The Impact of Living Wages on Employers: A Control Group Analysis of the Los Angeles Ordinance*

This paper analyzes the impact of the Los Angeles Living Wage Ordinance on employers using two original data sets and a quasi‐experimental research design. Relative to a control group of establishments, the starting pay of low‐wage workers has risen by $1.74 per hour, paid days off have risen by two days, and employer‐paid health benefits have not significantly changed among establishments covered by the living wage ordinance. Living wage establishments have witnessed a sizeable reduction in low‐wage worker turnover, a drop in absenteeism, reduced overtime hours, and reduced job training relative to the control group of establishments. The ordinance appears to have had no significant impact on the use of part‐time workers, the intensity of supervision, or the tendency of living wage firms to fill vacancies from within.     

It's Been A Hard Day's Night: The Concentration and Intensification of Work in Late Twentieth‐Century Britain

This paper presents evidence on trends in work pressure in late twentieth‐century Britain. The main findings are: (1) Average hours of work levelled off at the start of the 1980s, following a long historic fall, but have not increased since. However, the dispersion of hours has increased, and working hours have been concentrated into fewer households. (2) Work effort has been intensified since 1981. Intensification was greatest in manufacturing during the 1980s, and in the public sector during the 1990s. (3) Between 1986 and 1997 there have been substantial increases in the number of sources of pressure inducing hard work from employees.     

‘It was doing my head in’: Low-paid multiple employment and zero hours work

This article explores the lived experiences and working time complexities of low-paid workers in legitimate multiple employment and zero hours work. Based on detailed qualitative research, these workers have 2, 3, 4, 5 and even 7 different jobs out of necessity due to low-pay, unpredictable working hours and employment precarity. The research reveals that workers need to be available for (potential) work at any point but may not actually be offered any hours, which we argue constitutes unremunerated labour time. The findings highlight a densification of working time with zero hours work as employers maximize productive effort into specifically numbered, demarcated and minimized working hours, which tightens the porosity of labour. There is a dual fragmentation and individualization of employment, as these workers traverse multiple, expansive, complex and dynamic temporalities of work. This study identifies new economic and temporal indeterminacies of labour, which fundamentally transform the employment relationship and wage-effort bargain.     

Working for Position: Women, Men, and Managerial Work Hours

Job hours may be determined in part by positional striving to keep up with or outwork others in one's organization. A prisoner's dilemma in which employees have an incentive to work more than a socially optimal level of hours may arise from positional competition. This article uses survey data to estimate how much positional striving increases job hours, and considers how it may contribute to workplaces more in accord with men's than women's hours preferences.     

Always on across time zones: Invisible schedules in the online gig economy

This study investigates work schedules in online labour markets, operating in 24/7 mode across spatial borders and time zones. Focusing on largely hidden and invisible work of freelancers such as searching for jobs and communicating with clients, the study documents how platforms put pressures and constraints on freelancers’ time through the mechanism of task allocation. We use data on 241,582 timestamped messages posted by 29,759 unique users in 4082 contests on a leading Russian‐language freelance platform to reveal how freelancers’ efforts to get a job make them work nonstandard hours, including evenings, nights and weekends. Freelancers have to be responsive and adapt their schedules to clients’ needs. Freelancers who live in time zones which differ from their clients are particularly disadvantaged, working a greater proportion of nonstandard hours. The findings emerging from the study contribute to current debates on the gig economy and a new time‐work discipline.     

Neo‐bureaucratic organisational forms,technology, control and contingent work: the case of UK TV

A feature in contemporary labour markets has been the growth of non‐standard work. This has to be set within a context of evolving new organisational forms and the ways that large organisations control these forms. Based on a qualitative study of freelance work in television, we have witnessed considerable vertical‐disintegration of the industry and a substantial growth of freelance working. Control over the network is maintained by employing former large broadcaster staff, and in turn their own preferred freelancers. This has significant implications for the nature of freelance work. While work is characterised as more insecure, generally the degree varies. This is based, in part, on occupation but also on access to social capital. Freelancers also reported a positive attitude to work, but more negative findings on working hours, work intensification and on related benefits.     

工作与闲暇的经济学分析

本文对工作时间与闲日阻时间的选择进行了理论分析,从工作决策理论、家庭劳动力供给理论、时间分配理论等不同角度,分析人们对工作时间和闲暇时间选择的特征,从而进一步分析了21世纪缩短工作时间的必要性和积极意义。     

‘Work always wins’: client colonisation,time management and the anxieties of connected freelancers

This article focuses on ‘connected freelancers’ as a category of teleworkers and examines the pressures placed on their work‐home balance by their relationship with clients. Based on diaries, questionnaires and interviews, it reveals that, while connected freelancers do not generally work excessively long hours, they do work irregular hours. This is because ‘work always wins’ in a conflict with domestic commitments, a phenomenon the article dubs ‘client colonisation’. Client colonisation was a source of anxiety for respondents, who found themselves continually thinking about the current and future projects on which their livelihoods depend. The article illustrates the porous ways in which they interleave work with non‐work activities and contrasts traditional ‘monochronic’ forms of work with emerging ‘polychronic’ forms, which erode work‐home boundaries. It concludes that a new model of work—one in which individual patterns of control over work‐home balance are paramount—already coexists alongside traditional models but is still insufficiently socially understood and accepted.     

Unions and Flexible Employment in Britain and Spain: A Descriptive Note

Spain and Britain are known to have different labor market structures and degrees of employment protection. Despite such differences, they show remarkably similar associations of unionization with temporary employment and nonstandard hours of work. In particular, we find that unionization in both countries is correlated neither with overtime/long hours of work nor temporary employment. In both economies, instead, part-time work is negatively associated with unionization. These cross-national similarities warrant a rethinking of the strategies of enlargement toward flexible forms of work that unions have supposedly adopted in recent years.     

Flexible Work and Immigration in Europe

Immigration has risen substantially in many European economies, with far‐reaching if still uncertain implications for labour markets and industrial relations. This article investigates such implications, focusing on employment flexibility, involving both ‘external flexibility’ (fixed‐term or temporary agency and/or involuntary part‐time work) and ‘internal flexibility’ (overtime and/or balancing‐time accounts). The article identifies reasons why immigration should generally increase the incidence of such flexibility, and why external flexibility should rise more than internal flexibility. The article supports these claims using a dataset of establishments in 16 European countries.     

‘The Magnificent 7[am]?’ Work‐life articulation beyond the 9[am] to 5[pm] ‘norm’

This article focuses on the work‐life ‘balance’ challenges of those who work in organisations that operate beyond standard hours. The concept of work‐life articulation is utilised to examine the experiences and practicalities of attempting to reconcile the, often competing, demands of employment and family life. Qualitative research was conducted in two private sector businesses and one‐third sector organisation in the UK during the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. The findings reveal increasing competitive pressures, efficiency drives and work intensification. ‘Business needs’ are prioritised over care responsibilities, and in the private sector organisations there is declining flexible working with a reassertion of the management prerogative. This article contributes to current debates over work‐life ‘balance’ and highlights variable, changeable and unpredictable working time arrangements that permeate non‐standard hours, which creates additional complexities and challenges for family time schedules and routines.     

Work Pressure in Europe 1996–2001: Trends and Determinants

Diverse theories have predicted a trend towards growing work pressure in advanced capitalist societies, while pointing to quite distinct causal factors. This paper seeks to assess these arguments using data from two surveys of employees in European Union member‐states carried out in 1996 and in 2001. It finds there is no evidence of a trend towards higher work pressure over this period. There is, however, support for some of the main arguments about the types of factors that affect work pressure: for instance, skill, job control, new technology and current job security are clearly important. But the trends in job control and job security have not been those predicted, while changes in another major determinant — the length of working hours — have tended to reduce work pressure. There are substantial and relatively stable differences in work pressure between countries, but to a considerable extent, these reflect compositional differences with respect to the main determinants of work pressure.     

The Evolution of Earnings Volatility During and After the Great Recession

This paper explores how men's and women's earnings volatility evolved during and after the Great Recession, the most severe downturn of the postwar era. Using matched March Current Population Survey data, I find that earnings volatility rose considerably after the Great Recession began and, particularly for men, the volatility increase was as large as in the severe recession of the early 1980s. These findings update the evidence on the counter‐cyclicality of earnings volatility. I show that such counter‐cyclicality is due mainly to counter‐cyclical volatility in annual hours of work. In turn, the counter‐cyclical volatility in work hours appears mainly among workers who experience unemployment.     

South Korea's Record Wage Rates: Labor in Late. Industrialization

Despite "unlimited labor" and political repression, real average wages in South Korea have risen rapidly, possibly faster than in any previous industrialization—including Japan's—or in any contemporary one. This study suggests that the process of industrializing late though learning, which has been especially intense in Korea, coupled with that country's special institutions, underlie the spectacular wages increases. The analysis also highlights the unique skill-set of late industrialization that high wages reward.     

Workers,Workplaces and Working Hours

This article uses the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 dataset to evaluate the importance of firm‐level factors in determining weekly hours of work in Britain, to analyse the amount of variation of hours within firms, and to assess whether workers are sorted into firms on the basis of hours. Nearly a third of the explained variation in weekly hours of work can be ascribed to firm‐level differences, which are unrelated to any observed worker characteristics. Firm‐level ‘policies’ are especially important in the private‐services sector. A further 40 per cent of variance can be attributed to the effect within firms of different occupation, skills and family characteristics. Finally, about a quarter of the explained variation in working hours is due to a sorting process of workers to firms, especially on the basis of skill and occupation.     

Mechanisms to improve labor productivity by performing telework

This study investigates mechanisms underlying the influence of telework on labor productivity in Japan. First, this study finds that appropriate telework hours increase labor productivity, but when telework hours are too long, telework decreases labor productivity. Second, telework increases life satisfaction, and life satisfaction improves labor productivity. However, telework increases the stress of balancing work and domestic chores, contrary to Japanese governmental expectations, and the stress decreases life satisfaction. The stress, fortunately, does not directly reduce labor productivity. Although telework increases happiness and work satisfaction, these factors do not influence labor productivity. Third, this study clarifies that telework is more efficient for improving labor productivity if workers commute more than 1 h or commute by trains or buses that are usually very crowded during rush hours in Japan. Finally, the effect of telework for workers who have a greater number of potential trivial duties is insignificantly larger. Supervisors and colleagues often ask others to perform trivial, extra tasks without regard for schedules. Telework may help workers avoid such trivial duties and increase labor productivity. However, the importance of trivial duties is also demonstrated in this study.     

'High-performance' Management Practices, Working Hours and Work–Life Balance

The effects of selected high‐performance practices and working hours on work–life balance are analysed with data from national surveys of British employees in 1992 and 2000. Alongside long hours, which are a constant source of negative job‐to‐home spillover, certain ‘high‐performance’ practices have become more strongly related to negative spillover during this period. Surprisingly, dual‐earner couples are not especially liable to spillover — if anything, less so than single‐earner couples. Additionally, the presence of young children has become less important over time. Overall, the results suggest a conflict between high‐performance practices and work‐life balance policies.     

Foreign Expansion by Italian Manufacturing Firms in the Nineties: an Ordered Probit Analysis

This paper develops an index of internationalizationcommitment or foreign expansion index(FEI) of the firm. The FEI integrates variousdimensions of commitment tointernationalization that, although interrelated,have usually been analyzed independently, i.e.exports, foreign penetration operations (suchas foreign commercial agreements, sales outletsabroad and so on) and FDI. Because of itsprominent inter-firm relationships andNorth-South discrepancies, this study focuseson Italy, constructing FEIs for each of some4,000 firms for three periods characterized bydifferent exchange rate regimes. Thedeterminants of FEI in each period are studiedat both the macro and micro levels, the latterthrough the use of an ordered probit model. Thefindings suggest that: (a) firm size,inter-firm relations, innovation capabilities,location and technology are all highly significantdeterminants of FEI, but their relative impacton the foreign expansion is influenced by theexchange rate regime; and (b) although still lowand especially so in the South, Italy's FEIshave risen somewhat during the 1990s.     

Restructuring Managerial Labour in the USA,the UK and Japan: Challenging the Salience of ‘Varieties of Capitalism’

This article provides a cross‐national, qualitative investigation into the experiences of middle managers in large organizations in the USA, the UK and Japan, following organizational restructuring. Despite well‐documented national differences in administrative heritage, institutional regimes or ‘varieties of capitalism’, our data point towards considerable similitude across the three countries in terms of a general expression of the need for change, and the concrete impacts of organizational reforms on managerial work. Specifically we analyse the changing nature of work roles, career paths, working hours and spans of control of mid‐level managers in five large firms in each of the three countries. The data demonstrate that middle managers in all three countries face fundamental changes to key areas of their work experience. In Japan, although changes do not amount to a genuine shift towards ‘Anglo‐Saxon’ institutions or business practices, the robust use of organizational reforms with very similar aims and underpinning assumptions to those used in the USA and the UK entails similar impacts in terms of work processes of middle managers across the three nations. This shared experience involved the augmentation of middle management skill levels, responsibilities and span of control, but alongside the downgrading of career expectations, and increased workload and work intensity. We argue that these changes are in keeping with some, but not all, of the features explained and predicted in Bravermanian labour process theory.     

It's all about games: enterprise and entrepreneurialism in digital games

This article aims to contrast benign notions of ‘free’ and ‘creative’ work in the context of labour market conditions and employment relationships. Empirical research reveals the exploitative and precarious nature of work in the experiences of self‐employed digital game developers and charts the responses of developers to unstable and insecure working conditions. Building on work by Pongratz and Voß, Haunschild and Eikhof, and Bergvall‐Kåreborn and Howcroft, this study finds that a typical response to increasing instability in the labour market is to adopt more enterprising and entrepreneurial behaviour in order to find work. This article illustrates the consequences for developers by highlighting examples of self‐exploitation, which is fuelled by a passion for work and is where entrepreneurial practices lead to long working hours, unpaid work and a blurring of work–life boundaries.