Industrial and Labor Relations Review articles from July 1994

Industrial and Labor Relations Review archives from July 1994

Long-run convergence of ethnic skill differentials: the children and grandchildren of the Great Migration.
July 1, 1994... The extent to which ethnic differentials persist across generations is a central question in social science. The fact that ethnicity matters - and that it seems to matter for a very long time - is evident not only in the United States, but also...

Employee participation programs, group-based incentives, and company performance: a union-nonunion comparison.
July 1, 1994... In response to intensified global and domestic competition, many American companies have sought to improve company performance through more effective use of their work forces. Central to many of these recent efforts are employee participation...

The credibility of drug tests: a multi-stage Bayesian analysis.
July 1, 1994... Testing workers for drugs of abuse has become commonplace in the United States. Eighty-five percent of corporations responding to a 1993 survey used some form of drug testing, and one out of five American workers was tested in 1992 (American...

Gender discrimination by gender: voting in professional society.
July 1, 1994... Becker's (1957) explanation for discrimination was that people have discriminatory tastes. Some of the newer theories - those, for example, that focus on language differences (Lang 1986) - also emphasize tastes for discrimination to some...

Gender earnings differentials in total pay, base pay, and contingent pay.
July 1, 1994... Most attempts to explain the gap in pay between men and women have focused on sets of explanatory variables included in wage equations. Typically, annual earnings or hourly wages are regressed on human capital and other productivity related...

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act: effects on notice provision.
July 1, 1994... Considerable controversy accompanied the passage of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) in August 1988. Opponents of the legislation saw it as adding significantly to employment-adjustment costs and thereby adversely...

Flexible production and the transformation of industrial relations in the motion picture and television industry.
July 1, 1994... Kochan, Katz, and McKersie (1986) developed a hierarchical model of industrial relations systems in which (1) strategic choices by management, labor, and government, (2) the structures of collective bargaining, and (3) the technical division of...

Multistate employment and training program evaluations: a tale of three studies.
July 1, 1994... In recent years, there have been a large number of evaluations of employment and training (E&T) programs targeted at the low income population, especially welfare recipients (Blank 1994; Greenberg and Wiseman 1992a, 1992b; Gueron and Pauly...

The effect of performance on a worker's career: evidence from minor league baseball.
July 1, 1994... There is a substantial theoretical literature in labor economics on issues of promotion and turnover - optimal incentive arrangements, tournaments, screening, hierarchies, and the matching of workers and firms. This research has yielded...

Union Voices: Labor's Response to Crisis.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... Union Voices includes eight separate articles written by labor activists who received Samuel Gompers Union Leadership Awards to "assist in the development of new approaches for labor unions" (from the foreword by Victor Gotbaum). The eight...

The Nissan Enigma: Flexibility at Work in a Local Economy.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... This case study of the Nissan automobile assembly plant in Sunderland, England, which opened in 1986, contributes to the literature on economic globalization as well as to the debate about "lean production" and teamwork in the auto industry....

The Challenge of Restructuring: North American Labor Movements Respond.
July 1, 1994... This book consists of 19 essays written primarily by political scientists, who, after more or less ignoring unionism for several decades, have recently begun to explore it in increasing numbers. I remark briefly on each of the papers. Ian...

Justice in Dismissal: The Law of Termination of Employment.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... Hugh Collins's goal in this book is to articulate a "conception of justice in the workplace" for unfair dismissal proceedings under the Employment Protection (Consolidation) Act of 1978. Collins eschews a single theory of justice in dismissal,...

Job Security in America: Lessons from Germany.
July 1, 1994... American employers typically rely on layoffs to downsize their work force. Although the authors of this book recognize that downsizing is unavoidable in any market economy, they contend that American government policy encourages employers to...

Clear and Convincing Evidence: Measurement of Discrimination in America.
July 1, 1994... In the 1980s, research on the economic concerns of African Americans centered on the so-called "underclass," and investigations into discrimination appeared to be over. This book renews work on discrimination in the labor market with a fresh...

Labor's Capital: The Economics and Politics of Private Pensions.
July 1, 1994... This book is an institutionalist view of the U.S. private pension system and, in particular, defined benefit plans. Ghilarducci argues that independent actions by the federal government, firms, and unions have resulted in uncoordinated...

Evaluating Welfare and Training Programs.
July 1, 1994... This book articulates the views of three "broad communities" that "design, perform, and utilize program evaluations." As the editors assert, the book's strength is that it does "not speak with one voice," but includes the differing...

Workers at Risk: The Failed Promise of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
July 1, 1994... This book provides a thorough review of OSHA's activities over its first two decades. The authors argue, quite convincingly, that OSHA has not lived up to its initial promise to promote safe and healthy workplaces. They also offer a number of...

As the Workforce Ages: Costs, Benefits, and Policy Challenges.
July 1, 1994... Issues of population aging are reemerging as an important focus for research and policy analysis precisely as the first wave of the baby boom begins to consider planning for retirement. As the Workforce Ages considers a broad swath of policy...

Women's Two Rules: A Contemporary Dilemma.
July 1, 1994... When it was only poor women who had to juggle childcare and paid work, the reformist solution was to enable them to stay home. But in the past 50 years, the massive entry into the labor force of middle-class married women induced scholars to...

Making Shiftwork Tolerable.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... Making Shiftwork Tolerable. By Timothy H. Monk and Simon Folkard. Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Francis, 1992. 94 pp. ISBN 0-85066-822-0. This book provides a general review of shiftwork - defined as regular employment outside the day working...

Medicare Now and in the Future.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... Any serious consideration of reforming the U.S. health care system must address what to do with Medicare, the federal insurance plan for the elderly and disabled. By any measure the program is expensive, and. every year it consumes an...

Organizational Justice.
July 1, 1994... Whenever rules are made, interpreted, or applied to organizational activities and practices, concerns about fairness arise. Attempts to institute justice systems may not have their intended effect because a response at one level of the...

Growth with Equity.
July 1, 1994... This book, by three nationally respected researchers in the Brookings Institution's Center on Economic Progress and Employment, addresses two problems facing the American economy: anemic productivity improvement and consequent slow economic...

The Challenge of Organizational Change: How Companies Experience It and Leaders Guide It.
July 1, 1994... There is little doubt that change is one of the most important issues for organizations today. As stated in this book, Company survival today depends on courage and imagination - the courage to challenge prevailing business models, and the...

Building the Competitive Workforce: Investing in Human Capital for Corporate Success.
July 1, 1994... Faced with soaring health care costs, pressures to cut overhead expenses, and difficulties in attracting and retaining a skilled work force, today's human resource professional must be prepared for challenges. Mirvis's Building the Competitive...

Fairness in Personnel Selection.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1994... The central tenet of this book is that personnel selection activities should be evaluated in terms of fairness as well as the traditional criteria of validity and utility. The author suggests "that current organizational justice theories...

Banking the Furnace: Restructuring the Steel Industry in Eight Countries.
July 1, 1994... Over the past twenty years, a shrinkage of production facilities and reductions in employment have put enormous pressures on industrial relations systems. Several monographs and anthologies have explored the effects of these developments on...

Retraining-Not Redundancy: Innovative Approaches to Industrial Restructuring in Germany and France.
July 1, 1994... Written in the wake of the mass layoffs in large manufacturing firms in Europe during the 1980s, this book examines alternatives to mass dismissals and external labor market flexibility as a means of industrial adjustment. It focuses on...

European Labor Unions.
July 1, 1994... This book is part of a series of historical encyclopedias designed by Greenwood Press to cover the development of the organized labor movement in all parts of the world. The present volume presents studies of almost all the European countries,...

Trade Policy, Industrialization and Development: New Perspectives.
July 1, 1994... The rival merits of "inward" versus "outward" oriented industrialization have divided development economists since the birth of their subject. Indeed, the policy importance of this debate has grown as a result of the turbulence of world trade...

Labor Parties in Postindustrial Societies.
July 1, 1994... This excellent anthology provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking overview of the current state of labor-affiliated Left parties in North America, Western Europe, and Israel. All but one of the essays focuses on a particular country. Most...

Automobile Workers and the American Dream, 2d ed.
July 1, 1994... The reissuing of this classic 1955 ethnographic study of blue-collar social mobility highlights a shift that has occurred in the American employment relationship. A study of blocked mobility among workers with long-term tenure in a single...

Cane and Labour: The Political Economy of the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1862-1906.
July 1, 1994... In the tradition of economic historians debunking time-honored myths about large-scale labor systems - Fogel (New World slavery), Galenson (American indentured servitude), and Nicholas (Australian convict labor), for example - Adrian Graves in...

The Battle for Homestead: 1880-1892, Politics, Culture and Steel.
July 1, 1994... The strike in July 1892 by steel workers against Andrew Carnegie's Homestead Steel Works stands as a defining moment of class conflict in the nineteenth century. In the space of a week, workers seized control of Carnegie's mammoth complex,...

Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864-1886.
July 1, 1994... As Carole Turbin vividly illustrates, the collar laundresses of Troy, New York, can teach us a great deal about the gender dynamics of U.S. labor movements from the Civil War to the "Great Upheaval" of 1886. Labor historians have long been...