Previous large-N research suggests that globalization could have either positive or negative consequences for labor rights in developing nations. This article examines the ways in which domestic political institutions and interests conditions the effects of economic globalization. It develops several hypotheses regarding the impact of domestic factors on labor rights outcomes and uses the case ...

Economic Growth with Political Lobbying and Wage Bargaining This paper examines an economy with a large number of industries, each producing a different good. Technological change follows a Poisson process where firms improve their productivity through investment in R&D. The less there are firms in the economy or the more they can coordinate their actions, the higher their profits. Labor is use...

A comparative perspective on labor unions reveals that the best of all worlds for the workers is coordinated bargaining at the national level and significant rank-and-file engagement at the local level. But the achievement of national and coordinated bargaining is an unrealistic goal in the foreseeable future in the United States. What American labor can do, however, is to become once again a s...

Nursing unions are currently on the rise in the United States and therefore their implications to the Nursing profession are becoming more relevant. This paper will explore the history of unions in the profession of Nursing, the goals of nursing unions, and evidence regarding the impact nursing unions have on patient outcomes. This background will give Nurse Educators (NEs) the information need...

The publication in 1984 of Richard Freeman and James Medoff’s What Do Unions Do?, which summarized and synthesized results from their broad-based research program, was a landmark in labor economics and industrial relations. What Do Unions Do? quickly changed the subject matter and approach for scholars studying unions. The models (or descriptions) of unions employed by labor economists were ext...

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducin...

In 1954, thirty-nine percent of private sector laborers were unionized; by 1999 that number dropped to ten percent.1 Labor unions provide vital services for workers and the decline of unions has also meant that workers go without those services. At one time, union representatives and organizers were hired by the labor unions to recruit workers to organize.2 In the postwar era the unions stopped...

Introduction Almost 20 percent of the people in the work force are union members. Just in terms of numbers, trade unions are an important influence in the labor market and in the U.S. economy. Further, unions are widely believed to play a major role in determining workers' standard of living and how work is done and in affecting firms' profitability. Freeman and Medoff (1984) recently presented...

an organization’s varied needs when it comes to recruiting and staffing. One often hears that the proposed solution to a “people problem” is to do a better job in the recruiting process of attracting better people, do a better job in the hiring process of identifying future stars and “weeding out” the problems, and do a better job of attracting and selecting a more diverse workforce. Moreover, ...

There is widespread agreement of the importance of information and communication technologies (ICT) in building equitable prosperity and globally competitive economies. Effective use of these technologies, however, requires building new capacities and skills, here referred to as eskills, not only in the working force but the entire population. These skills are in very short supply all over the ...