Industrial and Labor Relations Review articles from July 1995

Industrial and Labor Relations Review archives from July 1995

National union effectiveness in organizing: measures and influences.
July 1, 1995... Few would disagree that American unionism is in decline. The percentage of wage and salary workers belonging to unions has dropped by more than half over the past 40 years, reaching a 1993 level of about 16% (U.S. Department of Labor 1994)....

Collective bargaining after deregulation: do the Teamsters still count?
July 1, 1995... Economic deregulation, designed to subject the trucking industry to free market forces, has transformed that industry in three ways since 1977. First, the trucking industry before 1977 was a utility, regulated and tied to the public trust. The...

Why do workers join unions? The case of Israel.
July 1, 1995... One of the key questions in the study of labor unions is why workers join them. Most research addressing this question places a heavy emphasis on either the "collective voice" provided to workers by labor unions or the union premium added to...

Leveraging human assets in law firms: human capital structures and organizational capabilities.
July 1, 1995... In the business strategy and human resource management (HRM) literatures, there is a growing interest in understanding how human assets act as sources of organizational capabilities that provide firms with competitive advantage. This study...

The gender pay gap, fringe benefits, and occupational crowding.
July 1, 1995... Most studies of the gender pay gap have used the wage rate to measure compensation. Non-pecuniary dimensions of work and fringe benefits are usually ignored or are included as explanatory control variables. It is possible that the gender pay gap...

Fixing women's wages: the effectiveness of comparable worth policies. (Canada)
July 1, 1995... Women receive lower wages in the paidlabor market than men, on average. This gap remains even after accounting for differences in human capital. A reasonable conclusion is that the gap persists, at least in part, because the labor market works to...

The wage effects of sexual orientation discrimination.
July 1, 1995... Over the past three decades, legislators at the federal, state, and municipal levels have moved toward a general public policy stating that employers should employ and pay people based on what they can produce on the job, not who they are. The...

The impact of pension benefits on the distribution of earned income.
July 1, 1995... A renewed interest in the distribution of income has developed recently, as new evidence suggests that income inequality has worsened over the past twenty years. Researchers suggest several reasons for rising inequality, including an increase in...

International trade and worker displacement: evaluation of the Trade Adjustment Assistance program.
July 1, 1995... Policies to assist workers who become permanently separated from their employers are currently of major interest in the United States and other developed nations. Attention has focused on policies for displaced workers because of the number of...

Do health insurance and pension costs reduce the job opportunities of older workers?
July 1, 1995... As the share of the labor force made up of older workers grows and as more older workers search for employment, it becomes crucial to understand the forces affecting the decisions to employ older workers. But the labor market for older workers...

The labor market skills of recent male immigrants: evidence from the Current Population Survey.
July 1, 1995... Much of the recent debate about U.S. immigration policy revolves around dramatic changes that have occurred in the national origin and skill composition of new arrivals. The share of immigrants originating in Europe and Canada fell sharply during...

Sources of training and their impact on wages.
July 1, 1995... Concern about the quality of the American work force has led many observers to argue that improvements in worker training are necessary if the United States is to compete successfully in the global market. Enhancing the skills of workers through...

Myth and Measurement: The New Economies of the Minimum Wage.
July 1, 1995... Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage (Princeton University Press, 1995), by David Card and Alan B. Krueger, is an extraordinarily important book. Announced to the world in stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post,...

Myth and Measurement: The New Economies of the Minimum Wage.
July 1, 1995... Comment by Richard B. Freeman(*) What ill a 10%...50%...100% Increase in the Minimum Wage Do? Economists, like every "little boy and every gal" in Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe ("that's born...either a little Liberal or a little...

Myth and Measurement: The New Economies of the Minimum Wage.
July 1, 1995... Comment by Daniel S. Hamermesh(*) What a Wonderful World This Would Be(1) The major socioeconomic problem facing the United States in the past 15 years has been the widening of earnings differentials, which has been especially severe at the...

Myth and Measurement: The New Economies of the Minimum Wage.
July 1, 1995... Comment by Paul Osterman(*) David Card and Alan B. Krueger (CK) have written a book that represents a phenomenal amount of careful and honest research and that will be a classic in the minimum wage literature and also in the broader field of...

Myth and Measurement: The New Economies of the Minimum Wage.
July 1, 1995... Comment by Finis Welch(*) The book will interest everyone involved in the minimum wage debates, and it will cause economists to question seriously the models they use and how they do empirical research. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Cornell...

Industrial Relations Theory: Its Nature, Scope, and Pedagogy.
July 1, 1995... There is now widespread agreement that industrial relations (IR) systems in many countries have changed dramatically over the past 20 or so years. A number of IR researchers have become increasingly concerned that traditional IR theories do not...

Technocracy at Work.
July 1, 1995... For three decades the "technocratic" thesis has inspired a variety of critical social, moral, and political commentaries on the increasingly central role of science and technology in society. In Technocracy at Work, Beverly Burris uproots the...

Technological Change at Work, 2d ed.
July 1, 1995... This book examines the implementation of new technology in the workplace. It focuses on the introduction of computing and information technologies into production processes in Britain. The authors set out to capture "the actual experience of...

Front Stage, Backstage: The Dramatic Structure of Labor Negotiations.
July 1, 1995... Front Stage, Backstage is an important effort in the struggle to maintain the credibility of collective bargaining, an institution that is increasingly criticized. In pointing out the systemic constraints and demands of the collective bargaining...

Welfare and Work Incentives: A North European Perspective.
July 1, 1995... The question of whether taxation and welfare programs have negative effects on work incentives and on labor supply is an old one but continues to be debated. Research on the subject began with several simple studies in the late 1960s and early...

New Policies for the Part-Time and Contingent Workforce.
July 1, 1995... The Economic Policy Institute, to which the editor of this volume belongs, takes an approach that "involves a challenge to conventional views of market behavior and a revival of a cooperative relationship between the public and private sectors"...

Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law.
July 1, 1995... In 1993, the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and the AFLCIO Department of Economic Research sponsored a special conference dedicated to reviewing the past, present, and future of American labor-management relations....

Disability and Employment.(Brief Article)
July 1, 1995... Disability and Employment presents the findings of a two-year study of the labor market experiences of people with disabilities in Great Britain. This book is a compilation of the views of training and placement directors, employers, union...

Employment and Health Benefits: A Connection at Risk.
July 1, 1995... One reason for the ongoing discussion over health care reform in the United States is widespread dissatisfaction with the current system of primarily employment-based health insurance for the nonelderly. This book, the result of a two-year...

The Evaluation of the Washington State Family Independence Program.
July 1, 1995... Multiple evaluations of state welfare-to-work programs over the past decade have shown that most serious state efforts have been successful, at least as measured by increases in employment and decreases in welfare use (Judith M. Gueron and Edward...

Gender and Racial Inequality at Work: The Sources and Consequences of Job Segregation.
July 1, 1995... Since the early 1980s, sociologists have become increasingly attuned to the connections between organizational and job level characteristics and the stratified work outcomes of individual employees. Coincident with this interest has been a high...

Averting the Old Age Crisis: Policies to Protect the Old and Promote Growth.
July 1, 1995... Many countries that provide generous social security benefits are beginning to feel the strain of population aging and, as a result, are reconsidering how they provide retirement income. The World Bank has organized a project, headed by Estelle...

Japan's "Guest Workers": Issues and Public Policies.
July 1, 1995... This book provides insight into the issues currently debated in Japan in connection with foreign workers, and promotes the author's vision of how access of foreigners to the Japanese labor market should be regulated. Japan's foreign worker...

The Politics of French Trade Unionism.
July 1, 1995... The Politics of French Trade Unionism is an account of the relationship between, on one side, two of the main French trade union confederations, the Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT) and the Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail...

Trade Union Growth and Decline.
July 1, 1995... Walter Galenson's volume on the behavior of labor organizations across countries recognizes a fundamental truth that, although evident for some time, has until recently been steadfastly denied by conventional wisdom: unionism (measured in market...

Honda's Global Local Corporation.
July 1, 1995... In this book Andrew Mair seeks to analyze the character of the Honda Corporation as simulataneously a global and local player. Against the background of the failure of the so-called world car strategy, Honda adopted a strategy of transforming its...

Labor and an Integrated Europe.
July 1, 1995... The purpose of this book is to analyze the impact of European integration on labor and the labor market. In particular, the authors explore the effects of economic integration on (a) the system of industrial relations, (b) labor mobility, and (c)...

Collision: How the Rank and File Took Back the Teamsters.
July 1, 1995... Collision, written by labor reporter Ken Crowe of Newsday, is a fast-paced, multidimensional case study of a 15-year struggle to reform the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the largest union in North America. As a journalist covering...

Labour Market Evolution: The Economic History of Market Integration, Wage Flexibility and the Employment Relation.
July 1, 1995... These thirteen papers, based on a conference on the "Evolution of Labour Market Structures" held at McGill University in February 1991, were intended "to focus on the quantifiable characteristics of labour market structures and to analyse their...

Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners' Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America.
July 1, 1995... If you like the long feature articles found in the New Yorker as much as I do, then you too will like this book. The Copper Crucible provides a detailed account of the 1983 strike at the Phelps Dodge copper mines, which involved the hiring of...

The French Worker: Autobiographies from the Early Industrial Era.
July 1, 1995... Although much is known about the conditions and upheavals in France during the nineteenth century, historians have found it very difficult to uncover what ordinary people of that time thought about their lives, their work, and the momentous...

The Making of American Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class Formation in the Nineteenth Century.
July 1, 1995... Historians have long been fascinated by characteristics that distinguish the people of the United States from their compatroits in the mother countries of Europe. Both liberal and conservative believers in American exceptionalism point to the...