INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNAL最新文献

Trade unions face long-term challenges including declining memberships that threaten their influence. COVID-19 created new challenges and possibilities for renewal. This article presents findings from a study conducted during the pandemic, comprising a large survey and interviews that investigated how unions adapted to the changes to working life they and their members faced. Evidence from UK unions shows unions rapidly changing how they worked, particularly in adopting and investing in new technologies. COVID-19 became a trigger for adaptation for unions which helped to meet the challenges created by the pandemic and demonstrated unions' creative ability to adapt and maintain relevance. The article contributes new insights about union renewal and argues that renewal should be understood as a continuous and evolving process of adaptation and transition, shaped as much by internal strategy as external shocks. It argues that confidence within unions about their ability to reform is important for understanding renewal.

This article looks at the hospital European Sectoral Social Dialogue Committee (SSDC) through a Community of Practice (CoP) theoretical lens. Based on a 2-year project, qualitative in-depth interviews at the European level and in five Member states, and participant observation of the hospital SSDC, we propose a shift from traditional institutional and resource-based accounts and provide a learning and knowledge-focused understanding of this specific area of European industrial relations. Interpreting the SSDCs as a CoP sheds new light on the role of power relations, participation and informal activities among members and on how they work together; this, we find, can alert those interested in more effective functioning of the European Sectoral Social Dialogue on how to strengthen this supra-national level of industrial relations.

A union default would automatically enrol workers in a union with bargaining coverage over their work. Though there would be a right to opt-out, it would facilitate recruitment and retention of members, especially in sectors with small employers and high staff turnover. Research indicates it would receive majority support and, where available, induce most workers to membership of unions. This study looks at whether two potential features of a union default would influence the intention to remain a union member if defaulted or support for a union default. The first is a mandatory 30-day waiting period until opt-out is permitted. The second is a standardised, online process to facilitate opting out.

This article contributes to our understanding of the complex role of civil society organisations (CSOs) in tackling precariousness through advice, advocacy and activism. It draws on qualitative data gathered primarily from two local CSOs in the north of England that help clients navigate a highly flexible labour market and an increasingly punitive welfare system. The findings reveal that in marginalised communities, CSOs compensate for retreating state services by providing clients with individual advice and advocacy, but there is little evidence of the grassroots activism observed in labour CSOs in North America. We argue that the uneven tradition of community organising across cities in the UK combined with the complex dependencies of service-oriented CSOs on state resources has restricted their role to that of labour market intermediaries that serve primarily to integrate clients into low-wage jobs.

While isolated episodes of work stoppages keep occurring, aggregate industrial action rates have been on the decline over the last five decades. Attempts to explain this trend centre on the short-term effects of the business cycle and the long-term impacts of labour market liberalisation, deindustrialisation and globalisation. This paper argues that household indebtedness is a missing piece of the puzzle. Since indebted employees tend to become self-disciplined at the workplace on the fear of losing their job and defaulting, this paper argues that the post-1970 rise of household financialisation is associated with the decline of strike activity. The econometric evidence reported provides strong support to this argument for the cases of Japan, Korea, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom over the period 1970–2018.

Despite evidence that the gender gap in the labour market favours men, aggregate findings from correspondence studies show that women are more likely than men to be invited for a job interview. We hypothesize that the predominance of women among recruiters may explain this somewhat puzzling finding; recruiters may favour applicants of their own gender. We use the data from a large-scale correspondence study to test this hypothesis. As expected, we find that female applicants are more likely to receive callbacks for interview. We also see that in our sample the majority of contact persons responsible for the recruitment process are female. More importantly, we find that if recruiter and applicant are of the same gender, then the likelihood that the applicant will be invited for an interview increases. These findings reveal the gender favouritism at the selection stage in the labour market.

The role of trade unions in the social shaping of digital technologies is a vital question for research, public policy and social justice. This article draws on interviews with two unions in the grocery retail sector in the United Kingdom and Norway, and examines their involvement in technology decisions, and whether they can shape better outcomes for workers. By comparing a ‘neo-liberal’ economy and a ‘Nordic welfare state’, the article considers whether stronger institutional power and regulatory supports in Norway provide for greater influence in a sector regarded as challenging for unions. The findings indicate relatively few country differences and help shed light on the factors that enable and constrain unions’ role in digitalisation.

Unionized organizations are implementing more than ever technological changes to cope with an increasingly changing and highly digital environment. Despite the extensive literature on union responses to changes, there is not much evidence on how unions and employers draft provisions pertaining to technological changes in collective agreements. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct an in-depth analysis of these provisions in over 500 collective agreements signed between 2000 and 2020. Specifically, this study focuses on office workers in two of the most important Canadian industries, namely, the healthcare and manufacturing sectors. The findings indicate that within the examined provisions, the regulation of technological change varies along a continuum that extends from no obligations to stringent obligations on the part of the employer. Moreover, the results show that these provisions have remained stable over the past two decades.

To enhance the academic endeavours confronting the globalisation of managerial orthodoxy (predicated on antagonising the interests of companies and employees), we will investigate the relationship between institutional performance and employees' (subjective) wellbeing in Turkish shipyards by undertaking an extensive survey. We will argue that there is a positive association between the two covariates that lends itself to a conceptual frame of Mutual Interests Management (MIM). The MIM refers to the managerial impacts that result in cross-fertilisations between the interests of companies and employees. However, we will also argue that MIM has a dynamic and amorphous character in the sense that no correlation whether it be positive, negative or the lack of thereof necessarily survives through our purposive analyses with the trial of various interaction models among the specific types and combinations of variables considered. Accordingly, the conclusion stresses that the amorphous nature of MIM can be adapted by the managers at company-level to tailor or innovate feasible MIM strategies.

The year 2022 marks the 10th anniversary of the adoption of democratic management (DM) provisions in China. DM, once predominant in state-owned enterprises, has now been extended to all enterprises. Democratising workplaces in China represents institutional experimentation. Both DM-related research and practice thus require updating. Ten years on, a social consensus on DM's orientation and legitimacy remains elusive. Can expanding DM inspire industrial democracy or strengthen Party control over market-oriented workplaces? Or is DM merely window dressing as previous studies suggest? This article aims to uncover the type of workplace democracy that DM can achieve in China. A triangle of DM is established and integrated with institutional theory as an analytical framework to explore the causes and characteristics of DM in six case companies.