192 research outputs found
Human Resource and Employment Practices in Telecommunications Services, 1980-1998
[Excerpt] In the academic literature on manufacturing, much research and debate have focused on whether firms are adopting some form of “high-performance” or “high-involvement” work organization based on such practices as employee participation, teams, and increased discretion, skills, and training for frontline workers (Ichniowski et al., 1996; Kochan and Osterman, 1994; MacDuffie, 1995). Whereas many firms in the telecommunications industry flirted with these ideas in the 1980s, they did not prove to be a lasting source of inspiration for the redesign of work and employment practices. Rather, work restructuring in telecommunications services has been driven by the ability of firms to leverage network and information technologies to reduce labor costs and create customer segmentation strategies. “Good jobs” versus “bad jobs,” or higher versus lower wage jobs, do not vary according to whether firms adopt a high- involvement model. They vary along two other dimensions: (1) within firms and occupations, by the value-added of the customer segment that an employee group serves; and (2) across firms, by union and nonunion status.
We believe that this customer segmentation strategy is becoming a more general model for employment practices in large-scale service | operations; telecommunications services firms may be somewhat more | advanced than other service firms in adopting this strategy because of certain unique industry characteristics. The scale economies of network technology are such that once a company builds the network infrastructure to a customer’s specifications, the cost of additional services is essentially zero. As a result, and notwithstanding technological uncertainty, all of the industry’s major players are attempting to take advantage of system economies inherent in the nature of the product market and technology to provide customized packages of multimedia products to identified market segments. They have organized into market-driven business units providing differentiated services to large businesses and institutions, small businesses, and residential customers. They have used information technologies and process reengineering to customize specific services to different segments according to customer needs and ability to pay. Variation in work and employment practices, or labor market segmentation, follows product market segmentation. As a result, much of the variation in employment practices in this industry is within firms and within occupations according to market segment rather than across firms.
In addition, despite market deregulation beginning in 1984 and opportunities for new entrants, a tightly led oligopoly structure is replacing the regulated Bell System monopoly. Former Bell System companies, the giants of the regulated period, continue to dominate market share in the post-1984 period. Older players and new entrants alike are merging and consolidating in order to have access to multimedia markets. What is striking in this industry, therefore, is the relative lack of variation in management and employment practices across firms after more than a decade of experience with deregulation. We attribute this lack of variation to three major sources. (1) Technological advances and network economics provide incentives for mergers, organizational consolidation, and, as indicated above, similar business strategies. (2) The former Bell System companies have deep institutional ties, and they continue to benchmark against and imitate each other so that ideas about restructuring have diffused quickly among them. (3) Despite overall deunionization in the industry, they continue to have high unionization rates; de facto pattern bargaining within the Bell system has remained quite strong. Therefore, similar employment practices based on inherited collective bargaining agreements continue to exist across former Bell System firms
Telecommunications: Collective Bargaining in an Era of Industry Reconsolidation
[Excerpt] In this paper, we examine the reconsolidation of the industry, between 1995 and 2001, focusing on the merger, acquisition, and business strategies of the major corporate players; union responses to those strategies; and the resulting evolution of union-management relations and collective bargaining outcomes. We argue that the nature of the industry and technology, coupled with its institutional legacy, provides incentives for consolidation and recentralization of the ownership structure. In this process over the last decade, former Bell affiliates have sought union support before regulatory commissions, and the unions have leveraged their political power to make important gains in collective bargaining and in organizing new members. As a result, the outcomes for union members and prospects for union institutional viability are more positive than they otherwise would have been
Employee Voice, Human Resource Practices, and Quit Rates: Evidence from the Telecommunications Industry
In this paper, we examine the predictors of aggregate quit rates at the establishment level. We draw on strategic human resource and industrial relations theory to identify the sets of employee voice mechanisms and human resource practices that are likely to predict quit rates. With respect to alternative voice mechanisms, we find that union representation significantly predicts lower quit rates after controlling for compensation and a wide range of other human resource practices that may be affected by collective bargaining. Direct participation via offline problem-solving groups and self-directed teams is significantly negatively related to quit rates,but non-union dispute resolution procedures are not. In addition, higher relative wages and internal promotion policies significantly predict lower quit rates, while contingent staffing, electronic monitoring, and variable pay predict significantly higher rates
Telecommunications 2004: Strategy, HR Practices & Performance - Cornell-Rutgers Telecommunications Project
This national benchmarking report of the U.S. telecommunications services industry traces the tumultuous changes in management and workforce practices and performance in the sector over the last 5 years. This is a follow-up report to our 1998 study. At that time, when the industry was booming, we conducted a national survey of establishments in the industry. In 2003, we returned to do a second national survey of the industry, this time in a sector that was recovering from one of the worst recessions in its history
Telecommunications 2000 Strategy, HR Practices & Performance
This report constitutes the first benchmarking survey of business and human resource practices among a nationally representative sample of workplaces in the broadly defined telecommunications industry that includes wireline, wireless, cable, and internet providers. It grows out of a multi-year study of organizational change in the industry, and is based on extensive field study, site visits, interviews, and surveys conducted by research teams at Cornell and Rutgers Universities. Managers at 577 establishments across the country gave generously of their time during a lengthy telephone survey. The study was made possible through a generous grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
While this report is based on data collected among workplaces in the U.S., it has implications for the restructuring of the global telecommunications industry. In other research, we have found that the United States has been at the forefront of market deregulation and technology change, but many other countries have followed a similar path and look to the United States as a model for organizational restructuring (Katz 1997). Thus, at least some of the patterns we find here are likely to occur in other countries undergoing similar patterns of deregulation
Telecommunications 2000: Strategy, HR Practices and Performance
This report constitutes the first benchmarking survey of business and human resource practices among a nationally representative sample of workplaces in the broadly defined telecommunications industry that includes wireline, wireless, cable, and internet providers. It grows out of a multi-year study of organizational change in the industry, and is based on extensive field study, site visits, interviews, and surveys conducted by research teams at Cornell and Rutgers Universities. Managers at 577 establishments across the country gave generously of their time during a lengthy telephone survey. The study was made possible through a generous grant by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Telecommunications 2004: Business Strategy, HR Practices, and Performance
This national benchmarking report of the U.S. telecommunications services industry traces the tumultuous changes in management and workforce practices and performance in the sector over the last 5 years. This is a follow-up report to our 1998 study. At that time, when the industry was booming, we conducted a national survey of establishments in the industry. In 2003, we returned to do a second national survey of the industry, this time in a sector that was recovering from one of the worst recessions in its history
Industrial Relations and Productivity in the U.S. Automobile Industry
macroeconomics, Automobile, industrial relations, productivity
Convergence, Divergence, or Fragmentation: How are Digitalization, Service Competition, and Corporate Consolidation Reshaping Employment Systems in US Telecommunications?
This paper considers three rival employment system hypotheses, each suggesting a different level of institutional cohesion
and operation: the competitive convergence hypothesis, the institutional divergence hypothesis and the fragmentation
hypothesis. The four major telecommunications local networks and network services, fixed wire line, wireless, cable
television, and the Internet are undergoing significant transformations propelled by network digitalization, service
competition, and corporate consolidations. This research examines how these forces are reshaping technician employment
systems across these formerly specialized telecommunications networks and services. The principal finding is that even with
rising inter-network competition and common digital technologies, each network employment system persists, consistent
with the institutional divergence hypothesis. The three facilities-based networks: wireless, cable television distribution, and
wire line, maintain distinctive employment systems rooted in their respective institutional histories, while the Internet
Service Providers exhibit fragmentation reflected in their meteoric rise and current business difficulties
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NEPC Review: Assessing the Compensation of Public-School Teachers
This report compares the pay, pension costs and retiree health benefits of teachers with those of similarly qualified private-sector workers. The study concludes that teachers receive total compensation 52% greater than fair market levels, which translates into a $120 billion annual “overcharge” to taxpayers. Built on a series of faulty analyses, this study misrepresents total teacher compensation in fundamental ways. First, teachers’ 12% lower pay is dismissed as being appropriate for their lesser intelligence, although there is no foundation for such a claim. Total benefits are calculated as having a monetary value of 100.8% of pay, while the Department of Labor disagrees, giving a figure of 32.8%—a figure almost identical to that of people employed in the private sector. Pension costs are valued at 32%, but the real number is closer to 8.4%. The shorter work year is said to represent 28.8% additional compensation but the real work year is only 12% shorter. Teachers’ job stability is said to be worth 8.6%, although the case for such a claim is not sustained. In sum, this report is based on an aggregation of such spurious claims. The actual salary and benefits for teachers show they are in fact undercompensated by 19%.</p
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