Industrial and Labor Relations Review articles from January 1998

Industrial and Labor Relations Review archives from January 1998

Hybrids of hodgepodges? Workplace practices of Japanese and domestic startups in the United States.
January 1, 1998... The management literature has characterized many of the human resource practices found in large Japanese workplaces as "best practice" (Ouchi 1981). These characteristics have been well documented (see, for example, Koike 1988; Aoki 1990;...

Institutional change in shopfloor governance and the trajectory of postwar injury rates in U.S. manufacturing, 1946-1970.
January 1, 1998... The injury frequency rate in U.S. manufacturing has been on the rise since the early 1960s. This rather dismal trend has recently attracted the attention of government policy advisors and legislators. The Dunlop Commission report of 1994, for...

Job satisfaction, trade unions and exit-voice revisited.
January 1, 1998... A large number of studies have examined whether unions increase the pay of their members. However, if we are to assess the full impact of trade unions, a more fundamental question is whether trade unions raise the utility of their members. An...

How do unemployment insurance and recall expectations affect on-the-job search among workers who receive advance notice of layoff?
January 1, 1998... Prior research establishes that on-the-job search reduces the duration of subsequent unemployment spells and sometimes even prevents unemployment altogether (when workers search on the job and then go directly into new jobs). In fact, national...

Short-term employment transitions of women in the Israeli labor force.
January 1, 1998... In most industrialized countries, the female proportion of the labor force has increased dramatically during the past 50 years - from a small minority to almost half. This pattern has been particularly pronounced for women with children: young...

Of Heart and Mind: Social Policy Essays in Honor of Sar A. Levitan.
January 1, 1998... The title of this volume appears in the foreword written by five previous Secretaries of the Departments of Labor and Commerce. Secretaries John Dunlop, Juanita Kreps, Ray Marshall, George Shultz, and Willard Wirtz write, "We commend his...

Managing the Unions: The Impact of Legislation on Trade Unions' Behavior.
January 1, 1998... From their election victory in 1979 to the 1997 defeat, successive Conservative governments in the United Kingdom sought to tame what they saw as the excessive power of trade unions. New legislation regulating the rights, responsibilities, and...

San'ya Blues: Laboring Life in Contemporary Tokyo.
January 1, 1998... The old stereotype of Japanese labor relations, derived from observations of large corporations and prominently featuring lifetime employment and seniority-based salary structures, has long been under fire. In academic circles at least, it has...

Five Years After: The Long Term Effects Of Welfare-to-Work Programs.
January 1, 1998... The zigs and zags of the politics and economics of workfare for welfare recipients are enough to keep the head of even the calmest researcher spinning. After the feeble WIN program of the 1970s - which was about as effective as President Ford's...

Ending a Career in the Auto Industry: "30 and Out."
January 1, 1998... A decade ago, with its market share in free fall, General Motors (GM) sought to reduce its work force. In November 1986, the company announced that eleven plants would be partially or fully closed by 1990. Since the plants would be shut down in...

The Uncertain Retirement: Securing Pension Promises in a World of Risk.(Brief Article)
January 1, 1998... This book provides a wide-ranging critique of the termination insurance provided to defined benefit pension plans by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation (PBGC). The author argues that the interests of retirees, taxpayers, workers, and...

Curing the Dutch Disease: An International Perspective on Disability Policy Reform.
January 1, 1998... This edited volume is the first in what will be a series of international studies of social security issues. Its eight chapters discuss disability policies in several developed economies, and its title hints at the question underlying each...

Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality.
January 1, 1998... Would higher salaries improve the quality of the nation's teachers? If not, why not? What other policy changes might bring about such a change? These are the central questions underlying the analyses of the teacher labor market presented in this...

Workdays, Workhours and Work Schedules: Evidence for teh United States and Germany.
January 1, 1998... Daniel Hamermesh's Workdays, Workhours, and Work Schedules is a significant contribution to labor economics. Labor economists usually study work time in terms of the proportion of the population employed, weeks worked in a year, or hours worked...

Advances in the Economic of Aging.
January 1, 1998... This book, the fifth in a series on topics in the economics of aging, consists of papers initially presented at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference in May 1993. Like other volumes in the series, the current one contains...

Change at Work.
January 1, 1998... My mother once told me that my grandmother had been the favorite child in a family of seven children. Why was my grandmother so favored? Because she was the spitting image of her mother. There is a natural tendency to prefer someone who looks...

Personnel Economics.
January 1, 1998... This book summarizes the contributions to personnel economics of the author and other scholars working in a similar vein. The scope of Lazear's book, like the body of his work on which it is based, is impressive. Among the topics he tackles are...

Labour Markets in Europe: Issues in Harmonization and Regulation.
January 1, 1998... Social policy in the European Union (EU) has gained impetus in recent years. In 1991, all member states but the United Kingdom signed the so-called Social Chapter annexed to the Maastricht Treaty, which granted greater legal power to the EU in...

Union Mergers in Hard Times: The View From Five Countries.
January 1, 1998... Gary Chaison has a well-known track record as a researcher concerned with the subject of union mergers. The increased prominence of union mergers in several countries prompted the present book, which is primarily concerned with the following...

Organizing Dissent: Unions, the State and the Democratic Teachers' Movement in Mexico.
January 1, 1998... The powerful if often less-than-emancipatory role of organized labor within the Mexican political system has long puzzled observers north of the Rio Grande. Since the revolutionary era (1910-40), trade unions have thrived in Mexico and become...

Between Bargaining and Politics: An Introduction to European Labor Relations.
January 1, 1998... This slim volume by Hans Slomp provides simply the best introduction to European labor relations that I have seen. It is a common truism that "it is harder to write short than to write long." By that measure, this author has accomplished...