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The purpose of this paper is to extend the meaning maintenance model (MMM) by elucidating the meaning employees provide to both work and family during a furlough.

The sample consisted of 180 state government employees, who completed four surveys, starting at a time before a furlough was initiated through returning to work following a furlough. The authors used random coefficient modeling of a mixed-effects model for discontinuous change.

Findings suggest that a furlough is associated with increases in perceived psychological contract breach, an indication that the meaning of work is being threatened. Following the furlough, employees’ family identity salience significantly increased. Further, rumination about the furlough increased the shift in family identity salience.

This research tests the MMM in the context of furloughs and work-family implications. The results suggest that employees experience fluid compensation, a key facet of the MMM, during a furlough. Further, rumination of the experienced furlough can strengthen the fluid compensation process.

The implications for organizations implementing furloughs and various methods for implementing furloughs are discussed.

This research extends the MMM by empirically examining it in the context of furloughs and work-family implications. Further, it extends the MMM by examining the impact of rumination on the fluid compensation process.

In the present chapter, we explore how employee well-being changes over time, both linear and psychological during periods of economic instability. Moreover, we examine how employee job embeddedness (JE) buffers the effects of economic shocks on employee well-being, and how these buffering effects change employee perceptions of time. We theorize that employees with higher levels of JE psychologically experience economic shocks as occurring infrequently with the economically unstable period feeling quick, but employees with lower levels of JE psychologically experience economic shocks as occurring frequently with the economically unstable period feeling slow. Finally, we extend these relationships to account for the spread of employee well-being through social connections, both inside and outside of the work context. Because JE requires strong social connections, we theorize that the links component of embeddedness is responsible for economic shocks and employee well-being crossing over the work/nonwork boundary. We discuss the implications for our theoretical model.

In a recent review of the history of women in unions, the author suggested that downturns in the economy have had a more significant effect on women than men in unions, leading to significant declines in the membership of women in unions. The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between economic cycles and women's membership in unions.

The paper investigates that relationship using both quantitative and historical methods and generate evidence for the proposal.

Based on the historical and quantitative analysis, it is concluded that a more accurate way to depict the situation is to say that economic conditions influence union membership through a number of important intervening variables and, furthermore, that changes in those intervening variables over the past 40 years have substantially influenced the relationship between economics and union membership.

This paper is unique in its combination of historical and empirical approaches to addressing questions of a historical nature. The paper addresses an interesting proposal regarding relationships between economics and gender in union membership

In our 10th volume of Research in Occupational Stress and Well Being, we offer eight chapters that examine the role of the economic crisis in occupational stress and well being research. The first three chapters are considered more general overviews, and each examines a different aspect of economic stress and well being. Our lead chapter, by Songqi Liu and Mo Wang, provides an in-depth review of perceived overqualification. They develop and present a multilevel model of perceived overqualification that explicitly addresses antecedents, consequences, as well as the intermediating linkages within the relationships. The second chapter by Mindy K. Shoss and Tahira M. Probst also takes a multilevel approach by examining outcomes of economic stress. Specifically, they discuss how employee experiences with economic stress give impetus to emergent outcomes and employee well being. In our third overview chapter, Aimee E. A. King and Paul E. Levy develop a theoretical framework for organizational politics in an economic downturn. Specifically, they propose an integrative model that examines the role of the economic downturn, politics, and well being.