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

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

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.

Trade Unions and Family-Friendly Policies in Britian.

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, child care subsidies.

THE GROCERY STORES' WAGE DISTRIBUTION: A SEMI-PARAMETRIC ANALYSIS OF THE ROLE OF RETAILING AND LABOR MARKET INSTITUTIONS

How and why has the wage distribution in U.S. grocery stores changed between 1984 and 1994? Unlike other industries in the time period, the important change in the wage distribution is not rising inequality, but the real wages fell across the entire wage distribution. Changes in labor market institutions explain more than half of the change in the wage distribution in grocery stores. Specifically, the decline in the real value of the minimum wage explains little of the decline in the mean real wage but much of the change in the shape of the distribution between 1984 and 1994, and 95 percent of the decline at the lowest 10th percentile. The decline in union coverage in grocery stores and the narrowing of the union-nonunion wage gap explains much of the decline above the 25th percentile. A third institutional change, the use of part-time employees, is not associated with the changes in grocery industry wage outcomes. One might think that the major changes in operation and technologies that occurred during this time period are at least contributing factors, but we find quite the contrary. If average store size, weekly operating hours, and the use of scanning technology had remained at their 1984 levels, the real wage decline would have been even greater than that actually seen, and for the entire wage distribution. Changes in grocery retailing prevented and even greater decline in real wages. Again unlike many other industries, skill-biased technological change does not appear important for grocery industry wage outcomes. The basis of our analysis is a statistical technique which combines nonparametric kernel density estimation with a parametric re-weighting, applied to Current Population Survey data supplemented with secondary data sources on the Grocery industry.Agribusiness, Labor and Human Capital,

Advancing Dispute Resolution by Unpacking the Sources of Conflict: Toward an Integrated Framework

Organizational leaders, public policy makers, dispute resolution professionals, and scholars have developed diverse methods for resolving workplace conflict. But there is inadequate recognition that the effectiveness of a dispute resolution method depends on its fit with the source of a particular conflict. Consequently, it is essential to better understand where conflict comes from and how this affects dispute resolution. To these ends, this paper uniquely integrates scholarship from multiple disciplines to develop a multi-dimensional framework on the sources of conflict. This provides an important foundation for theorizing and identifying effective dispute resolution methods, which are more important than ever as the changing world of work raises new issues, conflicts, and institutions

Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice in Workplace Resolution Procedures

Systems for resolving workplace disputes are very important to workers and firms, and have been the subject of much debate. In the United States, traditional unionized grievance procedures, emerging nonunion dispute resolution systems, and the court-based system for resolving employment law disputes have all been criticized. Much of the existing debate on workplace dispute resolution, however, has been atheoretical, with a focus on techniques of dispute resolution rather than the goals of the system. What is missing from the debate are fundamental standards for comparing and evaluating dispute resolutions systems. In this paper, we develop efficiency, equity, and voice as these standards. Unionized, nonunion, and employment law procedures are then evaluated against these three standards.