Although white collar work is of vast importance to the economy, the Operations Management (OM) literature has focused largely on traditional blue collar work. In an effort to stimulate more OM research into the design, control and management of white collar work systems, this paper provides a systematic review of disparate streams of research relevant to understanding white collar work from an...

Unions have a substantial impact on the compensation and work lives of both unionized and non-unionized workers. This report presents current data on unions' effect on wages, fringe benefits, total compensation, pay inequality, and workplace protections. Some of the conclusions are: • Unions raise wages of unionized workers by roughly 20% and raise compensation, including both wages and benefit...

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence consistent with models of signaling through unemployment and to uncover a new stylized fact using the 1988-2006 DWS, namely that, among white-collar workers, post-displacement earnings fall less rapidly with unemployment spells for layoffs than for plant closings. Because high-productivity workers are more likely to be recalled than low-prod...

The impact of international trade on wages has received substantial attention in recent decades; but only recently have the specific effects of exporting on wage inequality been investigated in detail. This paper employs the unexpected 1999 Brazilian exchange rate devaluation to identify the effects of exporting on Brazilian manufacturing firm-level wages using employer-employee linked data. We...

This study examined the possibility that there is a curvilinear relationship between income and subjective well-being in China. This study also investigated whether this curvilinear relationship is moderated by social class and mediated by respondents' material affluence. The study was conducted in China, and the sample consisted of 900 blue-collar workers and 546 white-collar workers. The resu...

This paper studies the perceived effects on the working conditions in 24 medium sized manufacturing companies, approximately 1.5 year into their implementation of Lean. This is studied quantitatively based on four stakeholders’ perceptions (the workers, the managers, the production supervisors and the white-collar workers), based on three factors; changes in the working environment, work with s...

BACKGROUND The study of illnesses causing absence of workers from work in industries is a practical method to study the health status of industrial workers and to identify occupational health hazards. The iron and steel industries are particularly hazardous places of work. Published data from India on health status of iron and steel workers is limited, therefore this study was undertaken to inv...