Stefanova explores the relative utility of analytical concepts in defining the security posture of the European Union and traces how the evolution of its security features has shaped its continued ...enlargement strategy. He concludes that the eastward enlargement creates an opportunity progressively to enhance the positive security impact of the union well beyond the status of its military capabilities.
The technique of permitting unions to derogations from core employment standards has been increasingly advocated as a means of making labour law more flexible while still protecting workers since the ...union is considered to bring countervailing power in support of workers’ preferences. The new British Columbia Employment Standards Act contains a broad union derogation provision. Industrial relations experts have commented that employment standards that permit the opting out of statutory employee protections in this way invites corrupt arrangements between employers and employer-dominated unions. Using the new BC statute as a case study, the assumption that requiring the union’s consent to derogation from core standards ensures that the derogation reflects workers’ preferences is tested using two sources of empirical data: collective agreements entered into by an employer friendly union (the Christian Labour Association of Canada); and collective agreements in which the union had neither the opportunity nor the strength to prevent derogation.
In traditional models, a binding minimum wage creates a excess supply of low‐skilled workers for minimum‐wage jobs. Employment falls, and some jobs are reallocated from high‐ to low‐rent workers. ...This disequilibrium cannot persist. Competition to secure the property rights to now‐scarce jobs undoes most of the effects of the minimum wage. Workers who attach the highest value to the jobs are willing to work harder to keep them; marginal workers are squeezed out of the market as high‐rent workers ratchet up effort level. This process erodes the rent conferred by the minimum wage but also increases the value of marginal product, which reduces the size of the employment effect. The minimum wage confers more money income on low‐skilled workers and creates some distortion in the optimum combination of wage rate and effort level. Under plausible conditions, the minimum wage has little effect on rent, employment, output, and profits.
PDF
