In April 2016, a National Living Wage replaced the National Minimum Wage for employees in the UK aged 25 and above, raising their statutory wage floor by 50 pence per hour. This uprating was almost double any in the previous decade and expanded the share of jobs covered by the wage floor by...

We explore the various claims made by Freeman and Medoff (FM) in their famous book What do unions do? about the impact of unions on wages and update them with new and better data. The main findings are as follows. 1) Private sector union wage premium is lower today than it was in the 1970s. 2)...

Although there is a substantial literature indicating that unemployment and joblessness have profound adverse impacts on individuals' health and wellbeing, there is relatively little evidence of their impact on sleep. Using data for over 3.5 million individuals in the United States over the...

Most economists maintain that the labor market in the United States is 'tight' because unemployment rates are low. They infer from this that there is potential for wage-push inflation. However, real wages are falling rapidly at present and, prior to that, real wages had been stagnant for some...

Across Europe, there are many differing opinions on whether workplace employee representation should be encouraged or discouraged. Yet there is very little evidence on the variations in workplace employee representation across Europe or the reasons for this. We use a workplace survey covering 27...

Using nationally representative Norwegian data we show family-owned workplaces are less likely to close than observationally similar non-family-owned workplaces. But this changed during the Crisis when the family businesses' closure hazard soared. This hike in 2009 was not related to performance...

Unions make differences to employee satisfaction that correspond to their effects on individual economic advantage. Panel data reveal how changes in economic circumstance and changes in job satisfaction are linked to changes in union coverage. When individuals move into a union covered job they...

Drawing on principal-agent perspectives on corporate governance, this paper examines whether employees' hourly pay is linked to ownership dispersion. Using linked workplace-worker data from the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) 2011, we find average hourly pay is higher in...

Books reviewed: Decentralised Pay Setting: A Study of the Outcomes of Collective Bargaining Reforms in the Civil Service in Australia, Sweden and the UK. K. A. Bender and R. F. Elliott Ashgate, 2003. A Very Late Development: An Autobiography Alan Fox British Universities Industrial Relations...

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members ('never-member') since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member, rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members, that is behind the decline in overall...