This essay argues that crosscutting allegiances between managers and workers, and between existing workers and ex-workers, have formed strong social and psychological bases for sustained collective action and inaction during a period of organizational transformation in contemporary China. This thesis challenges the conventional wisdom that implies either class formation during marketization or ...

A research partnership of representatives from labor, academia, and public health enabled unionized San Francisco hotel workers to achieve important policy changes in workplace health and safety. Known as the "Housekeeping Study," the project took sixteen months to complete. A unique aspect of the project was that it utilized participatory action research methods, involving workers themselves a...

Since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, collective bargaining has been the primary means by which U.S. workers can collectively negotiate terms and conditions of employment with their employer. Currently, more than 100,000 contracts are in effect, covering approximately 9 million workers and their employers in the private sector. (An additional 8 million workers are cover...

We develop a theoretical model of individual labour supply in which the canonical model of the competitive labour market emerges as a special case. More generally, we are able to characterise labour supply behaviour when, in the absence of a continuum of jobs, firms are able to push workers on to lower indifference curves and off their labour supply curve. We show that in such circumstances wag...

Anne E. Polivka is a research economist in the Office of Employment Research and Program Development, Bureau of Labor Statistics. of continuing in their jobs. Under this definition, there were approximately 2.7 million contingent workers in February 1995. The second estimate of contingent workers added self-employed workers and independent contractors who expected their employment to last for a...

OBJECTIVES In Brazil, workers without a formal job contract represent approximately half of the labor force but there are no official statistics on occupational injuries for them. This study estimates the annual incidence of non-fatal work-related injuries for workers with and without job contracts and examines gender differences. METHODS This is a community-based study carried out with a ran...

Costs for workers’ compensation benefits in California have increased sharply in recent years, following periods of decline and stability. California was already one of the most expensive states for total costs per injured worker and for a number of types of testing and treatment in the midto late 1990s. For example, a series of multi-state studies revealed that California has the second highes...