The Workers of Nations: Industrial Relations in a Global Economy.

• Author: Gitter, Robert J.

The goal of this book is to examine changes in the industrial relations systems of various nations in light of the increased degree of globalization in the world's economy. The impact of globalization on labor is potentially more serious than on capital. Labor is less mobile than capital in light of the ease at which capital can now move across borders. The authors of this collection of eight papers and an introductory chapter are from a diverse background, with five of the twelve authors coming from political science, and others from management, geography, sociology and economics. The overall work, however, suffers from several problems that prevent it from effectively examining the issues of industrial relations under increased globalization.

Some of the pieces are enough out of date to limit their relevance to the issues at hand, e.g., Christopher L. Erickson and Sarosh C. Kuruvilla's "Labor Cost Incentives for Capital Mobility in the European Community." They conclude that although the gap in productivity between workers in the nations of the European Community is decreasing, the gap in wages is not. Much of the data is for 1980, while the rest is for the decade of the 1980s. The European Community had not yet cased the ability of labor and capital to move during that time period, but rather made a number changes later in the period leading up to and including Europe 1992. Hence, trans-national wage differentials logically could have been expected in the 1980s. The data and analysis are historically interesting, but do not examine the effect of reduced barriers to the movement of labor and capital within the European Community on changes in wages and productivity. The authors also examined the relationship between productivity and compensation in 1980, using a rank ordering of the twelve nations for both characteristics and conclude that "average labor productivity is not directly proportional to compensation." Rank orderings can be greatly misleading, however, when there is a slight difference between firms of a similar rank. I calculated the simple correlation between productivity and compensation as .83 using the authors data. One could, in my view, interpret the data as showing proportionality existed between compensation and productivity after all.

George Tsebelis and Peter Lange present some interesting ideas on game theory and strikes. They expand on Hicks's notion that if all parties in a collective bargaining negotiation are...