British Journal of Industrial Relations最新文献

While it is well-known that employees with disabilities have significantly more negative work experiences compared to other employees, research geared towards understanding how employers could improve some of these experiences is still underdeveloped. To advance this research agenda, this study investigates links between five distinct types of discretionary arrangements (work discretion, scheduling discretion, part-timing, homeworking and pay for individual performance), and outcomes related to work experiences and the wellbeing of employees with disabilities (job satisfaction, perception of fairness, recognition, motivation, engagement, work stress and work-life interference). To explore these links, we use data from the European Working Conditions Survey (2015). We find that not all work arrangements that increase discretion at the workplace have a positive impact on employees with disabilities and that some can be especially detrimental. By unpacking the multiple ways in which various types of discretion at the workplace affect employees with disabilities, this study not only makes a theoretical contribution but also provides employers who aim to improve the working experiences of employees with disabilities with some empirical evidence to help them take more inclusive actions.

This article examines the impact of corporate financialization on the labour share using data for publicly listed non-financial corporations across 14 European countries. We test hypotheses derived from industrial relations literature on financialization against competing explanations for the labour share decline based on technological change and market concentration. Our findings show that increased dividend and interest payments, as well as financial profits, are associated with a fall in the labour share. These results support theories linking corporate financialization to rising overhead costs, shareholder-value orientation and increasing exit options for capital. We find no evidence that technological progress drives the decline in the labour share. While market concentration negatively correlates with the labour share, concentration has decreased during our sample period, suggesting that ‘superstar firms’ are also not the primary driver of changes in functional income distribution.

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationship between financialisation and functional income distribution. To this end, we empirically analyse the relationship between financialisation, the real wage level and the rate of profit in the US (1955–2019) using structural vector autoregressive modelling. According to our results, while an increase in financialisation leads to changes in the rate of profit with ambiguous signs and unclear statistical significance, financialisation has a clear, negative and persistent effect on the real wage level. We conclude with a reconsideration of the role of financialisation in shaping functional income distribution, as it appears to contribute directly to restraining real wage levels rather than directly impacting profitability.

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the political and structural determinants of social dialogue in 25 European countries between 1980 and 2018 using a measure of social dialogue based on an original survey of industrial relations and social policy experts. We assess hypotheses on the role of structural (unionisation, employer organisation) and political (government partisanship, government strength) factors on the extent of cooperation between governments, trade unions and employers in public policymaking. We find a declining trend in the overall extent of social dialogue in the countries surveyed. Using panel regressions, we show that higher levels of social dialogue are more prevalent among governments where there is a balance of power between right-wing and left-wing parties, and thus where unions and employers can act as ‘brokers’ between left and right parties. We find no association between most structural factors (unionisation, collective bargaining coverage, employer organisation) and levels of social dialogue.

This article analyses the role of green investments (GIs) in the adoption of decentralised bargaining and the single aspects negotiated therein. Using data on a large representative sample of Italian firms, we find that investing in green technologies increases the overall probability of decentralised agreements. Further, GIs lead to an increase in negotiations on performance-related pay and welfare benefits. These results are robust to an econometric strategy that controls for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity issues. Our explanation for this evidence is that the current ecological transition in production processes is likely causing significant organisational changes. Managing these changes requires increased flexibility in negotiating critical issues at the company level, such as wage premiums and non-monetary benefits to employees.

The incompleteness of labour contracts is expected to cause uncertainty among forward-looking employees as to whether implicit contracts with greater intrinsic rewards in lieu of pay will be breached by employers, thus reducing employee well-being. David Marsden theorized that an organization's form of governance can serve as a stable, easy-to-observe signal of the likelihood of a breach, and thus employees across governance types will exhibit different extrinsic–intrinsic trade-offs. Using the European Working Conditions Survey, we extend Marsden's theory and find supportive evidence across 35 European countries and 9 governance categories. We also extend Marsden's theorizing into the comparative domain and analyse patterns of subjective well-being, compensatory pay and organizational governance across varieties of political economies.

Digital labour platforms are contested because they create work relationships that neither fall into the category of traditional employment nor fulfil the criteria of freelance work due to platforms’ heavy interference in the work process. Although existing research has elucidated different pathways for improving the working conditions of platform workers, we develop an employment relations perspective on platform-mediated work systems building on David Marsden's theory of employment systems. On the basis of an assessment of the psychological, economic and legal contracts underlying platform-mediated work, we discuss the limited functionality of these contracts in their ability to control opportunism among platforms, workers and clients. Our analysis contributes to existing debates by providing a theoretically informed framework for analysing the design of platform-mediated work systems and their consequences for the participating parties. Our insights add nuance to the platform regulation debate by going beyond the question of worker classification towards understanding the organizational and institutional elements of the work system that need to be redesigned and supported by appropriate institutional safeguards. An employment systems perspective also allows for reflection on the economic, societal, sectoral and strategic conditions that could drive such changes.