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Collective employer representation in the UK has changed in fundamental ways in recent decades. Collective bargaining has declined and instead, the authors have seen the emergence of a significant new form of collective organisation, the employer forum (EF), which promotes good corporate behaviour and typically focusses on issues of equality and diversity, social policy and community engagement. The purpose of this paper is to examine this new form of collective action through a case study on Business in the Community (BITC) Wales. It also compares this EF with traditional employers’ associations (EAs) in order to establish what is significant and distinctive about EFs.

BITC Wales is a “typical case” (Patton, 2014; Seawright and Gerring, 2008) that shares key characteristics and functions with other EFs across key analytical dimensions, and therefore provides insights into the wider population of EFs in the UK. In addition, the paper compares EFs, examined through a qualitative case study of BITC Wales, and traditional EAs, introduced and discussed in the literature review, along the same analytical dimensions. The aim of contrasting EAs with the case study on BITC Wales is to establish what is distinctive and significant about EFs and to consider the implications for employment relations in the UK.

The paper argues that EFs and EAs support employers in dealing with the challenges of managing the employment relationship and threats to profitability in different political contexts. The organisation of employers in EAs was a response to increasing trade union power and labour costs. EFs are helping employers to deal with a different set of challenges, including declining social cohesion in communities in which employers operate, reputational and legal risks posed by new equality and diversity legislation and expectations of good corporate citizenship by consumers and their own employees. EFs address these challenges by engaging in social projects in local communities, by promoting good corporate behaviour through benchmarking and codes of conduct, and by boosting the reputation of employers through award schemes and promotion of corporate social responsibility activities of member companies.

Previous literature has not examined EFs and their role in employment relations. This paper considers EFs as a new actor in employment relations.

This paper develops and tests a new integrative theoretical framework for the study of workplace conflict that links the literatures of such disciplines as organization behavior, industrial relations, management, psychology, sociology, and social movement. It provides testable hypotheses where conflict is structurally blocked by laws, organizational rules, or social norms. It is hypothesized that a blockage of one expression will cause conflict to take on more covert forms of that same expression and to shift to other permitted forms.

In a test of the theory in municipal collective bargaining, the paper found that conflict that was structurally blocked in the form of strikes was redirected to both covert collective actions (sick-outs, slowdowns, etc.), other permitted collective actions (e.g., unfair labor practices) and such individual expressions as grievances.

There would appear to be a promising agenda for future research into the other cases described in the framework. For example, from the nonunion employer where collective actions are prohibited but individual grievances allowed it is hypothesized that such covert conflict as absenteeism, theft, or sabotage will be reduced. On the other hand, these same nonunion firms are predicted to have higher levels of individual conflict than unionized firms where both strikes and grievances are permitted.

Future research that evaluates workplace conflict resolution ought to take into account the complex relationships between conflict expressions suggested in the new framework. The temptation of researchers to study one expression at a time should be resisted.

The growth of organized labor during the latter part of the nineteenth century triggered an organizational impulse on the part of employers across the country. Although some employers’ associations began as “negotiatory” bodies engaged in collective bargaining, the vast majority of them shifted toward a more “belligerent” approach. Academic scholarship has generally focused on the belligerents at the national level. Recently, some scholars have begun to study organized employers at the community level, but they continue to feature the more typical staunchly anti-union associations. This study of Columbus, Ohio's master printers’ association reveals a different pattern of local labor relations during the years between 1887 and 1960 – an association that had generally smooth bargaining relationships with craft unions. Columbus’ conservative and sheltered economy enabled the longstanding cooperative shared printing craft culture to thrive. But changes in Columbus’ economy, shifts in larger patterns of industrial relations, the hard-line influence of the national employers’ association, and technological changes altered the context of local labor relations. The result was that, by 1960, the Columbus association sought the upper hand in labor relations by becoming a more traditional and belligerent employers’ association. This story of “latecomers” adds to our understanding of organized employer behavior under different historical periods and circumstances.

This paper proposes a new theoretical framework to explain enterprise unionism and conducts the first systematic comparative study of union structure in nine Asian countries. Our framework emphasizes political dynamics and the role of the state in labor relations and argues that the initial period of the collective bargaining era constituted a critical juncture (state labor policy) that occurred in distinctive ways in different countries and that these differences played a central role in shaping the different union structures in the following decades. The nine countries are mainly divided into three groups, depending on the type of state labor policy: enforcement of enterprise unionism; centralization/laissez-faire (non-enterprise unionism); and dual unionism/gradual transition (middle-ground). Governmental data were used for the study. A clear correspondence between state labor policy and union structure in each of these groups was found. We believe that our framework significantly enhances our understanding of the Asian cases. Future research should explore the validity of the proposed framework through comparative studies of Latin American cases where enterprise unions have also been observed.

Ageing demographics are impacting employers around the world and, for many organisations, there are strong business reasons to develop strategies for managing the age profiles of their workplaces. Societal ageing is not necessarily bad news for business: older workers can be a valuable resource for employers in terms of skills, in-house knowledge and flexibility. Further, as populations age, businesses are delivering goods and services to an ageing market, and older workers can be a valuable resource. While ageing demographics can provide opportunities for the business community, there are significant challenges facing employers. For example, balancing the career interests and expectations of older and younger workers will necessitate new approaches to workforce planning, performance management and team building. As skilled workers become more scarce, employers need to also find ways to make better use of the talents and capabilities of older unemployed people. This chapter is written by representatives of employer networks in Europe and Asia. We discuss innovative approaches to age diversity of organisations on both continents. These include approaches to phased retirement, lifelong learning, flexible retirement and mentoring. In the final section, we suggest a research agenda which will generate practical knowledge for businesses which want to better manage workplace ageing. A business-focused research agenda includes improving the understanding of generations in the East and West, the intersection of age and other forms of diversity, lifelong learning, joblessness and providing the business case for businesses of different forms.

This study was undertaken by William Keyser and Tim Sharpe of Metra Oxford Consulting Limited with the Oxford Centre for Management Studies, supported by the Midland Bank Limited and the Gatsby Charitable Foundation. The report is intended as a contribution to the national debate on manpower policy. It focusses on the way policies are administered and the degree to which they have the effects intended. It compares the way manpower policy is administered in Britain, West Germany and Sweden and suggests ways in which the effectiveness of the system could be increased. There is much in this report that is of interest, but we have selected chapter 2, Conclusions, to reproduce here. This gives a good summing up of the authors' recommendations and should encourage those interested in this field to study the report in full. Also of interest is what the report has to say about the role of the Manpower Services Commission—a topic on which there has been remarkably little comment in Britain. The conclusions below are derived by the authors from points argued in the chapters which follow, but are not a complete list of all that might be drawn. They are based on the notion that while Britain has many of the necessary components of successful manpower policies, their orientation is lacking in two respects: one is a set of declared national goals and the other is an operational system set up with the objective of meeting the needs of individuals.

This study aims to develop a proprietary indicator to measure the digital presence of the institutions: the digital presence index.

This research delves into how nonprofit institutions, specifically business interest associations (BIAs), have developed their internet presence by applying essential digital marketing techniques. To this end, and using big data mining tools, this study analyzes the tracking by internet users of 102 BIAs, with their respective websites in 36 countries in Europe and the USA. In addition, the presence and activity of the institutions included in this study on social networks are considered.

This research serves as a basis for discussing the current gap between social reality and the digitalization of institutions. In this sense, conclusions are drawn on the importance of managerial profiles in decision-making on digitization and the necessary knowledge that, together with Web and social network managers, they must have to articulate the means and techniques that promote the internet presence of the organizations they manage.

Conclusions are drawn according to the geographical scope of the BIAs, and an argument is made about the difficulties of connection and loss of prominence of this type of institutions among their different target audiences, especially among the youngest and most digitized.

We study the potential effects of pension underfunding on corporate investment, financial constraints and improved employee bonding using 10 Pacific-Basin countries (including the United States, Australia, and eight Asian countries) at heterogeneous economic development stages and different regulatory environments. We document that corporate pensions are significantly underfunded in most countries of our sample in the period of 2001–2017, when interest rates were ultralow in most countries. In addition, firms from countries with stronger employee protection and more generous retirement benefits tend to show higher levels of underfunding in their defined benefit (DB) pension plans. To the extent of pension underfunding imposing constraints on corporate investment, we find that firms in these countries can face more constraints on investment when their pension is underfunded.

Human capital theory hypothesizes that no firm rationally invests in general job skills training because its competitors might hire the trained employees away before the firm could recoup its costs through higher worker productivity. Drawing from four explanatory perspectives, we developed several research hypotheses about the organizational and environmental sources of variation in company-provided job skills training for core employees, which we tested with a national sample of U.S. work establishments. Contrary to human capital theory expectations, the large majority of employers with core training programs reported providing skills that were either “to a great deal” or “to some extent” useful to other employers. Our general skills training analysis supported only one hypothesis, suggesting the inadequacy of human capital theory for explaining company training investments. We found evidence that the substantive contents of company job skills training programs differentiated into technical skills and social skills dimensions. Multivariate equations supported several hypothesized effects of organizational and environmental factors on the social and technical skills contents of company core training investments. We conclude with a reassessment of the classic general-specific job skills hypothesis and speculate about future directions for job skills training theory and research.

The Equal Pay Act 1970 (which came into operation on 29 December 1975) provides for an “equality clause” to be written into all contracts of employment. S.1(2) (a) of the 1970 Act (which has been amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975) provides: