M.Phil.

Ph.D. (Psychology and People Management) / Ineffective communication, inadequate disciplinary measures and little interest in the advancement of black employees are of the greatest problems in the South African manufacturing industry. An investigation was done to determine the perception of different groups working on different levels concerning communication, black advancement in the work situation and discipline. A theoretical framework indicate that vertical communication is essential for stable labour relations in any industry. Employees show a great need to be treated fairly and to obtain democratic decision making power by means of ordered representative systems. The cultural gap, discrimination in education and training, the attitude of both whites and blacks towards one another as well as the attitude concerning integration of work facilities seem to be the most important reasons for black advancement's failure in South Africa. For black advancement to be successful in the work situation, total social, political and industrial integration is necessary.

This dissertation examines the role of organized labour in governing relations in post- Fordist networked industrial districts within the context of three such sector-districts concentrated in the south-west corner of the Canadian province of British Columbia. It discusses the impact of this role on relational structures and behavioural patterns within these industries and on sector-district performance in the marketplace. It thereby builds upon the scholarly research which followed Piore and Sabel's (1984) popularization of the so-called neo- Marshallian Industrial Districts (MIDs) of the ‘Third Italy'. The study begins with a historical review of labour's influence on the evolution of production organization and institutional governance from the initial emergence of production for the market up to the current era. This review both demonstrates the significant influence of labour on the evolution of market oriented production regimes and provides a broader historical perspective for the analysis of the three cases. These case- studies use primary documentation and interview transcripts to expose the historical source and contemporary practice of labour's normative place in production organization and institutional governance in contemporary 'network systems of industrial governance' (Hollingsworth, Schmitter and Streeck 1994). Labour's roles in these three sector-districts are compared with each other and with an idealized network construct, both to further illuminate and explain the variable outcome and to illustrate possible avenues for institutional reform. The insight acquired into labour's role in the network model will contribute not just to a better understanding of the future of industrial relations in this emergent system. It will also contribute to the broader, related study of the nature of sociopolitical organization and institutional governance in the encompassing community. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

The rise and development of ‘Coloured’ labour relations and political organisations form the central theme of this study. These two areas of South African contemporary history have received comparatively little attention for a number of reasons. Not the least of these is the controversial issue of whether or not it is justifiable or accurate to treat ‘Coloureds’ as a separate and identifiable group apart from the black majority. The term ‘Coloured’ as used in the South African context refers to those people often described in other societies as of mixed race, mulattos or half-castes. Within this study the term ‘Coloured with a capital C and hereafter without apostrophes is used to avoid confusion with ‘coloured1 meaning black. Black is used in the general sense of all those people not being White. The impact of organized Coloured politics, however, has been greater than their minority status would suggest, especially in the Cape, and in particular in the Western Cape, where most of the people described as Coloured live. When Coloured political mobilization started in the 1890’s, it centered in Cape Town. The founding of the first successful Coloured political movement, the African Political Organization (APO), marked the start of successful black political mobilization on a national scale in South Africa. Other Coloured organisations which emerged after the APO made important contributions to the tactics and ideologies of Black political leaders. Coloured intellectuals in the 1940’s propagated the principle of non-collaboration with segregatory political institutions, implemented through the tactic of the boycott, a strategy employed to good effect by contemporary Black organisations. This study is divided into three main sections. Chapters 1 and 2 trace the origins of the labour history in which past and present day developments in the industrial relations system can be viewed in relation to the political, industrial and economic systems that have evolved within South Africa since the occupation of the Western Cape by the Dutch in 1652. The initial contact between these Europeans and the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape developed a relationship which determined the pattern of interaction between Black and White South Africans the major traces of which have still remained until today. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 deal with the early history of the Coloured people, their industrial and political organisations prior to the watershed year of South African Industrial Relations, 1979, whereafter a more generalised view is adopted in order to trace the broad trends which have emerged with the new labour dispensation and its industrial enfranchisement of the Black worker. The remaining chapters concentrate on Coloured participation within the Industrial and Political arenas, particularly in the Western Cape, and offer substantiation for the postulate of a new political grouping based on socialist principles and having a similar trend in terms of its origins to that of the British Labour Party at its birth at the turn of this century. It is concluded that this grouping would be a natural home for the ‘stateless’ Coloured, and ideologically and politically would offer coherence and structure to the disparate groupings within the United Democratic Front (UDF) and form the most potential, Western Cape based political party ‘in waiting'. / This occasional paper is based on the technical report which received the Finansbank award for 1987

O objetivo do estudo é a interpretação da expressão “relação de trabalho”, inserida no art. 114, I, da CF/88, pela EC. 45/2004. Por meio do método analítico investigam-se os fundamentos políticos, jurídicos e sociológicos que respaldam a interpretação constitucional e demarcam a função institucional da Justiça do Trabalho para a sociedade brasileira. Inicia-se com breve relato da história da Justiça do Trabalho e seu regime de competências. Segue-se apanhado geral da doutrina e da jurisprudência que dá sentido e localização ao objeto de estudo ao evidenciar os pontos de convergência e divergência dos mais variados autores que se debruçaram sobre o tema. Após localizar o leitor no objeto de estudo, parte-se para a tentativa de aprofundar as razões sociológicas e políticas que estão por trás da alteração da norma constitucional de modo a dar fundamento à conclusão que se seguirá. Concluída a análise político-social sobre o modo de ser do trabalhador contemporâneo, retoma-se o prisma estritamente jurídico para concluir que a expressão “relação de trabalho” inclui na competência da Justiça do Trabalho todas as demandas promovidas pelos trabalhadores em face dos respectivos tomadores de serviço, independentemente da existência de relação de emprego a partir, única e tão-somente, do pressuposto do trabalho prestado por pessoa física, de um lado, e, de outro, a conjugação dos pressupostos da onerosidade ou da profissionalidade. No que tange às relações de consumo, não têm pertinência na delimitação do alcance da norma constitucional, mas podem ser relevantes no julgamento de questões prejudiciais incidentais, quando a relação de trabalho contiver em seu bojo também uma relação de consumo.

This dissertation examines how firm-specific behavior concerning factors of production is shaped by institutional constraints in development countries. The initial two chapters analyze how firms in Brazil compensate workers for their labor: the first centers on the role of the collective bargaining framework, and the second quantifies the impact of firms on the racial wage gap. The final chapter focuses on firms' use of credit for working capital in response to disruptive periods of violence during Mexico's Drug War. Firms compensate workers not only with wages, but also with other job characteristics that the labor literature broadly refers to as amenities. However, it is hard to study amenity compensation because we rarely observe variation in amenities across establishments in some systematic way. One exception is the comprehensive set of amenities codified in the text of collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that unions negotiate with employers. In chapter 1, I leverage a reform that automatically extended all existing CBAs in Brazil to analyze the impact of this new collective bargaining framework on firm compensation, as measured by wages and amenities, as well as subsequent selection effects in the workforce. To quantify the value workers place on amenities secured by unions, I measure how textual elements in CBAs influence an establishment's ability to poach workers from other employers, conditional on wages, using data on the universe of CBAs merged with an administrative linked employer-employee dataset. I find that automatic extensions increase compensation by 1.6-3.8% when unions are strong---an effect that is driven by additional amenities whose value more than offsets foregone wage gains. These changes in compensation lead to an increase in hiring concentrated among low-skill workers, implying an elasticity of labor supply to the affected firms of around 2. Further evidence suggest that unions reduce compensation inequality within establishments. While union-driven changes to firm compensation can lead to an influx of low skill workers, how firms select and pay workers can have important consequences for wage disparities between groups. In Chapter 2 (work co-authored with François Gerard, Edson Severnini, and David Card), we measure the effects of firms' employment and wage setting policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. We find that nonwhites are less likely to work at firms that pay more to all race groups. This sorting pattern explains about 20% of the white-nonwhite wage gap for both genders. Moreover, the pay premiums offered by different employers are also compressed for nonwhites relative to whites. This within-firm differential wage setting contributes another 5% of the overall gap. We then explore to what extent the under-representation of nonwhites at higher-paying firms is due to the selective skill mix at these workplaces. Using a counterfactual based on the observed skill distribution at each firm and the nonwhite shares in different skill groups in the local labor market, we conclude that assortative matching accounts for about two- thirds of the underrepresentation gap for both men and women. The remainder reflects an unexplained preference for white workers at higher-paying firms. Interestingly, the wage losses associated with unexplained sorting and differential wage setting are largest for nonwhites with the highest levels of general skills. This suggests that the allocative costs of race-based preferences may be relatively large in Brazil. The first two chapters reveal that firms exercise some discretion over compensation and hiring within the context of institutions such as collective bargaining and nondiscrimination laws. But firms are also constrained by other institutions in how they carry out their day-to-day activities. In particular, the capacity of the State to exercise control over the legitimate use of force promotes the fundamental trust required between agents to make welfare-enhancing transactions. In Chapter 3, I analyze how drug-related violence affects credit use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Leveraging administrative data on working capital credit lines issued to MSEs in Mexico, I exploit geographic variation in homicide rates as well as exogenous kingpin captures to identify the causal effects of violence on credit use. I find that firms significantly increase the amounts drawn from their credit lines after experiencing violence shocks. More credit use could be motivated by rising short-term liquidity needs (distress story) or increasing risk of holding cash (substitution story). Rising default probabilities indicate signs of distress, although heterogeneity analyses reveal cash-for-credit substitution among non-revolving borrowers. I also find evidence that rising liquidity needs among distressed MSEs are likely driven by decreased economic activity rather than theft or extortion. As such, this paper highlights the important role that financial products play in terms of helping firms absorb violence shocks as well as providing safe alternatives to cash holdings under insecure environments.

The research adopts the technological affordance approach and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in employee communication and its effects on employees in the context of mainland China. The research postulated that organizations can actualize affordances of ESM to influence employees' cognitive perceptions of ESM (i.e., attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control) that further affect their ESM use intention and relationships with organizations (i.e., employee-organization relationships; EORs). Using a mixed-methods approach to examine Enterprise WeChat (EWeChat), the research interviewed 36 participants to explore organizational actions of EWeChat affordance actualization and employee perceptions about EWeChat use in mainland China. An online survey with 427 mainland Chinese employees adopting EWeChat was conducted to investigate the role of ESM affordance actualization in forming the employees' intention to continuously use EWeChat, as well as in cultivating their EORs through their attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and habits of EWeChat use. Key results of the research include the following. Thirteen EWeChat affordances and means of actualization (i.e., association, control, diversity, feedback, outeraction, perpetual contact, persistence, personalization, portability, privacy, social presence, synchronicity, and visibility) for specific organizational goals were identified. The influence of EWeChat affordance actualization on employees' intention to continuously use EWeChat was mediated by their perceived benefits and risks of EWeChat use. The utilitarian benefit, hedonic benefit, avoidance of work-life conflicts, social concerns, privacy concerns, and perceived behavioral control were positive indicators of the continuous EWeChat-use intention, while performance risk was a negative indicator. The effects of affordance actualization on EORs were partially mediated by employees' perceived utilitarian benefit and perceived professional image related to EWeChat use. The research extends the TPB to predict ESM use in Chinese workplaces. It explicates ESM affordance actualization as the interaction between ESM and organization (actor 1), and also between ESM and employees (actor 2). It also evidences that ESM can be used as a relationship cultivation tool. The research sheds light on how organizations in mainland China can effectively configure their ESM to maximize the efficacy and relational outcomes of its mobile application in employee communication

The research adopts the technological affordance approach and the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to examine the role of enterprise social media (ESM) in employee communication and its effects on employees in the context of mainland China. The research postulated that organizations can actualize affordances of ESM to influence employees' cognitive perceptions of ESM (i.e., attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control) that further affect their ESM use intention and relationships with organizations (i.e., employee-organization relationships; EORs). Using a mixed-methods approach to examine Enterprise WeChat (EWeChat), the research interviewed 36 participants to explore organizational actions of EWeChat affordance actualization and employee perceptions about EWeChat use in mainland China. An online survey with 427 mainland Chinese employees adopting EWeChat was conducted to investigate the role of ESM affordance actualization in forming the employees' intention to continuously use EWeChat, as well as in cultivating their EORs through their attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and habits of EWeChat use. Key results of the research include the following. Thirteen EWeChat affordances and means of actualization (i.e., association, control, diversity, feedback, outeraction, perpetual contact, persistence, personalization, portability, privacy, social presence, synchronicity, and visibility) for specific organizational goals were identified. The influence of EWeChat affordance actualization on employees' intention to continuously use EWeChat was mediated by their perceived benefits and risks of EWeChat use. The utilitarian benefit, hedonic benefit, avoidance of work-life conflicts, social concerns, privacy concerns, and perceived behavioral control were positive indicators of the continuous EWeChat-use intention, while performance risk was a negative indicator. The effects of affordance actualization on EORs were partially mediated by employees' perceived utilitarian benefit and perceived professional image related to EWeChat use. The research extends the TPB to predict ESM use in Chinese workplaces. It explicates ESM affordance actualization as the interaction between ESM and organization (actor 1), and also between ESM and employees (actor 2). It also evidences that ESM can be used as a relationship cultivation tool. The research sheds light on how organizations in mainland China can effectively configure their ESM to maximize the efficacy and relational outcomes of its mobile application in employee communication

Dissertation presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Industrial Sociology at the University of Zululand, 1999. / This research attempts to highlight the role of trade unions in industrial relations system in South Africa: A study of Mondi Kraft industry. The identified roles include, resolving conflicts between the management and the employees, improving the remunerations of the employees, creating a conducive forum for mediation and conciliation process in Mondi Kraft industry. This research confirms that lack of finance for workers to sustain themselves in the course of the strike action is one of the major reasons for ending the strike. It was also observed in this research that the ethnic factor influences individual's desire to associate with a particular trade union. Furthermore, this research showed clearly that poor education, lack of co-operation giving to union members and the hostile attitude of management towards the unions are the major problems confronting the growth and development of the trade unions.

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