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Can the Nordic wage-setting model, where social partners decide wages through collective agreements, counteract a growing low-paid sector? This article tests four definitions of low-paid jobs to analyze whether this sector has grown for the period 2005–2020 in Sweden. Despite policy changes pointing towards growth, all definitions show a slight decrease in low-paid jobs over time. The authors argue that the industrial relations system, with the aim of keeping the industry wage increases in check to aid export competitiveness, also sets a uniform level wage that limits low-paid jobs. It is also found that low pay in the Swedish setting is partly a result of working less than full-time or having unstable employment, and service workers and those with low education are becoming increasingly common in this position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pay gaps for women and minorities have persisted after accounting for observable differences. Recently, a dozen US states have banned employer access to salary histories. We analyze the effects of these salary history bans (SHBs) on private employer wage posting and pay. We develop a theoretical model of firms' choices between posting wages and bargaining, drawing out the implications of SHBs on wages for different groups of jobs. We then implement a comprehensive analysis in a difference-in-differences design, using Burning Glass job posting data in the US and the Current Population Survey. The results show that following SHBs, private employers posted wages more often and increased pay for job changers, particularly for women (6.2%) and non-whites (5.8%). The results imply that when employers can access applicants' salary histories while bargaining over wages, they can take advantage of past inequities, perpetuating inequality. There is also no evidence of adverse selection of workers overall or adverse employer reactions in the short run. Bargaining behavior and the use of salary histories appear to account for much of the difference in pay between disadvantaged job changers and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies on the drivers of public sector wage setting (PSWS) within the broader political and economic conditions in Central and Eastern Europe are scarce. To fill this gap, the paper questions to what extent the export-led growth model, based on foreign direct investment as driver of economic growth, influenced PSWS in Czechia and Slovakia after the 2008–2009 crisis. The paper provides new evidence of the appropriateness of the growth model literature, integrated by consideration of global production chains integration, for understanding PSWS in CEE conditions. The analysis shows that PSWS followed institutional traditions and established practices that only indirectly related to the countries' export orientation and integration into global production chains. The indirect growth model impact on PSWS in CEE conditions is channeled through a strong role of the statutory minimum wage, which serves as a wage benchmark both for the export sector and PSWS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether, and how, differences in wage bargaining schemes shape the relationship between global value chains (GVCs) and the wages of workers while considering both GVC participation and position in GVC. Our dataset is derived from the European Structure of Earnings Survey (SES), containing employee–employer data from 18 European countries, merged with sectoral data from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD). The results of an augmented Mincer-type regression show that under national and industry wage bargaining schemes, greater participation in GVCs is associated with lower wages, whereas no adverse impact from GVCs is observed for workers under enterprise bargaining schemes. Finally, numerous extensions and instrumental variable estimations confirm that the type of collective pay agreement may alter the response of wages to both GVC participation and position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the effectiveness of worker-owned cooperatives in addressing challenges facing workplaces like the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and the Great Resignation. Also cited are how said cooperatives are better suited to solve worker issues like better pay, improved health and safety, and increased worker autonomy and control.

This study examines the linkages between GVC involvement and wages in Poland given different wage bargaining schemes. The analysis is based on microdata from the European Structure of Earnings Survey for Poland combined with sectoral data from the World Input-Output Database. In particular, two measures of GVC involvement were used: the share of foreign value added (FVA) to export and the measure of traditional offshoring. The institutional settings are represented by the wage bargaining scheme which reflects the level at which the collective pay is agreed. The results show that despite the lack of a significant relationship between the sectoral involvement in GVC and the level of wages in Poland, on average workers covered by the collective pay agreement receive higher wages. Moreover, the wage-GVC nexus is conditioned on the type of pay agreements: the positive wage effect from national agreements is eliminated for a certain range of GVC intensity.

Using the Public Use Microdata Sample from the 2005 to 2015 American Community Survey, the authors provide new evidence on how state collective bargaining laws affect public-sector wages. To isolate the causal effect of bargaining laws on public-sector pay, they examine wage differentials between otherwise similar public- and private-sector employees located in the same local labor market. They estimate difference-in-differences (DD) models that exploit two sources of plausibly exogenous variation: 1) policy discontinuities along state borders and 2) variation within states in collective bargaining laws in states where the majority of public workers are without collective bargaining rights. Findings show that mandatory collective bargaining laws increase public-sector wages by approximately 5 to 8 percentage points. Results therefore suggest that mandatory collective bargaining laws provide a formal mechanism through which public-sector workers are able to bargain for increased compensation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a test of Coasean theories of efficient separations. We study a cohort of jobs from the introduction through the repeal of a large age- and region-specific unemployment benefit extension in Austria. In the treatment group, 18.5 |$\%$| fewer jobs survive the program period. According to the Coasean view, the destroyed marginal jobs had low joint surplus. Hence, after the repeal, the treatment survivors should be more resilient than the ineligible control group survivors. Strikingly, the two groups instead exhibit identical post-repeal separation behaviour. We provide, and find suggestive evidence consistent with, an alternative model in which wage rigidity drives the inefficient separation dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effect of labor productivity growth, workers' bargaining power, and legal minimum wage revision rules on income distribution in a novel agent-based macroeconomic model mostly inspired by the post-Keynesian literature. Its main novelties are a wage bargaining process and a mark-up adjustment rule featuring a broader set of dimensions and coupled channels of interaction. The former allows nominal wages to be endogenously determined by interactions involving firms and workers, which are mediated by workers' bargaining power. The latter assumes that firms also consider their position relative to workers (through their unit costs) to set their mark-up rates, thus linking the evolution of nominal wages in the bargaining process and labor productivity growth to the functional income distribution. This has implications for the personal income distribution through a three-class structure for households. The model reproduces numerous stylized facts, including those concerning the income distribution dynamics. By capturing the inherent social conflict over the distribution of income, our results show the importance of the coevolutionary interaction between workers' bargaining power and productivity growth to the dynamics of income inequality and to its relationship with output. This leads to a policy dilemma between promoting productivity growth and improving income equality which can, nonetheless, be attenuated by combining policies and institutions that protect workers with policies that stimulate technological innovation and productivity growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the European trend, German statutory collective bargaining extensions (SBEs) have decreased in the last two decades, contributing to the exceptional erosion of German wage-bargaining coverage. This article distinguishes between two liberalization dynamics: an intrasectoral dynamic that started with the introduction of employers' association memberships outside the scope of collective agreements, and an intersectoral dynamic. The latter is the result of an abnormal German institutional feature, the veto power of the employers' umbrella association in the committees that have to approve SBE applications. Activation of this veto enabled employers to promote collective bargaining erosion in sectors other than their own, in order to contain cost pressures. This intersectoral liberalization dynamic has been part of Germany's transition into an asymmetrically export-driven growth regime and could be stopped by means of political reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Itobiad: Journal of the Human & Social Science Researches / İnsan ve Toplum Bilimleri Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of Itobiad: Journal of the Human & Social Science Researches and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article provides an original theoretical exploration of the potential effects of northern activism on labor conditions and welfare in the South using a duopoly model with endogenous prices, wages and qualities. We assume that all consumers derive the same utility from one ("northern") good but are heterogeneous with respect to the other ("southern") good. This asymmetry captures in a stylized fashion the consensus among northern consumers on the labor conditions prevailing in the North and their ambivalence concerning labor practices in the South. A greater consumer's social consciousness can be seen as a punishment (boycott) for harmful practices or a reward (buycott) for more virtuous practices. If both forms of activism seem to have the same objectives, one should prefer an activism based on positive information. In an in-depth analysis of a boycott and a buycott campaign, we show that the less socially conscious a firm, the higher the likelihood to be targeted by a boycott or a buycott campaign. A higher quality may reduce this likelihood to be targeted. Northern firm should prefer boycott to buycott whereas southern one always prefer buycott. We also show that consumer surplus may decrease with the both form of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We set up a trade model with two countries, two sectors, and one production factor, which features a home-market effect due to the existence of trade costs. We consider search frictions and firm-level wage bargaining in the sector producing differentiated goods and a perfectly competitive labor market in the sector producing a homogeneous good. Consumers have price-independent generalized-linear preferences over the two types of goods, covering homothetic and quasi-homothetic preferences as two limiting cases. Due to the specific functional forms of indirect utility, homothetic preferences lead to risk aversion, while quasi-homothetic preferences lead to risk neutrality in our model. We show that trade between two countries that differ in their population size leads to an expansion of the differentiated goods sector and a contraction of the homogeneous good sector in the larger economy. This induces the larger country to net-export differentiated goods at the cost of a higher economy-wide rate of unemployment in the open economy (with the effects reversed for the smaller country). The welfare effects of trade depend on the preference structure. Looking at the two limiting cases, we show that the larger country is likely to benefit from trade if preferences are homothetic, whereas losses from trade are possible if preferences are quasi-homothetic. The opposite is true in the smaller country. This reveals an important role of preferences for the welfare effects of trade in the presence of labor market imperfection, a result we further elaborate on by considering more general preferences as well as differences of countries in their per-capita income levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the wage and leverage relationship, which supports the notion of strategic leverage. Unlike in previous papers, I use worker-firm matched data of Korea and find a significant negative relationship between wage and leverage. I argue that this negative relationship stems from Korean labor market conditions closer to the price-taking workers and price-setting firms. I further find that the relative bargaining power of workers significantly affects the wage and leverage relationship. Among the directors and union members, the negative relationship between wage and leverage becomes weaker. Finally, the relationship between the two remains significant after possible endogeneity concerns are accounted for by the instrumental variable approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local institutions in the shape of collective wage bargaining in firms are important for wage differences among labour of various origins. This paper considers local rent-sharing in Danish firms and finds that local wage bargaining reduces wage gaps between cross-border commuters of Danish, Swedish, German and Polish origins. Wage gaps are found to be between 6% and 12%, while individual union membership reduces the wage gap. Local peer effects, on the other hand, may increase wage gaps particularly for cross-border commuters of Polish origin, which can be interpreted as a form of local club behaviour in bargaining at the firm level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trade unions distort a profit-maximizing firm's input choice. The nature of the resulting inefficiency depends on whether there are wage negotiations or there is efficient bargaining. Moreover, trade unions redistribute income and thereby affect welfare. If firms also pursue Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) objectives, input choices may be distorted already in the absence of collective bargaining. Adopting a positive perspective, we show that CSR objectives, which induce a firm to expand production, have ambiguous wage and employment consequences in case of wage negotiations and raise employment if there is efficient bargaining. Importantly from a normative vantage point, such CSR objectives make a welfare-enhancing role of trade unions more likely in the presence of wage negotiations. The reverse is true in case of efficient bargaining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fra 1948 til 2004 ble lærernes lønn fastsatt gjennom forhandlinger med staten, selv om mange lærere hadde en kommune eller fylkeskommune som arbeidsgiver. Ingen annen yrkesgruppe har hatt en slik særstilling. Denne artikkelen forsøker å svare på hvorfor staten i en periode hadde forhandlingsansvaret for lærerne og hvorfor forhandlingsansvaret igjen ble overført fra staten til kommunene. Artikkelen berører utviklingen av forhandlingssystemet i stat og kommune og samlingen av lærerorganisasjonene. Byggingen av enhetsskolen etter andre verdenskrig og endringene i skolepolitikken på 1980-tallet hadde hver på sin måte betydning for politikernes holdning til lærernes forhandlingsrett i staten. Lokalt selvstyre og målstyring ble fra 1980-tallet nye styringsidealer. Kommunene fikk i 1986 et nytt inntektssystem med større finansielt ansvar for å avveie nytte og kostnader for de enkelte tjenestene. Endringen av styringssystemet i kommunesektoren var en vesentlig faktor som lå til grunn for beslutningen om å overføre forhandlingsansvaret for lærerne til kommunene og fylkeskommunene i 2003. Den særskilte organiseringen av skolesektoren, med skolestyre og skolesjef, ble avviklet. Artikkelen argumenterer for at svaret på hvorfor forhandlingsansvaret for lærerne først ble overført til staten for deretter å bli ført tilbake til kommunene, ligger både i de skolepolitiske målene og synet på skolens rolle i samfunnet og i den tenkningen som preget det politiske styringssystemet ved årtusenskiftet.

The effects of offshoring threats on the domestic skill premium are widely accepted, but theoretically unanalyzed. This study constructs a simple theoretical model based on task‐trading offshoring and collective wage bargaining models to examine the effects of a firm's offshoring threat on the domestic skill premium. Theoretical analysis suggests that under a moderate demand for the final good, the possibility of offshoring could lower the wages of unskilled domestic workers, who are vulnerable to offshoring, more than the wages of skilled domestic workers. Thus, even when there is no actual offshoring, the skill premium between the two types of workers increases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is nowadays accepted that labour market institutions matter in economic development. However, empirical studies on unions' effect are not univocal. We provide new insight into the impact of unions on the long-run performance of industrialized economies using an indicator of union centralization. Relying on a recent panel dataset of OECD countries, we estimate a growth equation and show that a high degree of union centralization can be harmful to growth. This effect is not driven by economic channels (such as private investment, human capital and research and development) but appears to be related to a direct effect of unions on the growth process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Pro Futuro is the property of University of Debrecen and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article revisits the debate in the literature of outsourcing and bargained wage. We focus on the triggers of international outsourcing. If the triggers are a decrease in foreign per-unit cost and an improvement in foreign workers' productivity, the effect of international outsourcing on the domestic bargained wage is always positive. Under certain conditions, a deterioration in domestic workers' productivity and a decrease in the degree of product differentiation, which lead to an increase in international outsourcing, decreases bargained wages. It is important to know what raises the intensity of international outsourcing in the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negotiations over wages have always been a central part of industrial relations in capitalist economies. The unstable value of money in the 19th and 20th centuries has made these negotiations both crucial and complex. Linking contemporary understandings of monetary values to wage bargaining provides an important historical background for a better understanding of real wage developments and the agency of workers. Adopting a comparative perspective, this paper discusses how managers and workers dealt with changing monetary values in Germany and the United States from the 1870s to the immediate aftermath of the First World War. The paper also discusses the extent to which actors understood the instability of their respective currencies' purchasing power and whether their perceptions changed over time. The paper reveals that negotiations were never exclusively shaped and guided by concepts such as inflation or the 'cost of living' in both countries but that the importance of the concepts changed with the level of price fluctuations and institutional setting. Indices could achieve a dominant role only in exceptional circumstances due to their artificial and contestable nature, their neglect of the complexity of workers' job contexts and living environments, and their normative implications concerning wage demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Since the late 1970s, inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated as workers' bargaining power has diminished. The discursive environment in which workers' wage entitlements is contested is an important--yet often neglected--influence on worker bargaining power. Analysis The authors examine editorials published in the Globe and Mail between 1970 and 2015 related to postal workers' wage bargaining to examine the criteria advanced to evaluate the legitimacy of workers' wage demands. Conclusions and implications The discourses examined contribute to normalizing and legitimating postal worker disentitlement by emphasizing harm as the evaluatory criterion by which workers' demands are judged. This framing of postal workers and their wage struggles contributes to an environment in which the legitimacy of wage demands is undermined, contributing to the overall economic and political climate in which wages have stagnated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian workers have experienced low to no wage growth for several years. This study examines Australian Workplace Relations Study data to describe and categorise workers' experiences in obtaining wage or salary increases, or a promotion, in their current workplaces. The findings suggest sharp divisions. On one hand, there are those achieving better pay and/or promotions who include managers, but also clerical and administrative workers, who often also benefit from bonus payments or commissions; and workers in companies covered largely by Individual Arrangements who negotiate their wages. These groups contrast with workers without pay rise or promotion, who include community and personal service workers, some of whom opt not to seek better conditions. One worker in eight is tied to a firm without processes and procedures for promotion or wage negotiations, and without recent experience of improved conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A challenge facing labor economists is to explain the existence of different wage-setting mechanisms. This paper investigates the relative efficiency of competitive wage, wage bargaining and wage posting. In a search-theoretical model with human capital investment we establish the conditions, which are associated to the cost structures of human capital investment and job vacancy creation, for one of them to prevail. The insight is that a mechanism generates the highest level of equilibrium welfare by achieving the best balance between aggregate output and aggregate cost. Under the Hosios condition and for a broad range of values of cost parameters, we obtain these results: if workers' matching contribution is sufficiently larger than their output contribution, then wage posting prevails; if their output contribution is sufficiently larger than their matching contribution, then wage bargaining prevails; if these two contributions are sufficiently close to each other, then competitive wage prevails. These findings justify in some sense the evidences reported by Hall and Krueger (2012) and Brenzel et al. (2014). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many European countries, sectoral bargaining agreements are automatically extended to cover all firms in an industry. Employers and employees can also negotiate firm-specific contracts. The authors of this paper use a large matched employer-employee data set from a 1995 survey in Spain to study the effects of firm-level contracting on the structure of wages. They estimate a series of wage determination models, including specifications that control for individual characteristics, coworker characteristics, the bargaining status of the workplace, and the probability that the workplace was covered by a firm-level contract. They find that firm-level contracting was associated with a 5-10% wage premium, with larger premiums for more highly paid workers. Although they cannot decisively test between alternative explanations for the firm-level contracting premium, they find that workers with firm-specific contracts had substantially longer job tenure than other workers, suggesting that the premium was at least partially a non-competitive phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the academic and policy literature on performance-related pay (PRP) focuses on its role as an incentive system. Its role as a means for renegotiating performance norms has been largely neglected. This study examines the introduction of performance-related pay, based mostly on appraisals by line managers, in Britain's public services during the 1990s. Previous research indicates that PRP failed to motivate many of the staff and that its operation was divisive. Nevertheless, other information suggests that productivity rose. This article seeks to resolve the paradox using contract theory to show that performance pay was the instrument of a major renegotiation of performance norms, and that this rather than motivation was the principal dynamic. Goal-setting and appraisal by line managers played a key role in this process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the IAB Establishment Panel, which is representative for western Germany, the authors find that establishment-level wages reacted to variations in the regional unemployment rate. The elasticity of wages with respect to unemployment, they estimate, was about -0.1. This responsiveness of the wage to regional variation is close to estimates found by other researchers (using individual rather than establishment data) for other countries, and contradicts the view that Germany's labor market, largely due to the nature of collective bargaining in that country, is relatively inflexible. Possible explanations for this finding are that the negotiated wage is treated like a minimum wage, with firms deviating from it in order to increase work effort; bargaining between firms and individual workers or between firms and works councils produces wage differences; or collective agreements do not restrict firms to the extent that is often assumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests hypotheses about the effects of social networks on inequitable salary negotiation outcomes using a U.S. high-technology company's salary negotiation data for 1985-1995. Analyzing results of 3,062 actual salary negotiations, the authors found that members of racial minority groups negotiated significantly lower salary increases than majority members, but this effect was dramatically reduced when the authors controlled for social ties to the organization. Having a social tie to the organization significantly increased salary negotiation outcomes, and minorities were less likely than majority members to have such a social tie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the current state of inflation in Europe. It emphasizes the likelihood of inflation remaining above 2 percent for the next one to two years due to factors like supply-chain disruptions, and suggests the need for macroeconomic coordination to prevent a wage–price spiral, with monetary policy targeting price stability, wage bargaining incorporating one-off payments, and fiscal policy providing income support for those adversely affected by higher inflation rates.

This article presents a novel explanation for instances of business support for welfare state expansion. It emphasizes the importance of cost considerations in shaping business preferences and argues that their willingness to support and ability to oppose demands for increases in the generosity of social insurance programmes depends primarily on the extent to which labour unions accept that these increases are to be financed by workers themselves. Based on a comparative-historical analysis of postwar welfare state development in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the article shows that this willingness among others depended on the type of labour market risk, the margin for pay increases, and the extent to which social welfare initiatives were perceived as actual improvements to the social wage by labour unions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]