Reproducing low‐wage labour: capital accumulation,labour markets and young workers

Drawing on evidence from Greater Manchester, this article examines how structural changes in capital accumulation have created particular labour market outcomes, which have led to young people becoming a source of cheap labour for the growing low‐wage service economy. Greater Manchester has been selected as a case study because of the sectoral composition of its labour market and because levels of low pay for young workers are above the national low‐pay average of 40 per cent. The research reveals that it is necessary to move beyond sociological explanations that concentrate on the ‘essential youthfulness’ of young people and instead draw on analytical categories from political economy in order to understand the structural causes of young people's material circumstances.     

Unions fit for young workers?

If trade unions are to reverse the membership decline sustained since 1979, more young workers must be recruited. This paper examines the views of young workers towards trade unions by reference to survey data. It argues that there is little evidence of a ‘Thatcher’s children’ effect in which principled opposition to trade unionism is widespread. Instead the paper shows that shifts in the labour market, the effects of employer resistance to trade unionism and union inefficiencies have a marked effect on the unionisation of young workers.     

Impact of globalization on U.S. wage inequality: Implications for policy

This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to consider whether globalization can explain declining relative wages of unskilled workers in the U.S. since the late 1970s. Most of the increase in wage inequality results from changes in the structure of production, part of which could be explained by outsourcing, which involves unskilled-intensive parts of the production process moving to low-income countries. Halting globalization would do little to offset the rising inequality that has already occurred, unless U.S. firms could be induced to move outsourced production back home, which would do much more damage than trade restrictions alone.     

The effect of the minimum wage for tipped workers on firm strategy,employees and social welfare

Millions of workers derive much of their income from tips and are subject to the “tipped minimum wage” that differs from the regular minimum wage. This article examines the implications of the tipped minimum wage and shows that increasing it may lead restaurants to adopt a compulsory service charge in lieu of tipping to extract the economic rent enjoyed by waiters under tipping. Because servers are better off with tipping, this implies that increasing the tipped minimum wage in an attempt to increase servers' income may achieve the opposite result. Moreover, increasing the tipped minimum wage may reduce social welfare.     

Berry-Esseen-type inequality for a special class of distributions

LetQ be the distribution of the suitably normalized sum of i. i. d.k-dimensional random vectors (k2) and letf be a measurable real valued function of the formf(z ₁,...,z _k )=z ₁+r(z ₂,...,z _k ), where the measurable functionr fulfills certain regularity conditions. A Berry-Esseen-type inequality is derived for the one-dimensional distributionP=Qf ^–1.     

Holdup in oligopsonistic labour markets - a new role for the minimum wage

We consider a labour market model of oligopsonistic wage competition and show that there is a holdup problem although workers do not have any bargaining power. When a firm invests more, it pays a higher wage in order to attract workers from competitors. Because workers participate in the returns on investment while only firms bear the costs, investment is inefficiently low. A binding minimum wage can achieve the first-best level of investment, both in the short run for a given number of firms and in the long run when the number of firms is endogenous.     

Managing aging workers: a mixed methods study on bundles of HR practices for aging workers

Since abilities and motives change with age and common human resource (HR) practices might be less suitable for aging employees, scholars and practitioners are currently challenged to find new ways of managing aging workers and motivating them to continue working. Therefore, this mixed methods study builds on literature on lifespan development and literature on HR practices in proposing four new bundles of HR practices for aging workers: accommodative, maintenance, utilization and development HR bundles. Since we draw on separate bodies of literature to propose new constructs, we use a mixed methods design in order to triangulate our findings. The proposed HR bundles were explored with a qualitative interview study among HR managers, line managers and employees in the Dutch construction sector, and tested with a quantitative survey study among Dutch government workers. Both studies confirmed that HR practices for aging workers can be classified into accommodative, maintenance, utilization and development HR bundles of practices.     

Why demotion of older workers is a no-go area for managers

Abstract

Demotion – the reduction of an employee’s rank and salary – is often mentioned by managers and policy-makers as a means of increasing the employability of older workers in an ageing labour force. However, so far in practice demotion is rarely applied. This paper is the first empirical investigation of how managers perceive demotion as an instrument of human resource management. By means of a survey and a vignette study among managers in the Netherlands (N = 355), we examine whether managers consider demotion of poorly performing older workers a fair solution. Three contributions stand out. First, based on attribution theory we find support for the hypothesis that managers judge demotion to be fair in those cases where deterioration in task performance is caused by controllable factors (such as work motivation) and unfair when the causes are uncontrollable (such as age). Second, the expectations of managers about the organization-wide consequences of introducing demotion as a human resource policy play a significant role in considering demotion. Most managers perceive negative organizational externalities (e.g. decrease in loyalty and motivation of staff) to arise when introducing demotion and are reluctant to apply demotion in practice. And a third contribution: positive (negative) beliefs of managers about the hard skills – e.g. creativity, willingness to learn, flexibility – of older workers make demotion less (respectively more) likely.     

Beyond informality: effectiveness of a new actor for representing call centre workers in Turkey

This article explores the organisational dynamics of the ‘Association of Call Centre Workers’ and aims to discover the effectiveness and sustainability of it as a new actor for representing the interests of call centre workers in Turkey. While traditional trade unions have fundamental problems such as efficacy and representation of various worker groups in changing workplaces, in the Turkish context, they have additional difficulties based on structural and legal constraints. Call centre workers seldom utilise the formal representation channels because of these and some other individual reasons such as a lack of information about their rights and labour movements. Moving from the importance of analysing the informal worker organisational dynamics in the case of a new trade union for call centre workers, the emphasis of the research is on the ability of the Association to develop a form of resistance and representation for the previously unrepresented.     

The serial correlation structure for a random process with steps

Summary We derive the detailed correlation structure for the simple “staircase model”: a process where white noise is superimposed on a deterministic step function that has equal rises and equal treads. It turns out that this structure is an immediate generalisation of that for a linear trend (which, for discrete data, can be alternatively considered as a step function with equal rises and unit treads). We compare the structure obtained with that for a random walk, and those for a subset of other ARIMA(p, 1,q) models, and those of general ARIMA(p, d, q) processes withd>1.     

The rational expectation dynamics of a model for the term structure and monetary policy

Decisions in Economics and Finance - We describe in this paper a variance reduction method based on control variates. The technique uses the fact that, if all stochastic assets but one are replaced...     

Creating a multilayered representational ‘package’ for subcontracted workers: the case of cleaners at Ben‐Gurion University

Research into the organising of subcontracted workers tends to focus on how such campaigns contribute to union revitalisation, the shortcomings of non‐union organisations in comparison with classic unionism and opposition rather than complementarity between strategies. Analysing the organising of subcontracted cleaners at a university, this article shifts this focus, evaluating the campaign in terms of how it assisted the workers, regardless of whether it contributed to union renewal, and in terms of complementarity between new and traditional industrial relations actors. Drawing on the power resources approach, it asserts that collaboration across different ‘paths to representation’ can create a multilayered representational ‘package’ in which different organisations with different power resources take on different aspects of what was once a (single) union's role, covering each other's shortcomings in a kind of de facto representational ‘division of labour’.     

Differential evolution utilizing a handful top superior individuals with bionic bi-population structure for the enhancement of optimization performance

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose a new DE variant incorporating a new mutation strategy and a bionic bi-population structure to enhance the overall performance of the canonical DE algorithm. As it is known to all that the guidance of a handful top superior elites is usually better than the guidance of only one elite in many cases, therefore, a handful top superior individuals are employed in the newly proposed mutation strategy for individual evolution. Moreover, hybridization of two populations of a certain species can improve the adaptation to the environment, and business and information exchanges between tribes can help their economical and technological development, so a bionic bi-population structure is also employed in the new DE variant for information exchanges. Both of the two aspects make the new algorithm achieve an overall better performance, and experiment results show that a handful top superior individuals with bionic bi-population structure has better performances on optimization accuracy, convergence speed and success rate under these tested benchmark functions especially those other algorithms may be trapped into local optima.     

Low cost country sourcing and its effects on the total cost of ownership structure for a medical devices manufacturer

In this paper, we describe a total cost of ownership (TCO) method as an activity-based costing (ABC) application along the value chain to measure and analyse the costs of international sourcing activities. We further describe the method's implementation for a manufacturer of high-tech medical devices. For this case study, we analyse the effects of shifting purchasing volume from traditional procurement market suppliers to low cost country suppliers on the cost structure of purchasing projects. We find that particularly costs at component and supplier level gain importance over traditionally dominating unit level costs. Furthermore, we identify low cost country sourcing as a decision with extensive impact on value chain entities other than purchasing. Finally, a considerable part of costs in low cost country sourcing accrue at the beginning of a purchasing project due to problems stemming from unsatisfactory initial quality, language barriers and intercultural communication.     

Endogeneity and the relationship between board structure and firm performance: a simultaneous equation analysis for the Athens Stock Exchange

The main goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between the three most important characteristics of the board of directors with firm performance. More specifically, we investigate whether the independence of the board, the leadership structure and the board size, are exogenous determinants to the firm's performance, using a simultaneous equations framework. Our database is composed of firms quoted in the ASE, starting from 146 observations in 2000 and ending with 232 firms in 2006. The findings suggest that the board independence and the leadership structure do not affect the firm performance. On the other hand, an inverse relationship between board size and firm performance is observed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Conditions for invariance of the multivariate versions of grubbs’ test and bartlett’s test under a general dependency structure

Summary This paper generalizes a result by Stadje (1984) by deriving conditions for which a general dependency structure for multivariate observations, given in Pavur (1987), yields a positive definite covariance structure. This general dependency structure allows the sample covariance matrix to be distributed as a constant times a Wishart random matrix. It is then demonstrated that the maximum squared-radii test and a test for equal population covariance matrices have null distributions which remain unchanged when the new general dependency structure, rather than the usual independence structure, for the vector observations, is assumed. Moreover, under a general dependency structure for which the population covariance matrices are unequal, it is shown that the distribution of the test statistic for testing equal covariance matrices is identical to the distribution of the same test statistic when the population covariance matrices are equal and the observations are independent.