Alex Bryson

Inside the workplace : findings from the 2004 workplace employment relations survey

1. Introduction 2. A Profile of Workplaces and Employees 3. The Management of Employment Relations 4. Recruiting, Training and Work Organization 5. Representation, Consultation and Communication 6. Employee Representatives 7. The Determination of Pay and other Terms and Conditions 8. Workplace Conflict 9. Equality, Diversity and Work-Life Balance 10. Workplace Climate and Performance 11. Summary and Conclusions

Changes Over Time in Union Relative Wage Effects in the UK and the Us Revisited

This paper examines the impact of trade unions in the US and the UK and elsewhere. In both the US and the UK, despite declining membership numbers, unions are able to raise wages substantially over the equivalent non-union wage. Unions in other countries, such as Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Cyprus, Denmark, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal and Spain, are also able to raise wages by significant amounts. In countries where union wage settlements frequently spill over into the non-union sector (e.g. France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Sweden) there is no significant union wage differential. The estimates from the seventeen countries we examined averages out at 12 per cent. Time series evidence from both the US and the UK suggests three interesting findings. First, the union differential in the US is higher on average than that found in the UK (18 per cent compared with 10 per cent). Second, the union wage premium in both countries was untrended in the years up to the mid-1990s. Third, in both countries the wage premium has fallen in the boom years since 1994/95. It is too early to tell whether the onset of a downturn in 2002 will cause the differential to rise again or whether there is a trend change in the impact of unions. It is our view that most likely what has happened is that the tightening of the labor market has resulted in a temporary decline in the size of the union wage premium. Time will tell whether the current loosening of the labor market, that is occurring in both countries, will return the union wage premium to its long run values of 10 per cent in the case of the UK and 18 per cent in the case of the US. On the basis of past experience it seems likely that they will.

Worker Voice, Managerial Response and Labour Productivity: An Empirical Investigation

This article investigates the relationship between worker voice practices, employee perceptions of managerial responsiveness and labour productivity. It argues that managerial responsiveness is a critical but under-investigated variable in the study of the relationship between worker voice, human resource management and performance. Our results suggest that managerial responsiveness to worker voice does lead to superior labour productivity. However, this relationship is only found in non-union workplaces and there is little relationship between formal voice regime and productivity. One important implication of this finding is that more responsive management will result in improved productivity, so policy interventions should focus on how to motivate managers to become more responsive to their employees.

Why so Unhappy? The Effects of Unionisation on Job Satisfaction

We use linked employer-employee data to investigate the job satisfaction effect of unionisation in Britain. We depart from previous studies by developing a model that simultaneously controls for the endogeneity of union membership and union recognition. We show that a negative association between membership and satisfaction only emerges where there is a union recognised for bargaining, and that such an effect vanishes when the simultaneous selection into membership and recognition is taken into account. We also show that ignoring endogenous recognition would lead to conclude that membership has a positive effect on satisfaction. Our estimates indicate that the unobserved factors that lead to sorting across workplaces are negatively related to the ones determining membership and positively related with those generating satisfaction, a result that we interpret as being consistent with the existence of queues for union jobs.

Youth-Adult Differences in the Demand for Unionisation: Are American, British, and Canadian Workers All That Different?

We examine demand for union membership amongst young and adult workers in Britain, Canada, and the United States. Using a model of representation advanced by Farber (1983, 2001) and Riddell (1993), we find that a majority of the union density differential between young and adult workers in all three countries is due to supply-side constraints rather than a lower desire for unionization by the young. This finding lends credence to two conjectures: first, tastes for collective representation do not differ substantially among workers (either by nationality or by age) and second, union representation can be fruitfully modeled as an experience-good. The experience-good properties of union membership explain the persistence of union density differentials (in this case between youth and adults) in the face of equal levels of desired representation.

Does High Involvement Management Improve Worker Wellbeing

Employees exposed to high involvement management (HIM) practices have higher subjective wellbeing, fewer accidents but more short absence spells than “like” employees not exposed to HIM. These results are robust to extensive work, wage and sickness absence history controls. We highlight the possibility of higher short-term absence in the presence of HIM because it is more demanding than standard production and because multi-skilled HIM workers cover for one anothers short absences thus reducing the cost of replacement labour faced by the employer. We find direct empirical support for this. In accordance with the theoretical framework we find also that long-term absences are independent of exposure to HIM, which is consistent with long-term absences entailing replacement labour costs and with short absences having a negative effect on longer absences.

Workplace Industrial Relations in Britain, 1980-2004

There was a time before the first Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (WIRS80) in 1980 when what we knew of industrial relations was based primarily upon small scale surveys and case studies. WIRS80 marked a radical departure in the study of industrial relations for two reasons. First, following in the footsteps of a small number of survey forerunners, it sought to ‘map’ industrial relations in Britain with nationally-representative large-scale surveys of workplace managers, thus permitting investigation of the incidence of practices and changes over time. Second, it focused on industrial relations institutions and outcomes, linking them to the processes of industrial relations that had been the chief focus of studies up until that point. This paper reflects on some of what we have learned in the five surveys over the quarter century since 1980, focusing selectively on the demise of collective IR, pay determination, union wage effects, variable pay, the climate of employment relations and union effects on employment growth.

Competition and the Retreat from Collective Bargaining

For most of the twentieth century, collective bargaining provided the terms on which labour was commonly employed in Britain. However, the quarter century since 1980 has seen the collapse of collectivism as the main way of regulating employment. Our argument is that the tacit settlement between organized labour and employers was undermined by increasing product market competition. The paper first provides an overview of the changing map of collective bargaining, focusing on the private sector. It then moves on to ask why the retreat took place, and to explore the part played by product market competition and, in particular, by the profitability of different industries. The paper concludes with an analysis of the consequences of privatisation.

The Returns to Scarce Talent Footedness and Player Remuneration in European Soccer

The authors investigate the salary returns to the ability to play association football (soccer) with both feet. The majority of footballers are predominantly right footed. Using two data sets, a cross section of footballers in the five main European leagues and a panel of players in the German Bundesliga, the authors find robust evidence of a substantial salary premium for two-footed ability, even after controlling for available player performance measures. The authors assess how this premium varies across the salary distribution and by player position.

Positive employee attitudes: How much human resource management do you need?

We propose a selective view of human resource management (HRM) that is guided by work motivation theory, arguing that one of the means by which firms achieve higher performance is by investing in certain forms of HRM practice that help fulfil intrinsic work values and thereby influence employees’ attitudes to their jobs and to the firm in a positive direction. Additionally, an accumulation of complementary practices has important communicative functions that intensify positive employee attitudes. Using nationally representative linked employer–employee data for Britain, we investigate the strength and form of the association between the array of practices deployed by the workplace on one hand, and organizational commitment (OC) and intrinsic job satisfaction (IJS) on the other – two types of job attitude that research has shown to be related to a range of performance measures. We find strong evidence that the relationship between employee job attitudes and our measure of HRM is non-linear, rising chiefly at higher levels of HRM. Results are robust to altered composition of the HRM index. Higher OC and IJS emerge at HRM intensity values which are attained by roughly half the British population of workplaces.