The ratchet effect undermines firms' ability to pay workers a steady piece rate. Using examples from the nineteenth-century British textile industry, this paper studies the different strategies firms and workers used to enforce piece rates. The strategies depended upon the emotional responses of...

This paper evaluates five recent experiences of worksharing in Québec since 1994: Bell Québec, Alcan, Scott Paper, the Ministère de l'Environnement et de la Faune and Sico. Participation in voluntary worksharing programs was high where workers' sacrifice (lost wages) was not great and where...

Assembled by Angus Maddison, the most widely consulted data set on worktime in the long nineteenth century is seriously flawed, because it assumes all countries had British work hours. This paper constructs new measures of worktime in Europe, North America and Australia between 1870 and 1900....

Globalization was a fact of life in Europe before 1913, but as trade shares increased, so did wage and employment instability. Faced by growing pressure from workers, national authorities established labour compacts - a packet of labour market regulations and social insurance programs - that...

Using a new data source on early Canadian strikes, this paper seeks to explain the determinants of strike durations, 1901-14. Three different approaches are evaluated: a screening model, a strike-waves model, and a war-of-attrition model. The results are sensitive to strike issue. For non-wage...

This paper asks whether the trend toward convergence in late nineteenth century Europe depends on the welfare measure used. We construct a Worker Development Index (WDI) composed of Williamson's real wage estimates, and new series of work hours and labor market regulations. Compared to...

We document the evolution of occupational gender segregation and its implications for women's labour market outcomes over the twentieth century. The first half of the century saw a considerable decline in vertical segregation as women moved out of domestic and manufacturing work into clerical...

Current forecasts paint a dismal future for unions; observers in the 1920s and 1930s also projected bleak prospects for organized labor. Analysts in the interwar years were off the mark. This paper seeks to investigate whether the revival of the labor movement before WWII was the result of...

Workers paid by the piece should in principle cooperate with new techniques that increase their output. In practice, however, firms seem unable to keep piece rates fixed, and when they cut rates workers often respond by restricting output. This paper investigates a case where in fact firms...