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Mutual gains can be made through greater cross-pollination between labour economics and industrial relations. The paper is organized around common criticisms of labour economics, with examples from industrial relations. Such criticisms, and their underlying principles, often explain important concepts in industrial relations, which can provide insights that may enhance labour economics. The intent here is to apply a forward-looking lens to advance theoretical and empirical reflection on current and future aspects of work and employment.

Une meilleure pollinisation croisée entre l’économie du travail et les relations industrielles conduirait à des gains mutuels. Le présent article s’articule autour de critiques courantes de l’économie du travail qui sont illustrées par des exemples tirés des relations industrielles. Ces critiques, ainsi que leurs principes sous-jacents, expliquent souvent d’importants concepts des relations industrielles et apportent par le fait- même des connaissances susceptibles d’enrichir les réflexions en économie du travail. L’intention de cet article est d’avoir un regard prospectif pour faire avancer la réflexion théorique et empirique sur les aspects actuels et futurs du travail et de l’emploi.

Based on qualitative interviews of workers, managers and labour inspectors in China, we examine how employers adjust, often in subtle fashions, to minimum wage increases. Our findings highlight the “law of unintended consequences” in that their effects are often “undone” or offset by subtle adjustments such as reductions in fringe benefits and in overtime work and overtime pay premiums that are otherwise valued by employees. Employees often feel that they are no better off in spite of minimum wage increases because of these offsetting adjustments. This study also suggests possible reasons for the small or zero effect of minimum wage on employment in China. Lack of enforcement may be one of the reasons, but the employees we interviewed seem well aware of the legal minimum wage and employers do not want to get involved in disputes over this matter. For employers who would otherwise be affected by the minimum wage increase, the cost increase is mitigated by the offsetting adjustments. As a result, minimum wages do not seem to weaken the competitive position of employers in China.

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)

Contents: Canadian labour and employment relations / Daphne G. Taras and Morley Gunderson -- Understanding the unionization decision / Ann C. Frost and Daphne G. Taras -- Labour history and the development of modern capitalism / Richard Marsden -- Unions : membership, structures, actions and challenges / Gregor Murray -- The management of industrial relations / Mark Thompson -- Managing the high-involvement workplace / Anil Verma and Daphne G. Taras -- Social, political, and economic environments / Frank Reid and Rafael Gomez -- Collective bargaining legislation in Canada / Sara Slinn -- The individual employment contract and employment / Geoffrey England -- Collective bargaining : structure, process, and innovation / Richard Chaykowski -- The collective agreement / Anthony Giles and Akivah Starkman -- Strikes and dispute resolution / Morley Gunderson, Bob Hebdon, and Douglas Hyatt -- The grievance arbitration process and workplace / Kenneth Wm. Thornicroft -- Union impact on compensation, productivity, and management of the organization / Morley Gunderson and Douglas Hyatt -- Public-sector collective bargaining / Mark Thompson and Patrice Jalette -- Union-management relations in Québec / Esther Déom and Jean-Noël Grenier with Marie-Pierre Beaumont -- Trade unions and labour relations regimes: international perspectives in a globalizing world / Carla Lipsig-Mummé. Previous eds. published under title: Union-management relations in Canada; Includes bibliographical references and index.

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.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to knowledge of profit-sharing by utilizing a before-and-after analysis of panel data to assess whether the effects of profit-sharing adoption on productivity growth vary, depending on whether a profit-sharing adopter utilizes work teams or not, while controlling for numerous variables that may affect these results within a carefully constructed sample of Canadian establishments. To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the moderating role of teamwork in the relationship between profit-sharing and productivity growth. Besides the implications for profit-sharing, ascertaining whether profit-sharing and work teams are complementary practices would have important implications for understanding how to develop more effective work teams, a topic of ongoing interest. We utilized a longitudinal research design to compare within-firm productivity growth during the three-year and five-year periods subsequent to profit-sharing adoption and within-firm productivity growth during the same periods in firms that had not adopted profit-sharing. Overall, our results suggest that use of team-based production plays an important moderating role in the success of employee profit-sharing—at least in terms of workplace productivity growth. Establishments that had adopted profit-sharing showed a substantial and highly significant increase in workplace productivity over both the three-year and five-year periods subsequent to adoption, but only if they had work teams. These findings are in line with the notion that work teams help to mitigate potential shirking behaviour in profit-sharing firms (Freeman, Kruse and Blasi, 2010) and are also in line with the argument that work teams serve as an effective mechanism to help translate the purported motivational and other benefits of profit-sharing into tangible productivity gains (Heywood and Jirjahn, 2009).

Our empirical analysis is based on Statistics Canada’s worker-firm matched data set, the 2003 Workplace and Employee Survey (WES). The sample size is substantial: about 4,000 workers over the age of 50 and 12,000 between the ages of 25 and 49. Training was a focus of the survey, which offers a wealth of worker-related and firm-related training variables. We found that the mean probability of receiving training was 9.3 percentage points higher for younger workers than for older ones. Almost half of the gap is explained by older workers having fewer training-associated characteristics (personal, employment, workplace, human resource practices and occupation/industry/region), and slightly more than half by them having a lower propensity to receive training, this being the gap that remained after we controlled for differences in training-associated characteristics. Their lower propensity to receive training likely reflects the higher opportunity cost of lost wages during the time spent in training, possible higher psychological costs and lower expected benefits due to their shorter remaining work-life and lower productivity gains from training, as discussed in the literature. The lower propensity of older workers to receive training tended to prevail across 54 different training measures, with notable exceptions discussed in detail. We found that older workers can be trained, but their training should be redesigned in several ways: by making instruction slower and self-paced; by assigning hands-on practical exercises; by providing modular training components to be taken in stages; by familiarizing the trainees with new equipment; and by minimizing required reading and amount of material covered. The concept of “one-size-fits- all” does not apply to the design and implementation of training programs for older workers.

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.

We examine the ways in which two major and related governmental institutions of China, the Communist Party of China (CPC) and government controlled All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), exert different effects on the attitudes and behaviour of people toward the environment. Our motivation is to see which institution is more effective in making individuals ‘aware’ of environmental issues, expressing a ‘willingness to pay’ to alleviate the problems, and ultimately to ‘act’ on the issue by altering their behaviour. Based on theories of planned behaviour and social learning, we hypothesize that membership in the CPC as well as in the ACFTU fosters an ‘awareness’ of environmental problems and a ‘willingness to make a sacrifice’ to protect the environment, but that members of the ACFTU are more likely than members of the CPC to act on the issue by altering their behaviour. We test our hypothesis based on a nationally representative sample (n = 3112) from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS). Our results indicate that both the Party and the union have positive effects on ‘awareness’ and ‘willingness to pay’, but the union effect is generally stronger and only it (and not the Party) affects individual behaviour toward protecting the environment. Unions in China are generally regarded as having little or no independent power to organize workers and engage in free collective bargaining. Their role is to foster harmony between workers and employers and to co-opt grassroots actions, wildcat strikes and the growth of independent unions, all in the interest of fostering stability and growth. While this is undoubtedly the case, our results are consistent with an emerging view of a more variegated picture of Chinese trade unions that highlights some more positive elements, in our case, fostering ‘actions’ to improve the environment in China.