A primary goal of trade unions is to maintain and improve workers' terms and conditions, particularly workers who are members of the union, through collective bargaining with employers. Whether unions are successful depends, in large part, on their bargaining strength à which is based on their...

A survey of how employment is changing shows that employment relations continue to be relatively good, despite the recession. However there has been a marked rise in feelings of job insecurity in the public sector in Britain since the mid-2000s.

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been most pronounced. Using workplace-level data and a common model, we present decompositions of changes in collective bargaining and worker representation...

Using nationally representative workplace data we find the use of temporary agency workers (TAW) is positively associated with financial performance in the British private sector and weakly associated with higher sales per employee. However TAW is not associated with value added per employee....

Paper presented at the TUC's Leading Change programme, London

We establish the effects of salaries on worker performance by exploiting a natural experiment in which some workers in a particular occupation (football referees) switch from short-term contracts to salaried contracts. Worker performance improves among those who move onto salaried contracts...

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidise the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerable variation in joining among...

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been most pronounced. Using workplace-level data and a common model, we present decompositions of changes in collective bargaining and worker representation...

This paper presents the first comparative analysis of the decline in collective bargaining in two European countries where that decline has been among the most pronounced. Using establishment-level data and a common model, we present decompositions of changes in collective bargaining in the...