Machines cannot fully replace people even in a high-tech industry like car-making. That is one of the conclusions of research which uses the example of the newly merged transatlantic car-maker Fiat Chrysler to debunk a number of myths about the nature of manufacturing and its viability in the...

This paper estimates the size of the union membership wage premium by comparing wage outcomes for unionised workers with 'matched' non-unionised workers. The method assumes selection on observables. For this identifying assumption to be plausible, one must be able to control for all...

The introduction of a statutory recognition procedure offers British unions the opportunity to reverse membership decline by organising non-union workers. The aim of this paper is to test theories of individual union joining in order to assess the likely impact of the new procedure on British...

Under the auspices of the debate about high performance work systems, it has been suggested that the evidence of positive results is disappointing and that one reason is that there has been a lack of theory. This paper argues that there is indeed a great deal of theory that could be used to...

Equal opportunities policies and family-friendly practices are examined using data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey in order to assess (i) their associations with union recognition and strategic human resource management and (ii) the outcomes of what has recently been described...

To what extent can the decline in British trade union density between 1990 and 1998 be attributed to declining opportunities to unionize compared to declining propensity to unionize among workers with the opportunity to do so and to compositional change? This question is answered using data to...

We investigate the effect of union membership on job satisfaction. Whilst it is common to study the effects of union status on satisfaction treating individual membership as given, in this paper, we account for the endogenous selection induced by the sorting of workers into unionised jobs. Using...

In 2000 the UK government introduced, under the Employment Relations Act of 1999, a new statutory union recognition procedure, while in 2003 it published a consultation document on its Review of the Act. The document concluded that th eunion procedure was broadly working and confirmed that the...