The paper reviews industrial relations developments in Britain during 1999 by assessing how New Labour's policy commitment to encouraging 'partnership' is developing in practice. After a discussion of the Employment Relations Act it considers the wider influence of European legislation. It then...

The article analyses the institutional basis and form of the employment contract in Britain using the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. It assesses the extent to which collective bargaining still regulates pay and non-pay aspects of employment. The paper shows that while collective...

The contract of employment heads the list of those labour market institutions whose continued usefulness is called into question by what appear to be fundamental changes in the world of work. However, given the multiple tasks of classification, regulation and redistribution which it has...

This paper reconstructs the evolutionary path of the contract of employmentin English law. It demonstrates that the contract of employment is a more recent innovation than widely thought, and that its essential features owe as much to legislation as they do to the common law of contract. The...

The statutory protection currently provided by UK law to employees during transfers of undertakings and other restructurings has been criticised on the grounds that it undermines insolvency procedures and interferes with the 'rescue' process. We present an analysis which suggests that granting...

The paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories. The basic idea is that, for the most part, different unemployment policy prescriptions rest on different macroeconomic theories, and our...

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to investigate when seniority is rewarded by automatic incremental scales. Scales are seen as an alternative to individual merit pay. They are likely to be used when individual productivity is hard to measure, when firms provide all workers with...

In this paper we develop a theory of union bargaining power based on firm-specific skills acquired by the insider work-force. We show that unions increase the bargaining power of insiders only in states of the world in which the firm would like to retain insiders but not hire outsiders. Union...

Recent research in macroeconomics emphasizes the role of wage rigidity in accounting for the volatility of unemployment fluctuations. We use worker-level data from the CPS to measure the sensitivity of wages of newly hired workers to changes in aggregate labor market conditions. The wage of new...

The 'business case' for gender equality rests on the claim that organisations can improve their competitiveness through improved diversity management, in particular by reducing turnover and training costs and minimising reputational and litigation risks arising from potentially discriminatory...