The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Human Rights of Workers to Form or Join Trade Unions and to Bargain Collective

This document is part of a digital collection provided by the Martin P. Catherwood Library, ILR School, Cornell University, pertaining to the effects of globalization on the workplace worldwide. Special emphasis is placed on labor rights, working conditions, labor market changes, and union organizing.CCC_2012_Rpt_UN_Workers_Rights_as_Human_Rights_Principles.pdf: 162 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

The gendered impact of the financial crisis:Struggles over social reproduction in Greece

The global financial crisis has triggered a dramatic transformation of employment in the weakest Eurozone economies. This is evidenced in deteriorating work conditions, limited employee negotiating power, low pay, zero-hours contracts and, most importantly, periods of prolonged unemployment for most of the working population, especially women. We offer a critical analysis of the boundaries of formal and informal, paid and unpaid, productive and reproductive work, and explore how austerity policies implemented in Greece in the aftermath of the global financial crisis have transformed women’s everyday lives. In contributing to critical discussions of neoliberal capitalism and recent feminist geography studies, our empirical study focuses on how women’s struggles over social reproduction unfold in the public and private spheres. It proposes that women’s temporary retreat to unpaid work at home constitutes a form of resistance to intensifying precarisation, and, at times, contributes to the emergence of new collective forms of reproduction.</p

Varieties of crisis and working conditions: A comparative study between Greece and Serbia

We explore two historically different, yet regionally connected, countries and the way that their weak institutional foundations and long-term economic turbulence have made them unable to overcome crises, leading to the institutionalisation of adverse working conditions. We focus on the outcomes of the systemic crisis in Greece and the transition crisis in Serbia using semi-structured interviews and focus groups with managers and employees in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in two time periods. We argue that, although the crisis has different origins in the two countries, in both it has led to adverse working conditions becoming institutionalised in organisations and, therefore, less likely to change. Our research explores the institutionalisation of adverse working conditions and offers an understanding of the lived reality of institutions in the way they are experienced by individuals, examining variations in the origins, pressures and outcomes of different types of crises on business practices from an individual perspective

Is job insecurity higher in leveraged buyouts?

This paper assesses whether job insecurity is higher in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) than elsewhere. It draws on matched employer-employee data from the British 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study linked to data from the Centre for Management Buyout Research. The analysis finds no consistent evidence of higher job insecurity in LBOs as measured by workforce reduction practices (redundancy rates, job security/ no-compulsory redundancies policies and redundancy consultation), dismissal rates, labour use practices (non-permanent employment contracts and outsourcing), and employees’ job security perceptions. Job insecurity is no higher in either current or former LBOs than elsewhere. Contrary to what might be expected, it is also no higher in private equity-backed LBOs, management buy-ins, or high-debt LBOs, and there is only partial and weak evidence of higher job insecurity in short-hold LBOs. Job insecurity is also no higher in perfect storm LBOs (PE-backed management buy-ins that are short-holds with high-debt). Concerns over the negative implications of LBOs for job security thus appear misplaced