Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice

John W. Budd contends that the turbulence of the current workplace and the importance of work for individuals and society make it vitally important that employment be given a human face. Contradicting the traditional view of the employment relationship as a purely economic transaction, with business wanting efficiency and workers wanting income, Budd argues that equity and voice are equally important objectives. The traditional narrow focus on efficiency must be balanced with employees\u27 entitlement to fair treatment (equity) and the opportunity to have meaningful input into decisions (voice), he says. Only through a greater respect for these human concerns can broadly shared prosperity, respect for human dignity, and equal appreciation for the competing human rights of property and labor be achieved. Budd proposes a fresh set of objectives for modern democracies—efficiency, equity, and voice—and supports this new triad with an intellectual framework for analyzing employment institutions and practices. In the process, he draws on scholarship from industrial relations, law, political science, moral philosophy, theology, psychology, sociology, and economics, and advances debates over free markets, globalization, human rights, and ethics. He applies his framework to important employment-related topics, such as workplace governance, the New Deal industrial relations system, comparative industrial relations, labor union strategies, and globalization. These analyses create a foundation for reforming employment practices, social norms, and public policies. In the book\u27s final chapter, Budd advocates the creation of the field of human resources and industrial relations and explores the wider implications of this renewed conceptualization of industrial relations

Tripwire Detection for Landmines

Pre-processed Radon transform-based detection methods were identified as the most viable technique. There are some issues that arose when testing the various methods. A) The 'log' edge detection in Matlab seemed better than the default 'sobel' method, but is still worth considering other edge detection algorithms that might deal more effectively with noisy or grainy image. B) The algorithm works best when the wire is horizontal and spans the length of the image. If constrained to thin-strip type images then a simple solution is to run the algorithm twice, once with the image and a second time with the same image rotated through 45 degrees

Practicing What We Preach: Using Professional Degree Principles to Improve HRIR and Management Teaching

Many of the central principles of professional degrees taught to HRIR and business school students-putting theory into practice, knowing your customers, benchmarking against best practices, and using diverse toolkits for problem solving-are equally valid for the practice of teaching HRIR and business courses. Learning theory needs to be put into practice in the professional classroom, instructors must understand students and their diverse learning styles, teaching practices should be benchmarked against best practices, and instructors need to develop teaching toolkits for creating effective courses. As teachers of professional students, we should practice what we preach.

The Goals and Assumptions of Conflict Management in Organizations

[Excerpt] This chapter examines how different goals and assumptions about conflict in organizations shape perspectives on managing conflict and resolving disputes. Four frames of reference are described: the neoliberal egoist perspective emphasizing the operation of the free market as the ideal method of resolving conflict; the critical perspective emphasizing broad societal divisions between labor and capital as the source of conflict; the unitarist perspective viewing conflict as primarily a function of interpersonal differences and organizational dysfunction, which can be remedied by improved managerial practice; and the pluralist perspective emphasizing the mixture of common and competing interests in the employment relationship, which requires institutional interventions to remedy the inequality of bargaining power that produces conflict. The pluralist perspective may best balance the often competing goals of efficiency, equity, and voice. It is described further in this chapter together with its implications for the design of dispute resolution procedures and conflict management systems

Family-Friendly Work Practices in Britain: Availability and Awareness.

We use linked data on over 20,000 individuals and almost 1,500 workplaces from the Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 to analyze the perceived and actual availability of six major family-friendly work practices amongst British employees. We find a low base rate of actual availability, a lower rate of perceived availability, and evidence that accurate awareness of availability is further limited. We identify a range of individual worker and workplaces characteristics that are associated with greater perceived availability and typically also to awareness.

Labor Policy and Investment

Policy debates over proposed legislative labor policy changes include contentions that business investment will negatively respond to labor laws that favor labor. Research on labor policy, however, often assumes that investment is fixed. We present a sequential bargaining model in which labor policies that increase labor's bargaining power and reduce management's options during strikes are predicted to reduce investment. Using provincial data on investment for 1967 to 1999, a strike replacement ban and protections for workers who refuse to handle struck work are estimated to reduce new investment, especially within the first few years after the policy change.

Are Profits Shared Across Borders? Evidence on International Rent Sharing

In the literature on rent sharing in the labor market, many studies have documented a robustly positive correlation between wages for various micro-units firms, individuals, union-firm bargaining units with profits per worker at the level of that micro-unit's industry, where industry profits are interpreted as prosperity in the product market enjoyed by firms and available for sharing with workers. But these industry studies delineate product markets by the same country as that of the micro-units, and this implicitly closed-economy perspective may miss important international aspects of wage setting. In this paper we examine how profit sharing may be conditioned by the international linkages which help shape economic openness, by analyzing negotiated contract wages for a sample of over 1000 Canadian labor contracts spanning all manufacturing from 1980 through 1992. Our central finding is that the relevant measure of product-market prosperity, and thus the pattern of rent or profit sharing, varies significantly across international linkages including multinational ownership, union type, and trade barriers. There seems to be international rent sharing, with profit sharing across borders conditioned by institutions at both the firm and industry level.

Trade Unions and Family Friendly Policies in Britain

This paper uses linked data on over 1,500 workplaces and 20,000 individuals from the 1998 British Workplace Employee Relations Survey to analyze the relationship between labor unions and the availability of six employer-provided family-friendly policies. Unions appear to help with work-family issues by increasing the availability of parental leave and job sharing options through a combination of negotiating for additional benefits and providing better information about existing policies. There is also a negative association between union membership and the availability of working at home options and, for parents of young children, childcare subsidies.