The term 'fissured workplace' has been coined by David Weil to describe fundamental changes in the organisation of work arising from firms' competitive strategies in the 21st century. As Weil put it, fissurisation refers to 'both a form of employment (for example, temporary agency employment;...

Employment scholarship focuses too much on laws and not enough on norms. Yet norms capture the complete terms of employment more accurately than most legal contracts. Virtually every aspect of the employment relation that falls outside the realm of contract lawyers - corporate culture, office...

This study examines the potential impact of works councils and unions on the deployment of fixed-term contracts and agency temps. We report inter al. that works councils are associated with a higher number of temporary agency workers when demand volatility is high while the opposite holds for...

The traditional system of labour relations primarily involves the employer and the employee with the status and relationship of the parties clearly known to each other. However, it is now a trend in employment relationship to have a third party in the relationship and this has made employment...

Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) find that labor demand shocks in 19th-century Britain had an impact on master and servant prosecutions, as breaking an employee contract was a criminal offense until 1875. We first reproduce all regression tables in Naidu and Yuchtman (2013) and then test for robustness...

Although it is widely understood that employers and employees are not equally situated, we fail adequately to account for this inequality in the law governing their relationship. We can best understand this inequality in terms of status, which encompasses one's level of income, leisure and...

Perhaps no other country in recent years has witnessed greater change in its collective bargaining framework than the UK. This paper describes the dramatic developments and their consequences. Like Gaul, it is in three parts. The first part charts the six major pieces of legislation –...

The British Columbia Teachers' Federation (BCTF), representing all public elementary and secondary school teachers in the province, is one of the largest and most powerful unions in British Columbia. BCTF has always sought formal rights to full-scope collective bargaining, and unrestricted...

The emergence of social media, from Facebook to Myspace and Linkedin to Twitter - much like the earlier evolution of email, IM and web 2.0 - have changed communications, expanding the virtual horizons for social networking and business promotion on these popular communications platforms....