The Road is Long: Thirty Years of Equality Legislation in Britain

This article critically reflects upon the development of British employment equality law, tracking a positive yet hesitant, uneven and incomplete trajectory from anti‐discrimination towards equality, and from piecemeal and patchwork coverage towards inclusiveness, integration and intersectionality. It argues that the opportunities provided by the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights and the proposed Single Equality Act should be taken to address remaining weaknesses in the legislative equality package and the limitations in enforcement approaches which the article highlights.     

What Is Best for Workers? The Implications of Workplace and Human Resource Management Practices Revisited

Drawing on a 2003–2004 random household telephone survey of 750 Canadian workers, I explore the implications of work and human resource (HR) practices for six aspects of the quality of working life. I find “traditional” HR practices, associated with the bureaucratic model predominant after World War II and with union representation, to have strong positive implications for workers. Participative workplace practices also have strong positive implications, although these are largely limited to information sharing in the union sector. The actual organization of work (e.g., teams), contingent pay, and “new” HR practices, associated with the “new” HRM of the 1980s, all make little difference. Comparison of these findings with those from a comparable 1998 survey of 508 Canadian workers and a parallel 2003 survey of 450 English workers suggest, however, that the implications of work and HR practices may be historically and institutionally contingent and thus should be interpreted using a historical/institutional perspective.     

Labor Market Discrimination against Women with Disabilities

This article estimates the extent of wage discrimination and, for the first time, the employment effects of wage discrimination, against women with disabilities. In 1984, more than one-half of the offer wage differential between disabled and nondisabled women is attributable to discrimination, but the absolute wage differential is small. The results suggest that wage discrimination related to disability tends to be most severe for a relatively small group of women with impairments against which prejudice is most intense. There is a large difference between the employment rates of disabled and nondisabled women but only a small part of the differential is attributable to the disincentive effects of wage discrimination. The results also show that women with disabilities face a double burden of gender- and disability-related discrimination, but do not show that gender-related discrimination is worse for women who have a disability.     

A Decade of the Americans with Disabilities Act: Judicial Outcomes and Unresolved Problems*

A decade after its enactment, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has not resulted in the substantial employment gains for individuals with disabilities that its proponents had predicted. It also has not resulted in many legal victories for disabled individuals who have challenged alleged discriminatory actions by their employers. This article briefly reviews literature on disability and work and summarizes the data on the employment of individuals with disabilities. It addresses litigation trends prior to several significant U.S. Supreme Court rulings the ADA made in 1999 and compares them with litigation trends following the issuance of these rulings. The article concludes that the law needs to be amended if it is to serve those individuals with disabilities who are capable of productive employment but whose impairments do not fit the judicially narrowed definition of disability in the ADA.     

Railroads and Price Discrimination: The Roles of Competition, Information, and Regulation

I evaluate railroad price discrimination in three periods: 1870–1886, before the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act; 1945–1975, when rates were regulated but railroads faced extensive intermodal competition; and 1980–2010, after the passage of major regulatory reforms. While price discrimination was widespread in each period, the specific practices varied as the nature of competition, regulation, and the information available to decision-makers changed. The Act focused heavily on price discrimination, and limited some practices while encouraging others. One major weakness of the Act was the restrictions that were imposed on pricing practices that could lead to cost reductions and productivity improvements.     

Employers' Search and the Efficiency of Matching

Unskilled workers in low productivity jobs typically experience higher labour turnover. This article shows how this finding is related to variation in the efficiency of the matching process across occupations. If employers find it less profitable to invest in search and screening activities when recruiting for low‐productivity jobs, matches at the lower end of the occupation distribution will be more prone to separation. The analysis of a unique sample of British hirings, containing detailed information about employers' recruitment practices, shows that more intensive recruitment leads to matches of better quality that pay higher wages, last longer and make employers more satisfied with the person taken on.     

The Role of the Senior HR Executive in Japan and the United States: Employment Relations, Corporate Governance, and Values

Based on an original survey of senior human resources (HR) executives, this paper provides empirical data for a comparison of HR management structures and practices in Japan and the United States. In both countries, the headquarters HR function has shrunk and employment decisions have become more decentralized in recent years. However, because the pace of change has been more rapid in the United States, the gap with Japan has widened. Significant differences persist in other areas, such as the HR executive's role in strategic decisions, perceived power of the HR function, executive values, and the consequences of these values for organizational outcomes and corporate governance.     

Union Exclusion and the Decollectivization of Industrial Relations in Contemporary Britain

A major focus of the Conservative government's employment policy since 1979 has been the reduction of union power within the labour market, the employment relationship and as representatives of a separate ‘labour interest’ in society ' union exclusion. The principal impact of the legislative changes is to deny workers access to resources of collective power, thereby commensurately increasing employers' discretion to determine the terms of the employment relationship. When forming new subsidiaries and establishments, or purchasing non-union subsidiaries, employers have been able to resist unionization and recognition except on their own terms, but comparatively few have terminated existing union recognition agreements, preferring to marginalize the role of unions through the adoption of partial exclusion policies ' joint consultation, direct communication, performance-related pay, and the fragmentation of common employment and bargaining.     

What $2.5 billion can buy: The effect of the Broadband Initiatives Program on farm productivity

This paper investigates whether the Broadband Initiatives Program (BIP), implemented as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) had a positive impact on farm productivity, defined as farm sales per farm employment, in the counties that received any BIP funding. The effect of BIP on the growth of farm sales was examined for the 2008–2010, 2008–2011, 2008–2012 and 2008–2013 periods. The selection bias (the probability that a county received BIP funding) was accounted for using the inverse probability weighting regression method (IPW). The findings suggest that BIP funding had a significant but short-term impact on per employment farm sales.     

An International Investigation of Problem‐Solving Performance in the Semiconductor Industry*

Using a unique survey of engineers in major semiconductor companies located in Japan, South Korea, and the United States, this article analyzes how a firm's human resource (HR) system (i.e., practices that structure work, develop skills, and reward performance) and knowledge system (i.e., information access, sharing and control) are related to the problem‐solving performance of engineers. Because of the short product market life cycles in the semiconductor industry, expeditious problem solving is an important performance goal. Therefore, this article examines the performance of engineers in terms of the time it takes them to solve problems in the context of their firms' HR and knowledge systems. It was anticipated during this study that externally oriented organizational systems, which support individual career performance and mobility (an externally oriented HR system) and the use of private knowledge sources (an externally oriented knowledge system), would be associated with superior performance in terms of problem‐solving speed. The findings support this hypothesis and demonstrate the importance of externally oriented HR systems and at the same time suggest the surprising insignificance of the orientation of the knowledge systems. These findings are applicable to engineers in the sample from the United States, whereas the findings for the Korean and Japanese engineers are inconclusive. International variation is found where the U.S. engineers work under the most externally oriented and the Japanese engineers under the least externally oriented systems, and the Korean engineers fall in between. The findings of this article suggest that when constructing a work environment for new product development, managers should take into account how the underlying components of their organizational systems contribute to an internal or external focus, and how this orientation may influence performance.     

Employment Systems in Japan's Financial Industry: Globalization,Growing Divergence and Institutional Change

This article examines growing divergence and change in the employment systems of Japan's financial industry from the early 1990s until shortly after the so‐called Lehman Shock. This was a period which saw accelerated deregulation and globalization strongly impact the country's financial markets, leading to intensified competition over human resources. Foreign multinational corporations introduced into Japan's local product and labour markets new global ‘rules of the game’; in response, some native firms were forced to alter core aspects of a traditional employment model. The result was the emergence of diverging patterns of employment. The present study will demonstrate that the interaction of two key factors — national ownership and variation among core products and services offered — is shaping employment diversification, mediated by firms’ individual policies and practices. This research contributes to the debate on the effects of globalization on the divergence and change of employment systems.     

How Workers Fare When Employers Innovate

Complementing existing work on firm organizational structure and productivity, this article examines the impact of organizational change on workers. We find evidence that employers do appear to compensate at least some of their workers for engaging in high-performance workplace practices. We also find a significant association between high-performance workplace practices and increased wage inequality. Finally, we examine the relationship between organizational structure and employment changes and find that some practices, such as self-managed teams, are associated with greater employment reductions, whereas other practices, such as the percentage of workers involved in job rotation, are associated with lower employment reductions.     

Airports and Economic Development

This article tests whether the activity at a metropolitan area's airport helps predict population and employment growth. In regression equations explaining employment and population growth, the article uses various measures of airport activity, including boardings, originations, hub status and cargo volume. Because airports may be a function of, as well as a cause of, growth, the article instruments for airports by using geographical and lagged variables. It finds that, under a variety of specifications, passenger activity is a powerful predictor of growth; cargo activity is not.     

Straight to the Core — Explaining Union Responses to the Casualization of Work: The IG Metall Campaign for Agency Workers

The existing literature provides different accounts on the strategies of unions regarding marginal workers. It has been argued that under increasing labour market segmentation, unions have either to prioritize their core constituencies and to seek compromises with management, or to adopt inclusive strategies towards peripheral workers to counterbalance eroding bargaining power. This article shows that both strategies represent equally viable options to protect the interests of unions' core members. The strategic choice depends on the (perceived) competition between core and peripheral employees related to employers' personnel strategies; this affects the possible alignment of interests between unions' core members, on the one hand, and either management or peripheral employees, on the other. Our historical analysis of union strategies towards agency workers in the German metal sector illustrates this mechanism, and identifies institutional change towards liberalization as the trigger for aggressive segmentation strategies by employers and for inclusive union strategies.     

Employment of People with Disabilities Following the ADA

Studies finding a negative effect of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) on the employment of people with disabilities have used the work disability measure, which has several potential problems in measuring employment trends. Using Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) data that permit alternative measures of disability, this study finds decreased employment among those reporting work disabilities in the first few years after the ADA was passed but increased employment when using a more probably appropriate measure of ADA coverage (functional and activity limitations that do not prevent work). State-by-state variation in labor market tightness is used to find that people with disabilities may have especially procyclical employment, but the contrary results in overall employment trends remain after accounting for labor market tightness. Given the problems in measuring who is covered by the ADA, there is reason to be cautious of both positive and negative findings.     

The Unexpected Appearance of a New German Model

Most Continental European labour markets and welfare states have experienced a substantial transformation. Germany is a case in point as it exhibits increasing levels of employment and a growing share of low pay and non‐standard work. The article claims that changes in labour market institutions play a major role, but changes in industrial relations at the sectoral level and individual firms' staffing practices are equally important. Regarding labour market institutions, the pattern found in Germany shows sequences of reforms addressing the margins of the labour market and contributing to a growing dualization of employment. This dualization trend was reinforced by micro‐level dynamics in industrial relations and company employment practices, where we can observe growing reliance on mechanisms of internal flexibility for the skilled core workforce and increasing use of non‐standard types of employment in less specifically skilled occupations, in particular in the private service sector. Hence, the adjustment of the German model can only be understood by taking into account the interaction of policy change and actors' adaptive behaviour.     

Online,on call: the spread of digitally organised just‐in‐time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non‐standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT‐related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.     

The Impact of Amnesty on Labor Market Outcomes: A Panel Study Using the Legalized Population Survey

This article tests whether amnesty, a provision of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, affected the labor market outcomes of the legalized population. Using a quasi‐experimental framework, we find that employment fell, unemployment rose, and wage growth rates were higher for newly legalized men after the implementation of the amnesty program. For women, employment fell, transitions out of the workforce increased, and wages grew at a faster rate among the newly legalized population.     

The Employers' Offensive in the Provincial Newspaper Industry

This paper examines the widespread moves made by the employers in the provincial newspaper industry since 1987 to derecognize the National Union of Journalists. Based on personal structured interviews with NUJ lay and full-time officials, and editors and managers, it looks at the extent of the changes and the methods of introducing derecognition. This and several other indicators are used to argue that the employers' actions can be characterized as a strategic offensive. Finally the paper examines the reasons for the employers' offensive, disputing in part the arguments of other researchers in their explanation of the employers' reasons for derecognition.     

The Politics of Partnership? Innovation in Employment Relations in the Scottish Spirits Industry

Perspectives that emphasize links between workplace innovation and broader HR policies, particularly of a 'mutual gains' nature, have become increasingly influential. This paper analyses the links and tensions between workplace change and industrial relations systems in the context of attempts to create a shop-floor politics of partnership during a period of corporate restructuring in two spirits companies. We argue that interface tensions between the employment relationship, the labour process and organizational governance are inextricably linked to the outcomes of partnership initiatives. While there are positive outcomes to more integrated approaches to partnership, a range of industrial relations issues, notably the ambivalent position of shop-stewards, remains problematic.