Industrial Relations最新文献

Motivated by the efforts to understand shifting dynamics of change and stability in employment relations—not least ones brought on by a decade of crisis in what was a neoliberal consensus—scholars increasingly focus on the role of ideas, discourses, and identities. This paper argues for the potential of continuing down this path of employing ideational explanations in employment relations. First, it highlights four key weaknesses of employing more pure materialist–institutionalist approaches that have traditionally dominated employment relations scholarship. Second, it argues that to recognize and build on existing efforts to bring in ideas to employment relations, it is useful to place these on the macro-, meso-, and micro levels. Third, to further advance an ideational perspective on employment relations, it proposes to place more centrally the concept of ideational power. Fourth, it presents key insights from the papers that make up the Special Issue and fleshes out how the individual papers of the Special Issue contribute to this agenda.

Previous studies show that performance pay can benefit firms and workers by increasing productivity and wages. Yet, performance pay can also have unintended consequences for worker health. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we examine the hypothesis that alcohol use as “self-medication” is a natural response to the stress and uncertainty associated with performance pay. We find that the likelihood of consuming each of four types of alcohol (beer, wine, spirits, and mixed drinks) is higher for those receiving performance pay even controlling for a long list of economic, social, and personality characteristics and in sensible instrumental variable estimates. We also show that the number of types of alcohol consumed is larger for those receiving performance pay and that the intensity of consumption increases.

Ideas are important but hard to quantify, making large-scale, quantitative analyses difficult. Political parties are important ideational contributors, and their election year manifestos provide explicit compilations of their ideas. Using Comparative Manifesto Project data, we propose three channels through which ideas enter into manifestos and examine the fraction of manifesto content devoted to pro-worker and anti-union statements to measure the importance of these ideas. Multivariate analyses across 54 countries, 75 years, and 1132 parties uniquely uncover predictors of industrial relations ideas, including party characteristics, responses to other parties, and economic and political conditions. Further, pro-worker ideas matter to voters during elections.

The COVID-19 outbreak has led to an increase in social dialogue in general and, in particular, to an increase in tripartite cooperation between social partners' organizations and state authorities. This paper takes a critical look behind this cooperation and investigates the underlying rationales behind the tripartite cooperation in 19 countries. It is shown that even though the cooperation generally fulfilled its problem-solving function, an expressive function that signaled unity was identified to be of equal importance in such a time of crisis. This expressive function is also identified to potentially serve as the basis for a renewed social partnership.

Using the cases of Ireland and Portugal during the post-2008 Great Recession, we argue that unions' ideological formations around social concertation are central in aiding them to navigate their options about whether to engage in concessionary bargaining with government under crisis conditions. Building on Hyman's triangle of union identity, we show how an ideational perspective can complement interest-based accounts of unions' strategies to explain their engagement with policymakers or their opposition in the macro-management of the economy.

We analyze the impacts of recent city minimum wage increases in California and nationwide, following a pre-analysis plan (PAP) registered prior to the release of data covering two years of minimum wage increases. For California cities, we find a hint of negative employment effects. Nationally, we find some evidence of disemployment effects for teens, but not young adults or high school dropouts. City-specific analyses provide limited evidence of adverse effects on the share low-income, but the pooled city analysis does not; the national analysis generally finds no impact on the share low-income, except for reductions in the share near-poor, although that may at least partly reflect prior trends. All told, we view the results as providing neither strong evidence of substantial adverse effects of city minimum wages, nor strong evidence of substantial beneficial effects.

Digital platforms have led to the disruption of public policy in many sectors. Five years after the arrival of Uber in Quebec (Canada), the old regulatory framework was replaced by a policy which espouses the business model of the multinational. Following the discursive institutionalist approach, this research reveals the dynamic by which Uber penetrated the political sphere to take advantage of it and the roles of ideas and institutions in legitimizing the transformations.

Drawing on ideational perspectives, we examine how ideas about the future of work and the discursive forms they take contribute to policy-making about employment relations and labor markets. Analyzing data from an Australian government Inquiry reporting on the future impact of technological and other work changes, we find that rather than being about these topics, the Inquiry focuses more on actors’ ideas regarding the present state of employment relations and education. Moreover, the incomplete nature of actors’ narratives, particularly about the temporally distant future, may account for government’s unwillingness and/or lack of preparedness to make more radical changes.

Does collective bargaining lift wages for contingent workers? Well-worn theory suggests that temps at a covered employer earn less than otherwise similar “perms,” but still fare better than they would in a nonunion workplace. Our analysis of a national sample of matched employee–employer data first disposes of the universality of this conventional wisdom. Then, it allows us to test an alternative, contingent theory of the mitigating impact of collective bargaining on the temp wage gap predicated on received research in labor relations and institutional labor economics. We find that just how temps fare relative to perms hinges on the labor relations orientation of the employment relationship. Whereas unions clearly deliver for temps under adversarial conditions, they do not appear to do so where they adopt a more cooperative stance toward their employer counterparts.