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Union Power (union + power)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting71%
Humanities and Social Sciences28%

Selected Abstracts

An Analysis of Workplace Representatives, Union Power and Democracy in Australia

BRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 4 2009
David Peetz
The purpose of this article is to illuminate the views and experiences of workplace representatives in Australia in the context of falling union density, and to analyse factors that are most strongly associated with subjective union power at the workplace level, as perceived by delegates. The analysis relies on a large random survey of workplace delegates in eight significant Australian unions. The article describes the situation broadly facing delegates as shown by the survey and analyses a set of factors associated with the power of workers as perceived by delegates. We find that higher levels of reported activism among delegates are strongly associated with greater subjective union power. We also find that self-reported delegate confidence is also strongly associated with perceptions of higher union power, as is delegate's clarity about their roles. The data also show a strong association between perceptions of democracy within the union and union power. Support for delegates from the union office and organizers is also associated with higher levels of union power at the local level. The analysis provides some support for union renewal strategies associated with the ,organizing model' as applied in Australia and some other Anglo-Saxon countries that aim to increase the activism of workplace delegates through education, the provision of support for workplace delegates and more democratic union structures. [source]

Legitimizing the EU: Is there a ,Post-parliamentary Basis' for its Legitimation?

JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 3 2001
Christopher Lord
This article argues that its character as a non-state political system makes little difference to how the EU ought to be legitimated. Minimum requirements for the legitimation of the liberal democratic state (performance, democracy and identity) also hold for the legitimation of Union power, both normatively and sociologically. This constrains the application of innovative legitimation strategies to the Union, requiring that post-parliamentary solutions be recast as complements, rather than substitutes, for a system of representative politics in the European arena, if the EU is to meet the core standard of democratic rule, which we take to be public control with political equality. [source]

Producers, Processors and Unions: The Meat Producers Board and Labour Relations in the New Zealand Meat Industry, 1952,1971

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2001
Bruce Curtis
In New Zealand, the historical trend towards the rational-capitalistic transformation of agriculture was forestalled in part by producer boards, institutions that were intended to operate in the collective interests of farmers. Recently, there has been renewed interest both in the economic effects of the boards and in the role of farmers themselves within New Zealand's unique arbitral system of industrial relations. This paper bridges these areas of research by examining the influence of the Meat Producers Board on management,labour relations within the export meat industry. Whereas the Board is generally regarded as having empowered family-labour farmers, we argue that its interventions also empowered meatworkers and simultaneously weakened meat-processing companies as employers. The power resources indirectly supplied to meatworkers by the Board were an important external source of union power in the industry. By examining these resources, we identify the neglected effects of a key institution that shaped New Zealand's path of development by preventing the subsumption of ,independent' farming. [source]

REGIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT DISPARITIES: AN EVALUATION OF POLICY MEASURES,

AUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC PAPERS, Issue 4 2008
N. GROENEWOLD
This paper analyses the efficacy of regional and federal government policies in reducing inter-regional unemployment disparities. We use as our framework a two-region general equilibrium model with a given freely-mobile supply of labour. We assume inter-regional migration to occur in response to inter-regional utility differentials. Each region has households, firms and a regional government. In addition to regional governments, there is a federal government. The firms in a region use a single factor, labour, to produce a single good which we assume to be different to that produced in the other region. It is supplied to households and to the regional government in the form of payroll taxes. Households consume some, trade some with households in the other region and give some up to the federal government as income tax. Firms and households bargain over wages and firms then choose employment to maximise profits. The resulting equilibrium will generally not be a full-employment one. We simulate a linearised numerical version of the model. We examine seven alternative policies, six carried out by a regional government and one by the federal government. In the first group there are traditional tax/expenditure polices as well as policies which might be seen as attacking the natural rate of unemployment: changes in unemployment benefits, changes in union power, changes in the labour force and changes in labour productivity. The federal government policy is a regionally-differentiated fiscal policy. Contrary to expectations, many policies which have traditionally been recommended to alleviate unemployment are found, in fact, to exacerbate the unemployment problem. [source]

An Analysis of Workplace Representatives, Union Power and Democracy in Australia

BRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 4 2009
David Peetz
The purpose of this article is to illuminate the views and experiences of workplace representatives in Australia in the context of falling union density, and to analyse factors that are most strongly associated with subjective union power at the workplace level, as perceived by delegates. The analysis relies on a large random survey of workplace delegates in eight significant Australian unions. The article describes the situation broadly facing delegates as shown by the survey and analyses a set of factors associated with the power of workers as perceived by delegates. We find that higher levels of reported activism among delegates are strongly associated with greater subjective union power. We also find that self-reported delegate confidence is also strongly associated with perceptions of higher union power, as is delegate's clarity about their roles. The data also show a strong association between perceptions of democracy within the union and union power. Support for delegates from the union office and organizers is also associated with higher levels of union power at the local level. The analysis provides some support for union renewal strategies associated with the ,organizing model' as applied in Australia and some other Anglo-Saxon countries that aim to increase the activism of workplace delegates through education, the provision of support for workplace delegates and more democratic union structures. [source]

Contested Resources: Unions, Employers, and the Adoption of New Work Practices in US and UK Telecommunications

BRITISH JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Issue 3 2007
Matias Ramirez
The pattern of adoption of high-performance work practices has been explained in terms of strategic contingency and in terms of union presence. We compare the post-deregulation/privatization changes in work practice at AT&T, Bell Atlantic and British Telecom. On the basis of these cases, we argue that the choice of new work practices should be understood as a consequence not only of the company's resources or changes in its environment, nor of a simple union presence, but also as a consequence of the practices' effects on union power, the nature of the union's engagement, and the union's strategic choices. [source]