Documents Schröder, Heike 2 results

"Ageing workforces are placing conflicting pressures on European trade unions in order to, on the one hand, protect pensions and early retirement routes, and, on the other, promote human resource management (HRM) policies geared towards enabling their older members to extend working life. Using interviews from German and United Kingdom (UK) trade unions, we discuss how unions are both constrained and enabled by pre-existing institutional structures in advocating approaches to age management. In Germany, some unions use their strong institutional role to affect public policy and industrial change at national and sectoral levels. UK unions have taken a more defensive approach, focused on protecting pension rights. The contrasting varieties of capitalism, welfare systems and trade unions' own orientations are creating different pressures and mechanisms to which unions need to respond. While the German inclusive system is providing unions with mechanisms for negotiating collectively at the national level, UK unions' activism remains localized."

"This article explores whether comparative institutionalism can be used to identify path-dependent approaches to the management of ageing workforces in the United Kingdom (UK) and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), and considers whether and how the global phenomenon of population ageing is leading to a convergence of approaches between Western and Eastern economies. Using semi-structured expert interviews, the article discusses these countries' approaches to employment regulation, welfare provision and public sector employment. The findings show that the two economies exhibit a converging trend: namely shifting responsibilities for extended longevity from the state and employer towards the individual worker. However, stakeholder pressure (especially from trade unions) has tempered this trend in the UK more than in HKSAR. This indicates that stakeholders' relative ability to use their agency in setting and pursuing agendas that diverge from public policy paths influences not only national-level policy-making but also organisational-level HRM."