Robert Buchele

Motivating Employee-Owners in Esop Firms: Human Resource Policies and Company Performance

What enables some employee ownership firms to overcome the free rider problem and motivate employees to improve performance? This study analyzes the role of human resource policies in the performance of employee ownership companies, using employee survey data from 14 companies and a national sample of employee-owners. Between-firm comparisons of 11 ESOP firms show that an index of human resource policies, nominally controlled by management, is positively related to employee reports of co-worker performance and other good workplace outcomes (including perceptions of fairness, good supervision, and worker input and influence). Within-firm comparisons in three ESOP firms, and exploratory results from a national survey, show that employee-owners who participate in employee involvement committees are more likely to exert peer pressure on shirking co-workers. We conclude that an understanding of how and when employee ownership works successfully requires a three-pronged analysis of: 1) the incentives that ownership gives; 2) the participative mechanisms available to workers to act on those incentives; and 3) the corporate culture that battles against tendencies to free ride.

Labor relations and productivity growth in advanced capitalist economies

In this paper, we claim that worker rights (including collective bargaining rights, employment protection, and income security) promote productivity growth. We argue that cooperative labor-management relations encourage workers to make positive contributions to technical and organizational innovations that raise labor productivity, and that an industrial relations system that secures strong worker rights fosters cooperative labor-management relations. These arguments are supported by an empirical analysis of long-run productivity growth in 15 advanced capitalist countries. We first develop an index of worker rights and show its positive effect on several indicators of labor-management cooperation. We then develop an index combining measures of worker rights and labor-management cooperation and show its positive effect on the rate of growth of labor productivity.

Employment and Productivity Growth in Europe and North America: The Impact of Labor Market Institutions

In this paper, we examine long-run employment and productivity growth in the major economies of North America and Europe from 1960 to the early 1990s. We develop a model in which output growth is determined by the growth of aggregate demand, and the relative contributions of employment and productivity growth to the growth of output depend on country specific labor market institutions. We find that institutions that promote collective bargaining, employment security and social protection have roughly equal and opposite effects on employment growth (negative) and productivity growth (positive), giving rise to an inverse relationship between these variables. The welfare implications of this finding are that labor market deregulation could result in more work and greater inequality and insecurity for workers, without significantly increasing the rate of economic growth.

Worker Rights Promote Productivity Growth

ROBERT BUCHELE is Professor of Economics at Smith College. JENS CHRISTIANSEN is Professor of Economics at Mount Holyoke College. industrial-relations system ought to be judged, at least in part, on how workers are treated by it. So there is a case for a policy that enhances worker rights even if that policy reduces productivity growth. But in contrast to the widespread belief today that worker rights undermine economic efficiency, we believe that a strong case can be made that worker rights enhance productivity. In sum, whats good for workers is also good for the economy, certainly in the long run as well as in the short run.

Economics as a Social Science: Introducing the Capitalist Economy

in easily digestible, if somewhat tasteless, form) are designed to give students a view of the capitalist system which leads them neither to question its basic institutions nor to think seriously about how and why these institutions operate. This paper is addressed to those teachers who would like to give students an opportunity to come to their own conclusions about how the capitalist system functions. We hope that this paper will also be useful to ’students’ themselves, both those in academic institutions and those who don’t happen to have classroom teachers (or who feel that their