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The book ,"Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice," by John Budd, is reviewed.

The Thought of Work, by John W. Budd, is reviewed.

Workplace democracy speaks to an ever-present need to advance the fundamental rights of employees to associate freely and to have some say over business decisions that affect their lives. It also speaks to the need to respect the expertise that employees develop day in and day out on the job and, importantly, to strengthen protections and extend rights to marginalized workers who are bearing the brunt of the shift to low-wage, insecure, precarious work. In this discussion paper, authors Rafael Gomez...and Juan Gomez...offer recommendations on a path forward. --Publisher's description

The importance of volunteer activity for employees, employers and governmental and non-governmental organizations that are increasingly relying on volunteers is discussed, followed by an econometric analysis relating volunteer activity to a variety of characteristics of work and family as well as to personal and demographic characteristics of the volunteers. The analysis is based on Cycle 9 of the Canadian General Social Survey (GSS) of 1994—an ideal data set since it links volunteer activity to a wide range of characteristics of work and family. The results are interpreted through the lens of a household production function framework, highlighting the importance of time cost and income, but also characteristics of work and family. (English)

We utilize two representative cross-national data sets to shed light on what has been a vexing problem in the industrial relations literature; namely, the existence and persistence of the representation gap documented more than a decade ago by Freeman and Rogers (1999). Specifically, we estimate the determinants of employee desire for a range of collective voice mechanisms, including unionization. We do this separately for the US and Canada and then, using an application of the Oaxaca decomposition technique, we decompose the differences in those desires between the two countries into a component due to differences in the characteristics of respondents and another due to differences in preferences for collective voice mechanisms. Our results indicate that: (1) roughly half of workers in both countries expressed a desire for a range of collective voice mechanisms to deal with workplace issues; (2) that desire for collective voice was stronger in the US than in Canada; and (3) that virtually all of the stronger desire for collective workplace voice in the US, as compared to Canada, was due to stronger employee preferences for collective solutions as opposed to differences in the characteristics of workers. We offer plausible explanations for our findings and discuss the implications for labour law reform.

We study the propensity of persons with disabilities to engage in volunteer activity using the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS). Our principal focus is on the effects of various income support programs on persons with disabilities participation in volunteer activities because income support programs can differ with respect to their treatment of unpaid work. For example, workers' compensation programs embody strong disincentives to volunteering while public disability insurance programs explicitly encourage unpaid work. We find that workers' compensation is associated with decreases in the probability of volunteering while public disability insurance is associated with increases in the propensity to volunteer. The relevance of these results to both theories of volunteerism and public policy is discussed.

Across countries, union membership and voter turnout are highly correlated. In unadjusted terms union members maintain a roughly 0.10 to 0.12 point gap in voting propensity over non-members. We propose a model -- with three causal channels -- that explains this correlation and then empirically tests for the contribution of each channel to the overall union voting gap. The first channel through which union members are more likely to vote is through the so-called "monopoly face" of unionism whereby unions increase wages for members and higher incomes are a significant positive determinant of voting. The second is the "social custom" model of unionism whereby co-worker peer pressure creates incentives for union members to vote alongside fellow members. The third channel is based on the "voice face" of unionism whereby employees who are (or have been) exposed to collective bargaining and union representation at the workplace are also more likely to increase their attachment to democratic engagement in society at large. We test to see how much of the raw "union voting gap" is accounted for by these three competing channels using data from 29 European countries. We find that all three channels are at work, with the voice accounting for half of the overall gap and the other two channels (monopoly face and social custom) each accounting for approximately a quarter of the overall union voting gap.

We offer an explanation for the phenomenon of declining democratic engagement by assuming that what happens at work is the primary driver of what occurs outside of the workplace. If workers are exposed to the formalities of collective bargaining and union representation, they also perhaps increase their attachment to, and willingness to participate in, structures of democratic governance outside of the workplace as well. In order for this argument to hold, one first needs to test whether individual union members are more prone to vote and participate in civil society than non-members: other research refers to this as the union voting premium. We find that the voice effect of unionism on democratic participation is significant and is larger for groups that are significantly under-represented when it comes to voting, namely those with fewer years of education, immigrants, and younger workers. We also discuss the legal implications of these findings.

The industrial relations (IR) field in Canada and the United States (US) emerged in the late 1910s-early 1920s and is thus on the cusp of its 100th anniversary. The impetus for the creation of the IR field was growing public alarm in both countries over the escalating level of conflict, violence, and class polarization in employer-employee relations. The two countries established federal-level government investigative committees, the Royal Commission on Industrial Relations (1919) in Canada and the Commission on Industrial Relations (1911-1915) in the US, to travel cross-country, gather evidence, and report their findings and overall evaluation. To commemorate the IR field’s centenary, this paper conducts the same type of cross-national ER evaluation, but with modern methods. First, this exercise requires a formal evaluation instrument, like a physical exam worksheet. Adopted is a modified version of a balanced scorecard. Second, the scorecard’s framework and questions should be theoretically informed. The framework used is a modified version of the diagrammatic model of an IR system presented by Mackenzie King in Industry and Humanity (1918). The third step is to fill in the scorecard with data from individual workplaces, which are obtained for the US from a new nationally-representative survey of 2000+ workplaces, the State of Workplace Employment Relations Survey (SWERS). The fourth step is to aggregate all the diagnostic measures to obtain a summary numerical estimate for each of the companies of its state of ER performance and health. Based on a 1-7 (7 = highest) scale, then converted to F to A grades, we find that the average ER grade given by managers is B+ and by employees C+. The company scores are graphed in a frequency distribution that visually represents, for the first time in the literature, the lowest-to-highest pattern of employment relations performance and health across the US.

Why have Americans, who by a clear majority approve of unions, been joining them in smaller numbers than ever before? This book answers that question by comparing the American experience with that of Canada, where approval for unions is significantly lower than in the United States, but where since the mid-1960s workers have joined organized labor to a much greater extent. Given that the two countries are outwardly so similar, what explains this paradox? This book provides a detailed comparative analysis of both countries using, among other things, a detailed survey conducted in the United States and Canada by the Ipsos-Reid polling group. The authors explain that the relative reluctance of employees in the United States to join unions, compared with those in Canada, is rooted less in their attitudes toward unions than in the former country's deep-seated tradition of individualism and laissez-faire economic values. Canada has a more statist, social democratic tradition, which is in turn attributable to its Tory and European conservative lineage. Canadian values are therefore more supportive of unionism, making unions more powerful and thus, paradoxically, lowering public approval of unions. Public approval is higher in the United States, where unions exert less of an influence over politics and the economy. --Publisher's description