional and nonstandard employment models, and public and private forums. An important trend is the growing influence in the nonunion sector of ‘private justice’ provided in employment arbitration and conflict management systems as a replacement for ‘public justice’, and in the union sector, private neutrals also play a key role.

This six-country study includes examination of the institutional context in which public agencies for conflict resolution operate; the internal and external pressures for change in the activities of these agencies, including the shift from collective to individual forms of workplace conflict; the extent to which the changes being introduced are altering the traditional organizational character or culture of these bodies; and the effects of the pandemic on how public agencies involved in conflict resolution carry out their work.

In 2007–2008, Sweden implemented changes to the Ghent system of unemployment insurance, leading to union density decline. We study the interaction of labour force composition and institutional changes, finding that the structural tendencies of the decline strongly interacts with these changes, exposing previous precarious categories even further.

Australia's major public dispute resolution agency has changed substantially since the 1990s from a stand-alone tribunal administering a collectivist system of compulsory conciliation and arbitration to an integrated agency resolving both individual and collective disputes as well as performing a broader regulatory role. It remains central to Australian industrial relations, reflecting its adaptability and the peculiarities of its political and industrial relations contexts.

This paper reports on a public transport company in which local unions, by repeatedly threatening to strike, managed to significantly enhance their negotiating position and exert considerable power over their management. While extant literature has mostly paid attention to ‘weak’ unions struggling for renewal and revitalization, the present study rather explores a situation in which unions manage to become ‘strong’ by making aggressive uses of power, as well as the implications for union effectiveness. It is shown that management deficiencies can provide unions with unprecedented opportunities for exerting power, yet hamper their ability to reach greater effectiveness as the absence of an engaged managerial line makes it difficult to secure decisions favouring workers and the organization. This paper contributes to theory on union power and effectiveness by offering an alternative to the resource-based view of union power that has been prevalent in prior research. Union power and effectiveness in the workplace appear to be deeply rooted in the power relations that unions sustain with other organizational actors, demonstrating the relevance of a relational perspective that goes beyond union-centred action, resources and capabilities to include the complex dynamics of their interactions with other organizational actors.