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Outline the position of Workers’ compensation systems and the small role played by the state. Discusses the usual entitlement and details the five types of compensation benefit available to workers, medical care, funds to cover temporary disablement, permanent disability, vocational rehabilitation and death benefits. Provides details of the mandatory requirements for employer liability and states the procedures and responsibilities of employers when an injury occurs. Touches upon the return to work programme and safety programmes and recommends that employers take serious action towards prevention through safety training to reduce liabilities.

The 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was the most deadly disaster in garment manufacturing history, with at least 1,134 people killed and hundreds injured. In 2015, injured workers and the families of those killed received compensation from global apparel brands through a US$30 million voluntary initiative known as the Rana Plaza Arrangement. Overseen by the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Rana Plaza Arrangement awarded payments to survivors using a pricing formula developed by a diverse team of ‘stakeholders’ that included labour groups, multinational apparel companies, representatives of the Bangladesh government and local employers, and ILO actuaries. This paper draws from anthropological scholarship on the ‘just price’ to explore how a formula for pricing death and injury became both the means and form of a fragile political settlement in the wake of a shocking and widely publicised industrial disaster. By unpacking the complicated ‘ethics of a formula’ (Ballestero, 2015), I demonstrate how the project of creating a just price involves not two sets of values (ethical and financial) but rather multiple, competing values. This paper argues for recognition of the persistence and power of these competing values, showing how they variously strengthen and undermine the claim that justice was served by the Rana Plaza Arrangement. This analysis reveals the deficiencies of counterposing ‘morality’ and ‘economy’ in the study of price by reflecting upon all elements of price as situated within political economy and history.

Examines the compensation method used in state‐owned enterprises in the People′s Republic of China. A questionnaire survey of 504 workers′ attitudes towards compensation practices regarding wages, bonuses, pensions, unemployment compensation and other incentives was conducted. Research results revealed that there was strong agreement among respondents for the ranking of the different forms of compensation practices. The respondents preferred a performance‐based compensation system as opposed to an egalitarian system. These results give some insight into designing a compensation package and the direction for economic reforms in enterprises.

Employment protection legislation defines social criteria according to which firms can dismiss workers. If firms evade the law, then negotiation about compensation begins. To reduce the legal and financial uncertainty often associated with ex post bargaining, the German government stipulate severance payments in the case of mutual agreements in law in 2004. This paper aims to examine whether social criteria affect the dismissal probability of workers.

The probability of receiving compensation and the factors determining the amount of severance payment are estimated when it comes to private negotiations about the termination of an employment contract. In addition, the effect of the reform of the employment protection legislation on the probability of receiving compensation and the amount of redundancy pay is analysed. A stepwise estimation strategy is developed to account for sample selection bias when examining which workers receive severance payments and the determinants of severance pay variation. Empirical evidence is provided using German panel data for the period 2000‐2006.

The paper shows that workers protected by law have the lowest probability of being dismissed. The expected severance payment and firm size increase the probability of receiving compensation while the amount of severance payment depends significantly on the way the employment relationship is dissolved. Contrary to the intention of the legislator, the reform increases the level of compensation.

The paper fills a gap in the literature by taking into account selectivity bias when estimating the probability of receiving redundancy pay and the size of compensation. The evidence also provides insights which may be useful for the ongoing discussion to reform employment protection legislation in Germany.

The purpose of this paper is to examine occupational health and safety (OHS) and workers' compensation legal entitlements and policy issues raised by the use of foreign temporary workers under the s457 visa scheme in Australia.

Interviews were conducted with 15 representatives of unions and employers along with written responses from government agencies and examination of government statistics, court and other documents.

The study suggests that foreign temporary workers can face significant difficulty in accessing their OHS rights and entitlements. This represents a challenge for government as well as unions and human resource professionals trying to manage workforce diversity.

Further detailed investigation is required into the extent of problems identified in this paper in Australia and other countries.

The study indicates that governments making use of guestworkers need to investigate whether these workers have effective access to the protection of OHS and workers' compensation laws and, if not, as indicated by this study, to make suitable policy interventions.

The human resource implications of managing guestworkers have been under‐researched to date despite the global growth in numbers. The paper starts to fill this gap, identifying a number of important policy issues in relation to OHS.

Costs associated with workplace injuries and illnesses continue to be a major concern for apparel manufacturers. A major cost is that of workers' compensation insurance, the social insurance programme that provides a means of paying for costs associated with work‐related injuries and illnesses. The purpose of this study was to examine the practice by US apparel companies of involving employees on safety teams or committees as a strategy for reducing workers' compensation costs. Data were generated from responses to a mailed questionnaire by 134 upper level managers in apparel companies located throughout the USA. Results indicated that 60 per cent of the respondents involved employees on a safety team or committee. Chi‐square analysis showed a significant difference in observed frequencies and expected frequencies for change in workers' compensation costs when employees were involved in safety teams or committees. Employee involvement was reported as a component of ergonomics and safety programmes by over two‐thirds of the companies that were developing and implementing such programmes. The findings from this study provide support for involving employees on safety teams or committees as a cost reduction strategy.

Institutional rules and economies of scale can create incentives for firms to make inframarginal decisions when offering fringe benefits. We examine how such incentives might affect a firm's offer of health insurance.

We develop and estimate an empirical model of the firm's offer of health insurance that includes incentives created by rules and economies of scale. We quantify the behavioral manifestations from rules and costs as recruiting difficulty in areas outside those in which compensation is set and the percentage of high-skilled jobs in the firm and use the California Health and Employment Surveys (CHES) to estimate the model.

We show a 10–13 percentage point increase in the probability of a firm offering workers health insurance in jobs outside of those in which compensation is being set, if the recruiting difficulty lies in mid- or high-skilled positions. This increase is about twice the size of the increase associated with recruiting difficulty in the position in which compensation is negotiated.

A failure to control for the influence of inframarginal decision making when estimating the wage-insurance tradeoff helps produce wrong-signed estimates.

By bringing institutional rules and economies of scale into the framework of a firm's offer of fringe benefits, we help move the focus of the fringe benefit-wage tradeoff away from the individual level.

The purpose of this paper is to study the factors affecting the return to work (RTW) of injured workers in an institutional setting where workers’ earnings are fully compensated during the disability period.

The authors use a unique data set matching employer-employee panel data with Italian workers’ compensation records. The authors estimate survival models accounting for workers’ unobserved heterogeneity.

Workers with higher wage growth, higher relative wages and from firms with better histories of stable employment, RTW sooner. More vulnerable workers – immigrants, females, members of smaller firms – also tend to return sooner. But even when we control for such measures of commitment, status, and job security, high-wage workers RTW sooner.

The authors use proxies as measures of commitment and status. The authors study blue-collar workers without finer job qualifications. The authors estimate a reduced form model.

In an institutional environment where the immediate cost of workers’ compensation benefits falls largely on firms, employers seem to pressure those workers whose time off is more costly, i.e., high-wage workers. The lack of evidence of ex post moral hazard behavior also demands for a better understanding of the relationship between benefits and RTW.

Workers who are induced to RTW before full recovery jeopardize their long- term health and employability. Firms that put such pressure on employees might generate social costs that can be particularity high in the case of high productivity workers.

The paper offers the first quantitative analysis of an institutional setting where injured workers face 100 percent benefits replacement rate and have job security. This allows focus on other workers’ or employers’ reasons to speed RTW. It is one of very few economics studies on this topic in the European context, providing implications for human resource managers, state regulators, and unions.

Digital labor platforms (DLPs) are transforming the nature of the work for an increasing number of workers, especially through extensively employing automated algorithms for performing managerial functions. In this novel working setting – characterized by algorithmic governance, and automatic matching, rewarding and punishing mechanisms – gig-workers play an essential role in providing on-demand services for final customers. Since gig-workers’ continued participation is crucial for sustainable service delivery in platform contexts, this study aims to identify and examine the antecedents of their working outcomes, including burnout and engagement.

We suggested a theoretical framework, grounded in the job demands-resources heuristic model to investigate how the interplay of job demands and resources, resulting from working in DLPs, explains gig-workers’ engagement and burnout. We further empirically tested the proposed model to understand how DLPs' working conditions, in particular their algorithmic management, impact gig-working outcomes.

Our findings indicate that job resources – algorithmic compensation, work autonomy and information sharing– have significant positive effects on gig-workers’ engagement. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that job insecurity, unsupportive algorithmic interaction (UAI) and algorithmic injustice significantly contribute to gig-workers’ burnout. Notably, we found that job resources substantially, but differently, moderate the relationship between job demands and gig-workers’ burnout.

This study contributes a theoretically accurate and empirically grounded understanding of two clusters of conditions – job demands and resources– as a result of algorithmic management practice in DLPs. We developed nuanced insights into how such conditions are evaluated by gig-workers and shape their engagement or burnout in DLP emerging work settings. We further uncovered that in gig-working context, resources do not similarly buffer against the negative effects of job demands.

Financial expert systems have been developed in the past few years for applications such as credit assessment, portfolio management, and insurance underwriting. The decision making process of the experts in these application domains to a large extent relies on intuitive knowledge acquired by these experts after many years of practice. Eliciting and formalizing this knowledge is a critical phase in the design and development of such expert systems. This paper describes a prototype expert system for auditing and evaluating workers' compensation insurance premiums. This system differs from the abeve expert systems in that most of the experts' knowledge is explicitly accessible as regulations in procedures and manuals. This expert system is an instance of what can be called an expert system for regulation management (ESRM). The main role of the expert in the development of an ESRM is to explain regulations. The expert system presented here exhibits two features critical to the effectiveness of an ESRM: (i) an appropriate representation of complex regulations, and (ii) the capability to incorporate frequent changes to regulations quickly.