This article examines the recent changes to the federal legal regime that controls the taking of protected industrial action in Australia. It considers the impact of both the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act 2005 (Cth) and the Workplace Relations Amendment (Work Choices) Act...

The one-day strike, once a surprising, even exceptional, tactic has become a social phenomenon. Workers now walkout in protest—and quickly return—all the time. So do high school students. The New York Times has published a “how-to” guide. Yet, while headlines tout how more workers struck...

This paper reconsiders the orthodox Anglo-American understanding of labour as a constituency situated outside of the core corporate governance domain. It challenges the dominant neo-classical theory of the firm, which asserts that shareholders are in general the only group of ‘incomplete’...

We maintain that employer associations are a specific form of employer collusion that is overt, formal and labour market focused which encompasses but is by no means confined to collective bargaining. We consider the conditions under which this form of collusion might emerge, and how it might...

The strikes' literature is dominated by the causes and effects of strike action as they relate directly to strikers themselves. This paper considers another important group of affected workers - those individuals incidentally made idle as a result of the strike action of others. Using a unique...

This paper explores the prisoner's dilemma that may result when workers and firms are involved in labour disputes and must decide whether to hire a lawyer to be represented at trial. Using a representative data set of labour disputes in the UK and a large population of French unfair dismissal...

In this paper we challenge the conventional view that strikes are caused by asymmetric information regarding firm profitability such that union members are uninformed. Instead, we build an expressive model of strikes where the perception of unfairness provides the expressive benefit of voting...

A first approach to the attitude maintained in the EU and the People’s Re-public of China (PRC) towards alternative dispute resolution (ADR) displays similitudes regarding the support that this movement receives in both places. However, and standing on this common acceptance, a deeper analysis...

In this paper we analyse the impact of changes in product market competition on wage outcomes in the presence of an open shop union. With less than full union membership, product market competition is shown to affect not only a unionised firm's profits but also its payoff in the event of a...

Using cross-country data, this paper investigates the relationship between workplace representation and strikes. Works councils are associated with reduced strike activity. However, where union members make up a majority of works councillors, such union-dominated councils experience greater...