The Use of Criminal Record in Employment Decisions: The Rights of Ex-offenders, Employers and the Public

The evidence suggests that employers discriminate against ex-offenders in the labour market. The problem is potentially serious as it involves a substantial proportion of the population, especially the male population. Since research has shown that most people with prior convictions stop offending by their late 20s or early 30s, the validity of selection based on criminal record remains questionable. This paper examines the need for legal protection of ex-offenders by limiting employers' access to, and use of, information on criminal background. The rights and interests of the various parties involved, employers, ex-offenders, and the general public, are discussed. Approaches to the legal protection of ex-offenders in Australia are reviewed and legislative changes proposed.     

Weight Discrimination in the American Workplace: Ethical Issues and Analysis

Research providing consistent evidence of pervasive discrimination against overweight job applicants and employees in the American workplace raises important questions for organizational stakeholders. To what extent is the disparate treatment of job applicants or employees based on their weight ethically justified? Are there aspects of weight discrimination that make it more acceptable than discrimination based on other characteristics, such as race or gender? What operational steps can employers take to address concerns regarding the ethical treatment of overweight individuals in the workplace? This article investigates these and related questions. Its purpose is to provide information and analysis that will assist organizations in formulating ethical responses to a widespread phenomenon: weight discrimination in the workplace. Although its focus is the American workplace, the proposed employer ethical obligations and the practical guidance that is provided are viewed as generalizing across countries and cultures.     

Employer branding: strategic implications for staff recruitment

Abstract

In many developed economies, changing demographics and economic conditions have given rise to increasingly competitive labour markets, where competition for good employees is strong. Consequently, strategic investments in attracting suitably qualified and skilled employees are recommended. One such strategy is employer branding. Employer branding in the context of recruitment is the package of psychological, economic, and functional benefits that potential employees associate with employment with a particular company. Knowledge of these perceptions can help organisations to create an attractive and competitive employer brand. Utilising information economics and signalling theory, we examine the nature and consequences of employer branding. Depth interviews reveal that job seekers evaluate: the attractiveness of employers based on any previous direct work experiences with the employer or in the sector; the clarity, credibility, and consistency of the potential employers’ brand signals; perceptions of the employers’ brand investments; and perceptions of the employers’ product or service brand portfolio.     

Antecedents of Truck Drivers’ Job Satisfaction and Retention Proneness

The aim of this study was to (1) explore the antecedents of truck drivers’ job satisfaction, (2) identify the impact of financial and nonfinancial job properties on satisfaction with the job and with one's employer, and (3) the drivers’ proneness to retaining their jobs. Based on the extant literature, we develop a conceptual model that is tested using survey data for 164 truck drivers. Multiple linear and ordinal logistic regressions were used to estimate the proposed effects. The results reveal that nonfinancial job properties and satisfaction with one's employer affect job satisfaction is statistically significant. Financial and nonfinancial job properties affect satisfaction with one's employer whereas the former shows a lower impact compared to the latter. Satisfaction with the job and one's employer impacts retention proneness. The contribution of this study was to (1) add to the understanding of the factors that predict retention of truck drivers in relationship to job satisfaction and (2) highlight the different roles of financial and nonfinancial job properties in this specific work context.     

Anti-Discrimination Laws: Undermining Our Rights

The purpose of this article is to argue in favor of a private employer??s right to discriminate amongst job applicants on any basis he chooses, and this certainly includes unlawful characteristics such as race, sex, national origin, sexual preference, religion, etc. John Locke and many after him have argued that people have natural rights to life, liberty, and property or the pursuit of happiness. In this view, law should be confined to protecting these rights and be limited to prohibiting other people from transgressing those rights. The law should not hinder an employer??s ability to discriminate, any more than it should compel people to marry against their wishes. These laws generally emerge from a moral perspective that people think should be imposed on everyone else. But those who don??t welcome those morals are in effect being coerced to abide by them against their will; this is unethical. Finally, it will be argued that the free market has mechanisms by which discrimination will, be rendered powerless to harm its victims.     

Beyond efficiency: some By-products of functional flexibility

This article examines the outcomes of implementing functional flexibility for employers and employees. The use of functional flexibility is normally associated with improving efficiency. However the findings reported here, drawn from four case studies, show evidence of positive outcomes for both employers and employees which go beyond efficiency. For employees there was evidence of increased job satisfaction and in some cases increased remuneration and job security. For employers, there was evidence of improved operational functioning and customer service, reduced labour turnover and an enhanced reputation in the local labour market. It is argued that a ‘virtuous circle’ is set up.     

How employers can stanch the hemorrhaging of collegiate GPA credibility

Grade inflation is rampant across universities, colleges, academic majors, and certainly in American business schools. Extensive evidence shows that the distribution of college GPAs is skewed sharply toward high grades. Consequently, GPAs often poorly convey students’ relative academic achievement, sending a muddled message to prospective employers. This article explores the causes and consequences of grade inflation. It concludes with six recommendations for employers who want to encourage college administrators to control collegiate grade inflation, thereby strengthening the accuracy and value of a GPA in the processes of applicant evaluation and job placement.     

Employer training in Australia: current practices and concerns

This paper presents and analyses results from a research project on current trends in employer training in Australia. While the formal vocational education and training (VET) system is well‐researched, the everyday training that happens in workplaces is relatively under‐researched in Australia. Using some of the results of an employer survey undertaken in 2015, the paper describes and analyses employer‐based training across a range of industry areas. The survey included groups of questions on a range of matters, including the reasons why employers train, and how these relate to employers’ perceptions of their operating environment, and the structures they have in place to manage and organize training. Detailed data are provided about three specific forms of training: in‐house training and learning; the use that employers make of external providers of training; and employers’ use of nationally recognised training – training from the VET system. Finally the paper reports what managers said about the barriers to providing more training. The paper analyses the findings in relation to the literature and also identified changes over time in training practices in Australian companies. Implications for training policy and practice, as well as for future research, are identified.     

Training Agreements: Resolving Under-Investment in Training?

Here the authors examine UK employers’ use of training agreements and their impact on training and development practice. In particular, they review the literature on training agreements and find this to be underdeveloped and based upon little empirical data. Drawing on postal survey and focus group evidence from management trainees and an interview survey of employers, they show that training agreements are relatively widespread, and that employers mainly use agreements as a filter mechanism to assess an employee’s commitment to the training requested. The evidence suggests that training agreements do little to improve, and may negatively effect, a trainee’s commitment to the employer.     

The determinants of employers’ use of temporary contracts in the frictional labor market

This paper focuses on the following two primary reasons that employers use temporary contracts: to flexibly adjust employment and to screen workers. A search-matching framework is used to not only address employers’ endogenous choices in using temporary contracts, but also numerically identify the situations in which these contracts are likely to be used as a screening tool for permanent positions. This numerical exercise demonstrates that reducing employment protections in permanent jobs, reducing benefits for unemployed workers and raising the conversion probability from temporary to permanent employment will increase the relative proportion of employers who use temporary contracts as a screening device.     

Work in the Platform Economy: Beyond Lower Transaction Costs

Work on platforms is part of a wider trend towards the increasing fragmentation of work. It takes different forms, ranging from short spells of employment with the same employer to moving between different work arrangements to juggling multiple jobs at the same time. In all its forms, it signals an increasing job instability and is often fuelled by insufficient income from one job to cover the cost of living.     

A great place to work!? Understanding crowdsourced employer branding

The benefits provided by employment and identified with a specific employing company are referred to as employer branding. We argue that when employees use IT to share and access work-related experiences openly across organizations, their expectations and assessments of workplaces change. We collected 38,000 reviews of the highest and lowest ranked employers on Glassdoor, an online crowdsourced employer branding platform. Using IBM Watson to analyze the data, we identify seven employer branding value propositions that current, former, and potential employees care about when they collectively evaluate employers. These propositions include (1) social elements of work, (2) interesting and challenging work tasks, (3) the extent to which skills can be applied in meaningful ways, (4) opportunities for professional development, (5) economic issues tied to compensation, (6) the role of management, and (7) work/life balance. We clarify that these value propositions do not all matter to the same extent and demonstrate how their relative valences and weights differ across organizations, especially if institutions are considered particularly good or bad places to work. Based on these findings, we show how employers can use crowdsourced employer branding intelligence to become great places to work that attract highly qualified employees.     

Employer’s Use of Social Networking Sites: A Socially Irresponsible Practice

The Internet has drastically changed how people interact, communicate, conduct business, seek jobs, find partners, and shop. Millions of people are using social networking sites to connect with others, and employers are using these sites as a source of background information on job applicants. Employers report making decisions not to hire people based on the information posted on social networking sites. Few employers have policies in place to govern when and how these online character checks should be used and how to ensure that the information viewed is accurate. In this article, we explore how these inexpensive, informal online character checks are harmful to society. Guidance is provided to employers on when and how to use these sites in a socially responsible manner.     

Tough on criminal wealth? Exploring the link between organized crime’s asset confiscation and regional entrepreneurship

This paper addresses the question “How does the fight against organized crime affect regional entrepreneurship?” We focus on asset confiscation in relation to alleged connections of their owners with organized crime, a highly debated policy measure against organized crime. Extending work on institutions and regional entrepreneurship, we propose that confiscation has contrasting effects on regional entries. On the one hand, confiscation of economic assets associated with criminal organizations’ legitimate activities in a region reduces competition and triggers renewal, fostering new entries. On the other hand, seizure of criminal organizations’ operational assets weakens their ability to exercise sovereignty, creating an institutional vacuum that lowers founding rates. Our results, based on a longitudinal study of Italian provinces between 2009 and 2013, provide support for both hypotheses. We also find that the negative effect associated with the confiscation of operational assets is mitigated when local governments have policies facilitating asset redeployment.     

Retail employee guardianship behaviour: A phenomenological investigation

Supermarkets suffer significant losses as a consequence of shoplifting. Amongst the existing electronic and manual surveillance measures for retail crime management, the role of employees in preventing or controlling retail crime has not been systematically addressed within the extant literature. This paper contributes to addressing this gap by examining how employers’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) involvement influences employee proclivity towards guardianship behaviour in shoplifting prevention. A phenomenological approach is adopted comprising semi-structured interviews of twenty-nine shop-floor employees of two national supermarket chains within a cosmopolitan city of New Zealand. Findings strongly support the suggestion that employee perceptions of employer internal and external CSR may shape their feelings of organisational attachment, resulting in employee guardianship behaviour that manifests in in-store shoplifting prevention. Further, from a societal perspective, this study suggests that a reduction in retail crime contributes towards positive relationships among key stakeholders such as supermarkets, their employees, and society at large based on the social, environmental, and employee welfare practices of supermarkets.     

Sweatshop Regulation and Workers’ Choices

The choice argument against sweatshop regulations states that public officials should not prohibit workers from accepting jobs that require long hours, low pay, and poor working conditions, because enforcing such regulations would be disrespectful to the workers who choose to work in sweatshops. Critics of the choice argument reply that these regulations can be justified when workers only choose to work in sweatshops because they lack acceptable alternatives and are unable to coordinate to achieve better conditions for all workers. My thesis is that the presence of unacceptable alternatives to sweatshop labor or barriers to coordination cannot justify sweatshop regulations such as minimum wage and maximum hour laws. Although officials should promote alternatives to difficult and dangerous sweatshop labor, they should not do so by limiting workers’ and employers’ options through coercive regulation. And the fact that sweatshop workers may face coordination problems does not undermine the claim that sweatshop workers choose to work in sweatshops, just as other workers face coordination problems but nevertheless make occupational choices. Furthermore, efforts to restrict sweatshop workers’ choices are morally risky and may not promote workers’ wellbeing or wellbeing in general.     

Investigating the impact of the technological environment on survival chances of employer entrepreneurs

Given the big employment losses in the current economic and financial crisis, not only the creation of new jobs is important for economic and social welfare, but also the conservation of existing jobs. In this respect, it is crucial that firms that employ personnel survive. In this article, we investigate the role of the technological environment in determining the survival chances of employer entrepreneurs, defined as owner-managers of firms that employ personnel. We estimate survival models to analyze durations as an employer entrepreneur, using micro-panel data from EU-15 countries drawn from the European Community Household Panel. As indicators for the technological environment, we use a country’s R&D expenditures, a country’s employment share of high-tech and knowledge-intensive sectors, and a country’s number of patent applications to the European Patent Office. We find strong support for a positive relationship between these indicators of the technological environment in country j and year t and survival chances of employer entrepreneurs in that same country and year. Our analysis also suggests that a selection effect may be part of the explanation in the sense that in a more advanced technological environment, relatively more ‘high-quality’ individuals select into entrepreneurship.     

合适成年人讯问到场的现实窘境及制度完善--以张志超案为视角

考虑到未成年被追诉人的身心不健全,我国将未成年人刑事案件诉讼程序设为特别程序,特别辅以合适成年人制度保护其合法权益。张志超案折射出我国刑事诉讼程序中合适成年人制度的立法问题及司法困境,迅速解决此类案件中出现的合适成年人通知、到场及否定性制裁等问题,对于保护未成年被追诉人的合法权益,防范冤假错案具有重要意义。     

Handle with care: Avoiding and managing retaliation claims

Anti-retaliation protections for whistleblowers are routinely included in federal statutes. During the past decade, claims of retaliation in employment-related cases have grown in numbers and in reach, due in part to a seemingly far-reaching commitment by the U.S. Supreme Court to interpret anti-retaliation provisions to provide maximum protection to complainants. Employers must take care not to run afoul of the anti-retaliation provisions; however, that does not mean that employees who complain of discrimination are ‘untouchable.’ This article provides an overview of anti-retaliation law as it relates to the employer–employee relationship and outlines eight practical tips for managing and avoiding retaliation claims. Though anti-retaliation provisions provide ample reason for employers to proceed with caution in the face of employee complaints, employers need not succumb to paralyzing litigation fear when addressing concerns regarding complaining employees’ performance issues.     

Employee References: Between the Legal Devil and the Ethical Deep Blue Sea

An employer asked to provide a reference for a former or departing employee is confronted with a number of complex legal and ethical concerns. The issue of references is always controversial, involving a balance of employers' fears of legal liability, interests in providing relevant information to prospective employers, and concerns for fairness to former employees. Recently this topic has been the focus of new attention as the result of a court decision holding a former employer legally liable for wrongs committed by a former employee in a new job. In that case, the former employer had provided a positive reference while neglecting to note certain negative aspects of the former employee'sperformance. This paper addresses legal and ethical aspects of the reference dilemma and incorporates responses of human resource professionals to the question of ethical reference policies and practices.