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This article examines the role the Australian Trade Union Training Authority (TUTA) played in international education through the provision of trade union courses and exchanges. We consider how an investigation of trade union networks contributes to a richer understanding of international education linkages.

This paper is based on research conducted for an Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded project: Trade union training: reshaping the Australian industrial landscape (ARC LP180100500). This research involved a critical analysis of 60 semi-structured oral history interviews and textual archives, including the official records held by the National Archives of Australia and papers held by the Noel Butlin Archives, the Australian Council of Trade Unions and in private collections.

TUTA was established primarily as a national union training organisation, but from its inception, it also acted as a hub for the development of regional and international labour networks. The nature of TUTA’s work placed it at the intersection of international trade union and educational domains. Although there were some points of contact with formal international programs (e.g. Japan–Australia and Kellogg Foundations, the Colombo Plan and US Department of Labour exchanges schemes), the specific contribution of TUTA is overlooked in the educational exchange literature. The role of TUTA is revealed through institutional connections and individual experiences.

Further research is required to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of TUTA from the perspective of former participants in international TUTA course and current and former trade unionists in the Asia–Pacific.

This article builds new knowledge by examining the connections forged in the Asia–Pacific region at the intersection of trade union and educational networks, an area often overlooked in the literature on educational exchange.

Working conditions, pay rates and the rights of workers to collectively negotiate have become important points of discussions in recent years, with support for unions and union applications rising to levels long unseen in America. In many instances, though, companies have responded aggressively. This is not the first time such a dynamic has played out in American business. This study aims to take a fresh look at one of America’s most prominent historical disputes between labor and ownership – the Homestead Massacre of 1892 – to glean lessons from that conflict that remain relevant to today’s business environment.

This study adopts game theory and the principles of repeated interaction to assess how differing discount factors led to differences in time orientations between the workers and the Carnegie company. These differing time orientations affected both the strategy each side deployed in the negotiations and the payoffs received by the parties. Letters, contemporary news reports and histories of the events leading up to and immediately following the 1892 Homestead Massacre are qualitatively analyzed with a genealogical pragmatic approach.

Differences in temporal orientation between management and workers exacerbated the conflict, with the workers adopting a more cooperative stance and distal time orientation, while the Carnegie company negotiated with a proximal time orientation and played to “win” a game that, in fact, could not be fully won or lost given its infinitely repeating nature. The result was a short-term victory for the Carnegie company but with long-term negative consequences that highlight the suboptimal outcome the company achieved by playing a proximal strategy in an infinite game.

Although the incident at Homestead is a well-studied labor dispute, many of the themes that preceded the incident have resurfaced in the modern work context. This work, by adopting game theory as an analytical framework, provides new insights into management mistakes that led to the labor conflict and lessons for what present-day managers can do to avoid exacerbating labor strife.

Drawing on bargaining power and the inequality aversion perspective, this study aims to probe employees’ influence on addressing income inequality between top executives and nonexecutive employees. Meanwhile, it examines the moderating role of employee-related factors and plan attributes.

This study uses a staggered difference-in-differences design with a propensity scoring match approach and verification of the parallel trend assumption to test the hypotheses.

The results support the hypothesis that employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) significantly reduce within-firm income inequality. The negative effect is amplified by both the presence of trade unions and the unemployment rate at the regional level, as well as the duration of the lock-in period and the scale of participants within the stock ownership plan.

This study has implications for income inequality research and ESOP design and provides theoretical support for policymakers and corporate governance.

This study contributes to the literature on income inequality by examining the implementation of ESOPs from the employee perspective. Furthermore, it extends the current literature by investigating the strengthening effects of regional factors and ESOP attributes on the relationship between ESOPs and income inequality. The conclusions provide new empirical evidence to promote the effective implementation of ESOPs by combining internal and external factors.

Drawing upon a political economy approach, this article aims to analyze the transformations in the labor market within the context of contemporary capitalism, focusing on the phenomenon of financialization.

Financialization is defined as a distinct wealth pattern marked by a growing proportion of financial assets in capitalist wealth. Within financial markets, corporate performance is continuously assessed, in a process that disciplines management to achieve expected financial results, with consequences throughout corporate management.

We find that this phenomenon has implications for labor management, resulting in the intensification of labor processes and the adoption of insecure forms of employment, leading to the fractalization of work. These two mechanisms, added to the indebtedness of workers, constitute three elements for disciplining labor in contemporary capitalism.

We argue that these forms of discipline constitute a subsumption of labor to finance, resulting in an increase in labor exploitation. This formulation of the relationship between financialization and changes in the realm of labor also contributes to understanding the unrealizing potential of social free time in contemporary capitalism.

With the increasing global popularity of the gig economy encompassing freelancers, online platform workers, self-employed, on-call workers and other temporary contractual workers, this study aims to review research focusing on the gig economy to explore the nuances of working in various alternative work arrangements. We aim to enhance the understanding of existing literature and highlight underexplored areas for future research.

A systematic literature review of 258 studies based on gig economy and gig work was conducted. It follows systematic search criteria and SPAR-4-SLR protocols. The analysis uses different gig worker profiles given by Watson et al. (2021) to categorize studies, followed by thematic analysis to identify patterns in the literature.

Our analysis of studies on gig economy shows that the majority of existing literature is based on gig service providers. Within this literature subset, major areas of study are work conditions, financial conditions, emergence and role of collectives, the impact of algorithmic management and the impact of rise of the gig economy on entrepreneurship. There is little research focusing on gig goods providers, gig data providers, agency gig workers and traditional gig worker profiles. More focus is also needed on emerging markets and markets transitioning to the gig economy.

Differing from reviews that have attempted to define gig work and workers, we focus on literature on the lived experiences of gig workers. By reviewing studies on different gig worker profiles, we are able to highlight future research directions for pointed sample sets and comparative underexplored areas.

This study aims to investigate the mediating role of trust in management and the moderating role of employee-management congruence in high-performance work system (HPWS) perceptions on the relationship between HPWS and firm performance.

Survey data on HPWS practices and employee–manager perceptions from a large sample of South Korean firms were integrated with objective financial performance data. Path analysis using STATA 18.0 with robust standard errors was used to test the hypothesised moderated mediation model.

Trust in management partially mediated the relationship between HPWS and firm performance. While employee–management congruence in HPWS perceptions did not moderate the direct effect of HPWS on firm performance, it significantly moderated the indirect effect through trust in management. The positive influence of HPWS on performance via trust was stronger when employee–management congruence was high.

This study extends the social exchange perspective on the HPWS–performance relationship by incorporating trust in management as a critical mediator and employee–management congruence in HPWS perceptions as a moderator. The findings highlight the importance of fostering shared understandings of human resource practices between employees and managers to optimise the trust-building and performance-enhancing effects of HPWS.

In the fashion of Martin (2012), we develop an innovative application to a standard, well-grounded methodology to investigate resilience in two critical dimensions: recovery and resistance. Our novel approach allows us to investigate the resilience performance to the 2008 financial crisis within countries of this macro-region according to their shock isolation and absorptive capacities.

By individually estimating six open economy DSGE models within the Central Europe and Baltic macro-region, we identify the business-cycle-volatility drivers for each country. Then, we use the outcome of our six estimates to conduct a principal component analysis to determine structural common characteristics required to explain economic resilience in the CEB macro-region.

In terms of resilience, Central European economies exhibit quite similar paths in terms of recovery, meaning they have similar economic structures. By contrast, Baltic countries behave differently, being outliers in opposite extreme positions. The contrary occurs for resistance: Baltic countries share a similar ranking, whereas Central European economies exhibit substantial differences.

It is important to acknowledge that a limitation of the analysis is that we explicitly consider each country as a stand-alone open economy which are subject to stochastic disturbances. Precisely, we do not model trade or other interactions across countries within the CEB region and with the rest of the world. Consequently, spillover effects in the aftermath of the shock are not accounted for.

We estimate the relative vulnerability or sensitivity of economies within the macro-region to disturbances and disruptions (resistance) and the speed and extent of recovery from such a disruption or recession (recovery). First, we built two different kinds of measures of resilience by aggregating the estimated parameters through non-centered and centered principal component analysis. Then, we use our model to investigate the relation between financial shock and the economic resilience across the region. The approach can be applied to several case studies, parsimoniously.

Graduate students employed in graduate teaching and research assistantship positions have a unique experience of the institution because of their status as student-employees. Graduate assistants (GAs) face specific challenges around their well-being as they navigate various relationships and environments throughout their educational trajectory. The purpose of this study is to examine the specific workplace challenges GAs experience and their overall effect on GA wellbeing.

This research study examines graduate assistant responses from 12 US research universities to the Faculty Survey of student Engagement for Graduate student Instructors survey. This study’s analysis examined the open-ended responses (n = 493) at the end of the survey that asked participants for additional comments regarding their departmental and/or institutional experiences. Three waves of coding were implemented by the authors to identify common themes and areas of concern on GA working conditions.

The findings led to the creation of a concept map on GA working conditions that include three main components: contextual factors, stress and well-being and competing tensions. Within each component are subthemes related to social identity, funding, campus climate, time and priority concerns and assistantship structure and support. The map demonstrates the enmeshed connection across areas.

Findings suggest institutional investments through programming, system-level changes and interpersonal support to improve GA working conditions and their well-being.

Research on GA experiences with working conditions and well-being in a US context is limited. This study is valuable because many graduate students who occupy graduate assistantships are asking for increased pay and benefits at their institution. Graduate assistantship labor organizing is occurring alongside institutions’ focus on improving health outcomes for graduate students.

The study draws on emerging research on declining employee mental health, particularly employees with low educational attainment, in human resource management (HRM) and health and tests whether labor market institutions are empirically associated with better mental health among workers from different educational backgrounds.

This study draws on a large national sample of part- and full-time workers and models a conditional relationship between labor market institutions and employee self-rated mental health using ordinary least squares (OLS) models with fixed effects.

The findings indicate membership in a labor market institution such as a union is positively associated with improved employee mental health, but the relationship is moderated by educational attainment. Union membership is associated with better mental health among employees with low educational attainment and appears to bring these workers up to a level of mental health that is comparable to more highly educated workers, thereby reducing mental health inequality. However, union membership has no effect on the mental health of more highly educated employees.

Despite the recognition that declining worker mental health presents challenges for workers, organizations and society, systematic empirical research on institutional mechanisms that may affect mental health is limited. This study draws on data of part- and full-time workers to model the relationship with a sample large enough to specify conditional models to account for heterogeneous relationships conditional on workers' educational attainment. The findings have important implications for our understanding of employee mental health, employment relations and institutional mechanisms to help workers and improve organizational performance.

This study aimed to investigate the perception and acceptance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies among the Israeli workforce. More specifically, it examined how age, income, and education level are related to employees’ fears of being replaced by AI technologies and their willingness to adopt these technologies in their personal and professional lives.

Data were collected by surveying 502 adults from the Jewish population of Israel in February 2023 via an Internet panel. Stratified sampling was performed to ensure a representative cross-section of the population.

Contrary to the expectations from a technologically advanced society, the findings indicated varied levels of enthusiasm and apprehension. Age was found to be negatively correlated with the fear of being replaced by AI technologies and the willingness to adopt these technologies. Income was negatively correlated with the fear of being replaced by AI technologies. Education level was negatively correlated with the fear of being replaced and positively correlated with the willingness to adopt.

The findings provide valuable guidance for policymakers, educators, and business leaders in shaping AI integration strategies. They emphasize the need for targeted educational and policy initiatives to bridge the gap in AI readiness.

This study offers unique insights into the perceptions toward AI in a leading technological hub, contributing to the understanding of how advanced societies are adapting to rapid AI integration.