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Case studies of 12 leading British employers were driven by employers' interest in issues related to working long hours in light of introduction of the Working Time Directive, a European Community initiative enacted into British law that sets limits on working hours per week. Data showed over one-fourth of full-time employees worked over 48 hours per week; men were more likely to work longer hours; and women's hours were increasing. Reasons for working long hours fell into four broad categories: workload, a long hours culture, individual commitment to the job, and need to improve pay. Consequences were increased sickness absence, low morale, and high turnover; lower productivity and quality of work outputs; greater health and safety risks; adverse impacts on family and social life; and reduced employment opportunities for those unable or unwilling to work long hours. The few successful interventions to ameliorate consequences were aimed at changing work patterns and changing individual behavior and company culture. Key elements were early consultation with staff and managers; solutions tackling underlying issues; and implementation that includes commitment and sponsorship for change from the very top, a change agent, the bringing of key people on board, communication and publicity, support and counseling, leading by example, a range of initiatives, effective time management, and message reinforcement and maintenance of momentum. Ongoing monitoring and feedback and evaluation were also seen as vital. (Five case studies provide examples of different types of intervention implemented in a range of contexts. The report contains 19 references.) (YLB)

This is the first of two volumes of selected papers presented at the 1996 conference on "Changes in Working Time in Canada and the United States." Eleven chapters focus on weekly hours worked by individuals, including the recent changes in the distribution of weekly working time in Canada and the U.S., implications of the changing distribution of hours worked for earnings inequality, and efforts to reduce unemployment through mandated hours reduction. "Introduction and Overview" (Ging Wong, Garnett Picot) is followed by these three chapters in Part I that offer statistical overviews and analyses of the trends in working hours for Canada and the U.S.: "The Changing Workweek: Trends in Weekly Hours of Work in Canada, 1976-95" (Mike Sheridan et al.); "Trends in Hours of Work in the U.S." (Philip L. Rones et al.); and "Working Hard" (Linda Bell, Richard B. Freeman). Three chapters in Part II consider the role of working time on increased earnings inequality: "Working Time, Wages, and Earnings Inequality Among Men and Women in Canada, 1981-93" (Garnett Picot); "Patterns of Foregone Potential Earnings Among Working-Age Males, 1975-92" (Robert Haveman et al.); and "The Growth of Income and Employment Inequality in Australian Cities" (R.G. Gregory, Boyd Hunter). These two chapters in Part III examine issues related to labor supply and hours constraints: "Supply of Hours Per Day and Days Per Week--Evidence from the Canadian Labor Market Activity Survey" (Richard E. Mueller) and "Hours Constraints: Theory, Evidence, and Policy Implications" (Kevin Lang, Shulamit Kahn). These three chapters on Part IV focus on "short-time compensation (STC) programs": "Measuring the Effects of STC on Workforce Dynamics" (Karen Needels, Walter Nicholson); "Short-Time Work in the U.S.: Implications for Evaluation of STC Schemes" (Alec R. Levenson); and "Economic Activities and the Demand for Work Sharing in Canada" (Tim Siedule et al.). Cited author and subject indexes are appended. Each paper contains references. (YLB)

The book is designed to explain the entire Fair Labor Standards Act. The 1974 amendments are detailed regarding new and previously covered employees, agricultural labor, government employees, domestics, conglomerates, small stores, other revisions, overtime exemptions, and age discrimination. The document elaborates on specifications for overtime for various categories of employees including executive, administrative, and professional exemptions and salesmen. The employment and wages of children and students are discussed at length. Recordkeeping requirements are divided into two sections dealing with general and miscellaneous rules. A section devoted to equal employment opportunities deals thoroughly with court rulings on the position of man and woman before the law, job advertisement, implementing corrective measures, and drafting an Equal Employment Opportunity Contract (EEOC) policy statement: it presents Title Seven of the Civil Rights Act, a sample of the Employer Information Report EEO-1, and information report instructions. The concluding section is concerned with equal pay and the beneficial effects of the law. (JB)

Chapter 2 of the book "Manager's Legal Handbook" is presented. It discusses the basic concepts of compensation including setting pay levels, minimum wage, overtime, flexible work schedules, and record-keeping requirements. The author provides important information for human resources and payroll personnel on how to deal with compensation issues such as pay levels and work schedules of employees.

Chapter 10 of the book "Save Your Small Business," is presented. It suggests when a business is facing an economic downturn, long-term solution is to work smarter, instead of working extra hours. Businesses which meet consumer's need cost-effectively can survive in bad economic conditions and may have opportunities of being productive in less time.

Chapter 7 of the book "The Essential Guide to Family and Medical Leave" is presented. It discusses how much leave can an employee take based on the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Employees eligible for all types of leave are entitled to 12 weeks of FMLA leave in a 12-month leave year. The company may change calendaring methods with a 60 days advance notice. Moreover, each week of leave is based on the employee's normal workweek which includes any overtime the employee is required to work.

A section about statutory restrictions on overtime employment from the book "An A-Z of Employment Law" is presented. Adult workers are not required to work more than an average of 48 hours a week, except managing executives and other persons with autonomous decision-making powers. A worker whose contract requires him to work at night cannot be required to work more than eight hours in any 24-hour period. Health and safety inspectors and local authority are responsible for enforcing the upper limits on working time.

The creation of a new communist state demands from all participants in socialist construction a firm, genuinely proletarian labor discipline, the fullest use of every working day, every working hour, and the decisive elimination of all types of disorganized production, in particular absenteeism. Why do we need a second five-year plan when we have not gotten anything from the first one? Purge the Towns of Social [i.e., Human] Garbage! By the end of the term of the first five-year plan, 10.7 million new workers had entered the labor force. The cities and construction sites were teeming with people, but housing, running water, electricity, sewage disposal, and food distribution were all still woefully inadequate for the needs of the new population. People lived amid horrific conditions: crowded into single rooms and corners in subdivided apartments, in hastily erected, rickety barracks, in primitive tent and cave dwellings, even in the factories and shops themselves. Thousands of new, badly needed workers arrived each day at the country's sprawling construction sites, only to leave again for lack of housing. Turnover rates soared as workers sought better living situations in other places. Everywhere labor was on the move, trudging from building site to city, thronging the railroad stations, packing the trains. The plants and sites were extremely disorganized. Dining halls and kitchens built to serve several hundred workers now turned out meals for thousands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter examines the industrial relations policies of engineering Employers' associations during the inter-war economic recession. A key issue taken up is how the industry responded to economic change - first the sharp and sustained economic recession and later the rapid recovery which came with rearmament from the mid-1930s. Previous published studies have tended to concentrate upon the national, industry-wide perspective, with the debate pivoting on the question of employers' collective authority and power during the slump. One interpretation stresses the altered balance of power in the employers' favour during the 1920-35 period. Gospel posits that, despite serious divisions within engineering employers' ranks, their organisations exploited the enhanced bargaining power conferred by market developments and the collapse of trade unionism to play a primary role in structuring industrial relations during these years. Zeitlin argues, conversely, that engineering employers' organisations between the wars were weakened by internal strife and patently failed to influence industrial relations at all levels – within the workplace, the local labour market and at the national/political level. According to Zeitlin, engineering employers were unable to exploit the success of the 1922 national lock-out to ‘Americanise’ industrial relations and achieve a transformation in the division of labour in the industry. Hence, the industry's long-term competitiveness was fundamentally compromised. The aim here is to examine such interpretations critically in the light of detailed evidence from a single region. Thus developments within engineering factories and within local labour markets are brought more sharply into focus, whilst internal divisions within the engineering employers' power bloc will be identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conjuncture of rising worker organisation and militancy – an ability and will to sustain resistance – with intensifying competition and more hostile product markets encouraged many employers to seek alternative, less costly and provocative strategies to maintain labour discipline and stabilise industrial relations. Employers' associations played a key role in this process of formalising industrial relations, as this chapter will demonstrate. Not that this was a tidy, symmetrical or neat evolutionary process. Rather, union recognition and collective bargaining mechanisms spread slowly, sporadically and experimentally, in different shapes and forms, at different times and with differing consequences between and within British industries. Nevertheless, an increasing number of employers' organisations– indeed, probably the majority by 1914 – reorientated their labour relations policies towards acceptance of trade unions and towards prevention rather than the forcible breaking of strikes. Increasingly, the local, regional and national employer organisations were stressing the common interests and bonds between master and man, and seeking ways to reconstitute a stronger degree of consent towards capitalism, reversing the process of evaporating loyalty and indiscipline as strikes grew and became more bitter, as companies responded to growing competitive pressures by intensifying workloads and as traditional paternalist relationships fractured as firms grew larger. The secretary of the Oldham Master Builders' Association, Sam Smethurst, articulated a sense of this changing attitude in 1913: Instead of having a series of struggles all over this vast area it would be better if we could thoroughly understand what is wanted, consider whether it is reasonable and whether we, as the heads of the building trade in this area, could make some recommendations for a settlement that would be friendly instead of antagonistic. […] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The war emergency dislocated product and labour markets, radically altering the social and political environment in which employers' organisations operated. This produced conflicting and paradoxical results. The volatility of product and labour markets increased intra-class competition, undermining solidarity as competition intensified for scarce labour, for raw materials and for government contracts. Labour was directed into the armed forces and into war-related work, producing radical changes in the employment profiles of British industries. The effects of war upon product and labour markets were perhaps the main destabilising agents, setting in train forces which fractured internal discipline, undermined central control over wages and conditions, making consensus collective action more problematic. This was particularly marked, as one might expect, in the engineering sector, where, McKinlay, Wigham and Zeitlin have argued, employer cohesion waned and central authority atrophied between 1914 and 1920, resulting in a diminution of managerial rights and the adoption of a flexible, conciliatory, rearguard defensive policy by the EEF. On the other hand, unprecedented government intervention in industry, combined with a quite remarkable surge in trade union growth and shop-floor labour militancy during the period 1914–20 placed great pressure upon individual employers, raising the capacity for collective action amongst industrialists. Hence, these years witnessed a counter-surge in the number, representativeness and stability of British employers' organisations, at all levels, peaking in the early 1920s. Moreover, many employers' organisations acted, often quite aggressively, though with varying degrees of success, to bring the destabilising influences, especially of the period 1914–17, under some control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The action effects of the mobilization drive of one unit depend considerably on the degree to which this drive triggers counter-mobilizations in other units in the same system or situation, which seek to neutralize the new power of the mobilizing unit or to block its intended self-changes … this is the case with mobilization; the mobilization of a unit frequently does trigger the mobilization of opponents. The great wave-year mobilizations … were invariably rewarded with some kind of legislative success, the ultimate touchstone of the value of political action. It would be tedious in the extreme to take the reader along every inch of the road travelled by the main currents of the fear … It is however possible to convey in reasonably clear terms how these currents moved across the country. SWITCHING SIDES: THE VIEW FROM ABOVE Mobilization of a group is likely to lead to countermobilizations by other groups. In the case of industrial conflict both political and economic elites may respond. And if the telltale signs of the magnitude of a mobilization process are the speed and extent of the elites' responses, then the 1968–72 strike wave was a momentous process. Political elites reacted quickly, in some cases repressing but mostly facilitating those official, large-scale organizations (i.e., unions) that could control conflict. In the case of industrial conflict, political elites could also remain aloof from the movement, letting social classes deal with their problems on their own. Prime Minister Giolitti adopted such a hands-off strategy during the 1919-20 “red years” (biennio rosso). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective bargaining is the great social invention that has institutionalized industrial conflict. In much the same way as the electoral process and majority rule have institutionalized political conflict in a democracy, collective bargaining has created a stable means for resolving industrial conflict. Collective bargaining provides one of the more important bulwarks for the preservation of the private-enterprise system. … Collective bargaining is an institution which bolsters the existing economic order.… A union movement which emphasizes collective bargaining is inevitably a conservative movement, for collective bargaining is inseparable from private enterprise. UNANSWERED QUESTIONS In Chapters 2 and 3 we saw that economic models of strikes can explain the nonperiodic, medium-term fluctuations in strike activity. In Italy, however, strike activity also shows distinct periodic, two- to three-year cycles. Furthermore, the cycles in numbers of strikes and strikers peak at different times: the cycle in the number of strikers peaks approximately one year earlier than the cycle in the number of strikes. The evidence confirming the existence of a three-year periodic cycle has been accumulating over the preceding three chapters. The exploratory data analyses summarized in Chapter 1 revealed the basic pattern (Franzosi, 1980). The empirical testing of the Ashenfelter and Johnson model in Chapter 2 showed the existence of a three-year lag structure in real wages, thus pointing to a relationship between a three-year strike cycle and a three-year wage cycle. Traces of this pattern remained unexplained in the residuals obtained from the econometric estimates of the Ashenfelter and Johnson model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

De-Stalinization, if it was to have its desired impact, had to extend to the workplace. Repression, even in the 1930s, had simply failed to prove itself a viable stimulus to work. In 1956, therefore, the regime set out on a different path to try to create a popular feeling of identification with the system and its leadership. The 1940 criminalization of job-changing and absenteeism was repealed, so that workers could switch jobs without fear of legal reprisals. There was also an extensive reform of the trade unions, designed to give them the appearance, if not the reality, of greater responsibility to their members. As part of this reform, new labour regulations made it far more difficult for managers to fire workers except for serious discipline violations. A coercive element was to be retained, but this was to be enforced in the main not through labour law, but through the incentive system, as implemented in the wage reform of 1956–62, which is discussed at length in chapter 4. The reform of labour law meant significant changes in the state of the labour market. Workers were once more free to move about at will and had less to fear from the threat of dismissal. These changes, which had been essential from the point of view of the political liberalization of Soviet society, at the same time pushed the balance of power on the shop floor a little more in workers' favour, and in this sense helped to undermine the regime's economic strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]