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After 20 years of social partnership in Ireland the purpose of this paper is to use a national survey of firms and employees to examine the extent of the wage gap between union and non-union workers in the private sector and compare the degree of wage inequality in union and non-union firms and among union and non-union employees.

The analysis in the paper is based on the National Employment Survey carried out by the Central Statistics Office in October 2008. Approximately 9,000 enterprises were sampled and almost 5,000 enterprises responded – a response rate of over 50 per cent while almost 100,000 employees were sampled and 65,535 completed the questionnaire – a response rate of over 60 per cent. In total 22 per cent (14,619) of respondents worked in the public sector and 78 per cent (50,916) in the private sector.

It appears that over time the earnings premium enjoyed by unionised workers has declined. This may reflect a long term decline in union bargaining power in the private sector as union density levels have declined. Even so unionised employees enjoy a wage premium over non-union employees and collective coverage appears to reduce levels of income inequality. However, the overall union wage gap is relatively modest – being generally below 10 per cent possibly due to the harmonising effects associated with the period of social partnership supported by government trade unions and employers.

The cross-sectional nature of the data means that the factors associated with variations in employee earnings over time cannot be identified.

There is substantial evidence of a considerable spill-over effect as nationally agreed rates of pay percolated from the union to the non-union sector. It may also be the case that social partnership has acted to reduce wage inequality in non-union as well as union establishments. It appears that partnership type arrangements have the capacity to deliver for all workers in the private sector.

A unique aspect of the national survey data used here is the availability of employer/employee matched data from a robust national level survey with measures of union membership, earnings, individual and employment characteristics.

The undervaluing of care work, whether conducted informally or formally, has long been subject to debate. While much discussion, and indeed reform has centred on childcare, there is a growing need, particularly in countries with ageing populations, to examine how long-term care (LTC) work is valued. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the way in which employment policies (female labour market participation, retirement age, and precarious work) and social policies (care entitlements and benefits/leave for carers) affect both informal carers and formal care workers in a liberal welfare state with a rapidly ageing population.

Drawing the adult worker model the authors use the existing literature on ageing care and employment to examine the approach of a liberal welfare state to care work focusing on both supports for informal carers and job quality in the formal care sector.

The research suggests that employment policies advocating increased labour participation, delaying retirement and treating informal care as a form of welfare are at odds with LTC strategies which encourage informal care. Furthermore, the latter policy acts to devalue formal care roles in an economic sense and potentially discourages workers from entering the formal care sector.

To date research investigating the interplay between employment and LTC policies has focused on either informal or formal care workers. In combining both aspects, we view informal and formal care workers as complementary, interdependent agents in the care process. This underlines the need to develop social policy regarding care and employment which encompasses the needs of each group concurrently.

Many familiar global corporations have well-developed corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies that enunciate socially caring values that include the dignity and well-being of their employees. Yet opposition to independent employee voice from companies with trumpeted CSR credentials indicates an uncomfortable contradiction between rhetoric and reality in the treatment of employees as valued stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to explore these contradictions using the lens of a libertarian tradition.

The CSR statements of three companies are examined to provide the context for their espoused values towards employees. Media, trade union and academic publications on each of the companies are then considered to identify systematic evidence of anti-union practices.

The paper illustrates the paradox of companies with espoused CSR policies advocating the dignity and well-being of their employees with often explicit coercive anti-union practices. These practices are a constraint on the negative freedom/liberty of employees in the libertarian tradition and amount to unethical behaviour on the part of the firm.

The paper offers important insights into the disconnection common in many firms between normative ethical claims in CSR statements to treat employees as valued legitimate stakeholders and the reality in the workplace.

The link between human resource practices and earnings for workers is a notable research lacuna and the purpose of this paper is to address this relationship using a matched data set covering all employees and employers in the Irish private sector.

The analysis is based on the National Employment Survey (NES) (2008). The survey provides measures of individual characteristics such as union membership, collective bargaining coverage, sector, occupation, age, sex and educational attainment. It also provides data on individual employee earnings including overtime and shift allowances, together with weekly hours worked. The particular benefit of the NES is that it is a large-scale matched employer-employee survey.

The results indicate that extensive use of high-involvement practices measured in this study is positively associated with higher earnings for both lower and higher earning employees. The authors also find that for employees covered by a collective agreement, the positive effects of high-involvement work practices are complementary with a union earnings premium.

Some caution is required in the interpretation of the results given the cross-sectional nature of the data. With cross-sectional data it is difficult to establish definitive causal and directional linkages between high-involvement measures and levels of earnings and earnings inequality.

For trade unions and their members, the results imply that the involvement practices as measured in this study are unlikely to substitute for the earnings premium associated with collective bargaining coverage. For human resource, increasing the earnings of low-paid employees may carry relatively marginal costs but the benefits maybe considerable in the form of employee engagement, increased effort levels and productivity gains.

This study extends the literature on the outcomes of high-involvement practices for employees and firms by addressing their association with employee earnings particularly at the lower end of the wage hierarchy.

Following Marx and Engels' identification of the “essential condition of capital”, the purpose of this paper is to begin an initial critical exploration of the essential condition of intellectual capital, particularly the ownership rights of labour.

Adopting a critically modernist stance on unitarist HR and OB discourse, and contextualised within a background on the stock option phenomenon and recent accounting regulation, the paper argues that the fundamental nature of the capital‐labour relation continues resiliently into the IC labour (intellectual capital‐labour) relation.

There is strong evidence that broad‐based employee stock options (ESOPs) have become institutionalised in certain firms and sectors – but the future of such schemes is very uncertain (post 2005 accounting regulation). Overly unitarist HR/OB arguments are challenged here with empirical evidence on capital's more latently strategic purposes such as conserving cash, reducing reported accounting expense in order to boost reported earnings, deferring taxes, and attracting, retaining and exploiting key elements of labour.

Research supports the positive benefits of broad‐based employee stock ownership schemes. Further research on the benefits of such schemes and the reasons why they are or are not implemented is now required.

From the perspective of labour, nothing appears to have really changed (yet) in terms of the essential condition of intellectual capital.

This paper explicitly raises the issue of the ownership rights of labour to intellectual capital.

The purpose of this article is to examine the outcomes of a substantial broad‐based employee share‐ownership scheme for employee attitudes and behaviour in a privatised firm.

Results are based on a survey of 711 employees in Eircom, an Irish telecommunications firm, which is 35 percent employee‐owned.

The ESOP has created sizable financial returns and has had extensive influence in firm governance at the strategic level. However, findings show only a limited impact on employee attitudes and behaviour. This is attributed to a failure in creating a sense of employee participation and line of sight between employee performance and reward.

The aim of employee share‐ownership often includes aligning employee objectives with those of other shareholders, and thus improving labour performance. The findings in this study highlight a need to provide employees with a sense of ownership and control. Findings also question the assumption that where employees have a substantial shareholding, they will focus on securing the long‐term prospects of the firm.

Little research has examined the impact of a large employee shareholding on attitudes and behaviour within a public‐quoted firm. The substantial and unparalleled size of the Eircom ESOP presented a unique opportunity to conduct such a study.

In many cases, immigrants work in jobs that are incommensurate with their qualifications and work experience. The aim of this study is to examine the experience of this “talent waste” in Polish immigrants working in the Irish labour market.

The study used a mixed method approach. First, 309 Polish immigrants were surveyed about their employment experiences since moving to Ireland. Second, 12 skilled Polish immigrants – those with third level qualifications – were interviewed. Interviews were semi‐structured and focused on the factors leading to their underemployment and how they responded to it psychologically.

The interviews revealed that immigrants to Ireland reported fewer barriers to skilled employment than immigrants in other research. Also, most had not sought employment that would utilise their qualifications when they first moved to Ireland. A typology of four psychological responses to employment status was put forth based on immigrant sense of professional identity and experience of dissonance.

The results of the study have important implications for employers, academic institutions, government representatives and skilled immigrants themselves.

Unlike other studies in this area, this study provides rich description and unique insight into the experiences of skilled Polish immigrants to Ireland over a number of years, as well as large‐scale survey evidence of this group of migrant workers.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

The connectivity between society, global events, current philosophy and trends.

How each period is characterised by available technology, knowledge and globalisation relevant to the time?

How culture is shaped by societal philosophies?

Emerging characteristics that capture the ‘zeitgeist’.

A feature of the industrial landscape in the 1990s is the emergence of a growing number of non‐union companies. Numerous factors have been suggested to explain this increase such as an increasingly competitive product market; fear of unemployment; a shift in managerial attitudes towards trade unions and the use of human resource management policies which are inimical to unionism. However, the most comprehensive attempt to establish the factors which increase the probability of union avoidance among companies is to be found in the industrial relations literature in the USA. Based on a survey of Irish manufacturing companies, evaluates the explanatory framework which has emerged from this literature and concludes that its validity is questionable in an Irish context.

This paper provides an introduction to three key concepts derived from chaos theory, with practical examples of each, which the authors believe can offer marketers an enriched understanding of the process by which they set out to construct an alternative future. A central tenet of chaos theory is that the future is inherently unpredictable in detail, but can be predicted in broad terms: what appears to be random (e.g. the unexpected results of a new marketing strategy) may turn out to be determined by a phenomenon known as an attractor. Marketing managers are setting out to “construct a future”. The broad outcomes of their actions may be predictable in general terms, but the path by which their organisations reach those outcomes, and the detailed stages through which they pass, are not – however sound their conventional marketing planning may be. Practising marketing managers may understandably have reservations about transferring concepts which have not yet been fully tested in the natural sciences, where they have their origin, into marketing planning. Nevertheless, many are not in fact unique to chaos theory. Therefore, they are used here as a metaphor, to encourage managers to take a different view of the strategic issues facing their organisations, and to question the conventional wisdom that executive action can be taken on the basis of extensive rational analysis, in the expectation that it will achieve predetermined objectives. This paper thereby offers novel insights into the process of redefining markets and the opportunities that they provide. The attractor metaphor holds out a number of challenges for innovative marketers, as well as some cautionary lessons.