Documents Nyland, Chris 8 results

"The primary objective of this study is to intervene in the debate on methods to measure and compare legally mandated employment conditions by applying a recently devised numerical instrument to Federal labour standards in Australia in two points in time. In order to achieve this aim, non-parametric absolute indexes are generated for 1979 and 2000 to measure the strength of labour standards and associated changes over time. The numerical results suggest that two of the 10 standards measured, workers? compensation and collective bargaining, diminished while the indexes for equal employment opportunity/employment equity, unjust discharge, occupational health and safety and large-scale layoffs increased. The central tenet of the paper is that although the numerical data provide useful information, they should be interpreted in light of broader regulatory and policy developments that substantially reshaped the features of the Australian employment protection regime during the period considered. This is necessary because the method utilised is highly sensitive to the nature of the regulatory sources that are adopted to construct the statistical indexes."

"Scholars who have deliberated on trade union density decline have paid scant attention to the diminished importance of organised labour's capacity to stabilise markets by harmonising wage growth and total factor productivity. We underscore the significance of this omission by documenting how interwar US scientific management theorists and practitioners enhanced unions' ability to stabilise markets in an era of high productivity growth, and in so doing helped build union numbers and influence. We argue, moreover, that once the productivity wave ended, employers and the US state came to view unions as a source of stagflation, conflict, and inefficiency. This development was particularly pronounced in nations with adversarial pluralist industrial relations regimes rather than the democratic corporatist agenda advocated by Frederick Taylor and his acolytes. We conclude that in an era characterised by revitalised support for knowledge-intensive reindustrialisation, revisiting the scientific managers' agenda might assist trade union renewal."

This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

"Over the last two decades, high performance work systems (HPWSs) research has been dominated by examining the effects of these systems on firm performance. Research on the impact of HPWSs on employees has been marginalised. This study examines the impact of HPWSs on two psychological outcomes for employees, namely, subjective well-being (SWB) and workplace burnout, by utilising data collected from 1488 physicians and nurses in 25 Chinese hospitals. It also examines the moderating effects of employees' organisational based self-esteem (OBSE), as an individual intervention and physician–nurse relationships, as an organisational intervention, on the relationship between HPWSs and employee outcomes. HPWS is found to increase employees' SWB and decrease burnout. Such well-being-enhancing and burnout-relieving effects are stronger when employees have high OBSE. The positive effect of HPWS on SWB is also stronger when there is a collaborative relationship among employees in an organisation. The major contribution of this study is to unpack the ‘black box' of how HPWS influences employee well-being in the Chinese healthcare sector context."

"Managing employer social insurance compliance is a particularly difficult governance challenge in emerging economies that have weak regulatory regimes. Utilizing qualitative evidence from eight case studies conducted in Shanghai, the People's Republic of China, this article details how employers respond to attempts by the State to manage social insurance behaviour. Five concerns arose from employers' perceptions and responses to the established policies and regulatory structures: construction of an effective policy, level playing field, cost control, firm reputation, and recruitment and retention. Further, the findings indicate that there are three enterprise features that could affect compliance behaviour: risk factors, skill composition of the workforce, and form of ownership. It was anticipated that firm size may affect compliance behaviour, but no clear pattern emerged."

"Many scholars and policy-makers argue that advanced market economies are converging towards a neoliberal labour market model with diluted labour standards. However, others insist that `capitalism allows variety'. The primary purpose of this article is to provide empirical evidence that supports the latter position, by comparing legally mandated labour standards in Italy through 1979—2003 and by juxtaposing the results against OECD panel data which allegedly show a decline in labour standards. This comparison suggests that a more complex regulatory transformation occurred than is allowed for by the OECD: indeed, labour standards for core workers in Italy were actually strengthened. This discrepancy reflects the limited focus of the OECD data."

"Prior to 2011 the China Enterprise Confederation (CEC) was the only employer association recognized by China's government. Drawing on interviews with staff from employer associations, employers and state officials, this study clarifies the role of Chinese employer associations, with the focus being on the CEC. The study finds that the Confederation is a quasi-state agency that undertakes many of the activities conducted by employer associations in developed economies. It also finds that the demise of the CEC's monopolization of employer representation can be attributed to its inability to act as an agent of countervailing power and its inability to sustain a complementary relationship with the social partners that are suited to the newly emergent employment relationship being constructed in China."