Industrial Relations最新文献

Works councils in many countries are involved in dismissal procedures and may therefore invoke high hold-up costs for firms laying off workers. To avoid these conflicts, firms with a works council may have a stronger preference for more agreeable job applicants who have a low risk of dismissal. We conduct a discrete choice experiment among recruiters to assess their preferences regarding job applicants' personality traits and competence. In line with our expectations, we find that recruiters from works-council firms more strongly prefer agreeable job applicants. We also find that more agreeable recruiters choose more agreeable employees, indicating a similarity-attraction effect.

This article uses the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey to investigate the links between gender or ethnic diversity and workers' level of trust in managers or the extent of identity with the values and objectives of the firm – dimensions of what we might call social capital within the workplace. These are both factors that one might expect to make firms more cooperative and, hence, productive. Controlling for plants workforce composition, we find an opposite effect of females and ethnic minorities: a higher female share in the plant is associated with higher trust and identity for both men and women (men much more than women), while a higher minority share is associated with lower trust and identity.

The Labor Standards Act of Japan requires employers to compensate employees based on hours worked, but exemptions apply to specific occupations with agreements between employers and employees. We assess the impact of being exempted on hours worked, earnings, and the physical and mental health conditions of employees. We find that, on average, exempt workers work longer hours and earn more than nonexempt workers, without hurting their health status. We also find, however, that being exempted exacerbates health status when it is applied to employees who do not have discretion in how and when they work.

Pay secrecy (PS) policies, commonly found in the US private sector, restrict pay communication among employees. Previous research suggests that these policies help prevent pay dissatisfaction and attrition among low earners by limiting salary comparisons. However, by exploiting the staggered adoption of PS bans across US states as a negative shock to PS, I find no causal relationship between PS and voluntary turnover. This suggests that workers' reluctance to ask others about their pay renders PS policies irrelevant for retention purposes. This, in turn, highlights the need for organizations to consider alternative approaches to enhance employee retention and commitment.

This paper addresses the role of technology in shaping worker-level task prices, exploiting within-occupation variation using a unique survey linked to administrative data for over 180,000 Dutch workers between 2014 and 2020. Nonroutine abstract and interactive tasks are related to wage premia, and routine tasks to wage penalties. However, these task returns vary according to exposure to the types of (new) technology, such as computers, robots and artificial intelligence. Overall, wages are higher in technology-intensive industries, but newer technologies target non-routine tasks differently. This may have profound implications for the nonroutine wage premium given the rise of artificial intelligence.

In this article, we study whether performance evaluations can serve as an instrument for firms to increase employee retention. Feedback on one's own performance may affect individual turnover intentions differently depending on the relative wage rank of workers among their peers. In line with these considerations, empirical evidence based on panel employer–employee data shows that relatively low-paid employees decrease their turnover intentions after the implementation of a performance evaluation system at the establishment level. We find no effect for relatively high-paid employees.

Using a resume study, we investigate hiring discrimination for leadership positions against job applicants with Chinese and Indian names before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We submitted more than 8000 job applications to job advertisements in Australia. We find hiring discrimination against applicants with Chinese and Indian names for non-leadership positions before and during the pandemic. However, hiring discrimination has not increased during the pandemic. Importantly, and consistent with the glass cliff theory, hiring discrimination has largely vanished for leadership positions during the pandemic, for which discrimination was most pronounced before the pandemic.

Competition in the labor market theoretically leads to higher wages, yet empirical evidence to substantiate it, particularly in developing countries, has been sparse. Our study delves into the impact of increased competition in the labor market on workers' wages using a panel dataset from Chinese industrial firms spanning 1998 to 2013. Employing OLS and IV regressions, we demonstrate that a decrease in employer concentration is significantly linked to higher wages. The elasticities of employer concentration on wages fall within the range of −0.034 and −0.107. Additionally, our findings suggest that state-owned enterprises gained the most from this upswing in competition, primarily due to restructuring. Furthermore, we demonstrate that total factor productivity serves as an important channel linking employer concentration to wages.

This paper studies whether a decline in employment protection reduces workers' long-term sickness absences (of >6 weeks). We exploit exogenous variation from a German policy change that shifted the threshold exempting small establishments from dismissal protection from 5 to 10 workers. Using German register data, we find that the reform significantly reduced employees' transitions into long-term sickness during their second year after being hired. This response is due to a behavioral rather than a compositional effect and is particularly pronounced among the medium-skilled and younger males. Further results indicate that the reform did not alter the probability of involuntary unemployment after sickness.