Documents wage determination 348 results

"The 2023 annual review of minimum wages was prepared in the context of unprecedented inflation across Europe. While this led to hefty increases in nominal wage rates in many countries, it was in many cases not enough to maintain workers' purchasing power. Based on developments over the last decade, this report shows that, overall, minimum wage earners in nearly all countries saw their purchasing power rising, the gap between their wages and average wages narrowing, and to some degree growth exceeding labour productivity development. Despite the short-term losses in real terms, these longer-term gains did not disappear in 2023. Even in the context of rising inflation, the processes of wage setting did not change substantially. But the early impacts of the EU directive on adequate minimum wages are noticeable, with more countries electing to use the international ‘indicative reference values' mentioned in the directive – 50% of the average or 60% of the median wage – when determining their targets for new levels. This year's report presents, for the first time, an in-depth insight into net minimum wages for single adults, through the EUROMOD tax–benefit microsimulation model, while presenting the latest research findings on minimum wages, published during 2022."

"This article examines the impact of a firm's position in Global Value Chains (GVCs) on wages according to workers' origin. Based on a unique linked employer–employee dataset regarding the Belgian manufacturing industry covering the 2002–2010 timespan, our estimates show that firms that are more upstream in the value chain pay on average significantly higher wages. However, the wage premium associated with upstreamness is also found to be unequally shared among workers. Unconditional quantile regressions and decomposition methods suggest that high-wage workers born in developed countries benefit the most from being employed higher up the value chain, while workers born in developing countries appear to be unfairly rewarded."

"Job levels summarize the complexity, autonomy, and responsibility of task execution. Conceptually, job levels are related to the organization of production, are distinct from occupations, and can be constructed from data on task execution. We highlight their empirical role in matched employer-employee data for life-cycle wage dynamics, refine a task-based view of wage determination, and demonstrate that differences in job levels account for most of the observed wage differences. We also show, within a structural framework, that a job-level perspective provides a novel and fruitful interpretation of widely studied phenomena such as the gender wage gap and the returns to education and seniority."

"Vor etwas mehr als zehn Jahren begann die Einführung der reformierten Entgeltrahmenabkommen (ERA) in der Metall- und Elektro- (M+E) Industrie. Der Beitrag beschreibt Langzeiteffekte dieser Tarifreform in der M+E-Industrie Baden-Württembergs. Die präsentierten Befunde basieren im Wesentlichen auf einer im Spätherbst 2015 durchgeführten standardisierten Parallelbefragung von Betriebsräten und Personalverantwortlichen aller tarifgebundenen Betriebe der M+E-Industrie in Baden-Württemberg sowie ausgewählten Ergebnissen der jährlich durchgeführten Verdiensterhebung von Südwestmetall. Im Ergebnis zeigt sich: ERA ist weiterhin prägend für die betriebliche Entgeltdifferenzierung und erfüllt die ihm zugedachte Ordnungsfunktion. Eine erneute schleichende innere Erosion des Tarifvertrags ist bisher nicht eingetreten. Im Leistungsentgelt werden die erweiterten tariflichen Möglichkeiten kaum genutzt. Zielvereinbarungen spielen im Tarifbereich nur in Kombination mit der Leistungsbeurteilung eine gewisse Rolle. Der vereinbarte Systemwechsel in der Belastungsbewertung bzw. -vergütung ist akzeptiert und zeigt positive Effekte auch hinsichtlich des Abbaus von Belastungen."

"Based on a large-scale survey of Swedish firms, the authors identify significant heterogeneity in their attitudes towards refugee hiring, job performance, wage setting and discrimination, though experience of employing refugees reduces negative attitudes. Firms' reasons for discontinuing their employment of refugees are not related to discrimination by staff or customers, but rather to refugees' suboptimal job performance. While the majority of firms do not regard the collectively agreed minimum wages as an important obstacle to the hiring of refugees, firms with a large share of refugees on the payroll report that reducing those wage rates would enhance employment substantially."

"We investigate empirically how the relative wages of skilled and unskilled workers vary with their relative supplies in open economies. The investigation is based on a Heckscher-Ohlin model that is more general than the canonical version and related to recent advances in trade theory. Our results bridge the gap between trade economists and labour economists in views on the role of national labour markets in wage determination when countries trade. As labour economists believe, relative wages are sensitive to variation in skill supplies in open economies. As trade economists believe, however, this sensitivity decreases with openness to trade."

"In this paper we study the evolution of the Italian wage inequality, and of its determinants, using two decades of matched employer-employee data covering the entire population of private-sector workers and firms in the Veneto region. We find that wage inequality has increased since the mid-1980s at a relatively fast pace, and we decompose this trend by means of wage regression models that account for both worker and firm fixed effects. We show that the observed and unobserved heterogeneity of the workforce has been a major determinant of the overall wage dispersion and of its evolution. Instead, we find that the importance of the dispersion in firm-specific wage policies has declined over time. Finally, we show that the growth in wage dispersion has almost entirely occurred between job titles (livelli di inquadramento) for which a set of minimum wages is bargained at the nation-wide sectoral level. We conclude that, even in the presence of the underlying market forces, trends in wage inequality have been channelled through the rules set by the country's fairly centralized system of industrial relations."

"We theoretically analyse the effects of sick pay and employees' health on collective bargaining, assuming that individuals determine absence optimally. If sick pay is set by the government and not paid for by firms, it induces the trade union to lower wages. This mitigates the positive impact on absence. Moreover, a union may oppose higher sick pay if it reduces labour supply sufficiently. Better employee health tends to foster wage demands. If the union determines both wages and sick pay, we identify situations in which it will substitute wages for sick pay because adverse absence effects can be mitigated."

"The combined increase in firm or company-level and industry-level collective bargaining over recent decades in France has renewed the debate over the potential complementarity or the substitution effect between the two bargaining levels. In this article we study how the two bargaining levels are associated at the workplace level in France in the wage determination process. Our study is based on the REPONSE 2004-2005 survey –which provides information on the role given to industry-level bargaining and the current process of negotiations in the workplace– and on two case studies: one in the automotive sector, the other in call service centres. Three company profiles are defined. In the first two profiles, one of the two bargaining levels has greater emphasis than the other while the third profile is characterised by the weakness of negotiations, whatever the level. Whatever the profile, our analysis shows that the content of negotiations is different at each bargaining level –the company level being more focused on wage determination and the branch level on wage regulation. Besides these key levels of collective bargaining, we stress the growing influence in wage determination of individual performance interviews within the company, and of third parties such as the prime contractor or the parent company, outside the firm."

"Recent scholarship has found wage-setting practices to be a key ingredient in the eurozone crisis, but has yet to examine the specifics of individual wage-bargaining systems and how they behave under EMU. This article addresses this oversight, dissecting wage-bargaining systems by the mechanisms that deliver horizontal and vertical coordination, as well as the indicators to which they are calibrated. It then presents the results of a comparative study of the wage-bargaining systems in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. Comparisons of the Dutch and Belgian systems find that calibration is an important component of wage-bargaining systems, while greater subtlety is needed with regard to the role of the state. While Belgium has clearly struggled because of its practice of indexing wages, the German and Dutch cases instead suggest that developments unconnected to monetary union may be limiting their ability to manage its pressures. The article concludes that in order to continue to function, these three systems require revisions."