Negotiation of psycho-social risks of remote working. An enterprise-level comparison in Italy and France

The article focuses on how the actors of industrial relations acted at firmlevel in multi-national company, Danone, in two different institutional contexts (Italy and France), in order to set rules and procedures aimed to mitigate the negative psycho-social consequences of remote working adopted during Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, it examines what was the role of firm-level industrial relations in setting specific oriented actions and what were the relations between these, global policies of the company and national level policies about health and safety and in general the institutional context. It emerges the importance of informality of relations between actors in helping to face an emergency together with the role of global policies of the company that seems to overcomes the different national institutional contexts.

The Response of Social Europe in Times of Covid-19

This article addresses selected issues relating to the current situation of Social Europe, examining a possible legal basis for a Directive on short-time work as proposed by Sylvaine Laulom. Subsequently, it discusses the legal basis for the proposed Directive on minimum wages, concluding that there is no sufficient legal basis in EU primary law as a result of Article 153 (5) Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). The article then provides a brief overview of developments in long-term care and collective bargaining for self-employed persons. Finally, it concludes with examples taken from Austrian case law of how the COVID pandemic can open up a new perspective for dealing with existing problems in labour and social security law. © 2023 Kluwer Law International BV, The Netherlands

Introduction

Individualised employment relations formed a key pillar of the shift to neoliberal economic policy in the 1980s, complementing other dimensions of orthodoxy deployed across governments, public administrations and central banks in the same time. In the neoliberal narrative, market forces would ‘naturally' and justly compensate labour for its contribution to productivity, like any other input to production. Consequently, redistributive institutions empowering workers to win more adequate wages and conditions (through minimum wages, Awards, unionisation, and collective bargaining) were dramatically eroded, or discarded entirely. Combined with welfare state retrenchment, this restructuring of labour market policy increased the pressure on people to sell their labour, and under terms over which workers wielded little influence. Since then, forms of insecure, non-standard work have proliferated globally, and employment relations have been increasingly individualised. Now, most workers in Anglo-Saxon market economies, and a growing proportion of workers in European and Nordic nations, rely on individual contract instruments (underpinned only by minimum wage floors typically far below living wage benchmarks) to set the terms and conditions of employment. Wages have stagnated, the share of GDP going to workers has declined, and inequality and poverty (even among employed people) has intensified. More recently, after years of this employer-friendly hegemony in workplace relations, successive crises (first the GFC and then the COVID-19 pandemic) have more obviously shattered traditional expectations of a natural linkage between economic growth and workers' living standards.After a generation of experience with this individualised model of employment relations, and with the human costs of that approach becoming ever-more obvious, there is renewed concern with reimagining policies and structures which could support improvements in job quality, stability, and compensation. Important policy dialogue and innovation is now occurring in many industrial countries, in response to the negative consequences of neoliberal labour market policies. In those conversations, institutions like collective bargaining have returned to centre stage.

The Teacher as Union Member and Professional Educator: The Continuing Challenge of Bread and Butter and Professionalism

Teachers are central to education;they stand at the crossroads of education. It is chiefly through their efforts that the goals of education are achieved or thwarted. Susan Moore Johnson, Harvard Graduate School Professor of Education, sagely wrote just over 30 years ago, "Who Teaches Matters” (Teachers at work: Achieving success in our schools. Basic Books, New York, 1990, p. xii). Eric Hanushek concurs writing, "First, teachers are very important;no other measured aspect of schools is nearly as important in determining student achievement” (The economic value of higher teacher quality. National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, Calder The Urban Institute, Washington, DC, 2010, p. 3). The COVID-19 pandemic with its shutdown of many schools brought to the forefront the importance of teachers interacting with their students in classroom settings. Try as the teachers may, their virtual presence was a questionable substitute for the personal dynamics created by teachers with their students. Teachers consider themselves to be professionals, providing a fundamental service, and seek to present themselves to the public as professionals. Juxtaposed to the critical importance of the teacher is the fact that public school teachers are part of a heavily unionized workforce. For some, there is a challenge between being a professional educator and being a member of a union. Dana Goldstein, in The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession, asked, "Could unionized teachers fight for their own interests as workers for the educational interests of the city's children? Or were those two priorities at odds?" (The teacher wars: a history of America's most embattled profession. Doubleday, New York, 2014, p. 74). Essentially, is unionization organized in a way that supports the professionalism of teachers? DeMitchell and Cobb, in their study of unions and teacher professionalism, ask, "[Are] teacher unionism and collective bargaining compatible with teacher perceptions of professionalism?" (West's Educ Law Reporter 212:1-20, 2006, p. 19). This chapter explores the challenges of unions and teachers in developing and sustaining the union, which balances the traditional and legitimate responsibility that unions owe to the educators they represent while supporting the professional responsibility of the teachers to act in the best interests of their students. The discussion will begin with an exploration of professionalism - what does it mean to be a professional. Next, the rise of teacher unionization and the divergent paths of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers in relation to professionalism and unionization will be discussed. The organizing principle of the emerging state collective bargaining laws formats public sector laws consistent with the industrial union model of private sector unionization and the impact of industrial unionism on teachers and teaching. The chapter concludes with a review of DeMitchell and Cobb's research on the tangled fit of being both a union member and a professional educator. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Impact of Direct Taxation on Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence Based on Panel Data Regression Analysis at the Level of Eu Countries

Through fiscal policy, the government can influence businesses and individuals in order to regulate their behaviour. The research used panel data from all 27 EU countries covering the period 2008–2020 to investigate the impact of direct taxation on economic growth at the level of two main clusters of countries concerning fiscal efficiency. Therefore, the analysis employed cluster methods to classify the main EU countries in both groups of countries with a high level of fiscal efficiency and those with a rather limited level of fiscal efficiency. The study employs fixed effect models and dynamic GMM methods to investigate the effect of direct taxation components (personal and corporate income taxes) on economic growth. The analysis also considers the informal economy's role in relation to the official economy. The empirical results revealed that corporate income taxes significantly negatively impact economic growth for both clusters of high- and limited fiscal efficiency countries. Additionally, personal income tax was associated with lower economic growth for countries in the limited fiscal efficiency group. Thus, from the perspective of policymakers, lowering direct taxation can increase disposable income, stimulate consumption and economic growth, encourage investment leading to job creation, increase competitiveness, and reduce tax evasion and avoidance, thereby leading to a more efficient tax system.

Turning back the clock: Beliefs about gender roles during lockdown

We study the impact of lockdown measures on beliefs about gender roles. We collect data from a representative sample of 1,000 individuals in France during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. To measure beliefs about gender roles, we use questions from the 2018 wave of the European Values Study, and match respondents from the two surveys to compare beliefs before and during lockdown. We find evidence that the lockdown period was associated with a shift towards more traditional beliefs about gender roles. The effects are concentrated among men from the most time-constrained households and from households where bargaining with a partner over sharing responsibility for household production was likely to be an issue. Finally, we find correlational evidence that beliefs in equal gender roles increase with household income. Overall, our results suggest that men are more likely to hold egalitarian beliefs about gender roles when these beliefs are not costly for them.

Agri-food Cooperatives' Online Marketing: Evaluation of the Strategies Utilized by Spanish and UK Food Retailers Pre- and Post- COVID-19 Pandemic

El uso del Big Data por las grandes cadenas de alimentación está aumentando su poder de negociación frente al sector cooperativo productor agroalimentario. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo determinar el comportamiento en las redes sociales de los minoristas de alimentos que operan en España y el Reino Unido en las redes sociales, así como identificar cambios significativos antes y después de la pandemia de COVID-19. El estudio analiza los datos de Twitter de 16 minoristas de alimentos de los que se extrajo un total de 102.200 tweets válidos de sus cuentas oficiales. El análisis de contenido y de redes sociales mostró diferencias tanto en el comportamiento en Twitter de los supermercados del Reino Unido y de España, así como antes y durante la pandemia de COVID-19. Para las cooperativas agroalimentarias con poco poder de negociación en la cadena de suministro de productos frescos, el análisis de datos de redes sociales en internet es un factor clave para mejorar su posición competitiva. Estos hallazgos deberían ser valiosos para los científicos de datos y gerentes responsables de la formación de estrategias de las empresas agroalimentarias que tienen como clientes a grandes cadenas de alimentación. Finalmente, el estudio también confirma que, para las cooperativas agroalimentarias, el análisis de contenido de los tweets es una herramienta barata y útil para entender el comportamiento de sus clientes.Alternate :The use of big data by large food retailers is increasing their bargaining power against the agri-food cooperative sector. The aim of this study was to determine the social media behaviour of food retailers in Spain and the UK, and to identify significant changes pre- and post-COVID-19 pandemic. The study analysed Twitter data collected from 16 food retailers;a total of 102,200 valid tweets were extracted from their official Twitter accounts. A term frequency analysis and a social network analysis of food retailers' Twitter behaviour were carried out. The results obtained show differences for both UK and Spanish retailers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. For agri-food cooperatives with little bargaining power in the supply chain of fresh produce, data analysis is a key factor in improving their competitive positioning. These findings should be of value to data scientists as well as managers responsible for forming strategies in agri-food firms that have large food retailers as clients. Finally, the study also confirms that, for agri-food cooperatives, analysing tweet content is a cheap and useful tool for understanding customer behaviour.

European Cross-Sectoral Collective Bargaining as Post-Crisis Social Policy

This article proposes a policy project, centered around coordinated collective bargaining at the European Union level, to redistribute income towards low-wage workers in post-crisis Europe. It suggests we allow labor unions in sectors employing low-wage workers to present common wage demands across sectors and EU Member States. It shows that this would make union wage increases less harmful to workers and consumers than under uncoordinated sectoral bargaining, while coming more directly at the expense of managers and investors. The article then describes existing EU legal institutions that-although they do not quite amount to the policy proposed here-constitute useful precedents for it. These institutions are European social dialogue, European Works Councils, and European Framework Agreements bargained for by multinational firms and worker representatives. The article also discusses doctrines of EU competition and internal market law that could potentially be held to prohibit European cross-sectoral collective bargaining coordination. The article lays out arguments in favor of finding such coordination lawful, so that it may form part of the EU's policy arsenal to address wrenching economic inequalities worsened by the ongoing economic and health crises.

Sozialpartnerschaft unter Spannung

Dieser Beitrag untersucht anhand von Pressemitteilungen, Gastbeiträgen der Vorsitzenden und Presseinterviews, wie die Tarifparteien der deutschen Metall- und Elektroindustrie, Gesamtmetall und IG Metall, die Corona-Krise in der Öffentlichkeit darstellten. Die mit dieser Untersuchung eingenommene Framing-Perspektive verspricht Aufschluss darüber, wie die Tarifparteien die Handlungsfähigkeit der Sozialpartnerschaft einschätzen und welche Prioritäten sie setzen. Die Sozialpartnerschaft steht auch in den Kernbereichen des deutschen Wirtschaftsmodells in zunehmendem Maße unter Druck. Das spiegelt sich auch in unserer Analyse wider. Während auf den ersten Blick in der Beschreibung der Krise und dem Ruf nach staatlichen Hilfen zur Unterstützung der Wirtschaft und Sicherung der Beschäftigten eine Interessenkoalition besteht, ist diese genauer betrachtet durch ein starkes Ungleichgewicht gekennzeichnet. Nicht nur handelt es sich um rein strategische Kooperation bei spezifischen Themen (Autoprämie, Kurzarbeitergeld). Die Arbeitgeberseite besteht außerdem auf Lohnzurückhaltung und lässt die gewerkschaftlichen Aufrufe zur weiter reichenden gemeinsamen Verantwortungsübernahme unbeantwortet. Insbesondere vor dem Hintergrund weiterer Auswirkungen der Pandemie auf den Arbeitsmarkt wird so die gewerkschaftliche Verhandlungsmacht geschwächt und die Sozialpartnerschaft gerät weiter unter Druck.Alternate :This paper examines how the collective bargaining parties of the German metal and electrotechnical industry, Gesamtmetall and IG Metall, portrayed the Corona crisis in the public sphere. The empirical basis consists of press releases, guest contributions by the chairpersons and press interviews. The framing perspective adopted by this study promises to shed light on how the collective bargaining parties assess the agency of social partnership and what priorities they set. Social partnership is generally coming under increasing pressure even in the core areas of the German economic model. This is also reflected in our analysis: While at first glance there is a coalition of interests in the description of the crisis and the call for state aid to support the economy and provide employement security, a closer look reveals a strong imbalance. Not only is this common interest restricted to purely strategic cooperation on specific issues. What is more, the employer side insists on wage restraint and leaves unanswered the trade unionsʼ calls for joint assumption of social responsibility. Particularly against the backdrop of further effects of the pandemic on the labor market, this weakens the unionsʼ bargaining power and puts further pressure on the institutional pattern of social partnership.

Web-Based, Interactive, Interest-Based Negotiation Training for Managing Conflict in Isolated Environments: Opportunistic Study With an e-Survey.

BACKGROUND: Effective negotiation in relationships is critical for successful long-duration space missions; inadequate conflict resolution has shown serious consequences. Less desirable forms of negotiation, including positional bargaining (eg, negotiating prices), can exacerbate conflicts. Traditional positional bargaining may work for simple, low-stakes transactions but does not prioritize ongoing relationships. High-stakes situations warrant interest-based negotiation, where parties with competing interests or goals collaborate in a mutually beneficial agreement. This is learnable but must be practiced. Refresher training during conflicts is important to prevent out-of-practice crew members from using less effective negotiation techniques. Training should be self-directed and not involve others because, on a space mission, the only other people available may be part of the conflict. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop and test an interactive module teaching principles and skills of interest-based negotiation in a way that users find acceptable, valuable for learning, and enjoyable. METHODS: Using a web-based, interactive-media approach, we scripted, filmed, and programmed an interest-based negotiation interactive training module. In the module, the program mentor introduces users to "The Circle of Value" approach to negotiation and highlights its key concepts through interactive scenarios requiring users to make selections at specific decision points. Each selection prompts feedback designed to reinforce a teaching point or highlight a particular negotiation technique. To evaluate the module, we sought populations experiencing isolation and confinement (an opportunistic design). This included 9 participants in isolated, confined environments in the Australian Antarctic Program and the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation Mars simulation, as well as a subset of people who self-identified as being isolated and confined during the COVID-19 pandemic. Feedback was collected from participants (n=54) through free-response answers and questionnaires with numerical scaling (0=strongly disagree to 4=strongly agree) at the end of the module. RESULTS: In total, 51 of 54 (94%) participants found the activity valuable for learning about conflict management (identified by those who selected either "somewhat agree" or "strongly agree"), including 100% of participants in the isolated and confined environment subset (mode=3). In total, 79% (128/162) of participant responses indicated that the module was realistic (mode=3), including 85% (23/27) of responses from participants in isolated and confined environments (mode=3). Most participants felt that this would be particularly valuable for new team members in an isolated, confined environment (46/54, 85% of all participants, mode 4; 7/9, 78% of the isolated and confined environment subset, mode 3) as well as veterans. CONCLUSIONS: This module offers a self-directed, consistent approach to interest-based negotiation training, which is well received by users. Although the data are limited due to the opportunistic study design, the module could be useful for individuals in isolated and confined environments and for anyone involved in high-stakes negotiations where sustaining relationships is essential.

Locked in, logged out: pandemic and ride-hailing in South Africa and Kenya

This article examines the impact of the pandemic on ride-hailing drivers and their mitigation strategies during lockdown in Africa. Ride-hailing has emerged as one of the latest paid-work opportunities for the continent's many unemployed. Yet, ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Bolt misclassify drivers to avoid regulation and responsibilities towards workers' welfare. Drawing on 34 in-depth interviews with ride-hailing drivers, driver representatives and trade unions in South Africa and Kenya, this article makes two arguments. First, the gig economy in Africa provides work opportunities for the unemployed on the continent and simultaneously vitiates the working conditions through the commodification and informalisation of work. Second, the state-directed emergency measures act as a veneer to capital's efforts to commodify labour and the gig economy platforms have emerged as primary tools for it. Our account points to an urgent need for better regulatory systems to hold platform companies accountable and a collective bargaining mechanism in the gig economy.

The Electrical Contractors Case: Irish Supreme Court Illuminates Collective Bargaining and Delegated Legislation

As Europe begins to emerge from the Covid‐19 pandemic, two trends are clear: one, labour market reform is urgently needed, to cope with new economic and technological realities;and two, big government is back. The recent decision of the Irish Supreme Court in Náisiúnta Leichtreach Contraitheoir Éireann v Labour Court illuminates the relationship between collective bargaining and the regulatory state. In potentially one of the most important decisions in Irish labour law in decades, the Court rejected a constitutional challenge to legislation aimed at empowering social partners to regulate economic sectors through collective bargaining. This article situates that decision within recent scholarship on the ‘labour constitution' model of labour law, under which the social partners should participate in economic governance. It also highlights the relevance of the decision for the ‘Social Europe' agenda and the political economy of both national constitutional law and the EU internal market.

COVID's impacts on the field of labour and employment relations

The field of labour and employment relations covers work and employment from the perspective of workers, as distinct from the management-oriented field of HR. The COVID-19 crisis that spread across the globe in the early months of 2020 deeply affected employment and work in almost all sectors of the global economy. Already, many academic publishers in the field are demanding that articles and book manuscripts address it. More fundamentally, these developments pose challenges to some core assumptions of our field. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Making the ethical case for effective domestic abuse policy and practice: the role of trade unions

PurposeThis paper focusses on the role of trade unions in policy and practice designed to address the workplace impact of domestic abuse. The paper aims to examine this union remit through the lens of corporate social responsibility (CSR).Design/methodology/approachIn-depth interviews were conducted with 39 union representatives in a region of England to capture their views on and experiences of supporting members experiencing domestic abuse.FindingsThere is a clear ethical model by which the unions might articulate the key moral, legal and business drivers in determining effective domestic abuse policy and practice. Furthermore, the degree of "proximity”, in terms of union deliberation with employers and particularly joint action following disclosure, suggests that unions could play a key part in achieving "substantive” domestic abuse policy and practice within organisations.Originality/valueDespite unions' capacity to offer significant support to employers and employees, the role of unions in addressing the workplace impact of domestic abuse is under-researched. With reference to the concept of CSR, the article adds to the knowledge of how to address the workplace impact of domestic abuse.

The decline of paid overtime working in Britain

The share of paid‐for overtime hours within total paid‐for hours worked in Britain has declined from 5.4% to 2.0% between 1997 and 2020. We investigate this decline, focussing on its distribution across full‐time (f/t) and part‐time males and females and across 19 one‐digit industries. It is established that f/t males are dominant in the decline both of overtime working and overtime hours. We explore the implications of the decline on the share of overtime pay within total pay as well as on the gender pay gap. We test for economic, structural and cyclical influences on overtime working via a two‐part regression model that allows us to differentiate between the incidence of overtime working and weekly overtime hours of overtime employees. We examine how paid‐for overtime has varied with collective bargaining coverage, low pay, the 2008 financial crisis, the arrival of Covid‐19, job mobility and the public/private sector dichotomy. Combined marginal effects of changes in the incidence of overtime working and weekly overtime hours are also provided. The influence of the decline of collective bargaining in the last two decades on overtime working is highlighted using Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions.

Face masks drive increased rational decision-making.

Face masks play a pivotal role in the control of respiratory diseases, such as the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). Despite their widespread use, little is known about how face masks affect human social interaction. Using unique experimental data collected early on in the pandemic, we investigate how facial occlusion by face masks alters socio-economic exchange. In a behavioral economics study (N = 481), individuals accepted more monetary offers and lower offer amounts when interacting with a masked versus unmasked opponent. Importantly, this effect was mainly driven by faces covered with surgical masks relative to bandana-type masks. In the first weeks of mask use during the COVID-19 pandemic, motive attributions further moderated this effect: Participants who believed that mask wearers were seeking to protect others showed the highest acceptance rates. Overall, we describe a new phenomenon, the face-mask effect on socio-economic exchange, and show that it is modulated by contextual factors.

Liber Amicorum Manfred Weiss

Liber Amicorum Manfred Weiss by Marius Olivier, Nicola Smit, and Evance Kalula (Cape Town, South Africa, Juta, 2021, 395 pp.).

Negotiation of psycho-social risks of remote working. An enterprise-level comparison in Italy and France

The article focuses on how the actors of industrial relations acted at firmlevel in multi-national company, Danone, in two different institutional contexts (Italy and France), in order to set rules and procedures aimed to mitigate the negative psycho-social consequences of remote working adopted during Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, it examines what was the role of firm-level industrial relations in setting specific oriented actions and what were the relations between these, global policies of the company and national level policies about health and safety and in general the institutional context. It emerges the importance of informality of relations between actors in helping to face an emergency together with the role of global policies of the company that seems to overcomes the different national institutional contexts. © The Author(s) 2022.

Negotiating Indonesian Married Women’s Agency in a Career : Work From Home Arrangement as a Possible Solution

Financial challenges have led to the emergence of dual-earner couples. Nonetheless, in male-dominated societies like Indonesia, women’s career involvement, although contributing to the household income, is not correlated with men’s contribution to the household task. A career is seen as a privilege for women because their primary value is conventionally anchored on marriage and family. International studies suggested that the Work From Home (WFH) arrangement is an effective solution to enable women to balance their work and family roles. While WFH was non-existent in Indonesia before the COVID-19 pandemic, the latter forced companies to adopt the former. This provided an opportunity to examine whether WFH can be a remedy for working Indonesian women to negotiate their work and family roles. Hence this study is aimed to look closely at the issue, comprising two general aims. First, it provides a general picture of current practices of division of gender in Indonesia using current literature. Second, using online survey data from 201 Indonesian workers, this report provides empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of WFH, particularly for married working women in Indonesia in negotiating their work and household roles. While describing current feminism issues in the non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies, the article also discusses the long-term practical strategy to empower Indonesian women in careers by emphasizing gender equality while acknowledging the men’s leadership role.

NEGOTIATE LIFE? collective bargaining during the pandemic in Brazil

This paper analyzes how the union movement faced the challenges imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, investigating the collective bargaining that took place between March 2020 and early 2021. Its core question inquires: have unions been able to build webs of protection for their members, in the form of collective norms agreed upon with employers? A pertinent question, since the 2017 labor reform immensely weakened the capacity of organized labor to act, by ending the union tax and limiting collective bargaining to consensual forms of funding, thereby impoverishing unions;and by reducing the scope of issues subject to collective bargaining, which was aggravated by the federal provisional measures aimed at facilitating the business response to the crisis, at the expense of workers’ income. The empirical research is based on collective bargaining results from four categories of essential workers: food and supermarket retailers, nurses, truck drivers, and bank clerks. © 2022, EDUFBA - Editora Universttaria. All rights reserved.