Industrial Relations最新文献

Works councils provide an essential mechanism for worker participation in decision-making. While the literature has extensively explored their impact on worker and establishment outcomes, the negotiation process between works council representatives and their employer has remained largely unexplored. This article contributes to filling this gap by investigating wage discrimination towards works councilors in Germany. Fixed effects models leveraging panel data show that councilors receive a wage premium that positively correlates with the sectoral coverage of collective bargaining. In the manufacturing sector, where the tradition of bargaining is heavily entrenched, employers positively discriminate councilors. In contrast, in the service sector, where the culture of bargaining is weak, employers penalize works councilors. In both sectors, partisan and unionized works councilors are the most affected. The most likely hypothesis to explain these results is that employers strategically discriminate these councilors in order to bypass the traditional constraints of establishment-level participation. This article therefore questions the quality of industrial democracy in Germany.

Budd, Pohler, and Huang (Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society 2021) proposed a theory about how managers’ and employees’ (mis)matched frames of reference regarding employment relationships help explain HR outcomes observed in practice. In this response, I pose some questions about the scope of the theory, possible contingencies, and potential confounding mechanisms in hopes of motivating additional dialogue regarding the importance that frames of reference play in how employment relationships are enacted.

Do workers and employers hold strong views about the nature of the employment relationship? Are these views causally important for understanding the success or failure of human resources practices? In this article, I comment on Budd, Pohler and Huang’s project of bringing cognitive frames theory to employment relations research. I agree with their emphasis on informal workplace social dynamics and suggest further attention to the sources of cognitive frames in primitive social structures.

Using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data on Belgian firms, we explore the impact of workers’ tenure on firm productivity. To do so, we estimate production functions augmented with firm-level measures of tenure. We deal with the endogeneity of standard inputs and tenure, which arises from unobserved firm heterogeneity and reverse causality, by applying a modified version of Ackerberg et al.’s (2015) control function method, which explicitly removes firm fixed effects. Consistently with recent theoretical predictions, our analyses point to positive, but decreasing, returns to tenure. We also find that the impact differs widely across several firm dimensions. Tenure is particularly beneficial for productivity in contexts characterized by a certain degree of routineness and low job complexity. Along the same lines, our findings indicate that tenure exerts stronger positive impacts in industrial and capital-intensive firms, as well as in firms less reliant on ICT-intensive and knowledge-intensive processes.

The disagreement among studies on the employment effects of minimum wages in the United States is well known. Less well known, and more puzzling, is the absence of agreement on what the research literature says—that is, how economists summarize the body of evidence on the employment effects of minimum wages. Summaries range from “it is now well established that higher minimum wages do not reduce employment,” to “the evidence is very mixed with effects centered on zero so there is no basis for a strong conclusion one way or the other,” to “most evidence points to adverse employment effects.” We explore the question of what conclusions can be drawn from the literature, focusing on the evidence using subnational minimum wage variation within the United States that has dominated the research landscape since the early 1990s. To accomplish this, we assembled the entire set of published studies in this literature and identified the core estimates that support the conclusions from each study, in most cases relying on responses from the researchers who wrote these papers. Our key conclusions are as follows: (i) there is a clear preponderance of negative estimates in the literature; (ii) this evidence is stronger for teens and young adults and the less educated; (iii) the evidence from studies of directly affected workers points even more strongly to negative employment effects; and (iv) the evidence from studies of low-wage industries is less one-sided.

This article reveals the extent of international inequalities in the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on participation in paid work. Drawing on World Systems Theory (WST) and a novel quasi-experimental analysis of nationally representative household panel surveys across 20 countries, the study finds a much sharper increase in the likelihood of dropping out of paid work in semi-periphery and periphery states relative to core states. We establish a causal link between such international disparities and the early trajectories of state interventions in the labor market. Further analysis demonstrates that within all three world systems delayed, less stringent interventions in the labor market were enabled by right-wing populism but mitigated by the strength of active labor market policies and collective bargaining.

Analysis of broad, U.K. worker-establishment matched panel data from 2004 to 2011 reveals that working hours increase with the fraction of an establishment's workers receiving performance-based pay, if the cutoff for “long weekly hours” is from 35 to 39, but not beyond a sharp discontinuity at 40. Long hours are found to be unrelated to various workplace health problems but positively related to health-related absenteeism. Combined with complementary research on hours and productivity, the results suggest that the well-known productivity enhancements from performance pay are dampened by exhaustion-induced absenteeism stemming from additional working hours and higher per-hour work intensity.

In their contribution to this symposium, John W. Budd, Dionne Pohler, and Wei Huang provided directions for understanding how conflicts and human resource (HR) practices are influenced by framing processes. The current literature on frames in the field of human resources and industrial relations tends to view individual actors as representatives of theories on employment relationship, and it focuses on the formal side of HR practices. These features limit scholars’ scope and ability to address the agency of the actors involved in framing processes, particularly employees. Therefore, this article develops an analytical perspective based on the economics of conventions to help realize the promise of Budd, Pohler, and Huang's work for a deeper understanding of the co-construction of frames and changes in HR practices in work organizations.

Budd, Pohler, and Huang's (Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society 2022) proposed a theory of (mis)matched frames of reference to explain how managers’ and employees’ frames of reference regarding employment relationships may influence the use of human resource (HR) practices and help to explain the HR outcomes and conflicts observed in practice. We concur with Budd et al. that frames of reference provide a valuable and unique approach to studying employment relations and HR systems but have not received much attention. Therefore, we aim to extend their theory of (mis)matched frames of reference to strategic human resource management (HRM) research. We begin this commentary with a summary of their theoretical framework. We then introduce the background of strategic HRM and propose opportunities of applying frames of reference to advance strategic HRM research. Moreover, we discuss challenges of and considerations for using their framework in strategic HRM research.