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The Thought of Work, by John W. Budd, is reviewed.
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In this discussion paper, we make the case for a renewed national dialogue on workplace democracy. Though the term may sound better suited to an academic/policy conference from the 1970s, in plain terms workplace democracy actually speaks to an ever-present need: i.e., advancing the fundamental rights of employees to associate freely and to have some say over decisions that affect their lives in the workplace. By expanding employee voice, as a country, we can also generate positive spillovers that enhance job satisfaction, raise productivity and increase civic participation. These benefits improve the lives of workers, increase the bottom lines for firms and enrich society as a whole. These are also ideas, it should be noted, that lie at the heart of industrial relations scholarship going back more than a century and which we draw from in this discussion paper. --Executive Summary
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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