Documents Grimshaw, Damian 58 results

"With growing concern about the conditions facing low wage workers and new challenges to traditional forms of labor market protection, this book offers a timely analysis of the purpose and effectiveness of minimum wages in different European countries. Building on original industry case studies, the analysis goes beyond general debates about the relative merits of labor market regulation to reveal important national differences in the functioning of minimum wage systems and their integration within national models of industrial relations.

There is no universal position on minimum wage policy followed by governments and social partners. Nor is it true that trade unions consistently support minimum wages and employers oppose them. The evidence in this book shows that interests and objectives change over time and differ across industries and countries. Investigating the pay bargaining strategies of unions and employers in cleaning, security, retail, and construction, this book's industry case studies show how minimum wage policy interacts with collective bargaining to produce different types of pay equity effects. The analysis provides new findings of ‘ripple effects' shaped by trade union strategies and identifies key components of an ‘egalitarian pay bargaining approach' in social dialogue. The lessons for policy are to embrace an inter-disciplinary approach to minimum wage analysis, to be mindful of the interconnections with the changing national systems of industrial relations, and to interrogate the pay equity effects."

"Drawing on a multilevel study of commissioning, employers, and care staff, this article explores the role of time in the management of domiciliary care work for older adults in England and the consequences for the employment conditions of care staff. An index of fragmented time practices among 52 independent-sector domiciliary care providers reveals widespread tendencies to use zero-hours contracts and limit paid hours to face-to-face contact time, leaving travel time and other work-related activities unpaid. Care staff interviews reveal how fragmented time creates insecurities and demands high work engagement. Time management practices are shown to derive directly from strict time-based local authority commissioning. Subcontractors, both independent small firms and those belonging to national chains, can at best adopt human resource (HR) policies that are partial routes to failure, as evident in widespread recruitment and retention problems. Informal HR practices to accommodate working-time preferences help to retain individual staff, but adjustments are often marginal, adversely affect other staff and fail to expand the recruitment pool for social care. Labor shortages are likely to persist as long as workers are required to adapt to a regime of fragmented time and to work more hours than are paid, even at pay rates close to the national minimum wage."

"The European Union (EU) has an explicit commitment to raise the employment rate for women and to advance gender mainstreaming (GM) and gender equality in both employment and social inclusion policies. In this article we assess developments in the latest round of National Action Plans (NAPs), with particular attention to the situations in the 10 new member states. GM continues to be patchy and inadequate, with a similarly narrow focus in both 'old' and 'new' member states. After enlargement, the greater diversity of national situations in conjunction with ongoing reforms to EU policy frameworks create new challenges for GM."

"International research findings highlight the important role of institutions in shaping the wage structure of an economy. Evidence from a sample of seven public hospitals in the United Kingdom confirms those findings, suggesting that a more coordinated and centralized system of wage-setting (including extension of public-sector conditions to outsourced workers) improves pay for low-wage cleaners and assistant nurses. Renewal of wage-setting institutions provides a necessary but insufficient foundation for the elimination of low-wage work. Employee investment in skill development, career advancement and skill-based pay require management's commitment to the design of new, higher-skilled jobs and the strengthening of internal labour markets "

"The COVID-19 outbreak and resultant economic crisis has led to governments in Europe taking extraordinary action to support citizens. Bodies such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO) recommend such measures should include targeted support for the most affected population groups. Women form one of these groups, with disproportionate impacts on their employment and economic resources already documented. Although the disruption brought about by the COVID-19 crisis has the potential to reshape gender relations for everyone's benefit, there are concerns that the crisis will exacerbate underlying gender inequalities. Though these impacts are likely to be felt globally, public policy has the potential to mitigate them and to ensure a gender-sensitive recovery from the crisis. This paper introduces a gendered lens on the employment and social policies European countries have established since the crisis, with a brief comparative analysis of shorttime working schemes in four countries – Germany, Italy, Norway, and the UK. Ongoing research seeks to extend the comparative, gendered analysis of the design, access and impacts of COVID-19 employment and social policies across Europe."

"Digital platforms provide many workers with vital income and offer the promise of flexible work, and yet also contribute to experiences of precariousness and exploitation, particularly with regard to pressures to undertake unpaid work. This article explores why unpaid labour is necessary and what drives its extent and form among diverse types of digital platforms. We theorize two ideal types of ‘open' and ‘closed' socio-technical platform regimes of worker autonomy, building on sociological insights about socio-technical systems, management control over worker autonomy and labour market segmentation by skill. In principle, ‘open' (‘closed') platform regimes grant relatively high (low) worker autonomy in terms of access to the platform, paid work and control over work tasks. Analysing five case studies, illustrative of ‘open' and ‘closed' regimes, we investigate unpaid labour in low-skill locational (i.e. food delivery) platforms and medium/high-skill online (i.e. freelancing) platforms. In brief, digital freelancers exhibit a lower extent of unpaid labour within relatively ‘open' regimes, owing to greater autonomy over access to, and control over, platform work in a sector requiring medium/high skills. Conversely, ‘closed' regimes mitigate unpaid labour for food-delivery platforms by providing market shelter for workers, who are easily replaced in an overcrowded sector requiring few skills."

"There is renewed interest around the world in the potential of multilevel collective bargaining to contribute to a more inclusive and sustainable model of economic development. Recent country experiences nevertheless highlight tensions and contradictions in the roll‐out of new collective bargaining systems and suggest knowledge gaps regarding the idiosyncrasies of institutional design. This Special Issue provides a critical appraisal of the empirical evidence to date, guided by industrial relations institutional theory, and identifies lessons for policy and practice in the building and sustaining of effective multilevel bargaining systems."

"This article reviews the international evidence for economic benefits of multilevel collective bargaining, indicating that the expected gains are highly contingent and depend upon a raft of interlocking enabling conditions. We argue that the process of institutional reform requires that particular attention be paid to four key factors ‐ a country's political commitment to social dialogue, the degree of understanding of the complex institutional architecture of collective bargaining, the prioritizing of inclusive democratic representation and the resources available to invest in the capacities of workers' and employers' organizations. The article concludes by setting out key policy issues."