ABSTRACT This article provides a comprehensive review of existing research and develops an agenda for analyzing legitimacy in employment relations. It argues that legitimacy should be understood as a dynamic and contested process through which actors, institutions and policy ideas are legitimated, delegitimated and reworked. The article examines the legitimacy of employment relations ideas, the relationship between legitimacy, power and politics, the legitimacy of employment relations actors and of employment relations as a field of study. It concludes by locating the articles in this special issue within this broad agenda and draws out key insights for legitimacy research in employment relations.
ABSTRACT Trade union demands are a key input for collective bargaining negotiations (CBNs). However, there is little quantitative evidence on these demands and how they shape CBN outcomes. We digitize novel data on union demands for wages and non‐wage amenities to examine the relationship between demands and outcomes in German CBNs from 1993 to 2019. We find CBNs cover a rich set of non‐wage amenities in addition to wages. We show how these objectives are traded off against each other in the demands made by unions and in the outcomes of CBNs. We further investigate how CBNs reflect macroeconomic and labor market conditions.
ABSTRACT Employee turnover is costly, but it may also benefit performance through improving job‐worker match quality. Existing studies estimate only the net turnover‐performance relationship, ignoring benefits and biasing cost estimates. We develop a theory‐driven method that separately identifies operational costs and match‐quality benefits of turnover using commonly available workplace data. We link our structural model to the quadratic specification widely used in applied work and provide implementation code and detailed user guidance. Two applications show near‐zero net result when benefits offset costs in low‐skill, high‐churn settings, but high costs and no benefits when skilled and carefully selected workers are lost.
ABSTRACT During the 2010 crisis, the Portuguese government enacted several reforms to its prescription drug reimbursement system. As a result, value added per pharmacist in pharmacies fell by a third. We use longitudinal records from Quadros de Pessoal (QP), merged with collective bargaining data and firm financial records, to study the impacts of the reforms. We estimate that between 2009 and 2022, average wages of pharmacists fell by a third, mostly due to lower wages for new cohorts. We then consider how wages of pharmacists diverged relative to wages of other health care professionals and the decisions of college applicants to enter the profession.
This study documents the evolution of minimum wages bargained in Italian collective contracts over a 40-year period (1983-2023). Real minimum wages have grown over the last three decades, particularly among high-skilled occupations, but the 2022-2023 inflation crisis eroded this growth. Nominal minimum wage growth is strongly correlated with inflation, but not with sectoral productivity and unemployment, which is consistent with coordination across industries and real rigidity. Increasing differences between high- and low-skilled occupation minimum wages explain around one-third of the overall growth in the inequality of full-time equivalent daily wages that has occurred in Italy during the 1990s.
How does boss quality relate to the work intensity of subordinates? Bridging research on the antecedents of work intensity and the consequences of boss quality, we analyze this relationship using data from the 2015 European Working Conditions Survey and longitudinal data from the 2015/2018 American Working Conditions Survey. In cross-sectional, pooled, and panel analyses, we find robust evidence of a negative association between boss quality and employee work intensity. This association is substantially more negative in contexts in which supervisory discretion is likely to be greater-particularly in organizations that are small, in the private sector, and without employee representation.
Employee ownership (EO) is often linked to stronger worker outcomes, yet its implications for firm innovation remain contested. Using a 2010-2020 panel of publicly traded U.S. firms, we examine whether EO is associated with higher patenting and citation-weighted innovation, and whether EO strengthens the conversion of R&D investment into innovative output. Fixed-effects models, interaction tests, and event-time analyses show that EO firms exhibit higher baseline innovation and greater R&D innovation efficiency, with stronger associations when ownership-supportive work practices are present.
Truck drivers, their employers, and the public bear the costs of large truck crashes. Prior research finds that truck drivers tend to have fewer crashes when they are paid more, yet much of the U.S. industry operates with low pay and high turnover. We use carrier-level safety records and regional earnings information covering more than 40,000 carriers to show that the pay-safety relationship weakens during periods of labor market slack or heightened cost pressures. These findings suggest that upstream economic factors influence trucking safety and that recent economic regulation of trucking in other countries may inform U.S. policy.
Anxiety and depression contribute to billions of dollars of lost productivity each year. This work is the first to examine the impact of performance pay on self-reported measures of anxiety and depression in either the U.S. or Europe, using typical U.S. survey data. It finds no significant impact of performance pay overall but finds that stock options are associated with decreased rates of anxiety and depression, while bonuses are associated with increased rates of anxiety and depression. The heterogeneity indicates a need for further research into the mechanisms by which performance pay impacts mental health.
From a theoretical perspective, employees' fairness perceptions play a vital role in explaining the effect of employee representation on individual and firm-level outcomes. However, the fairness argument has not been scrutinized in empirical studies yet. Using German longitudinal linked employer-employee data, we show that particularly central collective bargaining agreements have a positive impact on employees' fairness perceptions, while firm-level agreements have a lower impact and workplace representation via works councils has an insignificant to negative impact on employees' fairness perceptions. In addition, we demonstrate that higher individual fairness perceptions resulting from central bargaining contribute to the productivity premium at the firm-level.
This paper investigates the impact of increased financial compensation during training on jobseekers' labor market outcomes. We exploit a reform implemented in France in May 2021 that raised training allowances exclusively for non-recipients of unemployment benefits. Using administrative longitudinal data, we compare the trajectories of trainees affected and unaffected by the reform. Our empirical strategy combines a synthetic triple-difference estimator with an event-study framework. We find no evidence that the reform increased employment rates within 24 months of training entry, but it did enhance job quality, improving both stability and alignment with the training field.
We study the relationship between occupational regulation and intergenerational occupational persistence. Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009-2024), we find that individuals are significantly more likely to enter a licensed occupation if a parent also worked in one, with the effect strongest in occupations where regulatory hurdles and economic rents are higher. No comparable effect is observed for certification and accreditation, and the results cannot be attributed either to the growth in licensed occupations or to increases in employment within licensed occupations. Our findings suggest that licensing can hinder intergenerational social mobility by perpetuating existing patterns of occupational inheritance.
Decarbonization heightens risks for workers, but union strategies shape how these risks are managed and whether new jobs offer quality employment. This paper compares U.S. and Canadian auto unions during the 2023 Detroit Three bargaining, focusing on strategic capacities and internal politics to explain their divergent responses to the EV transition. Both unions emphasized a just transition and secured significant gains through the negotiations. However, the UAW's militancy emerged as a compensatory mechanism for weakened capacity, while Unifor's traditional approach stemmed from organizational resilience. We argue that understanding this counter-intuitive relationship between capacity and militancy is critical to understanding cross-national differences in labor's climate strategies.
Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) for 1995-2023, we show that unionized immigrants earn 10.1 log points less than unionized natives, of which 4.8 log points are due to a lower union wage mark-up. Therefore, unionization is beneficial for immigrants but to a lesser extent than for natives in the United States. The difference in the union wage mark-up between natives and immigrants is most pronounced for males and low-skilled blue-collar workers.
This study presents a longitudinal analysis examining the process by which the Transport Workers Union (re)established its legitimacy through an integrated strategy encompassing comprehensive campaigns in road transport, aviation, and the gig economy in Australia. We reveal how unions can gain pragmatic legitimacy through power recomposition, moral legitimacy through moral framing, and cognitive legitimacy through the shaping of assumptions. We reveal the systematic transfer of proven strategies to different parts of the industry, adapting to specific conditions and audiences. Our findings provide a framework for unions to revitalize their influence within a dynamic industrial relations landscape.
We study the relationship between offshoring and labor market imperfections at the firm level in Belgium and the Netherlands. In both countries, wage-markup pricing stemming from workers' monopoly power is more prevalent than wage-markdown pricing originating from firms' monopsony power. Offshoring is associated with a higher prevalence and intensity of wage markdowns, driven by an increase in productivity that is only imperfectly passed through into an increase in wages. The lower firm-level productivity-wage pass-through in Belgium, attributed to its more centralized bargaining structure, makes wage markdowns more responsive to offshoring.
This paper draws on qualitative fieldwork on the Starbucks Workers United campaign and a comprehensive database of strike activity to better understand how workers organize strikes in the United States. By analyzing multiple types of strikes, this study challenges more conventional understandings of work stoppages as predominantly indefinite conflicts to resolve bargaining impasses. Strikes organized by workers with limited structural power resources may not always compel an immediate settlement, but union activists interpret strike effectiveness according to a range of indicators beyond whether they achieve material demands. These findings demonstrate the diverse ways that workers organize strikes and how they can leverage different power resources through industrial action.
We hypothesize that trade unions assist their members in avoiding situations of educational mismatch. We test this hypothesis using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and find that trade union membership is negatively associated with overeducation and positively associated with the likelihood of being educationally matched. These correlations are especially pronounced among core groups of members. Our findings suggest that a strong trade union presence within these groups helps avert the adverse consequences of overeducation and educational mismatch. We observe no systematic linkage between union membership and undereducation.
We test for intersectional labor market discrimination across five dimensions: gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and disability. Specifically, we test for "amplifying intersectionality"-negative interactions between the effects of marginalized identities that make wage penalties greater than additive. We make three contributions. First, we resolve contradictory findings on intersectional discrimination in existing research. Second, we analyze more dimensions than have typically been considered in past research. Third, we explore bias from selection on employment. We find little or no evidence of intersectional discrimination in wage differentials among the groups we study, and indeed, most evidence points in the opposite direction.
One of the arguments increasingly made to support large minimum wage increases is that they decrease wage or earnings gaps for minorities or women. The argument is often made with particular reference to higher tipped minimum wages for restaurant workers, because of discrimination in tipping that is immune to equal pay policy requirements. Of course, even if higher tipped minimum wages reduce hourly pay differences between groups, increases in tipped minimum wages can reduce employment or hours among restaurant workers, and these effects could differ by race and gender, so implications for hourly earnings do not necessarily extend to overall earnings. We estimate the impact of variation in tipped minimum wages-or, equivalently, tip credits-on earnings of restaurant workers (which ignores employment variation but incorporates hours variation). We find that tipped minimum wages raise hourly earnings of women, but not of Blacks or Hispanics. But tipped minimum wages generally do not raise weekly earnings for these groups (because of hours declines for women). In contrast, regular minimum wages boost hourly and weekly earnings of all three groups of restaurant workers, with the effects arising from non-tipped workers.
