Documents Verma, Anil 8 results

"This article examines the role of local industrial relations, specifically workplace unions and collective bargaining, in improving the working conditions of apparel factories exporting to multinational brands and retailers. Drawing on a unique data set collected in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Haiti, Indonesia, Jordan, Nicaragua and Viet Nam by the Better Work programme, we show that local industrial relations play a positive role under certain conditions, even when freedom of association and bargaining are restricted, providing partial support for the argument that labour standards at the production end of global supply chains can be improved significantly by engaging with local actors and institutions."

"This article examines the efficacy of labor representation on pension boards. Using existing literature and interviews with labor trustees, this article develops a modelwhere a more formal approach to recruitment and selectiotion,skill acquisition, and accountability is hypothesized to aid labor trustees in achieving effective integration and representation on pension boards. Data indicate that labor trustees are placed in a challenging environment with insufficient support from their union, other trustees, or the board. These findings have important implications for the selection, training, and
integration of labor trustees and the success of a labor agenda on pension issues."

"Worker participation in the form of involvement in joint health and safety committees (JHSCs) has been associated with improvements in workplace safety and health. JHSC efficacy has been conceived in terms of outcomes such as compensation claims or lost time injury rates and existing research has focused on measuring their effectiveness and on identifying determinants and correlates. This administrative and system-level research focus means that little is known or understood about their everyday processes or about the experiences of JHSC members. We use qualitative data from 54 participants across three case studies of unionized workplaces in the healthcare, hospitality, and communication sectors to shed light on these micro-social processes. Our findings suggest that social and power relationships can create inertia, even in unionized contexts, and that models of equal partnerships in workplace health should be developed to consider structural constraints."

" Factors influencing the adoption of human resource management (HRM) policies and practices are nested within the multilevel contexts of firms and industries. Institutional theory focuses on environmental pressure and suggests that an organization's choice of an HR system is partly attributable to mimetic isomorphism. This paper contributes to the strategic HRM literature by estimating the relative effects of industry-level isomorphism and firm-level contingencies on employers' choice of labor contracts. Drawing on different theoretical perspectives, this study examines multilevel environmental and organizational factors as determinants of HR systems and tests their impacts on the use of short-term labor contracts and weighted average labor contract duration, using a survey of 313 manufacturing plants in China. Utilizing a hierarchical linear model, our analysis shows that while most of the variance in HR systems occurred at the firm level, approximately 7% of the total variance in the four HR programs we studied are explained by industry-level factors. Findings suggest that international competitive pressure, capital intensity, firm size, unionization and ownership type have significant effects on use of labor contracts in a manufacturing context."

"This paper focuses on the labour-environment nexus from the perspective of developing countries, using the case of one of the most vulnerable groups of workers, namely, wastepickers in Brazil. For labour law, the case of wastepickers reveals the limits and potential of labour law to include informal workers, especially poor informal workers from the Global South. We argue that labour rights are essential for these workers even though their work does not fit in the description of an employment relationship. Labour law needs to expand epistemologically to capture different workers and influence the distinct dimensions of their lives. For this expansion of the law to become effective, labour rights and the promotion of collective organization must be recognized within a framework of coordinated policy reforms across labour, environment, and other areas of social policy. "