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The purpose of this paper is to provide a human resource management perspective of the workforce adjustment strategies implemented at workplaces in Britain in response to the Great Recession.

The analysis uses an ordered probit and a series of binomial probits to examine a micro data set from the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study.

Not all workplaces were affected equally by the recession. Not all workplaces chose to implement workforce adjustment strategies consequential of the recession, although the probability of a workplace taking no action decreased the greater the adverse effect of the recession on the workplace. Most workplaces used a combination of workforce adjustment strategies. Workplaces implemented strategies more compatible with labour hoarding than labour shedding, i.e., cutting/freezing wages and halting recruitment to fill vacant posts rather than making employees redundant.

What was examined was the incidence of the workforce adjustment strategies, not the number of employees affected by the implementation of a strategy. Further, what was examined were outcomes. What is not known are the processes by which these outcomes were arrived at.

This paper concurs with the findings of previous economic studies that workplaces hoarded labour, cut hours and lowered pay. In so doing, however, it provides a more detailed and more informed human resource management perspective of these adjustment strategies.

The first wave of interest in appraisal interviewing took place in the late 60's and 70's. That particular wave culminated in such classic studies and texts as Anstey et al 1976, Randell et al 1974, and many others. After something of a lull in interest there now appears once again to be a revival in staff training for appraisal. The reasons behind this re‐emergence of interest must of course lie in our current experience of de‐industrialisation, labour‐shedding and rationalisation. Today's Training Manager, either starting a company appraisal scheme afresh or intending to rekindle interest in an existing one, will quickly find that attitudes towards appraisal interviewing have changed. They differ drastically from those of five or ten years ago. Gone is the naive faith in appraisals as a panacea to cure all ills; gone is the immediate seduction of a behaviourally‐based performance objectives approach; tarnished is the shibboleth of better two‐way communication. Nowadays, by and large, the unspoken feeling so often is one of suspicion: rating systems are viewed as distasteful; public recording of performance is seen as potentially threatening, and all documentation related to appraisal systems is scrutinized and criticised by all and sundry within organisations. Yet schemes have to be implemented afresh, personnel have to be convinced of the usefulness of schemes and the Training Manager must ensure that all his staff know the mechanics of his company scheme.

Training Officers, Personnel Officers, Welfare Officers, Instructors and line managers find that much of their time is being taken up with activities related to destocking and labour shedding. But as well as this they also find that their everyday activities and roles are changing too. Increasingly they find themselves taking a caring role with staff; assisting whenever possible with their health, general welfare and mental well‐being. They find themselves talking with staff about general problems of living in today's changing world; about avoiding illness; ways of coping with social and personal disruption in their lives; about maintenance of sound health — even about avoiding health‐denying habits. At first sight all this seems due to the increased general population awareness of health and well‐being — the impact of Health Education Council public campaigns for instance. But is it? Is this the only reason?

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of changes in the relative composition and in the segmentation between formal and informal labour on earnings differentials among women over the last decade in Brazil.

The authors follow Machado and Mata’s method to decompose the changes along the earnings distribution, with correction for sample selection and using microdata from the Demographic Census of 2000 and 2010. Informal labour was divided into informal salaried labour and self-employment, and both groups were compared with the formal labour separately.

The results indicate that, in both cases, an increase in earnings differentials in the bottom of the earnings distribution due to segmentation, suggesting that the returns to formal labour have grown relatively to informal labour during the period. On the other hand, earnings differentials decrease as one moves up the earnings distribution due to the composition effect, which is stronger on the top of the distribution relatively to the bottom. Furthermore, there are compensating differentials for self-employed women above the 30th quantile, which contributed to reduce the inequality between this group and formal workers.

The paper contributes to a better understanding of the changes taking place in female labour, shedding some light on how they affect different points along the earnings distribution. Furthermore, the adopted approach proposes a new application for the correction of sample bias in the context of quantile regression by employing a logit multinomial, and using the Demographic Census data.

Two factors explain why the Serbian privatization experience deserves close attention from outside world. First, Serbia's starting conditions for privatization, with a historical tradition of workers’ management, strong trade unions, and an ambivalent initial attitude toward privatization, have as much in common with circumstances surrounding privatization in the developing countries as with those in the so-called economies in transition. Second, Serbia embarked on a resolute privatization path only in 2001, following more than 10 years of diverse privatization efforts in other post-socialist economies of the region. This makes Serbia a perfect case study of how a country can learn from the experience (both positive and negative) of other reformers.

This paper presents a general survey of the Swiss economy. It emphasises the various factors that have been put forward to explain the very low unemployment rate recorded in Switzerland up to the beginning of the 1990s. It also analyses the factors which may be held responsible for the dramatic reversal of the Swiss labour market situation, by considering the modification in the employers’ and workers’ behaviour in Switzerland as well as the changes observed in the structure of the foreign labour force. It comes to the conclusion that the unemployment observed since 1991 is not simply a consequence of a deterioration in the functioning of the Swiss labour market compared with earlier periods, but rather a result of changes in immigration policies and also the reflection in the statistics of a truer picture of the labour market imbalance created by the restructuring of the economy.

This paper aims to provide a brief overview of the global financial crisis (GFC), highlighting its most frightening dimensions, the policy responses and issues around the management of labour during and post‐GFC. Further, this paper introduces the five research papers that encompass this special issue.

The papers presented here are early contributions on how the GFC has impacted the management of people. The key areas focused upon include the human resource management responses of multinational enterprises, the response of trade unions, the roles of employee representative bodies and the rationalisation of post‐crisis managerial strategies.

The major conclusions of this special issue are that the impact of the GFC was variable across countries and sectors in addition to the process of decision making, the types of decisions made, and the determinants and consequences of those decisions.

The papers of the special issue provide some of the first empirical findings on how the GFC has impacted on people management, trade unions and the HR function in different contexts.

Twenty‐five years on, the Director of Research of Britain′s Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers′ Associations (1968) reviews subsequent events in pay and incomes policies, analyses their contemporary relevance, particularly over the need for an “effective incomes policy”. From the starting point of the need for stable internal pay structures, the analysis covers the “cascade effect” of uncontrolled pay drift. Felt‐fair inequities (especially at management levels) are shown as a prime cause of pay inflation and (as a consequence) of high unemployment. Concludes with a four‐point agenda for change which tackles and differentiates the private and public sectors, and concludes with an indictment of performance‐related pay.

This chapter analyses the recovery of the Danish economy from the crisis of the 1980s, its elevation to a bit of an ‘economic miracle’ or at least an ‘employment miracle’ from 1995 to 2005 and its subsequent decline during the financial crisis, which revealed more long-standing problems that precluded a quick recovery. The solution of Denmark's structural balance of payment problems in the early 1990s paved the way for long-term prosperity, and Denmark managed the challenges of globalisation and deindustrialisation almost without social costs. However, an accumulation of short-term policy failures and credit liberalisation facilitated a credit and housing bubble, a consumption-driven boom and declining competitiveness. In broad terms, the explanation is political; this includes not only vote- and office-seeking strategies of the incumbent government but also ideational factors such as agenda setting of economic policy. Somewhat unnoticed – partly because of preoccupation with long-term challenges of ageing and shortage of labour – productivity and economic growth rates had slowed down over several years. The Danish decline in GDP 2008–2009 was larger than in the 1930s, and after the bubble burst, there were few drivers of economic growth. Households consolidated and were reluctant to consume; public consumption had to be cut as well; exports increased rather slowly; and in this climate, there was little room for private investments. Financially, the Danish economy remained healthy, though. Current accounts revealed record-high surpluses after the financial crisis; state debt remained moderate, and if one were to include the enormous retained taxes in private pension funds, net state debt would de facto be positive. Still, around 2010–2011 there were few short-term drivers of economic growth, and rather unexpectedly, it turned out that unemployment problems were likely to prevail for several years.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the restructuring approach followed by the highly profitable Telefónica in its 2011 redundancy plan, and explores unions’ response to management strategy.

The research follows a case study approach constructing a dataset with information from company reports, committee records, union documents, press releases, and other available sources such as specialized journals and newspapers.

Specifically this case study tries to show how massive job cuts have been implemented through a labour-mediated downsizing strategy that mitigates contestation and industrial conflict.

The paper tackles the relevant question of how unions respond to corporate restructuring (involving downsizing) in countries where industrial relations institutions remain relatively strongly embedded and proactive.