After steady employment growth since the 1990s, Spain has experienced the sharpest increase in unemployment among OECD countries during the crisis, amplified by structural problems of the labour market. Very high de facto severance payment of permanent contracts has resulted in a rigid dual...

Human Rights Watch and others have criticized the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) for having remedies so weak they fail to enforce the law and to protect employees. This issue is not new. In fact, there was a hard fought struggle over NLRA remedies during its drafting and, once it became...

Wal-Mart matters to the form and substance of law and social reform in several distinct ways. This article describes Wal-Mart as serving three key purposes - as target, symbol, and model - in the contemporary social reform landscape. First, Wal-Mart, the largest employer in the United States is...

In this study, we investigate the role that some institutional features play in shaping the distribution of wages across a number of OECD countries. While considerable attention has been devoted in recent years to the evolution of earnings inequality and to the analysis of the competing...

In these tough economic times, employers have responded by pursuing four-day work weeks and other mechanisms that change the components of the standard five-day work week. Although four-day work weeks provide some savings in the form of reduced operating and energy costs and have received recent...

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) was drafted to be far more than a technocratic exercise. The NLRA's policies do play the role - or should play the role - of any legislative policy: providing guidance in interpreting and applying the law. However, the important social, justice, and...

Congress defined employee under the National Labor Relations Act to say that an employee is any employee and is not limited to employees of a single employer. It was the intent of Congress that worker rights and labor organizing was to extend beyond the scope of a single employer, because only...

This paper is the first to use a large micro-level data set to investigate the activities and effectiveness of Chinese unions. We show that Chinese unions have a strong State-Party voice face and a collective voice face but lack a monopoly face. The empirical findings on the effectiveness of...

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the effects of foreign trade expansion on men and women's employment and earnings in Germany and Japan since the early-1970s. The analysis is prompted by trade studies identifying manufacturing industries appearing most vulnerable to foreign trade,...

This paper explores the existence of downward real wage rigidity (DRWR) in 19 OECD countries, over the period 1973-1999, using data for hourly nominal earnings at the industry level. Based on a nonparametric statistical method, which allows for country- and year-specific variation in both the...