This article analyses challenges in organising Polish workers by Unison (UK) and Unia (Switzerland). Using case studies of projects delivered by those unions with the aim to enhancing inclusion of ...Polish workers, the article argues that the internal union dynamics, such as union identity and structures are instrumental for a sustainable organisation of migrant members. Furthermore, the example of Unia demonstrates that an important factor for successful organising of Polish workers was the recognition of their collective agency and their contribution to union revitalisation. Finally, the research demonstrates that previous membership in Polish trade unions was not a significant factor influencing their involvement in British and Swiss workers’ movements.
In response to the last recession, the European Union (EU) adopted a new economic governance (NEG) regime. An influential stream of EU social policy literature argues that there has been more ...emphasis on social objectives in the NEG regime in more recent years. This article shows that this is not the case. It does so through an in‐depth analysis of NEG prescriptions on wage, employment protection and collective bargaining policy in Germany, Italy, Ireland and Romania between 2009 and 2019. Our main conclusion is that the EU's interventions in these three industrial relations policy areas continue to be dominated by a liberalization agenda that is commodifying labour, albeit to a different degree across the uneven but nonetheless integrated European political economy. This finding is important, as countervailing transnational trade union action is the more likely, the more there is a common threat. Even so, our contextualized analysis also enables us to detect contradictions that could provide European labour movements opportunities to pursue countervailing action.
For many years, the employment relations (ER) literature took the perspective that employee voice via trade unions could channel discontent and reduce exit, thereby improving productivity. In ...organizational behaviour (OB) research voice has also emerged as an important concept, and a focus of this research has been to understand the antecedents of the decision of employees to engage or not engage in voice. In OB research, however, voice is not viewed as it is in ER as a mechanism to provide collective representation of employee interests. Rather, it is seen as an expression of the desire and choice of individual workers to communicate information and ideas to management for the benefit of the organization. This article offers a critique of the OB conception of voice, and in particular highlights the limitations of its view of voice as a pro‐social behaviour. We argue that the OB conception of voice is at best partial because its definition of voice as an activity that benefits the organization leaves no room for considering voice as a means of challenging management, or indeed simply as being a vehicle for employee self‐determination.
During the 1990s, a prominent strategy of economic adjustment to the challenges of competitiveness and budgetary retrenchment among the non-corporatist countries of Europe was the negotiation of ...social pacts. Since the onset of the great recession and the Eurozone crisis, social pacts have been conspicuous by their absence. Why have unions not been invited into government buildings to negotiate paths of economic adjustment in the countries hardest hit by the crisis? Drawing on empirical experiences from Ireland and Italy-two cases on which much of the social pact literature concentrated-this article attributes the exclusion of unions to their declining legitimacy. Unions in the new European periphery have lost the capacity either to threaten governments with the stick of protest or to seduce policymakers with the carrot of problem-solving. They are now seen as a narrow interest group like any other. Adapted from the source document.
Labor unions and tax aggressiveness Chyz, James A.; Ching Leung, Winnie Siu; Zhen Li, Oliver ...
Journal of financial economics,
06/2013, Letnik:
108, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We examine the impact of unionization on firms' tax aggressiveness. We find a negative association between firms' tax aggressiveness and union power and a decrease in tax aggressiveness after labor ...union election wins. This relation is consistent with labor unions influencing managers' in one, or both, of two ways: (1) constraining managers' ability to invest in tax aggressiveness through increased monitoring; or (2) decreasing returns to tax aggressiveness that arise from unions' rent seeking behavior. We also find preliminary evidence that the market expects these reductions around union elections and discounts firms that likely add shareholder value via aggressive tax strategies.
Linear regressions with period and group fixed effects are widely used to estimate treatment effects. We show that they estimate weighted sums of the average treatment effects (ATE) in each group and ...period, with weights that may be negative. Due to the negative weights, the linear regression coefficient may for instance be negative while all the ATEs are positive. We propose another estimator that solves this issue. In the two applications we revisit, it is significantly different from the linear regression estimator.
This first ethnographic study of factory workers engaged in radical labor protest gives a voice to a segment of the Japanese population that has been previously marginalized. These blue-collar ...workers, involved in prolonged labor disputes, tell their own story as they struggle to make sense of their lives and their culture during a time of conflict and instability. What emerges is a sensitive portrait of how workers grapple with a slowed economy and the contradictions of Japanese industry in the late postwar era. The ways that they think and feel about accommodation, resistance, and protest raise essential questions about the transformation of labor practices and limits of worker cooperation and compliance.
The situation of the DGB trade unions has been interpreted disparately since the end of the 2000s. For one side, they are experiencing a comeback. For the other, the decline that has been attested ...since the beginning of the 21st century is continuing. In order to resolve this contradictory interpretation, the Strategic Unity working group proposes a change of perspective: Scholarly work should primarily analyse which options for action and resources trade unions have and use to solve their crisis. Marcel Schwartz takes up this suggestion in his qualitative study and analyses revitalisation processes of IG-Metall and ver.di on the basis of the phenomenon of cloudworking. He then places his findings in the debate outlined above.
This article approaches the subject of trade union community-based organising from the perspective of one union’s attempt to broaden its remit by recruiting ‘non-workers’. In 2011, Unite, the largest ...private sector union in the UK, announced it was to recruit retirees, students and people who were unemployed into a new section of the union. This could be a radical and potentially ground-breaking development for a UK union where the organising approach stems from an understanding that the purpose of trade unionism is to advance the interests of the working class as a whole – whether or not individuals are, indeed, working – broadening the ideology of trade unionism from its narrow economistic focus. The article reports on a six-year study of this initiative and analyses whether this can be understood as a reorientation of union purpose as a consequence of loss of power in the workplace. It further considers the potential this has for rebuilding wider spaces of solidarity.
"From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages ...increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution's shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions' effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality - an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt. Die Untersuchung bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum 1970 bis 2010.
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