Yonatan Reshef

Manufacturing employees and technological change

Understanding why some workers resist technological change while others accept and facilitate it may be crucial for the survival of manufacturing firms. This study analyzes managers’ perceptions of employees’ reactions to technological changes at 206 Canadian manufacturing plants that made technological changes in their production operations between 1980 and 1988. The results indicate that the presence of a union and a technology clause in the contract significantly increase managers’ perceptions of employee resistance to technological changes. To avoid worker resistance to such changes, the results suggest that management should provide workers with an effective participation in the decision-making process and, if feasible, choose technology that will increase workers’ skill requirements.

The Roles of Supervisors, Employees, and Stewards in Grievance Initiation:

The authors develop a model of grievance initiation that incorporates the grievance-related behaviors of supervisors, employees, and shop stewards, such as the frequency of employee complaints to stewards and the frequency of steward attempts to resolve potential grievances informally. The model is estimated with 1989 survey data on 231 work groups. The grievance-related behavior patterns of the actors are found to be better predictors of grievance rates than the demographic characteristics, attitudes, personality, or other characteristics of employees, stewards, and the workplace, which have been the focus of previous research on grievance initiation.

Union decline: A view from Canada

Important changes are occurring in the Canadian unions’ political and economic environments. This paper argues that such changes may be detrimental to Canadian trade unions, given their structural and institutional situation. To support this argument, private-sector union and nonunion firms in Alberta are compared. This comparison uncovers some structural (union members’ employment patterns and union firm characteristics) and institutional (union services) attributes of unions. Combined with the politico-economic environments that Alberta unions have faced since the early 1980s, these attributes have led to a decline in union membership. Because these attributes are shared by many other Canadian unions, those unions may increasingly confront some of the same hardships currently plaguing their Alberta counterparts.

Employees, unions, and technological changes: A research agenda

Technological changes may disrupt labor-management relations. Understanding why some workers resist technological change, while others accept and facilitate it, can be crucial for the survival of many firms. Unfortunately, the industrial relations literature on employees and technological change suffers from a lack of common focus and the absence of a common theoretical framework. This article attempts to redress this problem by distilling the available knowledge into a model which describes the contexts in which employee reaction to techaological change would likely be supportive of the change, and those where it would not.

The Effect of Unionization on Workplace Innovation

Understanding the factors which facilitate or hinder workplace innovation is crucial to the survival of many firms. This study focuses on one such factor workplace unionization. In this study we develop and test a theory of the effect of workplace unionization on innovation which incorporates competing hypotheses from previous studies. The extent to which the unionization-innovation relationship might be generalizable to the influence of other organizational groups on innovation is addressed.

Government Behaviors and Union Protest: Systematizing the Relationship

I develop a theory of the relationship between government actions and union political protest that uses conjunctures and structures to explain government- related factors which influence union political protest. Conjunctures are dramatic political developments that have the potential to tilt the status quo in industrial relations against, or in favor of, union vested interests. Here, the core conjunctures are significant debts and budget deficits concurrent with governments preaching severe budget cuts and public sector restructuring that, if implemented, can undercut unions. Structures are the policy tools that governments use to implement their agendas. Together, conjunctures and structures constitute a distinct government logic that influences the likelihood of union protest.

Unions in the Time of Revolution: Government Restructuring in Alberta and Ontario

Review(s) of: Unions in the Time of Revolution: Government Restructuring in Alberta and Ontario by Yonatan Reshef and Sandra Rastin, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2003, pp. xviii + 279. CA

Political and Economic Determinants of Strikes in Israel: A Sectorial Comparison

63.00 cloth.

Shop Stewards' Image of Industrial Society and their Modes of Performance

This paper presents a sectorial analysis of strike activity in Israel. Israel provides an interesting case for strike analysis because it comprises three distinct sectors with varying degrees of politicization in industrial relations. By comparing strike activity among the public, private and Histadrut (General Federation of Labour in Israel) sectors two questions are investigated: (a) how are strike patterns affected by aggregate economic and political measures; and (b) what is the relative importance of economic and political factors for strike activity in each sector? The results indicate that economic determinants are more important than political determinants in the private sector, but that political determinants are equally important in the Histadrut and public sector.

American Manufacturing Unions' Stasis: A Paradigmatic Perspective

Shop stewardship is considered here as a process whereby shop stewards translate into behaviour some of their basic, implicit beliefs about the nature of industrial society. A theoretical model is developed, including four images of industrial society (independent concepts) and five types of steward role behaviours (dependent concepts). These dimensionalities, together with the relations between them, are estimated empirically. The empirical results are discussed with special attention given to their implications for steward selection processes and training programmes.