Trade Union Membership and Influence 1999-2009

This paper analyses the continued decline of trade unions in Britain and examines the possible implications for workers, employers, and unions themselves. Membership of trade unions declined precipitously in the 1980s and 1990s. The rate of decline has slowed in the most recent decade, but we find that unions remain vulnerable to further erosion of their membership and influence.trade unions, wages, holidays, workplace performance

The Evolution of the Modern Worker: Attitudes to Work

This paper examines how employees' experiences of, and attitudes towards, work have changed over the last quarter of a century. It assesses the extent to which any developments relate to the economic cycle and to trends in the composition of the British workforce. Many of the findings are broadly positive, particularly when compared with a picture of deterioration in the late 1980s and 1990s. The onset of a major recession in the late 2000s might have been expected to herald a fundamental shift in employees' attitudes to paid work and their working environment. The impression at the time of writing is, instead, of a more muted reaction than was seen in the early 1990s - in keeping with the more muted impact of the current recession on the labour market as a whole.wages, job security, employee engagement, employment relations, recession

Unions and Workplace Performance in Britain and France

Using nationally representative workplace surveys we examine the relationship between unionization and workplace financial performance in Britain and France. We find that union bargaining is detrimental to workplace performance in Britain and that this effect is larger when unionization is endogenized. In France, union bargaining is associated with poorer workplace performance but the effect disappears once unionization is treated as endogenous. However, high levels of union density do have a negative impact on workplace performance in France. In Britain the union effect does not rise with union density.Trade union, firm performance, France, Britain

Does worker wellbeing affect workplace performance?

This paper uses linked employer-employee data to investigate the relationship between employees’ subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically-significant relationship between the average level of job satisfaction at the workplace and workplace performance. This finding is present in both cross-sectional and panel analyses and is robust to various estimation methods and model specifications. In contrast, we find no association between levels of job-related affect and workplace performance

A review of occupational regulation and its impact

This Evidence Report develops a deeper understanding of the nature and impact of occupational regulation in the UK. The term, occupational regulation, is a broad heading for various mechanisms (including licence to practice and voluntary forms) through which minimum skill standards are applied within occupations. As such, occupational regulation is one of a range of levers, or best market solutions, which are designed to encourage employers to train on a collective basis. The use of occupational regulation as a mechanism for increasing the demand for, and supply of, skills was considered alongside other measures, as part of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills’ Review of Employer Collective Measures. However, that Review acknowledged the general topic of occupational regulation was under researched in the UK. This research, conducted by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, helps to address this and deepens our knowledge of the area by: providing a discussion on the existing theory on occupational regulation by examining existing economic literature; providing a detailed review of the existing evidence on occupational regulation in the UK, America, Canada and Europe (Germany, France and Italy), again via existing literature; providing a comprehensive map of occupational regulation in the UK, through the mapping of managerial, professional and non-professional occupations at the Unit Group level of the Standard Occupational Classification (2000); producing estimates of the labour market impact of occupational regulation in the UK. Its prevalence is estimated by comparing the mapping output with Unit Group data obtained from the Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS). Further analysis, via cross-sectional analysis, produces estimates on levels of qualifications, wages and rates of job-related training between workers in regulated and unregulated occupations. This uses QLFS 2010 data. And a Difference-in-Differences analysis is employed to evaluate the impact of switches in regulation status on skill levels, job-related education and training, wages and employment. This uses QLFS data between 2001 and 2010

How much influence does the Chinese state have over CEOs and their compensation?

All that we know about the CEO labour market in China comes from studies of public listed companies and State-owned enterprises (SOEs). This paper is the first to examine the operation of the CEO labour market across all industrial sectors of the Chinese economy. We find that the influence of the State extends beyond SOEs into many privately-owned firms. Government is often involved in CEO appointments in domestic firms and, when this is the case, the CEO has less job autonomy and is less likely to have pay linked to firm performance. Nevertheless, we find that incentive schemes are commonplace and include contracts linking CEO pay directly to firm performance, annual bonus schemes, the posting of performance bonds, and holding company stock. The elasticity of pay with respect to company performance is one or more in two-fifths of the cases where CEOs have performance contracts, suggesting many face high-powered incentives. We also show that State-owned and domestic privately-owned firms are more likely than foreign-owned firms to use incentive contracts

CEO incentive contracts in China: why does city location matter?

CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two policy experiments: the use of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and the privatization of state owned enterprises (SOEs). The introduction of SEZs is found to be uncorrelated with the prevalence of CEO incentive contracts. However, firms are more likely to use such contracts in areas that saw rapid SOE privatisation, irrespective of the firm's own current ownership status and irrespective of the size of the SOE sector in the late 1970s. The positive effect of privatisation is robust to various estimation techniques and model specifications. These findings suggest that domestic privatisation policies have been more influential than FDI in driving the expansion of incentive contracts in China

Three resilient megastructures by Pier Luigi Nervi

Resilience, as the ability of a structure to withstand threats and continue to function, is normally related to durability and performance to accepted standards over time. The resilience of a structure can be threatened by poor design, changes in the public’s perception of style, the potential for a change in use, and structural attack; catastrophic events such as fire, explosion, or impact are usually considered the main threats for resilience. In the contemporary built environment, resilience is considered increasingly important; it has, in fact, become one of the major design issues, especially for large, iconic or public and prominent structures, which has not always been the case. Following World War II (WWII), building designers faced the necessity to conceive projects within severe financial constraints, hence the proliferation of a low quality and limited life-span structures — buildings that were designed to be replaceable, cheap, and perhaps anonymous. This approach was thought to be an effective answer to quickly accommodate the large number of people moving towards the urban environment partly destroyed by the WWII. These very buildings now constitute the backbone of our urban scenery and, although some still function adequately, many are perfect examples of structures that exhibit a lack of resilience. Fortunately, a few designers refused this post-war tendency and attempted to design lasting structures of quality, most were engineers. This is not a coincidence, engineers had less to do with the issue of providing residential accommodations and more with the erection of large structures, which necessitated a higher quality control on materials and technologies: Pier Luigi Nervi was one of them. This work considers three large structures designed and built 50 years ago, in 1961, by the Italian engineer. The structures are the bus station at the George Washington Bridge in New York (USA); the Burgo Paper Mill in Mantua (Italy); and the Palace of Labour in Turin (Italy). All of these buildings are hybrid structures (concrete and steel), an unusual choice for Nervi that perhaps reflects the design climate at the time; These buildings reacted quite differently to the events that have occurred over the past half century. One of the key factors to achieve resilience it is considered to be the quality of the buildings, which includes their ability to perform maintenance. The lack of which for whatever reason, this study aims to demonstrate, will inevitably result in a weak performance in terms of resilience on the long run