The analysis of Australian union behaviour, growth and structure has centred on the relationship between unions and arbitration. To varying degrees it has been assumed that Australian unions are, through their involvement and legal incorporation into the arbitral system of labour market regulation and dispute settlement, dependent on arbitration for the supply of resources critical to their fun...

The paper addresses the issue of East-West union co-operation in Europe, through empirical evidence from case studies of western multinationals in the Czech Republic, and a review of union activities in the UK towards Polish migrants. The former show the limits of the EWC the institution which so far has been at the vanguard of Europeanisation, but has no collective bargaining role, and does no...

This contribution develops a framework for studying the e ects of the enlargement of a monetary union on macroeconomic performances in the presence of strategic interactions between non atomistic labour unions, monetary and scal authorities. We show that the extension of the monetary union to new identical member countries may have bene cial e ects, depending on the scal policymaking parameters...

We study employment, employee effort, wages and profit sharing when firms face stochastic revenue shocks and when base wages and profit shares are determined through collective bargaining. The negotiated profit share depends positively on the relative bargaining power of the trade union and has effort-enhancing and wage-moderating effects. We show that higher profit sharing reduces equilibrium ...

This paper investigates the existence of markups and their cyclical behaviour at industry sector level. Markups are given as a price-cost relation that is estimated from a dynamic, structural model of the firm. The firms face costly adjustment of labour and potential financial constraints. The model is tested on a panel of firmand plant-level data from Norwegian manufacturing industries. The re...

We critically consider the conventional belief that the attractiveness of international outsourcing lies in cheaper labour costs overseas and that it offers a means to ‘escape’ the power of unions. We develop an oligopoly model in which firms facing unionised domestic labour market choose between producing an intermediate in-house or outsourcing it to a non-unionised foreign supplier that makes...

We investigate the interaction between labour and credit market imperfections for equ ilibrium unemployment in the presence of profit sharing. Our analysis highlights the critical role of the outside option available of employees for the evaluation of the employment implications of intensified credit market competition. In a partial equilibrium with exogenous outside options increased bargainin...

Accounts of the founding of the International Labour Organization (ILO) usually emphasize the role of social-reformist intellectuals and politicians. Despite the indisputable role of these actors, however, the international labour movement was the actual initiator of this process. Over the course of World War I, the international labour movement proposed a comprehensive programme of protection ...