Documents Pekarek, Andreas 10 results

"Restructuring through mergers has been a key strategy of union revitalization. In Germany, union merger activity has been extensive but seemingly unpredictable in its outcomes, with failed mergers outnumbering successful attempts by a ratio of 2:1. The authors use case studies of two attempted union mergers in Germany—one failed and one successful—to exemplify how these complex processes unfold. Drawing on Walton and McKersie's (1991) work on negotiation, the authors show how common decision-making processes involving key actors at various organizational levels shape the trajectory of merger attempts. Looking beyond mergers to broader questions of union strategy, the authors argue that the concept of negotiated decision making can help reveal the strategic and logical dimensions of apparently unpredictable processes."

"Shop stewards are crucial to the vitality of unions, yet our understanding of why workers take on this important role is incomplete. This qualitative study seeks to contribute to addressing this gap by exploring the factors that influenced workers to become shop stewards in three dissimilar industries (construction, cleaning, and higher education). It draws on earlier research to investigate the explanatory potential of two sets of influences—personal factors and social processes—in interviews with 20 shop stewards and officials from three Australian unions. The study's findings support this conceptual approach, but suggest scope for its refinement. Finally, avenues for further research are identified, and policy implications for unions discussed."

"The publication of John Kelly's Rethinking Industrial Relations in 1998 spawned a growing interest among researchers in exploring how social movement (SM) theory can be used to inform union research, particularly in the context of revitalization/renewal debates. Our starting proposition is that this approach can be extended through an engagement with the larger corpus of SM theory. We focus in particular on the ‘collective action frame' concept. Drawing on examples used by SM scholars, we illustrate how these concepts can be used to extend and enrich union theory and pose new questions concerning the role of unions."

"The ‘gig economy' has emerged rapidly as a form of service delivery that challenges existing business models, labourmanagement practices, and regulations. The ways in which platform companies transact with workers, in particular, has created a burgeoning public interest, but has yet to give rise to a corresponding academic literature. In this paper, we ask whether the gig economy deserves to be a subject of employment relations scholarship, given its current dimensions and likely future. We argue that academic analysis is needed, to better understand the power dynamics operating within the gig economy and how these are testing existing norms and institutions. We discuss two mains ways that employment relations researchers can expand their theoretical repertoires and, in doing so, improve the evidence on gig-based working arrangements. We begin to sketch the outlines of a systematic research agenda, by elaborating indicative questions that need addressing to advance understanding of ‘gig work relations'. We caution, however, that academic analysis of the gig economy should not be predicated on an expectation that it is the future of work. A number of economic, industrial and political factors threaten to slow or halt the gig economy's growth. "

"Decentralization of collective bargaining has become widespread in developed economies, and EU policies have pushed this trend further. We use process-tracing methodology to explore the consequences of decentralization for the reproduction of partnership bargaining relations at company level. We compare two cases of decentralized bargaining in manufacturing, one in Denmark and one in Australia. Agreement-based decentralization seems to offer better process conditions for reproduction of local partnership compared to decentralization regulated by law. This implies that future decentralization measures should be negotiated rather than imposed."

"Labour‐management practices and workers' experiences in the gig economy are topics of major interest for researchers, regulators and the general public. Platform companies project a vision of gig workers as autonomous freelancers, but pervasive features of their own labour practices, along with workers' traits, create new vulnerabilities and risks. Efforts to improve gig workers' conditions to date have made in‐roads without achieving a general shift in platforms' practices or gig workers' conditions. In this paper, we explore how another, less‐recognised stakeholder group—consumers—shapes the conditions of gig work. Drawing on Australian public opinion data, we study consumers' views of the gig economy and ask whether these will help or hinder pro‐worker campaigns. While consumers are sympathetic to gig workers' financial plight, they also see benefits in the work's flexibility and opportunities for jobseekers. We explain how our findings can inform advocacy campaigns and further gig economy research."

"A cornerstone of industrial relations theory is the idea that the potential for conflict is inherent in the employment relationship. Across countries, forms of workplace conflict and methods of conflict resolution take a range of different forms. Yet aside from attempts to understand cross-national variation in strikes, little research has examined systemic differences in the manifestation and management of workplace conflict. The authors seek to fill this void by analyzing through a comparative lens practices for addressing employment-related conflict in four countries: Germany, the United States, Italy, and Australia. In contrast to the unidimensional varieties of capitalism approach, they analyze workplace conflict resolution systems across two dimensions: collective-individual and regulated-voluntarist. The analysis also emphasizes the importance of within-country variation and interactions between different conflict resolution subsystems."

"Coalitions within national union movements have been an enduring means by which unions pursue shared interests and policy ambitions. Drawing on social movement theory, we focus on the logics shaping union coalitions, and the conditions under which they differ, in order to gain analytical purchase on enduring debates about union behaviour in industrial relations. Taking the German case, we identify four key policy issues that have caused major divisions and competing coalitional activity between unions in the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) over the period 1964 to 2018. Our analysis suggests that there is a degree of fluidity between instrumental and ideological logics, which relates to the evolving socio-political contexts that shape the dynamics of union coalitions over time. In the German context, our findings indicate that the relative importance of the logics shaping coalition activity varies with the nature of the threats unions encounter. In the face of more specific and immediate threats, coalitional decision-making was more likely to be driven by instrumental logic, prioritizing the narrower concerns of the union and its core members. However, where unions' broader social visions came under threat, self-interest played a more modest role, and choices were more likely to be animated by ideological concerns and questions of public good."

"Union mergers have been widely studied in a variety of countries; however, little is known about their impact on union effectiveness. This article draws on in-depth interviews with officials and works councillors from four German unions, as well as on a representative survey of German works councils, to analyse how a union's merger status shapes its effectiveness in three spheres of activity: political lobbying, collective bargaining and establishment-level interest representation. We compare two cases of merger with two cases of continued organisational independence, finding that merger outcomes for individual unions vary considerably across our three union functions."

"The COVID-19 pandemic has caused labor market disruptions at an unprecedented scale and is akin to a stress test for industrial relations institutions. Drawing on a large-scale (n = 6111) study of German employees, we empirically investigate whether and how the two institutions comprising Germany's dual system of employee representation—works councils and collective bargaining—have delivered on their protective potential and mitigated the impact of the pandemic on workers. We demonstrate that employees in representative environments fare better on a range of protective outcomes."