Tight Labor Market Research Articles

U.S. Union Membership in Future Decades: A Trade Unionist's Perspective

Slower workforce growth, more gradual industrial restructuring, a tighter labor market, and the gradual emergence of a more efficient organizing capability will help to stem the projected decline in private‐sector union membership. A broad array of consumer benefits and the development of new form of union membership, such as those that do not necessarily result in exclusive recognition, should also help stem that decline

Employment, Selection and Training Procedures in Australian Manufacturing, 1940-1960

While contertrporary Australian industrial relations studies are focusing increasingly on the workplace, our understanding of the historical development of workplace industrial relations remains hazy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of workplace labour management, and the role of the personnel manager. This paper seeks to rectify this neglect by analyzing the origins and development of the personnel function in manufacturing industry since the Second World War. Personnel initiatives in the areas of employment, selection and training are examined. The paper concludes that, while a tight post-war labour market provided a general impetus for the more widespread use of specialist personnel work, the nature of personnel practice varied widely between firms.

Acquisition of Skills for New Plant Start-Up in Singapore along with a Plan to Retain Employees

There is always a problem in a new plant start-up acquiring a workforce that is competent. This is aggravated when the skills required are not available in the prevailing labor market. Couple this with a tight labor market with competition for workers. A further complication is doing all of this internationally (Singapore). The traditional on-the-job training was not considered capable of creating and developing a competent workforce. The solution of the problem that was adapted was a competency -based technical program using subject-matter experts. These SME's were selected from within the culture of the plant, brought to the United States and trained, coached and counselled so that they could develop and conduct the training back home in Singapore. Competency-based training that uses certification was taken a step further by the integration of human factors and social interaction consideration and skills. The SME's to be effective must be accepted as experts, coaches, counsellors and mentors. The feeling of caring and consideration needed to come across as credible and honest for success. When this did, the trainers were receptive and enthusiastic and they took pride in their accomplishment.

Controlling the Turnover Problem: The Use of the Realistic Job Preview “Experience”

Faced with the paradoxical relationship between a tight labor market and a high turnover rate, one potential solution is the realistic job preview (RJP). The RJP occurs when an organization makes sure that a potential employee receives a total picture of what is involved once hired by the organization. Although many organizations use what might be considered realistic job previews, they all do not go by the name RJP. The RJP usually involves presenting an overview of the job. Such an overview is usually conveyed by way of a third party, through a verbal presentation, an audio or video tape, or described in print.This paper focuses on a hybrid of the RJP where the applicants are asked to a sample of the job they will perform if hired. This variation of the RJP might be considered a realistic job preview experience (RJPE). Where as the RJP has been frequently discussed, there is very little known concerning the RJPE. Unlike the RJP, the RJPE, first, provides an opportunity for the organization to assess the...

Employment Strategies in Canadian and British Health Services

Based on research undertaken in 1988, an examination is carried out of the strategies being pursued by the Canadian and the UK health services in the light of current realities. These include developing employment plans to cope with rising demand, escalating costs and a tighter labour market.

Employment policies and practices in the lodging industry

Respondents were asked a series of questions about their strategic personnel management policies to see how they were coping with the labor shortage. The results were rather disappointing, from the perspective of trying to reduce labor turnover and compete favorably in the current tight labor market. Only one-half of the respondents in this survey indicated that they have formal training or education programs for their employees. Only two-thirds of the respondents in the survey encourage employee involvement in their jobs or encourage job security and longevity. Only one-third provide guidance on career paths within the company, and only one-third even claim to be paying relatively high wages.

Finding Qualified People in a Tight Labor Market

Human resources managers in architectural and engineering firms face an increasingly difficult dilemma of recruiting top talent for their firms. The labor pool for both generalist managers and technical specialists is extremely tight and is growing more competitive. Many times, an executive from a “crossover” industry will bring the most valued qualities to a position. These qualities include regulatory experience, union/management experience, customer service, financial controls, and distribution planning and logistics. Professional recruiters such as a retained executive search firm can offer companies worldwide capabilities in attracting critical talent at senior levels. In addition to retaining the resources of an outside recruiter, human resources managers must plan for the future by implementing a comprehensive program today.

Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario, 1900–1980 by Ian Radforth

technology and culture Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 921 reader to enlarge on and continue that effort through the connections to a broader history. I should also point out the remarkable role pictures play in the book. Rather than illustrating an occasional point, the 100 illustrations provide substantial additional information about the ways and places in which carpenters work, from historic houses to pile driving to concrete bridge building. Presented with little or no commentary, they strongly assist the reader’s ability to comprehend the carpenters’ history. • Laurence F. Gross Dr. Gross is a curator at the Museum of American Textile History in North Andover, Massachusetts. He is currently working on a history of the Boott Cotton Mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. Bushworkers and Bosses: Logging in Northern Ontario, 1900—1980. By lan Radforth. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Pp. x + 336; illustrations, tables (appendixes), notes, index. $C42.50 (cloth); $C17.95 (paper). Ian Radforth has turned his prizewinning York University doctoral dissertation into an outstanding account ofthe effect of mechanization on work and workers in the northern Ontario pulpwood logging industry. He describes the creation of the modern work environ­ ment—highly mechanized, capital intensive—as the outcome of strug­ gle and conflict between managerial initiatives and workers’ responses in the context of a changing labor market. The work force was not deskilled but reskilled; it emerged having more in common with ma­ chine operators and mechanics in other industries than with lumber­ jacks of earlier generations. Although Radforth’s material on union organization and ethnicity will not be of direct interest to most readers of thisjournal, his treatment of technology makes the book one which can be read with profit by all historians of modern industrial production. Like so many Canadian historians, Radforth begins with geography. The diverse, intractable terrain and species mix of the boreal forest long resisted the implementation of uniform technical solutions and preserved the value of workers’ knowledge and experience. Technical problems were highly site specific, more effectively solved by the worker with ax in hand than by forest engineers. As late as 1945 the bush was a traditional workplace, looking more as it did 100 years previ­ ously than it would thirty years hence. The impetus for change came from booming demand, a tight labor market, and competition from other producing areas with lower costs. To meet these challenges, to keep the pulp mills supplied with an inexpensive, reliable, year-round supply of logs, the industry turned TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE 922 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology to a set of technological solutions, introducing mechanization on a massive scale. For the most part, this involved borrowing components from the available pool of technology, then adapting and recombining them. The creativeness of this process receives only lukewarm ac­ knowledgement from Radforth. The search for new technology had its focus in the Woodlands Section of the Canadian Pulp and Paper Association. The section brought competing forest companies and equipment suppliers together to pool their knowledge and find so­ lutions to their common problems. This is an important story, and Radforth tells it well, though he fails to set it adequately within the growing literature on the history of industrial research in Canada. My principal complaints about this book relate to sources. First, the University of Toronto Press must learn that a proper bibliography is not a luxury to be dispensed with in cutting costs. It is a necessary part of a scholarly work, and readers will feel its absence here. Second, Radforth has not exploited the records held by any Ontario pulp and paper firm. I researched a dissertation on the Canadian pulp and paper industry at the same time as Radforth and found the industry to be entirely cooperative. Access to such records would have added welcome balance and a fresh perspective to an otherwise thoroughly researched and well-written study. James P. Hull Dr. Hull is visiting assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto. He is completing a study of the ways in which forest-products firms in Canada have managed technical knowledge. Workers and Dissent in the Redwood Empire. By Daniel A. Cornford...

A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America by Shelton Stromquist

918 Book Reviews—Labor and Technology TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE nally, Weitzman’s study recalls a recent T&C article by Laurence F. Gross, “Wool Carding: A Study of Skills and Technology” (October 1987), which adroitly documents the subtle connections between skill levels and technological change. Gross shows that management-pro­ moted deskilling could increase skill requirements as well as decrease them, a point skilled workers like Ben’s father and grandfather at the Lima works would no doubt have acknowledged. Historians interested in the new scholarship on work will want to consult studies like those of Gross, Berg, and Harper, but they will also find Weitzman’s story about building a locomotive enjoyable and instructive. Better than many scholars, in fact, Weitzman evokes the specifics of a world of production now largely lost. Moreover, in tack­ ling the subject of work wholly from the perspective of those who did it, he forcefully emphasizes the importance ofwhat Harper aptly labels “working knowledge.” As a brief and popular account of skill as re­ siding both in the hands and in the head, Superpower is a valuable contribution. Joseph J. Corn Dr. Corn is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford University, where he teaches courses in the history of technology. A Generation ofBoomers: ThePatternofRailroadLaborConflictinNineteenthCentury America. By Shelton Stromquist. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Pp. xix + 353; illustrations, figures, tables, notes, appendixes, bibliography, index. $29.95. Most historians, Robert Fogel notwithstanding, have deemed rail­ roads the central element in the creation of the modern American mass-production economy. Indeed, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., has de­ scribed the dual transport-communications revolution (railroads and telegraphy) of the mid- 19th century as the precipitant of the corporate revolution that saw the “visible hand” of management replace the “invisible hand” of the market in ordering the national economy. Now, Shelton Stromquist of the Department of History at the University of Iowa adds to the scholarship of Walter Licht, James Ducker, and other students of railroad labor relations by exploring in great detail the history of railroad workers between 1873 and 1900. Stromquist seeks to explain how changes in the economics, technology, and labor mar­ kets of American railroads fueled three decades of bitter and some­ times violent industrial conflict, conflict that, in Stromquist’s words, “. . . produced a generation of boomers whose class consciousness was embodied in the American Railway Union” (p. xiv). Primarily, however, Stromquist describes and analyzes the technol­ ogy of railroad transportation only insofar as such innovations altered TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews—Labor and Technology 919 the relationship between the supply and the demand for labor. His central hypothesis suggests that, as labor surplus superseded labor scarcity, railroad workers struggled to defend the privileges that had flowed to them as a result of a tight labor market. As the supply of labor expanded, railroad managements cut wages, intensified work, and diluted skills. In response, workers struck, formed unions, and entered politics to defend their interests. Over time, the locus of railroad labor conflict moved from east to west as workers flowed from surplus-labor markets to tight ones. Technology played a small part in this larger process—when, for example, air brakes reduced the number of brakemen needed per train, more efficient locomotives enabled crews to move longer trains, and new machine tools and methods of constructing (or repairing) rolling stock diluted skills in the railroad shops. Beyond its effect on the supply-demand function in the labor market and work practices in the shops, technology scarcely bulks large in this history of railroad labor conflict. Yet Stromquist does explore a variety of subjects that should interest students of late-19th-century American society and economics. In suc­ ceeding chapters, he describes statistically the pattern of railroad labor conflicts, the evolution of labor organizations in the industry, the wages, rules, and conditions of work, the community structure and social dynamics of railroad division points, the mobility and promotion tra­ jectories of railroad workers, and the establishment of systematic man­ agerial labor policies on the railroads. Because he approaches his subject topically rather than chronologically, the reader experiences a good deal of repetition as the same events are examined in successive chapters...

International management of R&D: The Swedish Experience

AbstractThis paper summarizes the results of in‐depth case studies of international R&D management in four Swedish multinational corporations. The results suggest that foreign volumes and shares of R&D expenditures are rapidly increasing. Through a rapidly increasing number of foreign acquisitions, foreign R&D laboratories have been added. As part of international rationalization of production, foreign units have been given global product mandates with responsibility both for manufacturing and R&D. In maturing foreign subsidiaries, routine technical activities have often evolved into proper R&D. Tight labour market conditions for engineers in Sweden have made it increasingly necessary to exploit existing technical capacity, regardless of location.Concurrently, companies face new pressures for international coordination and control of R&D. Coordination is required to reduce product differentiation, to facilitate technology transfer and to ensure the technical and market compatibility of products and components developed at different locations but sold as part of total systems. Drawing on the experience in the four investigated companies, the paper discusses how systems and procedures can be developed to meet the need for coordinated international R&D management.

Personnel Management in Britain: Were the 1970s Really a Golden Age?

Three sets of environmental conditions favour the personnel function: tight labour market conditions, substantial government intervention in the employment relationship through legislation, a sizeable increase in the proportion of the workforce that is unionised. The presence of the latter two in the 1970s is thought to be the basis of the gains made during that period. The extent to which these gains were considerabe relative to other management functions and enough to ensure a sufficiently entrenched position which could not be subsequently undermined or cut back remains open to question. The latter should be considered in any study specifically concerned with the supposed current decline of the personnel function.

Trends in the Entry to Higher Education: 1961-1972

might be expected to have affected postsecondary entry patterns. To reduce inequities of educational opportunity, several federal programs (e.g., the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant Program and the College Work-Study Program) were established to aid needy students. Federal compensatory programs (e.g., Upward Bound and Talent Search) and new efforts by individual colleges were also developed to encourage and support minority group participation in postsecondary education. These programs, as well as such social and economic factors as the war in Vietnam, the women's liberation movement, and a tight labor market for college graduates in the past decade, may have had a substantial impact on patterns of postsecondary educational enrollment. It thus seems appropriate at this time to ask questions about current enrollment patterns of high school graduates in postsecondary education, as compared to those existing prior to these potentially powerful intervening forces. The primary purpose of this paper is, therefore, to compare current patterns of participation in postsecondary education with patterns about ten years ago. In particular, the following questions are addressed: (1) What are the overall rates of college entry? Are they different from those about ten years ago? (2) Are there any differences in the college entry rates among groups defined by sex, ability, ethnicity, and socioeconomic background? Have the differences increased or decreased?

The Labour Market and the Continuity of Social Policy after 1834: The Case of the Eastern Counties

Tll SHE persistence of the allowance system in the industrial north of England after I834 has been established but it has been assumed that the Poor Law Amendment Act was comparatively effective in the rural south.2 Although the administrative framework of the New Poor Law was implemented swiftly in the south, and new unions and workhouses created, this institutional success concealed a failure of relief policy because outdoor allowances to the able-bodied poor continued to be given. The administration of poor relief as a response to underemployment in the rural labour market produced very similar social policies before and after i834: allowances in aid of wages continued but were ostensibly in aid of sickness; the parish vestry was replaced by the union workhouse as the local labour exchange; and parish roundsmen and labour-rate schemes were superseded by a ticket system as a means of apportioning labourers among employers. The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of i832-4 had stated that the great source of abuse is out-door relief afforded to the able-bodiedand had particularly condemned both allowances in aid of wages, and the employment of the poor in roundsmen and labour-rate schemes.3 The i834 Act had embodied the economic analysis and recommendations of the Royal Commission's Report but had failed to end these practices which blurred the distinction between the pauper and the independent labourer. This failure was the outcome of a misconception in the Poor Law Report of i834 which saw rural underemployment as a result rather than a cause of poor-relief practices before i 834.4 The ideological preconceptions of its authors blinded them to the work of theorists and reformers who had since the seventeenth century been studying the problem of underemployment in English agriculture. These had proposed a variety of make-work schemes to alleviate the social consequences of the periodicity of work in arable farming where seasonal unemployment succeeded a tight labour market during haytime and harvest.5 Although the develop

The ethics of supervision

Charles S. Levy, DSW, is Professor, Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University, New York, New York. Considerable attention has been paid in the social work literature to the purposes, skills, and processes of supervision. But the subject of ethics in supervision has been virtually neglected. This article discusses some of the reasons for according to ethics in supervision a high priority, particularly because of current conditions in the field. Six conditions that presently exist in so cial work make the formulation and imple mentation of an ethic for supervision in social work more imperative than ever be fore: (1) resources for social work training and education have been reduced or elim inated, (2) social agencies are finding it difficult to raise funds for their programs, (3) what was formerly a tight labor market has become a tight job market, (4) social work education at the bachelor's degree and associate degree levels has increased, (5) agencies are employing greater numbers of paraprofessional personnel, and (6) pro fessional personnel are increasingly de ployed in supervisory positions.

A Study: Those Not Working in a Tight Labor Market, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Greenleigh Associates

<i>A Study: Those Not Working in a Tight Labor Market, Milwaukee, Wisconsin</i>. Greenleigh Associates

How Gainful Employment Affects the Accomplishment of Developmental Tasks of Adolescent Boys

MfANY OF US remember the decade of the 1930's as a period of great frustration and low morale among our youth. Endeavoring to live and to engage in satisfying activities without money in a money economy was enough to dishearten all but the most Pollyanna-ish spirits. Especially exasperating was the thwarting of recreatory desires because recreation had become so largely commercialized. Now for a dozen years the situation has been reversed. The tight labor market of the war years and the postwar boom has given youth employment and resultant earnings. Some have dropped out of school at the earliest age of release, lured by the opportunity to become full-time earners, and large numbers of boys and girls in school have taken part-time jobs to gain the satisfactions that the activity and the earnings can give them.

The Value of a Testing Program in a Tight Labor Market

The Value of a Testing Program in a Tight Labor Market