Using nationally representative workplace surveys we examine the relationship between unionization and workplace financial performance in Britain and France. We find that union bargaining is detrimental to workplace performance in Britain and that this effect is larger when unionization is...

Data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey are analysed to investigate the processes and outcomes of pay setting for the largest occupational group in a representative sample of all but the smallest British workplaces. The effects of inflation, changes in labour demand and supply,...

The past quarter century in Britain has seen a concurrent decline in collective expressions of conflict and growth in the individualised expression of conflict, most transparently manifest in a dramatic fall in the incidence of strikes and a rising tide of claims to the Employment Tribunal. This...

Low pay is concentrated in lower-skilled occupations. But the factors that affect pay levels in these occupations are different from those that affect the pay of the higher skilled. The paper used the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to examine the determinants of pay in lower-skilled...

In the context of the skill-biased technological revolution associated with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), firms with relatively high (low) proportions of skilled workers can be expected to have a comparative advantage (disadvantage) in minimising the costs both of ICT...

The recession of the early 1990s saw London shift from being one of the best performing regions in terms of unemployment to one of the worst. This paper takes employing units (workplaces) as the primary unit of labour demand and uses evidence from them to test potential explanations for London's...

For most of the twentieth century, collective bargaining provided the terms on which labour was commonly employed in Britain. However, the quarter century since 1980 has seen the collapse of collectivism as the main way of regulating employment. Our argument is that the tacit settlement between...

This review focuses on pay variance across workers, employers and across time and illustrates how theories of pay determination can shed light on this variance. We discuss the limitations of the orthodox economic approach to pay setting and emphasise the importance of labour market imperfections...

In light of the increased relative demand for skilled labour associated with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), we combine survey data for UK enterprises in 1999 with post-survey financial data for the same enterprises to assess the impact of ICT skill shortages on firms’...

Data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey are analysed to investigate the processes and outcomes of pay setting for the largest occupational group in a representative sample of all but the smallest British workplaces. The effects of inflation, changes in labour demand and supply,...