Political Entrepreneurs and Co‐Managers: Labour Transnationalism at Four Multinational Auto Companies

This article examines labour transnationalism within four multinational automakers. In our sample, we find different forms of labour transnationalism, including transnational collective bargaining, mobilization, information exchange and social codes of conduct. We explain the differences through the interaction between management and labour in the context of the company structure; of particular importance are transnational coercive comparisons by management and the orientations of worker representatives as political entrepreneurs or co‐managers. We conclude that, although intensified worker‐side cross‐border co‐operation has not prevented wage‐based competition in general (due to the lack of between‐firm co‐ordination), it has reshaped employment relations within these multinational corporations.     

我国工薪所得个人所得税费用扣除标准的评价及动态测算模型的构建

工薪所得个人所得税费用扣除标准应以某年城镇居民最高收入家庭每一就业者负担的月消费性支出作为衡量指标,并充分考虑家庭人口和物价变动因素。通过计算1996年~2007年城镇居民家庭全国及分组每一就业者负担的月消费性支出,并对照2005年以来的两次工薪所得个人所得税费用扣除标准调整情况,发现两次调整均存在一定滞后性和扣除不足性,影响了居民的消费支出。在充分考虑家庭人口和物价变动因素条件下,通过构建我国工薪所得个人所得税费用扣除标准动态测算模型,测算结果是,我国2009年、2010年和2011年工薪所得个人所得税费用扣除标准比较的合理数值分别应为2,500元、2,650元和2,850元。     

The Effects of Race and Worker Productivity on Performance Evaluations

Using personnel data from a large firm, we examine the role of race, supervisor's race, and worker productivity on performance ratings for a diverse employee population. Controlling for worker productivity and other demographic variables, black employees receive lower ratings than whites. These differences in performance evaluations are associated with the racial composition of the subordinate-supervisor pair. Racial differences between subordinate and supervisor lead to lower ratings for both black and white subordinates.     

The Ethnographic Contribution to Understanding Co‐worker Relations

Relations among co‐workers are becoming both more important and more complex in modern workplaces as authority over job decisions is shifted from supervisors to quasi‐independent teams. The author develops a model of co‐worker relations that recognizes these changes and evaluates this model using data content coded from the full population of published book‐length workplace ethnographies (N = 204). Confirmatory factor analysis techniques support the existence of three distinct aspects of co‐worker relations: cohesiveness, conflict and peer supervision. The most important determinants of co‐worker relations are employee involvement programmes and management behaviour. Returning to specific case studies allows a theoretical elaboration of how employee involvement and management behaviour condition co‐worker relations. The author concludes by noting the importance of intellectual exchanges between qualitative and quantitative methods for generating new advances in the study of work and employment relations.     

Facilitators and Inhibitors of Collective Action: A Case Study of a US‐Owned Manufacturing Plant

This article develops a theoretical model of collective action at work using the key concepts of mobilization triggers, facilitating factors, and inhibiting factors. It then illustrates the value of this model for understanding why a low‐pay, low‐skill, blue‐collar manufacturing facility remained non‐union, drawing primarily on the accounts of a limited sample of redundant workers. These accounts are used to demonstrate the importance of social contexts where inhibiting conditions dominate and where management practices succeed in gaining worker consent and forestalling a collective response from workers.     

Justice and Union Participation: An Extension and Test of Mobilization Theory

Heeding John Kelly's call to reorient the field of industrial relations towards the study of injustice, we employ mobilization, social exchange and organizational justice theories to specify and test a model of union participation. Using individual‐level survey data from public‐sector union members to test our model, we find that differences in worker perceptions of workplace injustice and union justice explain slightly more variation in members’ union participation than more traditional measures of job satisfaction and union instrumentality perceptions. The implications of our analysis for researchers and union practitioners are also discussed.     

How Does Market Making Affect Industrial Relations? Evidence from Eight German Hospitals

The introduction of market mechanisms matters for industrial relations. In the German hospital sector, national liberalization policies have put immense pressure on local management and worker representatives and led to the growth of a low‐wage sector. In case studies of eight hospitals, we find some locales where market making has led to union revitalization and mobilization, but this effect varies. Using an eight‐way comparison, we infer a configuration of three aspects of the local political economy — labour markets, politics and co‐determination rules — that together provide a well‐fitting explanation for both variation and change.     

‘Shopping for Voice’: Do Pre‐Existing Non‐Union Representation Plans Matter When Employees Unionize?

The transition to unionization in three workplaces with pre‐existing non‐union employee representation plans (NERPs) is contrasted to three matched sites, which had only individual representation. Pre‐existing collective voice arrangements had substantial effects on the process and outcomes of unionization. While the individual representation sites presented a conventional process of mobilization and attachment to the union, the NERP sites revealed a more equivocal outcome. The union was used in an instrumental manner to increase NERP power and to achieve worker demands already articulated by the NERP. NERP leaders became union leaders. There remained significant attachment to the NERP and a reluctance to fully embrace unionization.     

Unobserved Worker Quality and Inter-Industry Wage Differentials*

This study quantitatively assesses two alternative explanations for inter-industry wage differentials: worker heterogeneity in the form of unobserved quality and firm heterogeneity in the form of a firm's willingness to pay (WTP) for workers' productive attributes. Building on hedonic models of differentiated product demand, we develop an empirical hedonic model of labor demand and apply a two-stage nonparametric procedure to recover worker and firm heterogeneities. In the first stage we recover unmeasured worker quality by estimating market-specific hedonic wage functions nonparametrically. In the second stage we infer each firm's WTP parameters for worker attributes by using first-order conditions from the demand model. We apply our approach to quantify inter-industry wage differentials on the basis of individual data from the NLSY79 and find that worker quality accounts for approximately two thirds of the inter-industry wage differentials.     

The Changing Spatial Relationship Between Residences and Worksites in the New York Metropolitan Region: Implications for Public Policy

In recent decades, most new metropolitan population and job growth has occurred in the suburbs. Conventional wisdom suggests that because of the selective nature of suburban labor market development, most metropolitan workers currently live further from their jobs. Distance, in turn, fragments urban labor markets and creates physical and informational barriers to employment.
This article examines the selective pattern of central city-suburban labor market development within the New York Metropolitan Region between 1960 and 1975 and analyzes the extent to which worker residences have adapted to spatial shifts in employment.     

Labour Market Regimes and Worker Recruitment and Retention in the European Union: Plant Comparisons

We analyse worker recruitment and retention outcomes, contrasting production worker skill profiles in the UK subsidiaries of five multinationals with, in each case, a matched plant in another EU state. From personnel records we build up plant distributions of worker pay, age, schooling, prior experience and tenure. We find evidence of local management discretion, with differences in unit labour costs and in recruitment/retention outcomes between the matched subsidiaries. UK plants have a 'hire and fire' environment and a less skilled worker mix. Such outcomes can be linked to the UK's lower labour costs and less regulated labour market.     

Immigration and Informal Labor

We develop state‐level proxies for informal employment using differences between measures of self‐reported employment and officially sanctioned employment. In construction and landscaping, industries associated with under‐the‐table labor, we develop proxies for informal work based on productivity per officially sanctioned worker. We relate each set of proxies for informal employment to changes in immigrant population and composition. We find some evidence that immigration is associated with informal employment generally and in the construction industry when prevailing wages are low. States with high concentrations of low‐skilled male immigrants have higher levels of informal employment in the landscaping industry.     

Flexibility in the gig economy: managing time on three online piecework platforms

Gig economy platforms seem to provide extreme temporal flexibility to workers, giving them full control over how to spend each hour and minute of the day. What constraints do workers face when attempting to exercise this flexibility? We use 30 worker interviews and other data to compare three online piecework platforms with different histories and worker demographics: Mechanical Turk, MobileWorks, and CloudFactory. We find that structural constraints (availability of work and degree of worker dependence on the work) as well as cultural‐cognitive constraints (procrastination and presenteeism) limit worker control over scheduling in practice. The severity of these constraints varies significantly between platforms, the formally freest platform presenting the greatest structural and cultural‐cognitive constraints. We also find that workers have developed informal practices, tools, and communities to address these constraints. We conclude that focusing on outcomes rather than on worker control is a more fruitful way to assess flexible working arrangements.     

Worker Turnover, Job Turnover and Collective Bargaining in Spain

This paper analyses the relationship between the presence of organized labour in firms (approximated by the scope of collective bargaining) and the extent of gross worker and job flows. According to the voice theory of Freeman, those firms having a union presence will have lower worker mobility. However, there is no analysis of the effects of the presence of organized labour on gross job flows. Using a Spanish data base, we find evidence of the existence of a voice effect on gross worker flows but not clear support for a voice effect on gross job flows.     

The Interactive Effects of Labor‐Led Political Mobilization and Vote Propensity on Turnout: Evidence from Five Elections

The concept of unions as political mobilization groups is not well documented relative to the general determinants of voting behavior and labor’s traditional political roles. Specifically, scholars have yet to study the interaction between individuals’ propensities to vote and labor‐led mobilization. Does labor have a stronger influence on frequent, occasional, or non‐voters? Using data totaling 188,551 individuals in Los Angeles over five elections, this paper empirically studies the interaction between vote propensity and mobilization, finding that occasional voters are generally most receptive to labor’s efforts, particularly amongst Latinos, and that personal visits and phone calls are successful for occasional voters.     

Managerial Responsiveness to Union and Nonunion Worker Voice in Britain

Over the last two decades, there has been a switch in British workplaces away from union voice and representative worker voice more generally toward direct employee involvement and nonunion representative forms of voice. This article assesses the implications of this switch for the effectiveness of worker voice, as measured by employee perceptions of managerial responsiveness. In general, perceptions of managerial responsiveness are better among employees with nonunion voice than they are among employees with union voice.     

Profit Sharing for Increased Training Investments

This article investigates whether paying a profit‐related wage stimulates training investments. The results point to increased worker effort and wage flexibility as two channels through which profit sharing enhances investments in training. While both effects are found for young workers, for older workers, profit sharing mainly affects training investments through greater worker effort. The results suggest that profit sharing can be especially useful for stimulating training among older workers, a growing group in the labour force with a relatively weak labour market position due to a lack of training.     

Labor Unions and Political Mobilization: Diminishing Returns of Repetitious Contact

Voter mobilization by unions has garnered some attention from scholars, and is seen as an important political tool. Unions often mobilize voters repeatedly across several campaigns; however, the literature treats mobilization as a singular event. This paper empirically analyzes turnout of 85,064 registered voters over 14 months at five election intervals in Los Angeles, exploring whether union‐led mobilization is subject to diminishing returns across multiple elections. Results indicate that diminishing returns occur; three or more contacts are no more beneficial than one or two. Contact in recent elections is more effective than distant contact, and results differ slightly by contact type.     

Job Attributes and Federal Wage Differentials

As part of the debate on how to treat attributes of a job (as opposed to a worker) when measuring federal differentials, the focus has been on the proper treatment of employer size. Using employer size, we highlight the two extremes in the literature of either holding job attributes constant or of assuming attributes do not transfer between sectors. A third alternative-estimating the extent to which the attribute will transfer-is much closer in value to that generated by holding employer size constant.     

Service Delivery Networks and Employment Relations at German Airports: Jeopardizing Industrial Peace on the Ground?

In this article, we ask how organizational restructuring towards a network form of service delivery challenges an established form of employment relations in Germany, that is labour–management collaboration. Building on a theoretical discussion of the marketization hypothesis, we develop a structuration perspective on the relationship between network restructuring and labour–management collaboration, which highlights the political economy of inter-firm networks. Empirically, we focus on two major airport authorities in Germany. Our findings show how these authorities at the core of service delivery networks face a strategic trade-off between short-term labour cost reductions and more adversarial employment relations. Apart from coinciding with a deterioration in working conditions for service workers, the handling of this trade-off depends on managers’ and worker representatives’ commitment to collaboration across the network. While unions and works councils initially continued with social partnership-type practices, the more adversarial management practices for enacting the network restructuring cause a fragmentation on the workers’ side and increase the conflict potential. We conclude that the agency of management and worker representatives in the enactment of inter-firm networks oscillates between more partnership-like and more conflictive practices, which turn the network restructuring into a political process with divergent outcomes for employment relations.