We’re here to make money. We’re here to do business’: The privatised state and questions for trade unions Ruth Barton, Monash University, and Peter Fairbrother, Cardiff University Under both Labor and Liberal governments Australia has been one of the world’s leading proponents of privatisation. One of the key arguments about privatisation is that it would end the ineffi cient state monopoly of ...

Friedrich Hayek wrote frequently on the consequences of trade unions, usually highly critically, making large claims about their very adverse economic and social impact. A close analysis of his work demonstrates that his judgments do not rest on a theory of trade unions which is clearly different from a conventional treatment; nor does he anywhere present any relevant new empirical work. Furthe...

Deregulation and liberalization of health services take several forms in Europe: public-private partnerships; contracting out of services; and corporatization of health care institutions. The impact on health workers includes changes in terms and conditions of employment, breakup of collective bargaining agreements, and often more stressful working conditions. The author examines four types of ...

The ambition of this paper is to analyze the discursive practices of three Danish trade unions for professional and managerial staff as found in their strategy and position papers. Using discourse analytic methods, the paper analyzes, discusses, and compares the strategy papers of the three unions in order to investigate how they problematize their roles and objectives. This investigation clari...

a r t i c l e i n f o The present study considers a unionised (nonlinear) duopoly with two different labour market institutions, i.e. efficient bargaining (EB) and right to manage (RTM), to analyse product market stability under quantity competition with trade unions. We show that when the preference of unions towards wages is small, (i) the parametric stability region under RTM is higher than ...

Gravity-based cross-sectional evidence indicates that currency unions stimulate trade as much or more than do free trade areas. Thus currencies are a source of the home-country bias in trade. This paper extends such findings to estimate the ultimate benefits of currency unions, via trade, in terms of income per capita. We use a large data set of economic and geographic variables for over 200 co...

TRADE UNIONS are deeply affected by the situation in which they operate. This is clearly shown if we compare the history of unions in Russia and Britain—one the home of the world’s first workers’ state, the other the first haven of mass reformism. Trade union experience in Russia was very meager. Before the 1905 revolution unions hardly existed. It is true that in 1901 a police chief called Col...

Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation, workplace safety is costly for firms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A laissez-faire approach in which firms set safety standards is suboptimal as workers are not fully info...

Important results recently achieved in games between trade unions and central banks rest on the assumption that workers’ organisations are interested, besides real wages and employment, in inflation per se. This hypothesis is crucial because: (i) the results are not robust to its removal; (ii) the justifications provided to support it are not without problems. The paper raises the issue, critic...

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