Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society

Publisher:: Wiley
Publication date:: 2021-02-01

ISBN:: 0019-8676

Issue Number

Latest documents

The Role of Rookie Female Directors in a Post‐Quota Period: Gender Inequalities within French Boards
The board‐level gender quota enacted in France has induced the massive arrival in corporate boards of a new population—namely, women with no prior board experience. We examine the positions and the compensation of these “rookie female directors.” We show that, conditional on their individual characteristics and firm effects, rookie female directors have had a limited access to the key positions within boards and have suffered from a significant compensation gap. We interpret this evidence of positional segregation as resulting from gender stereotypes that have persisted in the process of rookie female directors’ integration within boards.
Retirement Reforms: Occupational Strain and Health
A concurrent increase in the demand for state age pensions and health care has led to reforms in delaying retirement. We employ thirteen waves of longitudinal data to examine the mental and physical health effects of Australian men and women at “early” and “traditional” retirement. We use before and after propensity score matching (PSM) estimates between treatment and control groups of retired and not retired individuals aged 60 and 65 years. The results indicate a negative health effect according to occupational strain for both genders but a positive mental health effect for retirees with access to self‐funded retirement.
Board‐Level Employee Representation (BLER) and Firms’ Responses to Crisis
Short: We hypothesize that companies with board‐level employee representation (BLER) experience a lower probability of crisis‐induced dismissals than other firms. Theoretically, we link this effect to the employee directors’ ability to reduce the information asymmetry and moral hazard in employee–employer contracting, thereby facilitating the implementation of labor‐cost adjustments that are an alternative to workforce dismissals. We confirm our hypotheses by analyzing the behavior of Scandinavian public corporations with/without employee directors during the Great Recession.
Vulnerable Jobs and the Wage Effects of Import Competition
Do job characteristics modulate the relationship between import competition and workers’ wages? Using pooled cross‐sectional, linked employee‐establishment Census Bureau microdata and O*NET occupational characteristics, the paper models import competition and wages for more than 1.6 million individuals, grouped by job vulnerability defined by routineness, analytic complexity, and interpersonal interaction. Results show import competition is associated with wages that are: lower in routine and less complex jobs; higher in nonroutine and complex jobs; and higher for the highest and lowest levels of interpersonal interaction. This demonstrates the importance of accounting for occupational characteristics in understanding how trade and wages relate.
Does Individualizing the Labor Contract Hurt Women?
The twenty‐first century has been marked by a retreat of the collective bargaining rights of public employees throughout the United States. This study exploits the variation in legal environments resulting from these reforms to estimate the causal impact of different collective bargaining policies on public employee compensation. Using data from the American Community Survey, results show a modest wage penalty at the aggregate level for employees covered by constraints on collective bargaining. However, this wage penalty is differential and is concentrated on women in all but one case—a legal environment in which collective bargaining over wages has either been prohibited or directly constricted, allowing governments to periodically institute wage freezes and caps on raises for public employees. In this case, a pre‐existing wage gap in which men earned more than women is disappearing as male and female earnings converge at a lower wage. The paper suggests that the long‐term effects of restricting collective bargaining occur through the individualization of the labor contract and should be examined along individual‐level characteristics, such as gender.
Corrigendum
Issue Information
“Not Fissures but Moments of Crises that Can Be Overcome”: Building a Relational Organizing Culture in Community Organizations and Trade Unions
Community organizations and trade unions rely to a certain extent on a committed membership to be effective. It can be difficult, however, to build solidarity when there are diverse members with competing interests and this can lead to internal conflicts. Based on participant observation and interviews, this article examines how membership organizations have been able to maintain an active grassroots base and overcome internal crises through the development of a relational organizing culture.
The Effects of Minimum Wages on Low‐Skilled Immigrants’ Wages, Employment, and Poverty
Raising the minimum wage has been advanced as complementary policy to comprehensive immigration reform to improve low‐skilled immigrants’ economic well‐being. While adverse labor demand effects could undermine this goal, existing studies do not detect evidence of negative employment effects. We re‐investigate this question using data from the 1994 to 2016 Current Population Survey and conclude that minimum wage increases reduced employment of less‐educated Hispanic immigrants, with estimated elasticities of around –0.1. However, we also find that the wage and employment effects of minimum wages on low‐skilled immigrants diminished over the last decade. This finding is consistent with more restrictive state immigration policies and the Great Recession inducing outmigration of low‐skilled immigrants, as well as immigrants moving into the informal sector. Finally, our results show that raising the minimum wage is an ineffective policy tool for reducing poverty among immigrants.
The Signal of Applying for a Job Under a Vacancy Referral Scheme
We investigate the signalling effect related to participation in active labor‐market programs. To this end, we conduct an experiment in which human resources professionals make hiring decisions concerning fictitious job candidates who apply either under a job‐vacancy referral system or directly. We provide first causal evidence for a substantial adverse effect of referral on the probability of being hired. In addition, we find that employers perceive referred candidates as being less motivated than other candidates.