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The purpose of this paper is to explore the value that UK trade unions now place on the living wage.

The author is the TUC’s Pay Policy Officer and examines the issue from a practitioner’s perspective.

The living wage now has a well-established place within the hierarchy of pay demands adopted by UK trade unions. This continues a tradition of unions supporting norms and regulations as an adjunct to collective bargaining. However, support had to be achieved through a process of negotiation with the broader UK living wage campaign.

The paper concludes that there are good prospects for the living wage, and thus for the continued trade union support.

The living wage standard is seen as having a strong moral basis, which often helps to win agreement with good employers. This results in a steady stream of workers out of in-work poverty. The credit for such pay increases is often shared between employers and trade unions.

The paper is written by a practitioner with inside knowledge and experience of the entire course of the living wage campaign in the UK and how it has been adopted and integrated by trade unions.

Debates over the definition, processes and outcomes of minimum and “living” wages are heated and often politically contentious in garment-producing countries. Internationally, there have been various initiatives to promote and support the implementation of a living wage for workers in labour-intensive manufacturing, ranging from corporate-driven social responsibility and multi-stakeholder initiatives to the long-standing living wage campaign of the global unions. One prominent regional initiative is the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA). The purpose of this paper is to assess its reach and effect in Southeast Asia.

A living wage campaign is assessed with reference to Indonesia and Cambodia, two important garment manufacturing countries in Southeast Asia. The paper draws on data collected in interviews with garment manufacturers, brand representatives, trade unionists and labour NGO activists, including members of the AFWA Steering Committee in Indonesia and Cambodia, complemented by a systematic review of documents and reports produced by the AFWA.

As the paper shows, despite a series of initiatives, the Asia Floor Wage has failed to gain traction in Cambodia or Indonesia. This is so, the paper argues, because national economic, political and institutional contexts are the primary drivers of the strategies and priorities of constituent organisations, governments and industry stakeholders. In the absence of robust local and regional coalitions of trade unions, efforts towards a common and coordinated regional approach to living wages are thus unlikely to gain traction.

To a large extent, the literature on the concepts and practices associated with the living wage has focussed on developed rather than developing countries. This paper extends the literature by providing a systematic examination of a transnational wage campaign in developing Asian countries.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the impact of living wages on organisational pay systems.

The research draws on 23 semi-structured interviews with HR managers, trade union representatives, and politicians at four UK local government case study sites.

The findings suggest that living wages can have a positive impact on directly employed workers in cleaning, catering and care services, but the research also finds that the localised adoption of living wages can lead to significant wage compression, resulting in a broad band of “low skill-low wage jobs”.

The theoretical contribution is twofold. In-line with earlier research the “first-order” effects of living wages are clear: hourly wages for a large number of women in part-time roles increased sharply. However, this is only part of the story as “second-order” effects such as ripples and spill-overs are less extensive than suggested by other studies. This is due to the limited scope for trade unions to restore wage differentials through collective bargaining, the slow progress in extending the living wage to contracted staff, and parallel processes of downsizing and outsourcing.

Looks at the 2000 Employment Research Unit Annual Conference held at the University of Cardiff in Wales on 6/7 September 2000. Spotlights the 76 or so presentations within and shows that these are in many, differing, areas across management research from: retail finance; precarious jobs and decisions; methodological lessons from feminism; call centre experience and disability discrimination. These and all points east and west are covered and laid out in a simple, abstract style, including, where applicable, references, endnotes and bibliography in an easy‐to‐follow manner. Summarizes each paper and also gives conclusions where needed, in a comfortable modern format.

EU social policy is perhaps the most controversial aspect of European integration yet, despite all the political clashes on the matter, concepts like “social Europe” or “social dimension” remain ill‐defined and imprecise terms. Intends to outline and clarify in detail the debate about whether or not the European Union should have competence with regard to labour market affairs. A key message is that social policy has been controversial because it has become embroiled in the debate about the future political direction of the EU. In particular, three contrasting political models –symbiotic integration, integrative federalism and neo‐liberalism – have been put forward as organizing principles for the EU and each has a coherent view of what form social policy should take at the European level. It is the clash between these three models that has caused EU social policy to be so contestable and intractable.

In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

Robert Franklin Hoxie was of the first generation of University of Chicago economists, a figure of significance in his own time. He is often heralded as the first of the Institutional economists and the impetus behind the field of labor economics. Yet today, his contributions appear as mere footnotes in the history of economic thought, when mentioned at all, despite the fact that in his professional and popular writings he tackled some of the most pressing problems of the day. The topics upon which he focused included bimetallism, price theory, methodology, the economics profession, socialism, syndicalism, scientific management, and trade unionism, the last being the field with which he is most closely associated. His work attracted the notice of some of the most famous economists of his time, including Frank Fetter, J. Laurence Laughlin, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons. For all the promise, his suicide at the age of 48 ended what could have been a storied career. This paper is an attempt to resurrect Hoxie through a review of his life and work, placing him within the social and intellectual milieux of his time.

The subject of part‐time work is one which has become increasingly important in industrialised economies where it accounts for a substantial and growing proportion of total employment. It is estimated that in 1970, average annual hours worked per employee amounted to only 60% of those for 1870. Two major factors are attributed to explaining the underlying trend towards a reduction in working time: (a) the increase in the number of voluntary part‐time employees and (b) the decrease in average annual number of days worked per employee (Kok and de Neubourg, 1986). The authors noted that the growth rate of part‐time employment in many countries was greater than the corresponding rate of growth in full‐time employment.

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: