British Employees Research Articles

Research Developments in Employment Relations and Diversity: A British Perspective

The paper argues that the success or otherwise of diversity policies is (partly) dependent on their relation with the prevailing employment system. Changes in the British employment system under the New Labour government are reviewed, with particular reference to their implications for diversity, especially gender equality, issues. Some of the main areas of current policydebate are considered, including the `business case' approach. The problems for policy remain, however, particularly in the gendered nature of the components of the employment system, including industrial relations and HRM institutions and structures. Implications for future research are explored.

Employer Learning and Schooling-Related Statistical Discrimination in Britain

This paper develops and tests a new model of asymmetric information in the labour market involving employer learning. In the model, I provide theoretical conditions for the identification – based on the experience and tenure profiles of estimated returns to ability and education – of employer learning about unobserved worker’s productivity and statistical discrimination based on years of schooling. Using data from two British birth cohorts, estimates based on this model support the hypothesis that British employers have limited information about their workers, make inferences based on their education levels, and progressively learn about their true ability. Moreover, this learning process – particularly among blue-collar workers– favours incumbent employers relative to potential competitors (asymmetric learning). This informational advantage implies an additional distortion in the functioning of the labour market and policy evaluation rarely takes into account the informational impact of interventions and its implications for individual behaviour.

Minimum and preferred entry qualifications and training provision for British workers

This article reports the outcomes of a survey of British employers that requested information on the qualifications sought when recruiting employees, and on training and development offered subsequently to employees. Responses revealed that few employers actively sought vocational awards in potential employees. The only occupational category for which more employers specified a vocational award than an academic award was service workers. A substantial number of organisations specified no minimum entry level of qualification, even for higher–status occupations. Those organisations that did specify a minimum qualification level for recruits were significantly more likely to report that they trained their employees.

Employer Policies and Organizational Commitment in Britain 1992–97

An important current of thinking in the last decade has emphasized the need for a shift from control to commitment as the central objective of management employment policies. This paper is concerned to assess whether there was a significant increase in British employees’ commitment to their organizations in the 1990s, using comparative data from two large‐scale and nationally representative surveys carried out in 1992 and 1997. It finds that there was no evidence of an increase in commitment over the period. As in the early part of the decade, employees had only a weak level of attachment to their organizations. The analysis examines a number of factors that have been seen as important determinants of such commitment: changes in the level of skill, task discretion, controls over work performance, and forms of employee involvement. While there were changes in some of these factors that encouraged higher commitment, these were largely cancelled out by a notable decline in the discretion that employees were allowed to exercise over their work.

Reactions to Organizational Politics: A Cross-Cultural Examination in Israel and Britain

This article reports a comparative analysis of reactions to organizational politics (OP) in two substantially different cultures, Israel and Britain. Two resembling samples of public personnel ( n1 = 303 and n2 = 149 in Israel and Britain, respectively) were used to examine employees’ perceptions of organizational politics as well as several possible work outcomes (e.g. intentions of exit, voice, loyalty, neglect, job satisfaction, met expectations, and absenteeism). No differences were found between employees’ levels of politics perception in the two samples. However, a between-sample analysis supported the hypotheses of differences in reactions to OP across cultures. Generally, perceptions of organizational politics affected British employees more strongly than Israeli. The former responded with higher intentions of exit and neglect and lower levels of loyalty, job satisfaction, and met expectations. From these results, our main speculation is that reactions to OP may depend on cultural variants relevant to the organizational environment. Our findings are interpreted mainly in light of the idea of cultural differences in perceptions of conflict and politics. Accordingly, this study’s chief merit is its indication that culture-oriented constructs may be useful determinants of reactions to OP. Other implications of the study are also discussed, as well as suggestions for further inquiry into the cultural investigation of OP.

Relations of Self-Esteem Concerns, Group Identification, and Self-Stereotyping to In-Group Favoritism

In 2 studies, the author examined the effect of collective self-esteem (CSE; J. Crocker & R. Luhtanen, 1993) on people's willingness to display in-group favoritism. To test that self-esteem hypothesis, he measured public CSE, rather than private CSE, because the former parallels a threat to social identity, a state believed to motivate in-group favoritism. Furthermore, the author explored whether group identification and self-stereotyping moderated the effect of public CSE on in-group favoritism. The participants were 92 British and Dutch university employees. As expected, participants high in public CSE displayed more in-group favoritism than did those low in public CSE. Moreover, group identification and self-stereotyping appeared to moderate the effect of CSE.

All Change at Work? British Employment Relations 1980‐98, Portrayed by the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Series

All Change at Work? British Employment Relations 1980‐98, Portrayed by the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Series

An Awkward Partner?

The dominance of member states in the field of social policy has been traditionally depicted as one of the main hurdles facing the development of a European social policy. Resistance by national government to the transfer of influence and control over social policy to the European level has been particularly true for Britain. Opposition to various initiatives, such as the Social Charter and Social Chapter has demonstrated this. It is in this context that this article examines Britain's implementation of the Working Time Directive, this being demonstrative of the distinction between member states and the EU in the social policy arena. In this sense, the Working Time Directive is significant not just because of the provisions it brings to British employees, but because it demonstrates the changing nature of the relationship between member states and the EU in the realm of social policy.

Actual and optimal labour supply

The implications of assuming a coincidence of actual and desired work hours for labour supply estimates are investigated. Results suggest significant differences in the wage elasticities of British male employees reporting that their work hours have been constrained vis-a-vis those reporting satisfaction with actual hours.

キャドベリー社における産業福祉と労務管理 (一八九九-一九一四年)

This paper explores the role of industrial welfare in industrial relations, internal labour markets, and the management thought at Cadbury in early twentieth-century England.Welfare provisions by British employers have been hitherto regarded as an expression of philanthropy or gentlemanship in nineteenth-century England, which despised the mammonism. It has been also said that there was no labour management because of craft regulations in British industries. Industrial welfare, therefore, has been considered the only managerial authority of the employers, who could not manage production processes directly.In this paper, industrial welfare is dealt with as a labour strategy. British employers intended to avoid industrial conflict and increase efficiency of work through the various labour policies, such as overseeing, deskilling, piece-wages, and welfare provisions. In these respects, industrial welfare was useful as one means to modify conflicts in employment relations that could not be solved by the cash nexus and to win the loyalty of employees.The case of Cadbury indicates that industrial welfare contributed to reconstructing industrial relations system in the new managerial structure; that the company provisions, including health care and education of employees, provided a solution to recruitment, training, and promotion problems at the company-level; and that industrial welfare contributed to the humanising of labour. The human factor of labour management was emphasised by the employer, who used industrial welfare as a labour strategy at a time, when Taylorism was discussed in England.Finally, industrial welfare at Cadbury was used as one means of labour management based on the physical and mental control of the employees by the employers, who retained traditional authority under a bureaucratic organisation.

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:Mark Cully, Stephen Woodland, Andrew O’Reilly, and Gill Dix, Britain at Work, as Depicted by the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations SurveyNeil Millward, Alex Bryson, and John Forth, All Change at Work? British Employment Relations 1980–1998, as portrayed by the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey Series

Briefing: Most British employers who use applications forms as...

Briefing: Most British employers who use applications forms as...

Briefing: The use by British employers of the internet...

Briefing: The use by British employers of the internet...

Briefing: Almost 2 million British employees are now part...

Briefing: Almost 2 million British employees are now part...

Are wages habit-forming? evidence from micro data

Although utility functions play a central role in economics, the axiom that utility depends only on the absolute levels of its arguments is rarely tested. This paper uses panel data on 2000 British employees who remain with the same employer and who are not promoted from one wave to the next. It is shown that one important measure of well-being, overall job satisfaction, is strongly positively correlated with the change in the worker’s pay between waves, but is unrelated to the current level of pay. Empirical tests suggest that a reference-dependent satisfaction function, where individual well-being depends on current pay relative to past pay, is more consistent with these regression results than are productivity or agency explanations of increasing wage profiles. Some evidence is presented of greater job satisfaction effects of pay rises for lower paid, less well-educated and younger workers. These results provide some micro evidence consistent with the theory, widespread in social science, of habituation: individuals may become used to any given level of consumption or income. As such, they tie in with the finding that a country’s well-being, as measured by the average happiness of its citizens, is only weakly correlated with its per capita GNP.

The Statutory Union Recognition Procedure in the Employment Relations Bill: A Comparative Analysis

This paper analyses the provisions for union recognition contained in the British Employment Relations Bill in the light of problems with the system in operation in the 1970s and with its US counterpart. First, it establishes that these problems may be attributable largely to defects in design rather than fundamental flaws, and that this is demonstrated by the relative success of the Canadian system. Second, the paper evaluates the Bill's provisions, finding that it avoids many weaknesses of the 1970s and US systems but lacks a number of the Canadian system's strengths. Consequently recognition may be readily attainable if the union already has a majority, but there could be undue delays and opportunities for employer interference if this is not the case, and in general union recognition may not translate into effective collective bargaining. However, if the provisions do help diffuse the partnership model as the government envisages, apparent weaknesses in the Bill may yet prove to be the hallmarks of a distinctive system.

British employers and the Social Chapter: some survey evidence

This note reports the results of a survey of firms operating in Britain concerning the impact on their costs and operations of the Social Action Programme. We find that the realised and anticipated adverse impacts of the legislation are rather limited, although both do appear to be greater for firms which are relatively large, skill intensive, and which have a substantial amount of trade with other EU countries. In particular, the survey results provide little evidence to suggest that the imposition of a minimum wage of £3.50 per hour would have a substantial adverse impact on employment. Evidence does, however, suggest that firms which pay relatively low wages are likely to be affected more than others by the legislation.

Worker Resistance and Taylorism in Britain

SummaryWorker resistance and employer conservatism in Britain are said to have combined to retard British economic development and frustrate the emergence of modern managerial structures based on Taylorism and/or Fordism. However, the notion of worker resistance is a deeply unsatisfactory one because it fails to distinguish different forms of resistance and their implications for the labour process. And if British employers were slow to abandon older tools and techniques, they nevertheless did so. Worker resistance secured better terms and conditions of employment but was incapable of altering in any fundamental way the new methods of organizing work and managing production.

British Employment Policy in the 1980s: Learning from the American Experience

During the 1980s the Thatcher Government implemented numerous changes to the British employment system. Most of these changes had the effect of linking the receipt of welfare benefits to an individual's willingness to participate actively within a government sponsored employment or training scheme. These changes culminated in the Social Security Act (1989) which linked the receipt of welfare payments to an individual's active job search and willingness to accept any officially offered job after a maximum grace period of 13 weeks. While these changes are important in their own right, more interestingly, most trace their origins back to the American welfare‐to‐work system initiated by the Reagan administration during the early 1980s. This article will demonstrate why the Thatcher government turned to the United States in the development of their employment policy. Once an explanation for this has been provided the article will highlight the key policies transferred by the Thatcher Government in the development of the British welfare‐to‐work system. This entire analysis will be placed within a policy transfer framework in order to illustrate its usefulness in the analysis of policy development.

Assisting employees with drinking problems: Changes in mental health, job perceptions and work performance

A sample of 104 British transportation employees with alcohol-related problems were examined for changes in mental health and job perceptions before and after a company-based counselling programme. Data was mainly obtained by means of structured interviews. When clients were assessed at a 6-month follow-up, significant positive changes were found for the group as a whole in terms of context-free mental health, self- and supervisor ratings of work performance as well as measures of absenteeism. Small positive differences were observed for measures relating to perceived work demands. However, no significant differences were observed for the measures of job satisfaction and job commitment. The findings are discussed in relation to the expected client and organizational outcomes of workplace counselling interventions.