This paper investigates trends in collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany from 2000 to 2008. It seeks to update and widen earlier analyses pointing to a decline in collective bargaining, while providing more information on the dual system as a whole. Using data from the IAB Employment Panel and the German Employment Register, we report evidence of a systematic and continuing erosion of the dual system. Not unnaturally the decline is led by developments in western Germany. Arguably, the path of erosion will continue until rough and ready convergence is reached with eastern Germany. Expressed differently, if the process of decentralization underpinning these developments once was 'regulated' it no longer appears to be so.
Industrial relations are in flux in many nations, perhaps most notably in Germany and the Britain. That said, comparatively little is known in any detail of the changing pattern of the institutions of collective bargaining and worker representation in Germany and still less in both countries about firm transitions between these institutions over time. The present paper maps changes in the importance of the key institutions, 1998-2004, and explores the correlates of two-way transitions, using successive waves of the German IAB Establishment Panel and both cross-sectional and panel components of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey. We identify the workplace correlates of the demise of collective bargaining in Britain and the erosion of sectoral bargaining in Germany, and identify the respective roles of behavioral and compositional change.
ObjectivesThe Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) is the main source of public statistics on low pay in Britain. As part of the ADR-funded Wage and Employment Dynamics Project, we identify and adjust for non-response biases in ASHE and generate new estimates of the incidence of low pay.
MethodsWe linked the ASHE data to the Business Structure Database – a research-ready version of the UK's official register of businesses. This linked dataset enabled us to identify which types of employers were more or less likely to respond to ASHE in a given year, and to generate non-response adjustments to the existing ASHE weights.
We then used the unique personal identifier on ASHE to link observations across years. We compared rates and correlates of longitudinal attrition in ASHE with rates and correlates of employment exit observed in the ONS Annual Population Survey, generating longitudinal weights to account for non-random attrition.
ResultsWe find that jobs in smaller organisations, younger organisations and those in the private sector are under-represented in the annual achieved samples from ASHE, relative to their prevalence in the wider economy. The percentage of jobs paid at or below the National Minimum Wage is under-estimated by around one fifth if one does not take account of these cross-sectional response biases.
We find that longitudinal attrition is more likely to affect younger employees and those with low job tenure. However, we do not find that estimates of the rate at which employees move off the National Minimum Wage to higher rates of pay are biased by non-random patterns of longitudinal attrition.
ConclusionData linking enables us to identify observable response biases in the UK's official source of earnings statistics (ASHE). These biases affect our view of the bottom of the wage distribution, and have the potential to affect decisions around a key area of government labour market policy.
ObjectivesGovernments acquire extensive data holdings and face increasing pressure to make these available as record-level microdata for research. However, turning data into research-ready data (RRD) is not a straightforward exercise. We demonstrate how even in simple cases researcher involvement can bring substantial rewards for effective RRD development.
MethodsThis paper reports on an ADRUK-funded project to take a dataset originally collected by the Office for National Statistics for official statistics (the UK Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, ASHE), formally review its microanalytical characteristics, link it to Census 2011 data, and prepare a new 'research ready dataset' with appropriate documentation and coding. This should have been straightforward as the datasets had already been widely used as research microdata. However, the involvement of academic researchers in the production of research-ready data led to many important new insights.
ResultsThe research programme had 3 aims: testing assumptions about the data; reviewing data quality; and adding value.
Because of its sampling model, ASHE is assumed to have random non-response both longitudinally and in cross section. The research team showed that was untrue: there was higher attrition than expected, and both longitudinal and cross-sectional non-response appeared non-random..
The data quality review showed further concerns about the accuracy of some geographical indicators, and some variables of opaque provenance; in contrast, we confirmed the accuracy of administrative variables created by ONS.
As well as being important for researchers, these findings have the potential for significant effects on official statistics produced from the source data, enhancing the value of the source data.
Finally, value was added from new variables which reflected the team's wide research interests
ConclusionOften in government the assumption is that creating RRDs is a matter of creatign files and giving access to the researchers. Insights from our work show that the deep involvement of the research community can bring rewards for both data holders and researchers. For RRDs, researcher-led construction is vital.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused unexpected disruptions to Western countries which affected women more adversely than men. Previous studies suggest that gender differences are attributable to: women being over-represented in the most affected sectors of the economy, women's labour market disadvantage as compared to their partners, and mothers taking a bigger share childcare responsibilities following school closures. Using the data from four British nationally representative cohort studies, we test these propositions. Our findings confirm that the adverse labour market effects were still experienced by women a year into the COVID-19 pandemic and that these effects were the most severe for women who lived with a partner and children, even if they worked in critical occupations. We show that adjusting for pre-pandemic job characteristics attenuates the gaps, suggesting that women were over-represented in jobs disproportionately affected by COVID-19 pandemic. However, the remaining gaps are not further attenuated by adjusting for the partner's job and children characteristics, suggesting that the adversities experienced by women were not driven by their relative labour market position, as compared to their partners or childcare responsibilities. The residual gender differences observed in the rates of active, paid work and furlough for those who live with partner and children point to the importance of unobserved factors such as social norms, preferences, or discrimination. These effects may be long-lasting and jeopardise women's longer-term position through the loss of experience, leading to reinforcement of gender inequalities or even reversal of the progress towards gender equality.
The historical relationship between capital and labor has evolved in the past few decades. One particularly noteworthy development is the rise of shared capitalism, a system in which workers have become partial owners of their firms and thus, in effect, both employees and stockholders. Profit sharing arrangements and gain-sharing bonuses, which tie compensation directly to a firm's performance, also reflect this new attitude toward labor. Shared Capitalism at Work analyzes the effects of this trend on workers and firms. The contributors focus on four main areas: the fraction of firms that participate in shared capitalism programs in the United States and abroad, the factors that enable these firms to overcome classic free rider and risk problems, the effect of shared capitalism on firm performance, and the impact of shared capitalism on worker well-being. This volume provides essential studies for understanding the increasingly important role of shared capitalism in the modern workplace
