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The authors investigate how race and political partisanship affected variations in workplace and non-workplace mobility at three COVID-19 phases—lockdown (2020), reopening (2021), and endemic COVID (2022). They theorize that structural racism compelled relatively greater workplace mobility rates in Black communities during lockdown, and reduced Black workplace mobility during reopening and endemic COVID. By contrast, they posit elite-level anti-science skepticism and its amplification resulted in Trump-voting communities experiencing relatively higher workplace and non-workplace mobility rates than non-Trump-voting areas throughout the pandemic. Regressions primarily using county-level Google Mobility Reports data support the hypotheses, conditioning on state-level fixed effects and county-level urbanity, COVID job-type sorting, demographics, and socioeconomics. The county-level results are complemented by outcomes from novel individual-level COVID lockdown survey data, helping connect the proposed individual-level mechanisms to the county-level findings. The authors conclude that work mobility during COVID was racialized and politicized, offering empirical insights into how systematic disadvantages can lead to increased and unequal precarity during periods of acute economic or social crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mick Marchington's contributions to employee voice, participation, and involvement are broad and deep. This scholarship is consistently distinguished by a rejection of 'one‐size‐fits‐all' approaches in favour of complex, multi‐layered understandings. We reflect on some of Marchington's key contributions to employee voice, participation, and involvement, with an emphasis on the importance of internal actors who are conditioned by diverse internal and external influences. We also illustrate the lasting importance of this approach by applying it to the COVID‐19 health crisis currently unfolding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic inflicted unprecedented precarity upon workers, including concerns about job insecurity. We examine whether workers respond to job insecurity with voice, and assess the role of unions, managers, and employment arrangements in this relationship. Analyses of an original 2020 survey representative of Illinois and Michigan workers show that job insecurity is not significantly associated with voice. Further, while we find that union membership and confidence in organized labor are positively associated with voice, insecure workers are less likely to speak up than secure workers as confidence in organized labor increases. Last, we find that insecure nonstandard workers are less likely to use voice than their secure counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas are important but hard to quantify, making large‐scale, quantitative analyses difficult. Political parties are important ideational contributors, and their election year manifestos provide explicit compilations of their ideas. Using Comparative Manifesto Project data, we propose three channels through which ideas enter into manifestos and examine the fraction of manifesto content devoted to pro‐worker and anti‐union statements to measure the importance of these ideas. Multivariate analyses across 54 countries, 75 years, and 1132 parties uniquely uncover predictors of industrial relations ideas, including party characteristics, responses to other parties, and economic and political conditions. Further, pro‐worker ideas matter to voters during elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideological connections between the state, political systems and industrial relations have long been important. But the influence of the structural nature of a country's political system on trade union membership, coverage and influence has been largely overlooked. We uniquely theorize three channels through which a political system can shape unionization in the workplace independent of ideology: incentives for inclusionary governance, legislative body composition and policy enactment. Empirically, we use multiple European datasets to test the relationship between political and employee representation using multivariate analyses across more than 25 countries. We find that increased political representativeness, measured by lower disproportionality and the presence of multiparty coalitions, is a statistically significant predictor of a greater likelihood of individual trade union membership, coverage and influence, while competitive fragmentation, measured by greater numbers of political parties, is associated with weakened collective voice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter aims to answer whether foreign multinational corporations (MNCs) operating within the Chinese context differ from indigenous firms on several essential labor standards indicators: white- and blue-collar salaries, pension insurance, and working hours. In drawing upon neo-institutional and organizational imprinting theories and applying these to the Chinese context, the study addresses competing arguments regarding the expected effects of ownership type on these indicators. We employ seemingly unrelated regressions (SURs) to empirically examine a novel national survey of 1,268 firms in 12 Chinese cities. The regression results show that foreign MNCs do not provide uniquely beneficial labor practice packages to workers when compared with various indigenous firm types, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs), affiliate businesses of Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, and domestic private enterprises (DPEs). Specifically, although MNCs provide relatively higher wage rates, they underperform relative to SOEs concerning social insurance. However, DPEs consistently underperform relative to MNCs across most indicators. The mixture of the results contributes important nuances to the application of neo-institutional and organizational imprinting theories to the Chinese context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]