In China, rural migrant workers are now the biggest labor force in urban and industrial areas. However, these workers lack effective and legitimate ways to organize themselves to counterbalance the ...power of capital or negotiate for better rights. Since official trade unions are unable to represent or protect migrant workers, and independent unions are prohibited in China, labor non-governmental organizations emerge as an informal way to mobilize and protect workers. This article explores how labor non-governmental organizations mobilize migrant workers in China, and the dilemmas they face. Labor non-governmental organizations use three strategies to organize workers: legal mobilizing, cultural mobilizing and a campaign intervention approach. However, because they face daily surveillance, repression and co-option by the state, these non-governmental organizations have limited political opportunities to organize workers on a large scale or develop a labor movement. While some struggle to resist these attempts to restrict their activity, other non-governmental organizations become domesticated by the state. Overcoming these limitations will require new tactics by non-governmental organizations to carve an independent space to organize migrant workers.
CEO Incentives and Firm Size Baker, George P.; Hall, Brian J.
Journal of labor economics,
10/2004, Letnik:
22, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We develop a model that clarifies how to measure CEO incentive strength and how to reconcile the enormous differences in pay sensitivities between executives in large and small firms. The crucial ...parameter is shown to be the elasticity of CEO productivity with respect to firm size. We find that CEO marginal products rise significantly with firm size (confirming Rosen’s conjecture that CEOs of large firms have a “chain letter” effect on firm performance), and overall CEO incentives are roughly constant, or decline slightly, with firm size. We employ a multitask model to discuss implications for the design of control systems.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe the specific nature of school teacher’s professional identity in the context of its stability maintenance in the Soviet and modern periods of Russian ...society development.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 618 teachers of state comprehensive secondary schools were interviewed with a standardized questionnaire. The survey was divided into four semantic blocks: analyzing how teachers percept their own socio-economic situation; studying the structure of teacher’s social identity and determining the significance of professional identity; determining the nature of teacher’s motivation and professional values; and assessing the degree of labor precariatization.
Findings
This paper shows that a school teacher job had public prestige, social-labor and material guarantees, as well as ideological support from the state in the Soviet Russia. The excessive administrative burden, high social demands for teacher’s performance in the context of deteriorating economic situation in the country create risks for positive professional identity of teachers and, as a consequence, for societal integrity.
Originality/value
This study is relevant as it provides empirical measurements and substantiates macro-social effects of teacher’s professional identity. The excessive administrative load and high social demands for teacher’s performance in the context of deteriorating economic situation in the country create risks for maintaining the positive professional identity of teachers and, as a consequence, for societal integrity.
We study manager-employee interactions in experiments set in a corporate environment where payoffs depend on employees coordinating at high effort levels; the underlying game being played repeatedly ...by employees is a weak-link game. In the absence of managerial intervention subjects invariably slip into coordination failure. To overcome a history of coordination failure, managers have two instruments at their disposal: increasing employees' financial incentives to coordinate and communication with employees. Synthesizing methods drawn from psychology and economics, we quantify the impact of specific types of communication on workers' effort levels and manager's profits. This methodology allows us to rigorously compare the efficacy of communication and direct incentives in an environment where both are available. We find that communication is a more effective tool than incentive changes for leading organizations out of performance traps. Examining the content of managers' communication, the most effective communication strategy is quite simple: specifically request a high effort, point out the mutual benefits of high effort, and imply that employees are being paid well.
The codes of conduct of Western brand-name corporations normally require supplier factories in the Global South to comply with the local country's minimum legal wage; the codes also often stipulate a ...maximum sixty-hour work week. But the problems of illegally low wages and overtime violations in supplier factories remain unresolved. This article uses survey data collected in a city in South China on workers' wages and work hours to show how legal minimum wage rates, which normally are expressed in developing countries as a monthly wage, obfuscate the level of wages paid to workers. This will be demonstrated by comparing two different payment systems: time rates (which predominate in the toy industry) and piece rates (which predominate in garment manufacturing). The differences in the compensation rates and work hours resulting from the two systems lead the authors to contend that countries in the Global South and the implementers of corporate codes should calculate minimum wages in terms of hourly earnings in order to make wage payments more transparent and help reduce exploitative practices. Reprinted by permission of Routledge, Taylor and Francis Ltd.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of asymmetric perceptions of task conflict (i.e. one person experiencing more conflict than the other) on the anticipated relationship ...with the partner, as well as subjective and objective performance.
Design/methodology/approach
– In a 2 × 2 between-participants experimental design, we manipulated participants’ perception of task conflict (perceive task conflict vs does not perceive task conflict) and the perceptual conflict composition of their group (asymmetry vs symmetry). Participants were randomly allocated to each of the four experimental conditions. Eighty-four psychology students at a Dutch university participated (25 men and 59 women; average age = 21).
Findings
– Results show that when individuals realize that they have asymmetric task conflict perceptions, they have lower expectations about having a positive relationship with their partner and perform worse compared to when they have symmetric task perceptions (i.e. both experiencing either low or high levels of conflict).
Originality/value
– Past research on conflict has not often taken into account that individuals involved in a conflict can experience different amounts of conflict. By conducting an experimental study, in contrast to past research on conflict asymmetry, we can better understand the causal relationship between (a)symmetry of conflict and outcomes. We also provide insight into the mediating chain that examines how conflict asymmetry interferes with work processes and leads to negative work outcomes.
Abstract
We examine the evolution of labor arbitration decisions between 1988 and 2018 in which a union-represented employee was alleged to have committed sexual harassment. We find that management ...punished sexual harassment more stringently over time and that arbitrators became more sensitive to whether or not good procedure was followed by management over time. Distributive justice was also a major concern for arbitrators. The results suggest that it is essential for management to exercise procedural justice in disciplining employees, but that it is just as important for management to consider distributive justice when it comes to imposing discipline for inappropriate behavior.
In this article we extend consideration of differences of interest in employment
relationships to career issues. Two sets of interests — those of employing
organizations and of individual workers — ...often make careers ‘contested terrain’ in
which organizations pursue strategic advantages and individuals personal advantages.
The contestation is contextualized by current trends to individualized employment
relations and a focus on managerial, professional and technical work. The two
interest sets mirror a disjuncture between two disciplinary bases, the ‘vocational’
base underpinned by psychology and the ‘strategic human resource management’ (SHRM)
base, underpinned by economics. We develop a ‘psychological contract’ model, in which
both individuals and organizations invest knowledge capital in the other with a view
to obtaining long-term returns. We consider the implications of our analysis and
model for career management by both individuals and organizations, for future
research on careers, and for the interdisciplinary study of careers in an integrated
‘career studies’.
: The stunning decline of Ford, General Motors and Chrysler over the past decade has rendered the once “Big Three” US automakers a vulnerable “Detroit Three”. In their attempts to return to ...profitability, the Detroit Three have undertaken a series of “turnarounds” aimed at renewing their competitive edge. Through this corporate restructuring agenda, 250,000 assembly jobs in North America have been lost, upwards of 50 auto plants have been closed, wages and benefits for new hires have been cut substantially and once strong, independent auto unions have been thoroughly overwhelmed. Permanent restructuring, then, represents a crisis strategy on the part of the corporate elite to continually intensify the demands placed on labour in the hopes of creating new conditions for capital accumulation. Working within labour geography, this paper documents the “regional race to the bottom” in the North American auto industry while reminding labour geographers that capitalist restructuring is a powerful constraint on labour agency.
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