Documents Vernon, Guy 5 results

"Unions reduce aggregate pay inequality. Where industrial, or encompassing, unionism predominates, movements have generally coherently pursued inter-enterprise or inter-occupational compression. However, pay compressions have generally been rather unstructured where unionism is segmented by enterprise or the craft-general divide. Analysis of labour productivity growth in manufacturing across 14 OECD countries between 1965 and 1995 shows that an emphasis on aggregate pay compression hampers productivity growth under encompassing unionism, but under segmented unionism promotes it."

"The strategic integration of the human resource (HR) function is regarded as crucial in the literature on (strategic) human resource management ((S)HRM). Evidence on the contextual or structural influences on this integration is, however, limited. The structural implications of unionism are particularly intriguing given the evolution of study of the employment relationship. Pluralism is typically seen as antithetical to SHRM, and unions as an impediment to the strategic integration of HR functions, but there are also suggestions in the literature that unionism might facilitate the strategic integration of HR. This paper deploys large-scale international survey evidence to examine the organization-level influence of unionism on this strategic integration, allowing for other established and plausible influences. The analysis reveals that exceptionally, where the organization-level role of unions is particularly contested, unionism does impede the strategic integration of HR. However, it is the predominance of the facilitation of the strategic integration of HR by unionism which is most remarkable."

"A succession of studies have suggested that management-dominated work organization can deliver productivity alongside participation and reward for employees generally. Examination of the Japanese political economy before the traumas of the 1990s shows that it was a critical case of management-dominated work organization in an environment uniquely facilitative of innovation in work practice and its diffusion. However, detailed consideration of Japanese manufacturing shows that the sector was not generally characterized by comparatively participative, rewarding and productive work organization. The Japanese experience suggests that the potential for mutual gains under management-dominated work organization tends to be overstated."

"This article reviews the variations in aggregate union density in fifteen industrialized societies over the period 1960-2000. Drawing critically on a range of literatures, it argues that density is a valuable if imperfect expression of the weight of the infrastructure of joint regulation. Whilst density levels cannot express the character or anatomy of this regulation, they broadly depict the constraints imposed on managerial prerogative by routinized joint regulation."

"The comparative industrial relations literature now displays ambivalence about the continued significance of national architectures of joint regulation for employment relations outcomes. This article considers the capacity of such architectures to account for the marked cross-national comparative variation in the extent of overall pay inequality among the nations of the established advanced industrialized world at the turn of the millennium, with a particular focus on differences in pay inequality among continental European and coordinated market economies. The article demonstrates that the architecture of joint regulation can still account for pay inequality, but that it is the sheer strength of unions or weight of joint regulation, rather than the procedural formalities often emphasized in the comparative industrial relations literature, which are of purchase. "