No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Top-down and bottom-up approaches for trade union organising have become popular debates in industrial relations and critical considerations for unions hoping for a renewed status. This study investigated recruitment and recognition of white-collar workers in commercial banks in Barbados during the period 1997 to present in terms of centralised/top-down and workplace/bottom-up union approaches. Case study design was used to examine this phenomenon in five commercial banks by conducting 32 face-to-face interviews with shop stewards, union officials and bank managers involved in the recruitment and recognition processes. Five focus groups were held with shop stewards and documents and archival information were also used. This thesis shows that the Barbados Workers’ Union had initially used a top-down approach to gain recognition in the commercial banks but was initially unsuccessful; however, organisational contexts such as restructuring/reorganising, mergers/acquisitions and a lack of grievance resolution resulted in employee grievances. These grievances included job security, pay equity, and a need for grievance resolution procedure and employee voice which were used by the rank-and-file activists in their bottom-up mobilisation. Evidence from the study showed that the top-down approach was supported by the bottom-up approach once the grievances were framed by activists at the workplace. The findings have shown that when management’s actions create conditions conducive to mobilisation and grievances result which are common to most staff, mobilisation is likely once rank-and-file activists are willing to agitate for unionisation. Further, that once this bottom-up approach supports the top-down approach in a multidimensional way that top-down and bottom-up could contribute to successful recruitment and recognition campaigns. Evidence from this research suggests that rank-and-file mobilisation should be considered along with top-down strategies to increase the chance of recognition. The study contributes to research on top-down and bottom-up approaches and particularly to understanding the workplace dimensions for mobilisation.

The dissertation analyses the possible welfare-enhancing role of severance payments when labour markets are non-competitive. Chapter 1 introduces the material in the thesis. Chapter 2 presents a short survey of the results of the existing literature on dismissal costs. Chapter 3 uses a strategic bargaining model to show that, once dismissal costs are correctly modelled as a payment which takes place only in case firms sever the relationship, firing costs cannot affect the separation rate in models featuring voluntary severance in the absence of restrictions. Firms will always find it profitable to induce workers to quit whenever separation is efficient. Only if some other source of inefficiency prevents firms and workers to split the rents from continuation can firing costs result in a reduced number of separations. In this case they may be efficient. Chapter 4 analyses non-contractible firms' investment in general training in the presence of frictional unemployment. It argues that consensual layoff measures and other institutions that oblige firms to share the total separation payoff result in higher training. Since general training is vested in the worker on separation, in the absence of such measures, the firm would not capture any return to training in case of separation. Chapter 5 shows that in a dynamic efficiency wage model the time-inconsistency of firing decisions implies that severance payments increase aggregate employment and are second-best Pareto optimal as they induce firms to internalise the negative externality, in the form of foregone rents, that they impose on workers on severance. Chapter 6 concludes.

Traditionally, industrial relations have been studied with relation to three fundamental theories: pluralism, unitarism and marxism. However, over the past decade there has been an increasing contribution to industrial relations emanating from the boundaries of other disciplines: principally economics, organizational behaviour and business strategy. Among economists, and to a lesser extent, business strategists, there has been a growing concern about the relationship between macro-economic performance across several countries and labour market institutions. This has manifested itself in discussion of how specific wage bargaining structures influence unemployment and inflation. In these discussions industrial relations specialists appear to lag behind their economist colleagues, tending to favour analysis of the intrinsic relations between employers and employees. An important advantage, however, of these studies in employee relations has been in their ability to explain the conduct of an industrial relations system. This has not led to any consensus and few of the studies conducted in the past decade have investigated the strategic behaviour of both employers and employees. None have attempted to examine the macroeconomic implications of behaviourial changes and wage bargaining. This thesis builds on work already in train in a number of disciplines: principally industrial relations, business strategy, organizational behaviour and labour economics. Cognisant of the work in these areas, the study develops a theory which explains how perceived and actual increases in international competition influence the choice which employers and employees make and which eventually shape their institutions. By departing from the traditional theoretical constructs used in industrial relations, our "new" theory provides a basis for cross-country comparisons of macro-economic effects of labour relations behaviour. From our theory we devise testable propositions and draw a wide variety of time series data over a period of some twenty years, from seventeen O.E.C.D. economies to test these. These data, which lend themselves to econometric analysis, are augmented by qualitative evidence from case studies. Findings support our theory. The thesis makes three distinct contributions. Firstly, it suggests a "new" theoretical approach to the study of industrial relations which combines work from several disciplines. In this regard, it contributes a theory which explains labour market changes by recourse to macro-economic performance. Secondly, it makes a contribution, albeit modest, to policy, suggesting that some current Western policies for labour relations are inadequate since they do not clearly show employers and employees the actual implications of macro-economic performance. Thirdly, the thesis highlights some of the shortcomings of econometric studies which focus on a relatively narrow set of variables at the exclusion of qualitative data which is difficult to quantify.

Internal labour market theory states that the administrative rules and customs that restrict access and regulate the deployment of labour in craft markets will eventually be converted by trade unions into formal collective agreements, preferably enforced by closed shops. However there have been few opportunities to examine what happens when that process is reversed and the protection of those two institutions are removed. The demise of the closed shop in Britain is generally attributed to Mrs Thatcher's Conservative governments whose successive Employment Acts were intended to remove obstacles to the free functioning of the labour market. However, this research will argue, using the example of the British film production industry, that regardless of the political action it is unlikely that the pre-entry closed shop would have survived the technical and social changes of the 1980s. It also shows that many of the constraining practices and principles associated with the industry's internal labour market persist. By tracing the origins of organised labour in the early British film production industry, this research considers whether that closed shop, created by unusual wartime circumstances, merely endorsed the informal rules and customs that characterised an established closed craft community. It will demonstrate that continuity has been possible because internal labour market practices ensure that on-the-job training is only available to those likely to perpetuate the established working practices and demarcation. Furthermore, management are complicit because the efficiencies in screening and training means that a compatible trained workforce is always available. For contrast, it will be shown that in television and video production, seemingly similar sectors, an unrestricted, competitive labour market has been created by the demise of the closed shop, the workers' inability to create a substitute informal network, the unbridled influence of capital and government efforts to assist access to employment.

Workers and firms face substantial uncertainties about their prospects in the labor and product markets. The first three chapters of this thesis analyze how firing costs affect firms' behavior and workers' outcomes in the face of uncertainty about match quality and changing economic conditions. In the final chapter, I show how macroeconomic policy can reduce the risks associated with changing economic conditions. First, I examine a 1999 UK reform that lowered from two years to one year the tenure necessary for a worker to be able to sue their employer for unfair dismissal. After the reform, we observe a significant decrease in the firing hazard for workers with zero to two years tenure relative to the control group, and no overall increase in unemployment. Using a simple model based on the assumption that firms learn about match quality over time, I show that the empirical results are consistent with increased match quality after the reform. Second, I generalize the simple model developed in the first chapter. In particular, I allow for match quality to change over time. The model is useful to understand and predict how firing costs and various forms of uncertainty affect the separation hazard. Thirdly, I analyze the implementation of unfair dismissal legislation by judges in the UK. Judges seem to compromise between workers' and firms' interests. If workers are unemployed, judges decide more often in their favour when unemployment rates are higher. The reverse is true when workers have found a new job. Finally, in work co-authored with Philippe Aghion, we examine whether the government borrowing and spending more in recessions can increase growth by relaxing economic agents' credit constraints. Using a panel data of OECD countries, we find that indeed countercyclical public debt policy is more growth enhancing when private credit is less abundant.