Labour relations and industrial productivity

Abstract

Britain and Sweden have often been cited to illustrate the contrasting fortunes of post-War European economies. Britain seemed destined to struggle with bad labour relations and comparatively poor levels of output, whilst Sweden established a reputation as a model of corporatist management and high productivity.¹ The industrial turmoil of the 1970s swept Scandinavia as well as the U.K. and blurred this convenient contrast, but it was the dramatic improvement in the performance of British manufacturing in the 1980s which has forced us to reappraise the nature of ‘the British disease’. This improvement has been attributed by a number of writers to the changed climate of industrial relations, as many employers broke with the bad bargaining practices of earlier decades.² The power of the unions has been curtailed if not completely extinguished and resistance to new technologies has been overcome in many of the traditional strongholds of craft production. It seems logical to conclude that the defeat of the unions and the reform of industrial relations have been essential prerequisites of improved output.³ Yet the evidence is, at best, ambiguous. Current debates on productivity in Britain during the 1980s indicate the difficulty of measuring changes in contemporary output and the limits of the data available for such an exercise.⁴ The Swedish economy, and Scandinavia more generally, were historically successfully in combining a steady improvement in output with very high levels of trade unionism.⁵ It was able to sustain this progress during the 1970s and 1980s in the face of mounting pressures on the Swedish model. Established agreements were called into question by the outbreak of large scale strikes whilst dissatisfaction with central negotiations became apparent on the shop floor and in the board rooms of Swedish industry. Wage differentials increased whilst productivity improvements declined during the 1980s, particularly in the export industries. The trade unions were less attractive to manual workers in Sweden as well as Britain and in the opening months of the 1990 the Social Democrats were thrown into crisis by the resistance to their efforts to introduce austerity controls on labour. Sweden seemed to have belatedly arrived at the same impasse which British labour faced a decade earlier.     

Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution1

Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a large number of autobiographies by working men who lived through the industrial revolution has demonstrated that there was an upsurge in child labour in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with children's work entrenched in traditional sectors as well as spreading in newly mechanized factories and workshops. I have interpreted this rise in terms of the appearance of a new equilibrium in the early industrial economy with more and younger children at work. The new equilibrium, in turn, was related to a number of co‐incidental developments including: an increase in the relative productivity of children as a result of mechanization, new divisions of labour, and changes in the organization of work; the dynamics of competitive dependence linking labour market and families; high dependency ratios within families; stumbling male wages and pockets of poverty; family instability; and breadwinner frailty. The establishment of these links forges a new synchronization between revised views of the industrial revolution and a revisionist history of child labour.     

From the substance to the shadow: the role of the court in Japanese labour markets

Modern contract law generally does not allow property rights or similar claims to be made against employees. This undermines a claim on the return on the employer's investments in recruiting and training a worker, making them vulnerable to possible infringement from a bystander. Accordingly, employers’ investment in recruiting and training might become deficient. Therefore, protecting an employer's investment, balanced against the mobility of the labour market for better employer/employee matches, has emerged as an issue during the transition towards a market‐based economy. This article explores how the Japanese state court in its early period addressed this issue in the tight labour market of the silk‐reeling industry, which was the leading industry at that time. Initially, the court directly protected the interests of employers whose employees were poached, at the expense of workers’ mobility. Then, it seemed to govern transactions between employers indirectly as a shadow off‐the‐equilibrium path. Thus, an employer whose employee was poached and an employer who carried out the poaching would privately negotiate to settle the dispute, using a possible suit as a threat against the poacher. An examination of the suits that were actually filed supports this hypothesis. This indirect governance facilitated labour market mobility with some protection of the original employer's claim.     

Economic restructuring and emerging patterns of industrial relations

The Review of Black Political Economy -     

Peasant labour for urban industry: Temporary contract labour,urban-rural balance and class relations in a Chinese county

Urban-rural relations in China have a dual character: while a higher level of urban-rural economic balance than most other countries has been achieved, a sharp structural cleavage between workers and peasants has been maintained, based mainly on strict household registrations. Peasants are prevented from migrating to towns and gaining employment there, except under specially approved contracts arranged to resolve local shortages of industrial labour. Contract labour has complex and important effects on rural and urban industrial development. It also embodies the duality of urban-rural relations in China: at the same time as it redistributes wage funds from urban to rural areas, it reinforces the class cleavage between workers and peasants (including contract workers). It also opens up a complex web of inequalities and cleavages among those peasants with contract work and those without. Contract workers have been placed in a contradictory class position which has been a flashpoint of political conflict. The relationships of contract labour to urban industrial and rural development, urbanization, urban-rural balance and structural cleavage, class structure and political conflict are examined through a study of Shulu County, an ordinary rural area with agrowing industrial centre in which over half of the industrial labour force is comprised of peasant contract workers.     

From industrial policy to competition policy: A discussion based on two debates

The effectiveness and fairness of industrial policies are highly controversial topics in the academia both at home and abroad, which involve the basic proposition concerning the relationship of government and market. The governance mode of a well-positioned limited government plays an indispensable role in guiding economic transition and structural change, as well as correcting for market failures. Selective industrial policies are necessary, but they should be used in a prudent manner. Instead, marketization reform that provides the underlying institutional environment is more fundamental and crucial for sustainable economic development. Both theory and practice show that only a limited government can lead to an efficient market and provide effective industrial policies. China still has a long way to go towards a modern economic system, which calls for the transition from the use of industrial policies to the use of competition policies. Especially under the current severe internal and external environment, it is particularly necessary to accurately grasp the basic and fundamental nature of competition policy and the short-term and complementary feature of industrial policy as a reform principle. Only through such marketization reform can the ideal state of a limited government be approached so as to finally establish a modern economic system.     

Tradition and interaction: research trends in modern Japanese industrial history

This paper surveys research findings since the early 1970s, focusing on the growth processes of both traditional and modern industries and their relations with government activity in the period between the 1870s and 1940. Most of the surveyed research can be seen as a response to two theses: first, that pre-1940 Japan was essentially a market-led economy; and second, that the traditional sector did not decline in the industrialisation process, but in fact prospered. The survey argues that there were a good deal of interactions between the modern and traditional sectors at regional levels and that the regional economy occupied a significant place in the ways in which government business relations were structured.     

关于我国建筑企业规模结构问题的思考

产业结构调整和优化是经济发展的又一次机遇。本文结合盐城工业的现状 ,分析了工业发展的结构障碍 ,并提出了盐城工业发展的对策。     

从欧洲看深圳建设现代物流业临港工业区的目标与政策

一、物流业 1.深圳发展现代物流业的两大目标 (1)深圳建设现代物流业,应该树立两大目标:其一,促进现代化的、大型的、综合型的物流企业的迅速成长,提高物流业的效率和效益;其二,利用现代"物流链",推进与内地关联企业的纵向兼并和重组(不是简单的横向联合和扩大),实现深圳产业结构的优化升级.     

From growth studies to microhistory: Finnish economic and social history in the 1990s and early 2000s

Abstract

Economic and social history was already being practised in Finland before the Second World War, although it became established as an independent academic discipline only after the war. The terms social history or economic history were not used then; what we now recognise for instance as social history was then called “cultural history” or “history of the culture”. This approach was often characterised the collective approach to distinguish it from the individualistic approach of more historicist study. Nearly all economics research was historical before the 1950s, and practically all professors of economics were actually historians by training and had defended their dissertations in history, usually after having studied some economic problem of the past. But our discipline has also other roots. In Finnish universities the discipline called social policy, usually included in faculties of social science, has always had strong ties with social history.     

Market and institutional forces in industrial relations: the development of national collective bargaining, 1910–1920

This article reviews recent trends in the historiography of British industrial relations, and highlights a growing emphasis on the influence of employers and impersonal economic forces. In response, the article argues for a renewed recognition of trade unions as a proactive force in the development of industrial relations systems. This view is supported by analysis of the influence of market and institutional forces upon the spread of national collective bargaining. The conclusion is that commercial pressures on employers were relatively unimportant in a process driven by human agency, institutional forces, and wider economic pressures.     

Migration at the multi-level intersection of industrial relations: the Schleswig-Holstein Campaign and the Swedish garment industry in the early 1950s

This article deals with the so-called Schleswig-Holstein campaign, whereby about 800 – mostly female – young Germans arrived in Sweden in 1950–1951. The campaign was a German initiative, emphasising vocational training for young and unemployed refugees and expellees, even though it ended up in a more pragmatic labour recruitment. Firstly, the article investigates the international relationship between West German and Swedish labour-market authorities, and secondly, it concentrates on industrial relations in the Swedish garment industry. Thirdly, on local level it focuses on the streamlined clothing factory Algots in Borås. Thereby, the article deals with the mutual interplay between migration and industrial relations. It clarifies how industrial relations on different levels of society intersected and reciprocally moulded a framework for the actors involved in the migration process. Contrariwise, the article illuminates how the campaign affected the industrial relations. It also observes to what extent perceptions of gender, age, ethnicity, and class among the actors involved influenced their argumentation and agency.     

Reinterpreting the convict labour market

The convicts transported to NSW between 1817 and 1840 were young, fit, highly literate and brought occupational skills which were broadly representative of the British and Irish working classes. In the colonial labour market where convicts were coerced, more labour was forthcoming and at a lower wage than in a free labour market. The assignment of convict labour in the colony was efficient; skilled urban and construction tradesmen were employed in the same jobs in NSW as they had held in Britain. Domestic servants and unskilled urban workers whose skills were not suited to the needs of the colony experienced job restructuring. The organization of convict workers into teams and gangs in Australia was similar to the way work was organized in free labour Britain, and a mbc of incentives and rewards characterized the extraction of work from convicts. The human capital of the transportees and the labour system within which they worked help to explain the rapid growth of the colonial economy before 1840.     

Agricultural labour and the incidence of surplus labour: experience from China during reform

This paper contributes to the pool of studies of rural underemployment and revisits a number of estimates of surplus agricultural labour in China. The study is devoted to the conceptualization, identification and measurement of surplus at regional, provincial and national levels by a stochastic frontier functional specification. The analysis indicates that the existing size of agricultural surplus labour is still significantly large with the continued practice of the household registration system and China's WTO membership.     

周正毅“二进宫”拷问法治监管

周正毅再次被捕2007年1月21日,农凯集团公司原董事长周正毅因涉嫌行贿及虚开增值税专用发票犯罪,被上海市人民检察院依法逮捕。上海检察机关表示,周的犯罪嫌疑是在侦查上海社保基金案过程中发现的。2007年1月30日,上海市委代理书记、市长韩正,在上海“两会”上通报了周正毅案查处情况。韩正表示,司法机关已初步确定周正毅罪名为虚开增值税专用发票及行贿,并强调其虚开增值税发票罪涉案金额“特别巨大”。根据我国《刑法》,此项罪名最高可判死刑。2003年9月5日,经上海市人民检察院第一分院批准,上海农凯发展(集团)有限公司法定代表人周正毅,因涉嫌虚报注册资本和操纵证券交易价格,被上海市公安机关依法予以逮捕。2004年6月1日,上海市第一中级人民法院对本案作出一审判决,对被告人周正毅以操纵证券交易价格罪判处有期徒刑两年六个月,以虚假注册资本罪判处有期徒刑一年,决定执行有期徒刑三年,于2006年5月刑满释放。