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This paper examines the structure of wages in a very specific labor market: care assistants in residential homes for the elderly on England's "sunshine coast." This sector corresponds closely to economists' notion of what should be a competitive labor market, both because it has a large number of small firms undertaking a very homogeneous activity in a concentrated geographical area, and because the workers are neither unionized nor covered by any minimum wage legislation, so that there are effectively no external constraints on the wage-setting process. The authors find that the wage structure deviates in important respects from what would be expected in a competitive labor market. In particular, wage dispersion is small within firms, but large between firms; and the wage dispersion that is present does not seem to be closely related to workers' productivity-related characteristics. A test rejects the hypothesis that unobserved labor quality can explain these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates two different research in progress about politics, government and industrial relations as of April 1982. A paper has been developed by Daniel J. B. Mitchell on the use of gain sharing as an anti-inflationary device in the labor market. Gregor Murray continues to work on an analysis of relations between trade unions and Warwick, England during the 1970s.

The article presents a news brief related to research at the University of Warwick SSRC Industrial Relations Research Unit in England, as of July 1, 1972. Topics of ongoing research projects include industrial relations in factories, organizational behavior in labor unions, economic aspects of labor markets, and labor law and legislation in Great Britain.

This analysis of data from a 2003--2004 telephone survey of 750 Canadian and 450 English workers finds that work practices and human resource (HR) practices had important implications for unions. The effects differed by the type of practice (for example, traditional versus "new" HR), and were mediated by each country's institutional environment. For example, traditional personnel/HR practices were strongly positively related to the likelihood of union representation and strongly negatively related to workers' propensity to vote for a union in Canada, but made little difference to either of those union outcomes in England; and "alternative" work practices bore an inverse U-shaped association with union representation in Canada, versus a positive relationship with that outcome in England. In general, the Canadian findings are consistent with an adversarial dynamic, and the English findings with a more collaborative one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey for 1991-99 and the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1984-99, the authors investigate job mobility and estimate the returns to tenure and experience. Job mobility was higher in the United Kingdom than in Germany. Returns to experience also seem to have been substantially higher in the United Kingdom, where the wage gain associated with ten years of labor market experience was around 80%, compared to 35% in Germany. The low returns to labor market experience in Germany appear to have been accountable to one group of workers: those with apprenticeship training, who tended to receive fairly high starting wages but to experience relatively low wage growth thereafter. Wage growth due to labor market experience was similar between the two countries for the other skill groups. Returns to tenure were close to zero in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data collected in 2003-2004 in national telephone surveys of 750 Canadian and 450 English workers, the author finds that alternative work practices (AWPs), such as autonomous teams, quality circles, and information sharing, provided meaningful pay gains for non-union workers but not union workers in both Canada and England. In Canada, non-union AWP payoffs approached union wage premia at even moderate levels of AWP adoption, suggesting that AWPs may serve as an alternative means to higher pay, one that is incompatible with unions and that could erode demand for union representation. In England, there was no meaningful union wage premium, suggesting that AWPs may have replaced pay bargaining as a means to higher pay; but an interaction term combining union representation and "best" HR practices bore a strong association with higher pay, consistent with a new economic role whereby unions achieve gains for their members through collaborative, performance-enhancing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This longitudinal analysis of interview data for the years 1988 and 1990 explores the determinants of three forms of underemployment among young adults: part-time employment, temporary employment, and unemployment. The authors look at two occupational groups (office technology workers and machine operators) across six European countries (Belgium, England, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands). Factors that affected patterns of underemployment were education, occupational group, initial labor market experience, perceptions of the labor market (interviewees' view of labor market conditions), and organizational socialization practices (the strategies employers took to integrate the young workers into their first jobs). Organizational and societal factors appear to have had greater influence than behavioral variables such as job search strategies and demographic variables such as gender and age. Unemployment and temporary work had many determinants in common; part-time work, in contrast, was affected only by initial labor market experience and organizational socialization practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the teacher union movement and the system of teacher bargaining in England and Wales. Although the teacher union movement is marked by an unusually high degree of organizational fragmentation, salaries in both countries are negotiated in a single forum at the national level called the "Burnham Committee." This committee is unusual in the British context in that it has a statutory basis and negotiates fixed-term agreements which are legally enforceable. The author traces the postwar history of teacher negotiations and shows that the Burnham system has experienced increasing difficulties in the past decade, such as a rise in teacher militancy and a frequent resort to arbitration and other forms of government intervention in the negotiation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on research programs conducted by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, London, England. The Institute is a nonprofit organization that was founded in 1921 with the goal of developing the field of occupational psychology in Great Britain. It has received recognition as a research association from the Department of Trade and Industry. The membership of organizations and individuals focus on research, teaching, and advisory work. The research institute's goal is to bridge the gap between theory and practice, so it offers training courses, as well as a journal, research reports and bulletins. The Institute currently has twenty-three research projects in progress which relate to industrial relations, including vocational guidance and career development, personnel selection and appraisal, and industrial safety.

This article examines the job-finding methods used by unemployed and layed-off workers in Great Britain during the late 1960s. Formal and informal job search methods are described, and their efficacy in locating work is compared. The article discusses the impact of economic conditions and labor market demand on individual job hunting. A worker's age is described as an influence on the outcome of job searches among the unemployed. A profile of employment opportunities after unemployment is provided.

The article discusses the history and development of management-labor committees. In England, The Whitley Councils were founded for negotiation of wages, hours and working conditions. Following the World war I in Germany, work councils were organized by the Weimar Republic to address the demand and grievances of workers. In 1945, labor-management committees in France were established aimed to promote cooperation between workers and management. Meanwhile, work committees were created in Austria in 1947. In Mexico, the Labor Industry Pact was approved in April 7, 1945 by the Mexican Confederation of Industrial Chambers.

This article offers update on a research program of the London Graduate School of Business Studies Organizational Behavior Research Group as of January 1973. The research work is being conducted by an interdisciplinary team of social scientists that include Derek Pugh, John Child, Roger Mansfield, and Leslie Metcalfe. The research includes comparative studies of organizational phenomena at three analytic levels. These include organizational structure and functions in the environmental context, group composition and interaction, and individual personality and behavior.

The article reports on the London Graduate School of Business Studies' Organizational Behaviour Research Group. The Group developed out of the Industrial Administration Research Unit of the College of Advanced Technology in Birmingham. The research programs focus on the comparative structure and function of organizations. Three interdependent concepts of organizational behavior are organizational structure and functioning in relation to the environment, group composition and interaction, and individual personality and behavior.