In this paper we compare - in the laboratory - stoppage and virtual strike. Our experiment confirms that higher wages offered by an employer lead to considerably more costly effort provision. The number of strikes, the level of efforts and average total payoffs are higher under virtual strike...

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...

Arthur Linton Corbin famously remarked that courts, when deciding contract cases involving the defense of impossibility or impracticability of performance, should “pray for the wisdom of Solomon.” This is particularly true when the event causing non-performance is labor activity. This...

Implementation of workplace policies-whether through enforcement of laws or administration of programs-raises the question of the interaction between institutions created to carry out laws and the activities of workplace based agents that directly (e.g., unions) or indirectly (e.g., insurance...

Economic models of disputes often assume that the rules of the game are well understood and that parties know the possible consequences of their actions. In this paper we show the apparently unintended consequences of state-level legal innovations governing labor disputes that took place in the...

Newly certified unions often experience difficulty negotiating a first agreement. To remedy this, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) proposes that the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) provide for first contract arbitration. Using a panel of Canadian jurisdictions that have introduced FCA...

Expansion of the rights of individual workers to refuse unsafe work and to make anonymous health and safety complaints has met with concerns that these rights might be misused so as to increase union bargaining power or to otherwise harass employers. The authors construct a database that merges...

The work of American Sign Language (ASL)/English interpreters is filled with complex interpersonal, linguistic and cultural challenges. The decisions and ethical dilemmas interpreters face on a daily basis are countless and the potential for disagreement regarding those decisions is great....

Typically, workplace discrimination is approached from the perspective of a particular dimension (e.g., race or gender). This offers insight but also obscures important communality among different types of discrimination. We propose a construct of generalized workplace discrimination that...

Welfare economics—the normative branch of economics—is a consequentialist moral theory. Unlike deontological morality, at least in its basic form it attributes no intrinsic value to prohibitions on active or intentional harming of other people, lying, or promise breaking, and does not allow...