Solidarity's Abandonment of Worker Councils: Redefining Employee Stakeholder Rights in Post-socialist Poland

This paper examines the rejection of employee councils by Poland's trade union Solidarity. In the historical institutional analysis in the first part of this paper, Solidarity's early commitment to employee councils is traced to the evolution of ideas about economic reform that predominated in the union leadership. The impact of these dominant ideas are examined in the second half of the paper which relates Solidarity's abandonment of employee councils to broadly held beliefs about the limited rights of employee stakeholders. Together, the qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrates how trade unions' strategies and their ideological underpinnings have shaped Poland's postwar industrial relations institutions.     

ST:电源IC的一站式商店

对电源IC领导者ST(意法半导体)来说,有一个好坏参半的消息。好消息是,iSuppli预计,电源管理半导体市场将持续增长,且增长势头强劲,会从2004年的212亿美元增长到2009年的292亿美元。坏消息是,像在其他许多行业一样,中国正逐渐成为电源IC的主要消费国,北美公司通过将产品出售给中国的制造商而取得市场份额的增长,而像ST这样的欧洲公司的利益则相应地受到了冲击。     

Do endowments predict the location of production?: Evidence from national and international data

Examining the relationship between factor endowments and production patterns using data from Japanese prefectures and from OECD nations, we find evidence of substantial production indeterminacy. Regressions of outputs on endowments yield prediction errors six to 30 times larger for goods traded relatively freely than for non-traded goods. We argue that a compelling explanation for these results is the existence of more goods than factors in the presence of trade costs. If so, regressions of trade or output on endowments have weak theoretical foundations. Furthermore, since errors are largest in data sets where trade costs are small, we explain why the common methodology of imputing trade barriers from regression residuals has produced counterintuitive results.     

The effect of a rating change announcement on bond price

This paper examines the behavior of corporate bond prices during the period surrounding the announcement of a rating change. We find some evidence of price change during the period from 18 to 7 months before the rating change is announced. We find no evidence of any reaction during the 6 months prior to the rating change. We also find little reaction, if any, during the month of the change or for 6 months after the change. This evidence contradicts the recent findings of Katz and Grier and Katz.     

Union—nonunion wage differentials over the business cycle: A bilateral monopoly model

Summary The primary purposes of this paper have been to provide a theoretical explanation of the declining ratio of union to nonunion wages during economic expansion and to identify the bargaining ranges associated with changing labor demand conditions and also associated with variation in the degree of union power relative to management.By modifying the Marshall-Cartter bilateral monopoly model to permit firm wage preferences to be consistent with the assumption of profit maximization, the feasible negotiation ranges were identified. Depending upon the degree of relative union power, the nature of the union labor supply and MRC functions were found to vary, resulting in variation in the firm's optimum feasible wage-employment combinations. Generally, the more imbalanced the relative power ratio, the smaller will be the size of the bargaining range. Also, the more imperfect the union's information concerning the firm's demand for labor function, the larger the bargaining range.Because of the discontinuity in the firm's marginal resource cost function, a large rise in the marginal revenue product of labor may be required, for unionized firms compared with nonunion firms, before the firm will seek additional employment at the expense of rising wages. However, as expansion continues, the consequent narrowing of the union-nonunion differential will cease and may be partially reversed as a lagged wage patterning response by union firms occurs. Because the discontinuity is not an influence on wage determination during the recession phase, the increase in the union-nonunion wage ration during recession will be less than the decrease resulting from an expansion of equal strength.     

Money isn't everything

Three elements are essential to an effective incentive strategy: various reinforcers, the employee's motivational needs and the organization's business goals. When these factors are integrated into a coherent incentive policy, employees can focus their attention on the company's business goals.