Community Workforce Provisions in Project Labor Agreements: A Tool for Building Middle-Class Careers

[Excerpt] Project Labor Agreements are comprehensive contracts between a construction client and a consortium of unions. They have been used in the construction industry for over 60 years to achieve uniform labor standards, stability and high quality for large construction projects, and are currently evolving to address broader social and community issues. Community Workforce Agreements are PLAs that contain social investment or targeted hiring provisions to create employment and career path opportunities for individuals from low income communities. Pioneering examples of CWAs included the Los Angeles Community College District PLA (signed in April of 2001), providing for 30 percent of local resident workforce (20 percent of which should be individuals from economically disadvantaged and at-risk populations); and the Port of Oakland (California) PLA (implemented from 2001 to 2008), setting goals for employment of disadvantaged populations and utilization of minority-owned businesses. The first agreements on the West Coast were developed in response to communities’ demands for increased opportunities in the construction industry. To address these demands Building Trades Councils began negotiating PLAs with local hiring provisions. Other successfully implemented CWAs in the West include the Los Angeles Unified School District PLA (2003) and the City of Los Angeles Public Works construction projects (2006). Studies by the Partnership for Working Families and by UCLA found that these CWAs resulted in increased employment and retention of local workers, middle-class career paths and poverty reduction in Los Angeles communities, and that they currently constitute “the basis on which the city can monitor and assess the number of local residents working on its projects.” This report profiles the wide range of PLA/CWA provisions that have been designed and implemented during the last 15 years to establish goals and structures that assist in the creation of new standards and the implementation of new and existing laws and regulations related to the labor and employment rights of low income communities, women, and minorities

Employment Arbitration in the Securities Industry: Lessons from Recent Empirical Research

In this Article, we use evidence gathered from employment arbitration cases arising in the securities industry to address several research questions that emanate from the debate over the arbitration of employment disputes. We empirically answer the following questions: (1) Are critics correct in asserting that employment arbitration favors repeat players? (2) Do employees fare better under voluntary arbitration than they do under mandatory arbitration? (3) Are employees who allege violations of their civil rights, through the filing of discrimination charges, treated differently from those filing other types of claims? (4) Does the gender of the parties involved in the arbitration process affect outcomes in any way? (5) Is there evidence that companies learn from, or are affected by, the results of prior arbitration awards when dealing with a current claim? Although the literature has offered some answers to these questions, this Article provides a holistic review and overview of the arbitration experience within the securities industry and a summation of quantitative evidence on the subject

The Devil Is in the Details: Attorney Heterogeneity and Employment Arbitration Outcomes

Conventional wisdom holds that hiring a lawyer will improve outcomes for non-union employees who take individual rights complaints to arbitration. However, the limited amount of empirical scholarship into this topic has rarely accounted for the concurrent influence of employer representatives, or for the presence and effects of employee and employer attorney heterogeneity. I analyze all arbitration awards rendered within the securities industry from the implementation of its ADR program through the late-2000s, and first find that hiring an attorney benefits employees only in the rare cases that employers do not also include an agent. I then account for attorney selection into cases by limiting the analysis to only claims that involved attorneys. I use biographical records for each lawyer to explore attorney heterogeneity in education, expertise, gender, experience, and other characteristics. I examine longitudinal changes in attorney characteristics over time, and empirically test how these differences affect outcomes. I find that many employee and employer attorney characteristics vary and have grown more pronounced over time, and several of these variations shape outcomes. I conclude that although hiring an attorney may not redress power imbalances within employment arbitration, more nuanced analyses reveal that they are important to the system and certain types of lawyers can provide important benefits

Organizational Conflict Resolution and Strategic Choice: Evidence from a Survey of Fortune 1000 Companies

In this paper we develop the argument that a firm’s ADR strategies are likely to be associated with a firm’s use of one conflict resolution option or the other. More specifically, we examine whether a firm’s use of either arbitration or mediation is a function of (1) the extent to which the use of either of these dispute resolution processes aligns with the goals and objectives management is seeking to advance, and (2) the extent of the firm’s commitment to the use of these practices. We expect to find that an organization’s use of either mediation or arbitration may be governed by different underlying strategic objectives as well as the firm’s broader commitment to ADR. In what follows, we further develop this strategic choice argument

Organizational Strategies for the Adoption of Electronic Medical Records: Toward an Understanding of Outcome Variation in Nursing Homes

[Excerpt] An important element in president-elect Obama\u27s economic stimulus proposal is his plan to invest a significant proportion of federal dollars in installing electronic medical records (EMR) in U.S. healthcare institutions. In emphasizing the need for EMR, Obama is following the advice of numerous healthcare experts who have pointed out that the healthcare sector lags behind other industries in the use of computer technology. They believe the widespread use of EMR would help reduce medical errors, control the costs of healthcare, and lead to significant improvements in the quality of care Americans receive. In this paper we present preliminary results of an ongoing study of the introduction of EMR in 20 nursing homes in the New York City area. Although most observers believe EMR holds great promise for the improvement of healthcare, in fact recent studies have found mixed evidence regarding the effect of EMR on patient outcomes. The evidence we have gathered to date suggests that whether EMR has beneficial effects on the costs and quality of healthcare depends very much on the purposes and objectives nursing home managers and administrators intend to achieve through its use. That is, management strategy and style, we believe, strongly influences healthcare outcomes associated with technological innovation

The Cost of Worker Misclassification in New York State

[Excerpt] This study uses data based on audits performed by the NYS Department of Labor Unemployment Insurance Division during the four-year period 2002-2005. Audits were performed on firms in certain industries, and data was extrapolated statewide for these industries only, based on given employment information. Using general and specific audits conducted during the four year period 2002-2005, it is estimated that 39,587 New York employers (of about 400,732) in audited industries misclassified workers each year as independent contractors. Of these, approximately 5,880 employers, or 14.9%, were in the construction industry

The relative importance of industrial relations ideas in politics: a quantitative analysis of political party manifestos across 54 countries

Ideas are important but hard to quantify, making large-scale, quantitative analyses difficult. Political parties are important ideational contributors, and their election year manifestos provide explicit compilations of their ideas. Using Comparative Manifesto Project data, we propose three channels through which ideas enter into manifestos and examine the fraction of manifesto content devoted to pro-worker and anti-union statements to measure the importance of these ideas. Multivariate analyses across 54 countries, 75 years, and 1132 parties uniquely uncover predictors of industrial relations ideas, including party characteristics, responses to other parties, and economic and political conditions. Further, pro-worker ideas matter to voters during elections

The Lipsky Effect: An analysis of Professor David Lipsky\u27s influence on his graduate students over time

Grad_Student_Lipsky_Presentation.pdf: 29 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

The importance of political systems for trade union membership, coverage and influence: theory and comparative evidence

Ideological connections between the state, political systems and industrial relations have long been important. But the influence of the structural nature of a country's political system on trade union membership, coverage and influence has been largely overlooked. We uniquely theorize three channels through which a political system can shape unionization in the workplace independent of ideology: incentives for inclusionary governance, legislative body composition and policy enactment. Empirically, we use multiple European datasets to test the relationship between political and employee representation using multivariate analyses across more than 25 countries. We find that increased political representativeness, measured by lower disproportionality and the presence of multiparty coalitions, is a statistically significant predictor of a greater likelihood of individual trade union membership, coverage and influence, while competitive fragmentation, measured by greater numbers of political parties, is associated with weakened collective voice

Resolving Discrimination Complaints in Employment Arbitration: An Analysis of the Experience in the Securities Industry

This article empirically examines whether employment discrimination claims differ from other types of disputes resolved through arbitration. Whether arbitration is appropriate for resolving violations of anti-discrimination statutes at work is a focus of ongoing policy debates. Yet empirical scholarship has rarely considered whether different types of complaints might have distinct characteristics and receive varied outcomes in arbitration. The authors analyze all of the employment arbitration awards for cases filed between 1991 and 2006 in the financial services industry to determine whether differences in the type of allegation affect award outcomes. They also examine the effects of the financial industry’s decision in 1999 to introduce voluntary arbitration for discrimination claims. Results indicate that discrimination claims largely fared worse in arbitration than did other statutory or nonstatutory claims but that arbitration systems are capable of meaningful self-reform