Economic Integration, Market Power and Technological Change We examine a common market which expands by integrating new regions. Capitalists are strategically interdependent through the goods market and they improve their productivity through R&D. Production and R&D employ unionized workers. The purpose of integration is to maximize a weighed average of workers’ and capitalists’ utilities. The ...

It is well known that workers in Europe appear to receive more firm-provided general training than their counterparts in the United States. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that firms, in many cases, pay for the general training, contrary to the predictions of Becker (1964). In important recent contributions, Acemoglu and Pischke argue that it is through wage compression that unions and...

In this paper, we study how foreign ownership of Swedish companies affects employment and wages. To study these effects, we specify a model based on the assumption that the Swedish labour market can be described as one where trade unions and employers bargain over employment and wages. Our hypothesis is that bargaining power is affected by institutional settings and the ownership of the firm. T...

In the context of rising inequality between capital and labour among wage-earners in Europe, this state-of-the-art article reviews literature concerning relationship collective bargaining inequality. It focuses on two main questions: (i) what is bargaining, union power labour? (ii) wage wage-earners? Both questions are discussed general terms for single- multi-employer systems. argued that cove...

The global financial crisis provides an opportunity for Australia to undertake reforms which will create a more democratic workplace. This will require a new social settlement between government, employers and unions which not only restores and extends collective bargaining rights but also strengthens workers’ legal rights to participate in decision making at the enterprise level. In the global...

This paper uses a unique panel of data at the level of the bargaining group to examine aspects of `right-to-manage' models of wage determination. Empirical measures of ̄rms' and unions' bargaining power are identi ̄ed and found to be important in°uences on wage setting. The role of union characteristics in wage determination is examined; results con ̄rm their importance and illuminate previous su...

We consider a multi--sector overlapping generations model with imperfectly competitive firms in the output markets and wage setting trade unions in the labour markets. A coordination problem between firms creates multiple temporary equilibria which are either Walrasian or of the Keynesian unemployment type. There exist many deterministic and stochastic equilibrium cycles fluctuating between Key...

In the 2000-2004 Enterprise Bargaining round between the Australian Nursing Union and the South Australian state government, it was agreed that public hospitals would be staffed according to Excelcare timings or benchmarks. Excelcare is a computerised workload produce that measures the number of hours and minutes needed to perform a range of nursing tasks for patients on a given ward. This brou...

The experience of the South African independent unions underscores some of the complexities of union growth and decline. Whilst, as predicted in the literature, there is some relationship between institutional changes, economic trends, and long term structural change, it is clear that causal relationships are both complex and interrelated. Indeed, closer qualitative analysis of organizational t...

Labour strife in the education sector Ontario has repeatedly highlighted precariousness of certain types teaching and learning that are delivered under catch-all designation extracurricular. This paper reviews legislation over past 40 years impacted teachers’ right to strike; examines how teacher unions provincial government targeted extracurricular activities during collective bargaining; cons...