‘Nothing gets done and no one knows why’: PCS and workplace control of Lean in HM Revenue and Customs

This article examines the willingness and capacity of public sector unions to mobilise action against changes in the labour process in order to maintain some measure of control at the point of production. Taking as an instance an extended dispute in Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs over the introduction and impact of Lean processes, it marshals evidence gathered from documentary sources, branch representatives and national lay full‐time officers to engage with the notion of a trade union bureaucracy. In taking a union with a left‐wing leadership and a section with 80 per cent membership with an expressed willingness to escalate industrial action, the article tests Hyman's 1979 contention that, rather than a concentration on a bureaucratic caste, a much better explanation for conservatism centres on the nature of social relations within the union that encompass a wider layer of representatives.     

Do cultural differences explain differences in attitudes towards unions? Culture and attitudes towards unions among call centre workers in Britain and India

This article adds to the literature on worker attitudes towards unions by investigating the impact of cultural attitudes and the call centre labour process on union attitudes among call centre workers in Britain and India. It is hypothesised that workers with egalitarian and collectivist cultural attitudes will be more likely to have pro‐union attitudes than other workers, although if the impact of cultural attitudes is mediated by history and institutions, it might be expected that this relationship is stronger for British than Indian workers. Conversely, if union attitudes are largely a function of the call centre labour process, we would expect union attitudes to be similar among workers in both countries. Our results only partially support our hypotheses. Collectivist attitudes are only weakly related to union attitudes among the British sample but are more strongly related in the Indian sample. There are significant differences between union attitudes among our British and Indian samples. The article concludes that relationship between cultural attitudes and union attitudes are heavily dependent on institutional context. Cultural attitudes are unlikely to be either a constraint or a facilitator of union efforts to organise workers.     

Organising young workers in the Public and Commercial Services union

This article analyses the relationship between unions and young workers using the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union as a case study. PCS is leading the way in terms of engaging with and representing young workers. However, its future success may be limited due to changes to the external environment.     

Time Variation of Ex-Dividend Day Stock Returns and Corporate Dividend Capture: A Reexamination

This paper documents some empirical facts about ex-day abnormal returns to high dividend yield stocks that are potentially subject to corporate dividend capture. We find that average abnormal ex-dividend day returns are uniformly negative in each year after the introduction of negotiated commission rates and that time variation in ex-day returns during the negotiated commission rates era is consistent with corporate tax-based dividend capture. Ex-day returns are more negative when the tax advantage to corporate dividend capture is greatest and more positive when increases in transaction costs and risk reduce incentives to engage in corporate tax-based dividend capture.     

Fixed Investment and Economic Growth in China

This paper attempts to investigate empirically the investment-growth relationship in China. Using the exogeneity framework pioneered by Engle et al. (1983) and Engle and Hendry (1993), we find that fixed investment is a key determinant of China's economic growth, which, surprisingly, has not been rigorously examined in the literature. The super exogeneity test results suggest that there exists a robust (or structurally invariant) relationship between capital formation and income growth, thereby giving credence to policy evaluation.     

Ein simulationsbasierter Renditevergleich von fondsgebundenen Altersvorsorgeprodukten

The demographic change and its consequences forces citizens of Germany to realign towards private insurance products. This decision should be based on structured analyses. Most recent studies were inconclusive regarding this decision.As investments are commonly compared using average developments of the underlying, the possibility to switch the underlying during the duration of the investment, they are not represented accordingly and therefore bias the results of the calculation. We perform a thorough simulation analysis to compare two competing investments for retirement provisions while respecting additional costs and tax implications of switching.Without any switching the evaluation of other studies is generally verified (pure investment beats insurance product). But as soon as switching is implemented the tax advantage of insurance products is overcompensating the cost advantage of a pure investment solution. Further research should aim in this direction.     

Job quality and the economics of New Labour: a critical appraisal using subjective survey data

This paper assesses the record on job quality during the earlyterm of office of the New Labour government by interpreting,from a political economy perspective, changes in a variety ofsubjective measures of job quality taken from several differentdata sources. We find some improvements in job quality overthe period 1998–2004; however we argue that these improvementshave arisen not because of New Labour's policies towards theworkplace but because of low and falling rates of unemployment.Despite recent improvements, a large number of workers in Britainremain in low quality jobs and, without a radical change ofpolicy direction, sustained and substantial progress in thequality of work will remain elusive.     

INFORMATION, RATIONAL EXPECTATIONS AND MACROECONOMIC MODELLING

Book reivewed in this article:
Thomas J. Sargent (1987) Dynamic Macroeconomic Theory.
M. Hashem Pesaran (1987) The Limits to Rational Expectations.