The right to know: disclosure of information for collective bargaining and joint consultation

The legal obligation on employers to provide information to employees has grown since the early 1970s. At that time, the emphasis was on disclosure for collective bargaining. In the 1980s and 1990s, the emphasis shifted more to disclosure for joint consultation. In the context of new legislation, the possibility of further interventions from Europe, and a greater commitment to openness in other areas of company and public life, disclosure of information for collective bargaining and joint consultation at work is again on the agenda. This article focuses on disclosure for both of these processes. Disclosure for collective bargaining is the most developed and potentially significant area of the law from an industrial relations perspective. Disclosure for joint consultation, however, has been the most dynamic area in recent years. Voluntary information provision by firms has also been a significant part of developing human resource management practice. The paper therefore provides a broad examination of the law on disclosure. The UK provisions are conceptualised as constituting an agenda-driven disclosure model; i.e. the trigger for their use lies within the bargaining agenda. By contrast, the provisions stemming from European initiatives are event-driven; i.e. they are triggered by specific employer initiated events that affect employment contracts in other ways irrespective of the representative context. In the final sections, we attempt a broader evaluation of the intent and impact of the legislation and assess the pros and cons of the different approaches

Employee Voice and Human Resource Management: An Empirical Analysis using British Data

Using British workplace data we examine the relationship between human resource management (HRM) and different forms of employee voice. After controlling for observable establishment characteristics, we find voice and HRM are positively correlated, but this positive association is confined to certain voice regimes. Previous research has found no association between HRM and union voice. However, distinguishing between union-only voice regimes and dual channel (i.e. union and nonunion) voice regimes reveals that union-only regimes have the lowest incidence and intensity of HRM adoption while dual channel regimes have the highest HRM incidence and intensity. The implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.

UK intra-firm inequality: stock-based pay for CEOs and outsourcing of lower paid jobs

That the remuneration of top executives in large UK listed companies has grown much faster than average earnings since the early 1980s is hardly a surprise given the plethora of articles on top pay that have been published in the 40 years. Thomas Piketty has described this global phenomenon as “the rise of the super manager”, which he considers a major contributor to modern-day inequality

How should we think about employers’ associations?

We maintain that employer associations are a specific form of employer collusion that is overt, formal and labour market-focused which encompasses but is by no means confined to collective bargaining. We consider the conditions under which this form of collusion might emerge, and how it might develop. Since the context is the decline of employers’ associations in collective bargaining, we look at how collective bargaining involvement (and its disappearance) might relate to the growth or decline of other forms of collusion in areas such as product and financial markets, and political influence. Our central contention is that employers’ associations continue to perform an important role in helping employers set the terms of trade, albeit one that has adapted to the demise of sectoral bargaining

Flaunt the imperfections : information, entanglements, and the regulation of London’s Alternative Investment Market

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust under Grant RF-2016-78.The literature on financial market design is predicated on the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), advocating transparency, liquidity, and universal information with a view to capturing efficient prices. We provide a counterfactual: the 1995 formation of AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s junior market. AIM employs an alternative mode of market organization based on market imperfections. Our empirical study shows how AIM draws on reputation, social relationships and practitioner knowledge to organise market governance. We argue that the market’s design should be understood as capable of producing informationally efficient prices. We characterize AIM as having a ‘Whitean’ structure, compared with the ‘Fama’ structure of main markets. We conclude that the ‘Whitean’ producer market is a viable design option for financial markets.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Flaunt the imperfections : Affective governance and London’s Alternative Investment Market

The literature of financial market design is predicated on the efficient market hypothesis (EMH), advocating transparency, liquidity, and universal information with a view to capturing efficient prices. This dominant understanding of the ‘perfect market’ is highly influential and has been played out in the technological transformation of ‘main board’ exchanges since the 1980s. Yet recent history provides a counterfactual: the 1995 formation of AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s junior market. AIM employs an alternative – but effective – mode of market organization based on market imperfections. Our historical sociology shows how AIM’s structure draws on affect – reputation, social relationships and practitioner knowledge to organise market governance; design choices were shaped by existing market relationships and practices as well as the institution’s strategic commitments and organisational path dependencies. While finance literature remains sceptical of AIM’s ‘privatised regulation’ we argue that the market’s design should be understood as fit for purpose: capable of producing informationally efficient prices. We characterize AIM as having a ‘Whitean’ design structure, compared with the ‘Fama’ design structure of senior markets. We conclude that the ‘Fama’ model is just one possible configuration of a financial market, and that a ‘Whitean’ producer market is also a viable design option.OtherPeer reviewe

The role played by large firms in generating income inequality: UK FTSE 100 pay practices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries

We examine the role of large firms in generating income inequality. Specifically, we consider the growth in the use of asset-based rewards for senior executives, combined with continued use of salaries and wages for other employees, and the impact this has on measures of inequality within firms. Our paper presents data on intra firm inequality from the UK FTSE 100 for the period 2000-2015. It looks at ratios of CEO to average earnings and attempts to explain both the growth in inequality on this measure and the extent of variance between firms. It distinguishes between a period of ‘administered inequality’ up to the early 1980s when intrafirm processes defined differential pay and a subsequent one of “outsourced inequality”, when capital market measures dominate executive pay. In the latter period, intra firm inequality measures are defined by upward movements in capital market measures and the extent of outsourcing of low paid work. We conclude by discussing a number of UK public policy proposals regarding executive pay

The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution

this paper we categorize and analyze existing and future darknets, from both the technical and legal perspectives. We speculate that there will be short-term impediments to the effectiveness of the darknet as a distribution mechanism, but ultimately the darknet-genie will not be put back into the bottle. In view of this hypothesis, we examine the relevance of content protection and content distribution architectures.

The targeted delivery of multicomponent cargos to cancer cells by nanoporous particle-supported lipid bilayers.

Encapsulation of drugs within nanocarriers that selectively target malignant cells promises to mitigate side effects of conventional chemotherapy and to enable delivery of the unique drug combinations needed for personalized medicine. To realize this potential, however, targeted nanocarriers must simultaneously overcome multiple challenges, including specificity, stability and a high capacity for disparate cargos. Here we report porous nanoparticle-supported lipid bilayers (protocells) that synergistically combine properties of liposomes and nanoporous particles. Protocells modified with a targeting peptide that binds to human hepatocellular carcinoma exhibit a 10,000-fold greater affinity for human hepatocellular carcinoma than for hepatocytes, endothelial cells or immune cells. Furthermore, protocells can be loaded with combinations of therapeutic (drugs, small interfering RNA and toxins) and diagnostic (quantum dots) agents and modified to promote endosomal escape and nuclear accumulation of selected cargos. The enormous capacity of the high-surface-area nanoporous core combined with the enhanced targeting efficacy enabled by the fluid supported lipid bilayer enable a single protocell loaded with a drug cocktail to kill a drug-resistant human hepatocellular carcinoma cell, representing a 10(6)-fold improvement over comparable liposomes

Search for Nanosecond Optical Pulses from Nearby Solar‐Type Stars

With "Earth 2000" technology we could generate a directed laser pulse that outshines the broadband visible light of the Sun by 4 orders of magnitude. This is a conservative lower bound for the technical capability of a communicating civilization; optical interstellar communication is thus technically plausible. We have built a pair of systems to detect nanosecond pulsed optical signals from a target list that includes some 13,000 Sun-like stars, and we have made some 16,000 observations totaling nearly 2400 hr during five years of operation. A beam splitter-fed pair of hybrid avalanche photodetectors at the 1.5 m Wyeth Telescope at the Harvard/Smithsonian Oak Ridge Observatory (Agassiz Station) triggers on a coincident pulse pair, initiating measurement of pulse width and intensity at subnanosecond resolution. An identical system at the 0.9 m Cassegrain at Princeton's Fitz-Randolph Observatory performs synchronized observations with 0.1 μs event timing, permitting unambiguous identification of even a solitary pulse. Among the 11,600 artifact-free observations at Harvard, the distribution of 274 observed events shows no pattern of repetition, and is consistent with a model with uniform event rate, independent of target. With one possible exception (HIP 107395), no valid event has been seen simultaneously at the two observatories. We describe the search and candidate events and set limits on the prevalence of civilizations transmitting intense optical pulses