British Journal of Industrial Relations最新文献

We explore the long-run determinants of current differences in the degree of co-operative labour relations at the local level. We do this by estimating the effect of the medieval communes –that were established in certain cities in Centre-Northern Italy towards the end of the 11th century – and that contributed to the emergence of a co-operative attitude in the population on various proxies for current co-operative labour relations. Conditional on a large set of firm and municipality level controls, as well as a full set of province fixed effects, we find that firms located in municipalities that had been a free medieval commune in the past have higher current probabilities to adopt two-tier bargaining structures and to be unionized. We also report instrumental variables (IV) and propensity score estimates that confirm our main results.

Despite the considerable debate concerning the gig economy, research has yet to investigate what platform workers themselves want. In part, this is due to the difficulty of undertaking traditional social surveys in this sector. Therefore, this article makes use of a novel research design that generates a strategic non-probability sample of 510 platform workers with which to investigate workers’ preferences regarding labour rights, representation and voice. Findings suggest strong support for labour rights, trade unions and co-determination. The low pay, insecurity, risk and lack of organizational voice that we find provides a rationale for these preferences. Moreover, platform workers’ preferences are seemingly influenced by wider inequalities, with significant differences according to gender and country of birth.

This article proposes a new theoretical framework of employer association (EA) adaptive innovation, a strategic organizational response to challenging environments facing EAs and/or relevant firms. Through adaptive innovation, EAs can enlarge their span of service offerings beyond collective, selective and elective goods, services typically explained by Olson-inspired, market-transactional theorizing. We identify, explain and conceptualize EA shifts into also offering common goods as community-building, relational types of collective action. Territorial ecosystems are one prominent new domain for this type of strategic adaptive intervention. In our illustrative case, this involves collectively organizing an open innovation ecosystem beyond an EA's own walls. Ostrom's theorizing on the governance of the commons better explains these initiatives than Olson's. Our new framework, therefore, integrates Ostrom's with Olson's theories. In broadening the field's understanding of EA strategic opportunities, this article also opens prominent lines of inquiry for future EA research.

In recent decades, both academic research and industrial relations practice have been increasingly concerned with whether, and to what extent, transnational forms of labour regulation might constitute a countervailing power to globally operating companies. And although numerous studies have analysed the various instruments and institutions of transnational labour regulation – such as Global Framework Agreements, trade union networks and European or World Works Councils – as yet there has been little in the way of exploration of their dynamics or interconnections. Against this backdrop and based on a comparison of three case studies of multinational companies, we focus on what we consider to be the ‘missing link’ between the dynamics of social action and the interdependencies of institutions in order to explain how transnational institution building can contribute to the development of transnational labour regulation. Specifically, we investigate how different pathways to transnational labour regulation have been the outcomes of actions taken by actors in a multinational corporation and how, in turn, these developments shaped the dynamics of subsequent action. The study underlines that those pathways can only be properly understood when seen in terms of social actors, their power resources and their willingness and capacities to deploy them.

The article examines the quality and appropriateness of the data available to measure firms' affiliation to employer associations (EAs). We find large discrepancies in affiliation rates obtained from the five different data sources available for France, leading us in particular to discard tax data. Focusing on survey data, we show that asking managers about affiliation to EAs in general or affiliation to a list of specific EAs can lead to large differences in affiliation rates, highlighting the importance of the framing of survey questions. We then provide methods to estimate an aggregate firm-level affiliation rate from surveys covering workplaces with 11 or more employees. Exploiting (i) conflicting survey responses regarding EA affiliation between distinct establishments in the same firm and (ii) survey responses for firms that report paying contributions to EAs in their financial statements, we finally estimate the shares of employers that wrongly declare being or not being affiliated to EAs, and provide a rate of affiliation corrected for such errors. The implications for econometric analysis of the high observed error rates are discussed.