British Journal of Industrial Relations最新文献

Minimum wage legislation has spread across rich democracies in recent decades in response to rising inequality and in-work poverty. However, there are concerns that state regulation of wages could reduce incentives to join a union. We empirically test this crowding out hypothesis, using (1) an event-study macro-level analysis of trade union density in 19 advanced capitalist countries between 1960 and 2017 and (2) a multi-level analysis of 32 countries (1981−2020) where we use individual-level union membership as dependent variable. We find no evidence that statutory minimum wage adoption crowds out union density. We also test whether the most vulnerable groups of employees (young, low-skilled and low-income) have a lower propensity to join a union when a minimum wage is introduced but find no effect either.

This article contributes to debates on equality, diversity and inclusion by exploring the efficacy of employers’ equality certifications, focusing on the UK government's Two Ticks and Disability Confident certifications. In Study 1, using data on Two Ticks certification matched into the nationally representative Workplace Employment Relations Study 2011, we found the adoption of disability equality policies and practices, the prevalence of disabled people in the workforce and disabled people's experience of work were no better in Two Ticks than in non-Two Ticks workplaces. In Study 2, using Department for Work and Pensions data on Disability Confident certification matched into WorkL 2021–2023 data (the world's largest employee experience database), we found that the proportion of the workforce that is disabled is no higher in Disability Confident Level 1 ‘Committed’ organisations and Level 3 ‘Leader’ organisations than in non-Disability Confident organisations. While the proportion of the workforce that is disabled is higher in Disability Confident Level 2 ‘Employer’ organisations than in non-Disability Confident organisations, just 22 per cent of Disability Confident organisations are at this level. Disabled people's experience of work was no better in Disability Confident than in non-Disability Confident organisations. Our findings therefore question the efficacy of these employers’ equality certifications.

Concerns over widespread technological unemployment are often dismissed with the argument that human labour is not destroyed by automation but rather reallocated to other tasks, occupations or sectors. When focusing on pure employment levels, the idea that workers are not permanently excluded but ‘just’ reallocated might be reassuring. However, while attention has been devoted to the impact of automation on employment levels, little has been said about the quality of new job matches for displaced workers. Using an administrative longitudinal panel covering a large sample of Spanish workers from 2001 to 2017, we investigate the short- and medium-term re-employment prospects of workers displaced from sectors with an increasing density of industrial robots. Furthermore, we examine the role of reallocation to other sectors or local labour markets as adjustment mechanisms. Our analysis suggests that exposed middle- and low-skilled workers are more likely than non-exposed workers to remain unemployed 6 months after displacement. Among those who find a new occupation, an additional robot per 1000 workers increases the probability of being re-employed in a lower paying job by about 1.9 percentage points for middle- and low-skilled workers, with significantly higher penalties for those who relocate to a different sector. Moreover, these workers tend to face a qualification downgrading in the new job and are more likely to be re-employed through temporary employment agencies. High-skilled workers are less negatively affected by exposure, although they can also incur a penalty when changing sectors.

Using 20-year dynamic panel data, we analysed the difference in employment adjustment speed and behaviour between unionized and non-unionized firms, whether continuous or discontinuous, to investigate the effects of enterprise unions on job security in Japan. We confirmed that unionized firms were more reluctant to downsize and continue to offer stronger job security than non-unionized firms. However, the unions’ influence on job security has gradually weakened. The primary contribution of this study is its clarification that unions in Japan played the role of guardians of job security under increasing globalization and technological innovation over the 20-year sample period. Our clarification provides evidence that a different type of union, distinct from those in Western countries aiming for wage increases, is deeply embedded in the Japanese stakeholder system.

The race between education and technology is a key issue for trade unions. Unions often include skill upgrading and training in collective bargains, which might be an important tool to facilitate lifelong learning. In this article, I investigate how trade unions influence workers’ participation in further education using Norwegian-matched employer–employee panel data on full-time workers and a fixed-effects framework. In contrast to most existing studies, which rely on more or less representative surveys, our data comprise the entire working population over a period of 16 years, allowing us to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. An increase in the workplace union density is estimated to raise the individual propensity to participate in tertiary vocational education. I also find that workers in unionized establishments enjoy higher salaries during further education but at the expense of lower post-training wage premiums. In addition, unions are found to lower employee turnover. Together, these findings give empirical support to the theoretical prediction of Acemoglu and Pischke (1999), where firms may optimally choose to sponsor investments in workers’ skills in the absence of perfect competition in the labour market.

While there are normally positive expectations concerning job quality in cooperatives, many studies have described a more complex picture. The extant literature has, however, found it difficult to deal with evidence of poor working conditions in these organisations. Some contributions downplay the relevance of this issue, arguing that poor extrinsic aspects of job quality are compensated by intrinsic rewards, as confirmed by higher levels of job satisfaction. Others focus on external market pressure and interpret bad labour conditions as a form of degeneration of originally good employment practices. Through a qualitative analysis of job quality in cooperatives in three sectors of the Italian economy (social services, hotel cleaning and meat processing), we advance a different argument: we contend that employment practices associated with poor job quality are not the result of difficult market conditions but are rather the key explanation for the quantitative expansion of this form of economic organisation, which has moved from being an instrument for promoting good employment to a way of ensuring lower labour costs and higher flexibility within outsourcing relationships.