Since the abolition of the Wages Councils in September 1993, agriculture is the only sector in the UK economy covered by any form of minimum wage legislation. This paper investigates the impact of the system of minimum wages on the level and structure of earnings in agriculture and the level and...

If the presence of a union in a workplace or firm raises the pay level, unless productivity rises correspondingly, financial performance is likely to be worse. If the product market is uncompetitive this might imply a simple transfer from capital to labour with no efficiency effects, but is...

Establishment level data from the 1990 British Workplace Industrial Relations Survey are used to analyse links between employee involvement, contingent pay, collective representation and six different indicators of workplace performance: productivity levels and growth, employment changes, the...

Great Britain has had statutory regulation of minimum pay for much of this century but never previously had a national minimum wage (NMW). This paper outlines the history of minimum wage regulation culminating in 1997 with the establishment of the Low Pay Commission (LPC) and the introduction of...

Spanish experience of labour market deregulation since the early 1980s, particularly in the form of reform of fixed-term contract legislation, illustrates the potential pitfalls of such policies. The changing nature of employment protection legislation in Spain is outlined in this paper along...

Post-war concern about our industrial relations system has been dominated by three issues - pay performance at workplace, company and national level, and industrial action. In each case the focus of interest is the link between the institutions, procedures and processes of the system and the...

Union membership rose by 100,000 in 1999 ending two decades of sustained membership losses û the longest, deepest decline in British labour history yielding a cumulative fall of over 5 million members. This paper analyses that haemorrhage in membership and asks whether or not the recent...

'The ultimate objective of empirical work on incentives should be to find out why firms use the compensation systems they doàhuge advances in our understanding could be made by a concerted effort to collect data on contracts.' So concludes the 1998 Journal of Economic Literature survey on...

Links between Spanish industrial relations institutions and performance outcomes are examined. Part I considers changes in various institutions since the end of the Franco period: the structure of collective bargaining; trade union organisation; the activities and structure of management; the...

Management scholars and economists have recently set out the principles underlying the "ideal" payment system to elicit good performance by aligning the interests of the principal and agent. Such a system involves an incentive contract, reputation and certain organizational arrangements. We...