Industrial
Relations, Labour
Market Institutions and Employment
BEYOND BRITISH LEYLAND: AN END TO PAROCHIALISM
IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN THE BRITISH MOTOR INDUSTRY Author(s): Alan Tuckman and Michael Whittall After a last, and increasingly autocratic, attempt at sustaining an
independent mass British motor industry with the contrary Ryder and
Edwardes' plans employment relations have increasingly been shaped by
engagement with international players. Most conspicuously this has been
through association with Honda then ownership by BMW. In the process not
only has the company been opened to the anarchy of the global car market
but employees have had to come to terms with more cosmopolitan approaches
to industrial relations. Association with Honda brought pressure to
accommodate to 'lean production' with Rover Tomorrow metamorphosed into a
model workplace partnership agreement while BMW not only drew British
employee representatives into an EWC but also made them evaluate German
codetermination especially when domestic plants came under threat of
closure. As well as issues of division and competition between plants -
not necessarily internationally - this paper examines two central elements
in industrial relations which were evaluated by employee representatives
in their own attempts to come to terms with the internationalisation of
the car industry. Both these issues are long standing - and can be seen as
central in conflicts dating back to the 1960s - but have become
reformulated. Firstly issues of employee representation and voice, with
the role of shop stewards and trade union officials in relation to both
members and employers. In this to what extent employee representatives are
drawn into management. Secondly - and the source of continuing tension -
changes in working time arrangements which might appear to have reduced
hours but increasingly blur traditional boundaries. The paper draws from
interviews with trade union officials and shop stewards carried out over
the last five years as well as a wide ranging literature covering the well
documented longer term history of industrial relations of the British
motor industry. Author(s): Alessia Vatta
One of the criteria for membership in the European Union set by the European Council in Copenhagen (1993)is the socalled "economic criterion", that is the establishment of a market economy in the candidate countries. As a matter of fact, Western European employers have quite constantly supported the EU eastward enlargement, all the more that frequent academic criticisms regarded the emphasis on the strictly economic traits of the ongoing process (e.g. see Mayhew 1998). However, whereas private firms successfully spread all over the CEECs, the same did not equally happen with employers'organizations. Their operation and activities have been, and still are, rather difficult (Wiesenthal 1996; Solorzano-Borragan 2002). Both the European Commission and the EU-level interest groups were involved in the development of employers'organizations in the CEECs. The paper deals with the state of these collective actors, and analyses assistance initiatives led by the EU (mainly through the PHARE programme) and the EU-level interest groups (UNICE, UEAPME, ERT AND Eurochambres).
"WHAT DO UNIONS DO AT THE WORKPLACE?: THE PRECARIOUS SITUATION OF UNIONS IN LABOR INTENSIVE INDUSTRY IN PORTUGAL"
Author(s): Alan Stoleroff
This paper is concerned with the role of union organization at the industrial workplace and raises the issue of "what precisely do unions do" as a problem The paper is based on interviewing in the shoe and textiles industries in Portugal. Although unions are significantly present throughout these industries, observation has shown that the unions have a very low activity profile at workplaces in these sectors. However the union is most visible, that is, becomes visible, when employment crises occur, such as when a company threatens to close down operations. When the enterprise is "normally" at work, the unions' intervention is mainly restricted to basic branch collective bargaining and dues collection; when employment is threatened the union plays a political role to obtain state intervention to protect employment or remedy the misery that results from companies packing up for Eastern Europe or Asia. The paper will first describe the situation observed. The analysis will attribute this character of unions' workplace role to the characteristics of the industries and its workers (labor intensive, low skill, female, subject to globalization and threats of delocalization, etc.). By raising the empirical question of "what do unions do" at such precarious workplaces in traditional labor intensive industry, the paper will open discussion regarding the question of "what can unions do" and "what is the role of unions" in these workplaces.
Author(s): Anke Hassel
The paper analyses changes in wage bargaining systems in European Union
member states. It observes that despite strong expectations towards
decentralisation, wage bargaining systems in most countries have been
either stable or become more co-ordinated. The patterns transformation are
thereby not directly related to the degree of centralization of wage
bargaining systems the countries traditionally had. The paper argues that
these developments are mainly due to government involvement in wage
bargaining institutions. Governments facing tighter constraints by
monetary integration turned to new forms of incomes policy in order to
control pay bargaining. The paper specifically discusses the interaction
between governments and trade unions in 13 western European countries. TRADE UNION RESPONSES TO INTERNATIONALISATION – A
COMPARATIVE VIEW ON EUROPE , USA AND JAPAN Author(s): C.S. Jensen Author(s): Claire Wallace, Christine Cousins, Pavle Sicherl, Endre Sik,
Siyka Kovacheva, Jiri Vecernik, Manuela Stanculescu, Thomas Boje and Annet
Jager It is often claimed that
European labour markets are inflexible. In this study of 8 countries (UK,
Sweden, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Romania and
Bulgaria we undertook a survey of flexible work. We found that by asking
people themselves how flexible they are, there is a surprising amount of
flexibility, but that it takes different forms in different countries. Author(s): David Peetz, Chris Houghton and Barbara Pocock In
recent years union movements in the Anglophone countries of Australia, New
Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States have faced particularly
serious declines in membership density. To varying degrees these movements
have sought to respond to this decline by reorienting union organisation
and behavious from a 'servicing' approach to an 'organising' approach. In
Australia this has been coordinated through the peak union body, the
Australian Council of Trade Unions. This paper reports on a study of eight
unions in that country. A survey of over 300 union organisers and
managers, undertaken in 2002-3 and to be followed by a larger survey of
workplace delegates in those unions, identifies the way in which and the
extent to which workplace organisation and union offices are being
transformed, the barriers to transformation, the factors that facilitate
change and some of the consequences of transformation. Quantitaive data
and a rich collection of qualitative information have been collected and
coded and will be analysed over the coming months for presentation at the
ESA Conference. POPULAR AND ELITE WORKPLACE IDEOLOGY AND THE
SHIFT TO INDIVIDUALISM Author(s): David Peetz and Georgina Murray The transformation of workplace industrial relations in a number of
western countries from collective to individualistic forms of regulation
has been accompanied by a discourse alleging that workers are now
'individualistic' and therefore dismissive of collectivism. However, this
discourse is contested, and a clearly identifiable shift in elite
('dominant') ideology is not matched by an equivalent shift in popular
ideology. Using Australia as a case study, we show the role of key
elements of the capitalist class in shaping this putsch, including the
roles of organisers (employer associations, think tanks, management
consultants), executives and interlocking directorates in creating and
propagating individualistic ideology amongst elite groups including the
state, and compare and contrast this with shifts in measured popular
opinion on industrial relations and related issues. We conclude that the
revolution in workplace regulation that has taken place in that country is
an adaptation to the recreation of elite ideology, not of popular
ideology, and remains a disputed arena at the workplace level. Author(s): Franz Traxler Institutionally, collective bargaining has remained within the
realm of the nation states. At the same time, European integration (
namely the single European market and European Monetary Union) are widely
assumed to create a need for a European approach to bargaining. This is
for a social and an economic reason. Socially, such an approach helps
contain downward pressures on labour standards caused by international
competition, including competitive national bargaining policies.
Economically, Europe-wide bargaining is argued to contribute to
synchronizing bargaining with such macroeconomic requirements as price
stability and employment. Given the considerable diversity of the national
bargaining systems across Europe, building a European (i.e.
supranationally centralized and homogenized) bargaining system is not
realistic. Hence, transnational coordination of the national bargaining
strategies is the only feasible option when it comes to adopting a
European approach. The structure of this paper is as follows.
Analytically, it addresses the problems of transnational coordination and
the possibilities of overcoming them. Empirically, it gives an overview of
the ongoing attempts at transnational coordination. The paper concludes by
discussing the future prospects for Europe-wide bargaining policies. Author(s): Guglielmo Meardi Traditional
comparative typologies of trade union models, whether based on
sociological functionalism or on institutionalism, have a number of
limitations that are becoming ever more apparent. First, by using the term
'models', they exaggerate the internal coherence and continuity of union
types; second, by concentrating on the national boundaries, they
underestimate homogeneity within countries; third, they neglect the role
of cross-border influences, imitation, and linkages; fourth, they are
still unable to classify unions in post-communist countries, abandoned in
an undifferentiated residual group of (post) state-socialist unionism.
Some typologies have the additional limit of ethnocentrism. Although one
could be tempted into dismissing any typology, this paper defends the
empirical and theoretical utility of taxonomy, at least when the level of
abstraction is clear. However, typologies must be revisited in order to
address the existing four limitations. Using both first-hand documentation
and secondary literature, an alternative, more dynamic and transnational
typology is suggested, that includes the dimensions of organisation
structure, workplace representation, inclusiveness, political involvement,
workplace participation, and collective bargaining scope. The resulting
'types' point to some unexpected cross-national similarities and
intra-national diversity, and show a dynamism that deserves the label of
'styles' rather than 'models'. Given some structural differences in
collective action and association behaviour between small and large
countries, the taxonomy focuses only, at this stage, on the six largest
countries in the 'enlarged' EU: Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain and
Poland. Author(s): Helge Albrechtsen Since
the mid 1970s, policies to relieve the labour market have been developed
in several Western countries. In the FRG, in particular, early retirement
schemes have been used extensively but this strategy has also been
followed in the UK and DK. However, negative effects of this policy choice
are high costs and the loss of the productive potential of older workers.
In the context of the 'active turn' in various national labour market
policies during the 1990s, these problems have led to a reconsideration of
the early retirement strategy. Furthermore, not only has the OECD
recommended reductions of early retirement schemes but since the launching
of the European Employment Strategy in 1997, the issue of 'active ageing'
has become an important issue. This includes education as well as the
'social responsibility' of employers with regard to increasing the labour
market attraction to older workers. In this context, the role of the
social partners is essential to the improvement of skills and the
adaptability of enterprises. Yet, due to various regimes of welfare states
and IR, the implementation of these policy changes varies among the
countries under investigation. While DK and the UK restricted access to
early retirement, the German policy changes in this field have been
modest. It is within the variety of such capitalist configurations of
welfare and IR that the questions of path dependency and the
interrelationship between supranational and national policy levels occur. Author(s): Herman Knudsen Author(s): Jens Lind
THE OWL OF MINERVA FLIES AT DUSK: SOCIOLOGY AS REQUIEM FOR TACIT WORKPLACE KNOWLEDGE
Author(s): James Wickham
A widespread European policy discourse links competitiveness, innovation and the mobilisation of employees' practical knowledge. If employees are trusted they will contribute to the innovation process. This produces a win / win situation, benefiting both enterprise and employees. Such claims are the basis for trade union strategies of workplace partnership (as in Ireland) and elements of the European Commission's 'Learning Society' policy. They underlie employment sociologists' interest in 'implicit' or 'tacit' knowledge (Polanyi). The paper begins by exploring the intellectual roots of this optimistic thesis. It then uses a series of European Commission funded projects on workplace organisation to show that the current situation is in fact marked by processes which undermine the importance of independent workplace knowledge. Management now explicitly attempts to gather and harness employees' subjectivity in terms of both their personality and their knowledge. Organisational change and the creation of a generalised sense of insecurity undermine the workplace collectivity, so employee commitment becomes a requirement for a job rather than the consequence of a job. Innovations in information systems are subcontracted out, away from intervention by workers or their representatives. Perhaps most important of all, the ideology and practices of 'shareholder value' denigrate and disrupt all knowledge that cannot be codified and managed as a financial asset. In this situation sociologists of work who focus on workers' tacit knowledge may be like 19th century folklorists, cataloguing activities that are increasingly under threat. The paper ends by considering countervailing trends and the implications for European industrial relations policy.
Author(s): Joaquim Molins, Alex
Casademunt, Ramón de Alós-Moner, Antonio Martin and Rosa Nonell Author(s): Koch, Max
TOWARDS POST-FORDIST
DEVELOPMENT PATHS IN WESTERN EUROPE? Author(s): K. Roberts and J. Tholen This paper is based
on information collected by interviews during 2000 and 2001, using a
mainly structured questionnaire, with the owners or top mangers in 95
manufacturing, extractive and construction businesses in Kazakhstan, and
unstructured follow-up interviews in 11 of these companies. The findings
are used to assess the extent to which a literature-based model of
post-communist Russian management exists in Kazakhstan. Similarities are
noted: the prevalence of an 'insider configuration' (firms run in the
interests of managers and workers), and the importance of social capital
('connections'). In contrast, the evidence suggests that 'bureaucratic
extortion' is easier to avoid, Russian-style mafia are less in evidence,
and a 'nomenklatura effect' is weaker in Kazakhstan. It is argued that
these differences create greater space in Kazakhstan: for 'outsiders' to
develop businesses whose success depends essentially on satisfying the
market, and for young managers to rise to the top swiftly on the basis of
their ability to align the performances of their enterprises with market
demands.
* The research on which this paper is based was funded by INTAS (award 97-469).
Author(s): Maria da Conceição
Cerdeira The convergence and divergence of the industrial
relation systems is an old debate, now restarted by pressure of the
transformations of the productive system and the globalisation processes.
In accordance with this debate we tried to interpret the tendencies of
change of the Portuguese labour relation system. First, we will analyse
the evolution of the social actors organization and of the collective
bargaining. Secondly, we will present and discuss the results of an
empiric research developed in companies of process industries about the
negotiation of the professional classification IRISH JIG OR EURO-VISION- THE EUROPEANISATION
OF WORKPLACE RELATIONS IN IRELAND? Author(s): Michael Doherty Crouch (1993), in arguing that the somewhat arbitrary allocations of
historical legacies have shaped the occupancy of political space by
organised interests, has identified different models of industrial
relations in industrialised market economies. Traditionally, Ireland
tended to fit the pluralist model, where interaction between capital and
labour takes place principally in the context of a contractual setting
that governs rules and procedures. A bargaining relationship exists but
the parties have an adversarial value system, interest organisation is
fragmented and there is little or no central co-ordination. . However, the
period since 1987 has seen a significant shift in strategy by Irish
industrial relations actors, away from the traditional, adversarial,
British-style approach to a more consensual, 'European' model, resulting
in the conclusion of a series of national social pacts. Arguments have
been advanced by trade union leaders for an orientation towards moderation
and social partnership, citing the increased influence gained by trade
unions on national affairs, and the advantages of entering 'productivity
coalitions' with management to improve competitive performance. This paper
seeks to explore the impact and diffusion of this 'Europeanised Irish
model' on industrial relations at the workplace; which as a result of,
inter alia, bargaining decentralisation and changing economic structures
is increasingly becoming the most important arena for employment
relations. Qualitative case study data from two worksites will be
presented to examine the effects of these changes on trade union workplace
organisation, on relations between unions and employers, and on the lived
work experiences of ordinary union members. The data will explore the
perceptions of the partnership era at grassroots level; how is the
orientation towards partnership and consensus viewed by ordinary union
members, and to what extent (if any) do they feel it has impacted on the
union-member relationship and on their own working lives? Reference: Author(s): Miroslav
Stanojevic The two
ex-Yugoslav states were derived from specific type of 'communism'.
Compared to the contemporary 'soviet type' societies, in former Yugoslavia
an atypical working class structuration existed. On the background of the
comparatively accentuated market nature of Yugoslav 'communism', interest
cleavages within and between companies were stronger, but between the
state and society less intensive than in other 'communist' societies. In
spite of the strong horizontal fragmentation, at the end of the 80's
Yugoslavia was faced with powerful strike wave. In this environment direct
application of the liberal capitalism strategy in the form of 'shock
therapy' simply was not possible. This type of policy would imply
political death for its creators. Because of that, at the end of the 80's
the political elites in Serbia and Slovenia had two political solutions:
gradual market reforms, which had to respect workers interests, or radical
rejection of these reforms. First option implied inclusion of the workers'
collective interest in the 'transition', second one its radical
pacification. At mid 80's in the central committee of the Slovenian
communist party won the faction, who accepted gradual market reforms; this
option offered a 'voice' for labour. Almost at the same time in the
central committee of the Serbian communist party a political faction,
which rejected market reforms, came into the power. This faction used
nationalism as an instrument for aggressive labour pacification and
offered 'exit' option to the workers (literally exit from Serbia or a
movement towards the informal economy). The root of the later differences
between the two trajectories, the key point of the historical divorce
between the two republics and also the key point of the disintegration of
the former Yugoslav federation was in these two qualitatively different
reactions of the two political elites to the strong strike movement from
the late 80's. Political victories of the two essentially different
political factions had decisive strategic implications in Serbia and
Slovenia. These two cases reveal that the type of the 'transition', its
abortive or social-democratic variant, were subject of the strategic
choices. The decisive intervening variable of the whole process was the
political power. These different strategic choices framed the trade
unions. In Serbian as well as in Slovenian context the two major 'old
reformed' trade unions strongly accentuated the economism as an essential
part of theirs strategies. Both strongly focused on everyday, concrete
employees' interests. Within the Serbian context in the 90's this strategy
was the part of the 'exit' option and of the corresponding deconstruction
of the workers collective identity. In Slovenian context the same strategy
was a part of the 'voice' option formation, enabling survival of the
workers collective identity. The trade unions economism obviously is not a
universal key of the Labour Revitalisation in CEE Countries. Author(s): Nico A. Siegel "Social Pacts" or "employment pacts"
have been a core issue of comparative research on the changing contours of
corporatism during the last decade. New paradigms such as
"competitive corporatism" (M. Rhodes) or "supply-side
corporatism" (F. Traxler) have been suggested to summarize dominant
changes in corporatist policy patterns during an era of
internationalisation and national adaptation. Compared to the number of
comparative analyses which have tried to map and conceptualise major
changes and reorganisations of corporatist networks and interactions
between states and industrial organization much less research efforts can
be observed in trying to assess the effects of "new
concertation" platforms on economic and social policies in OECD
countries. Though there are a number of studies in which an impact of
"social pacts" or "employment pacts" on the reform
elasticity in employment and social policy has been stated or even
confirmed, empirical evidence about the impact of "new
concertation" still is rather thin. One major problem of the
mainstream in the social pacts literature seems to be that it is often
based on case studies with a certain (implicit) verification tendency:
though there are many theoretically plausible factors which may explain an
outcome that is causally connected to concertation talks, it is
concertation that is - without further methodological justification -
being made responsible for a certain policy outcome, e.g. in wage and
employment policy. As the German but not only the German case suggests,
"effective concertation" is a demanding interaction process
between different arenas of compromise finding. So far, research on social
pacts has often focused on the organisational prerequisites of effective
concertation and on external adjustment pressure. The main thesis of this
contribution is that analyses of social pacts have often underestimated
the relevance of factors connected to the core government process: party
competition, policy legacy and the dominant problem perceptions of key
societal actors, within and outside democratic governments. As I will try
to show in a comparative case study on Germany's ineffective social pacts
between 1996 and 2002 these three variables are helpful factors for a more
"embedded" thick description and analysis of "new
concertation" arenas. Author(s): Pavle Sicherl
Crouch, C. 1993. Industrial Relations and European State Traditions.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
The paper uses the results from the special surveys undertaken in the project Households, Work and Flexibility (HWF) of the 5. FP of the EU, incorporating Sweden, Netherlands, UK, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. It attempts to form groups of flexibility that provisionally distinguish between desirable and undesirable forms of flexibility. We first grouped respondents into eight categories, combining them later into three major groups; the major criterion was employment status of the respondent, combined with some other 'objective' characteristics of flexibility. These provisional three groups are: flexibility group A (flexible workers for who the flexibility seems to be a preferred pattern of work), flexibility group B (shift and irregular work patterns, temporary jobs and others), and standard employment group C (non flexible full time employment, regular working schedule, one activity). This produces in the case of Slovenia statistically significant differences with respect to work characteristics: e.g. people in flexibility group A undertake more work activities, more hours of work per week, have a more flexible schedule, as well as a more varied type of contract and place of work. This group is more likely to have higher incomes and more household goods, including Internet and PCs. They also have more satisfaction with earnings but less with working hours. On the other hand, flexibility group B is more often disadvantaged. The three flexibility categories show significant differences in ('objective') characteristics related to work and very few significant differences in ('subjective') opinions about possible work/family conflicts or agreement on various household issues. The empirical issue will be examined comparing the eight countries in the HWF project with an interesting range of development levels and past experiences. Keywords: work flexibility, non-standard employment, candidate countries,
Trade
Union Responses to Workplace Restructuring: Exploring Union Orientations
and Actions Author(s): Paul Blyton and Nicolas Bacon This paper presents four types of trade union response to workplace
restructuring. Each type combines trade union orientations and bargaining
tactics. Four union branches are described who negotiated the recent
introduction of teamworking in the UK iron and steel industry employing
each type of strategy. Data relating to the negotiations and outcomes were
captured using a variety of methods including interviews with management
and trade union negotiators involved in each of the four negotiations,
extensive analysis of documentation and departmental performance data for
the periods before and after the introduction of teamworking (including
output, labour productivity, health and safety measures and overtime
levels), together with employee attitude responses through two large-scale
surveys undertaken before and after the change to teamworking. The
findings highlight wide variation in the outcomes of teamworking for
management and workers according to union strategy. However, no single
strategy optimises all types of outcomes suggesting the choice of union
strategies involves important trade-offs in outcomes. Overall, the
findings and conclusions to the paper contribute to the debate over the
relative merits for trade unions of pursuing a moderate and cooperative
relationship with management, or alternatively maintaining a more militant
and conflictual approach. The findings underline the limits of this
bi-polar view of union strategy and action, and thereby point the way
towards a more sophisticated understanding of effective trade union
orientation and behaviour.
WHOSE QUALITY, WHOSE FLEXIBILITY?
Author(s):
R. Hyman
Author(s): Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick
and U. Erel LOCAL BARGAINING: REPOSITIONING OF THE SOCIAL PARTNERS
Author(s): Robert MacKenzie and Miguel Martínez Lucio
Author(s): Frédéric Rey
The paper argues that any discussion of
'de-regulation' should be sensitive to the manner in which regulation was
constructed and developed in the first place. Any change can only be
understood by a mapping of the complex interrelation of spaces, spheres
and actors of regulation. The paper draws from a range of positions that
argue that power relations in a variety of regulatory spaces and amongst
actors have influenced the nature of regulation, and the manner in which
de-regulation takes place. De-regulation is not a form of 'withdrawal' and
'opening'. The act of regulatory change requires shifts and re-alignments
across a wide range of fronts. This is because regulation involves
alliances and linkages across a range of spaces and actors, contingent
upon the peculiarities and limits of different states and their respective
civil societies. This is what makes de-regulation political and contested.
In this respect, the paper draws from debates on micro-political processes
but with the aim of showing how systems of regulation are tied together on
the basis of political alliances around the pursuit of economic and social
outcomes. The paper therefore starts by attempting to conceptualise
regulation in such a manner, and demonstrating how relations and links are
key to its operation and change. This is followed by a discussion of the
functions of regulation, where we argue that any discussion of the
micro-politics of regulation must be more than simply tracing relations
between actors without reference to their purposes and functions, as
favoured by Foucauldian approaches. This leads to a discussion of the
relationships between levels of regulation in terms of the state, joint
regulation and the organisational level. However, regulation cannot be
viewed solely in terms of a strict hierarchy of levels, as there is a
multiplicity of regulatory spaces and actors whose relationships define
the pattern and efficacy of regulation. As a consequence we argue that
questions of linkages, coupling and congruence between these actors and
spaces must be at the heart of our understanding of regulatory processes,
and ultimately their change. Author(s): Susanne Pernicka
EIRO, Non-permanent employment, quality of work and industrial relations, Comparative Study, July 2002.
ILO Bureau for Workers' Activities. Trade
unions and the informal sector: towards a comprehensive strategy.
Background Paper for the International Symposium on Trade Unions and the
Informal Sector, Geneva, 18-22 October 1999. OECD Employment Outlook,
2002. Author(s): Valerie Antcliff The UK television industry has undergone a process of
rapid restructuring. Legislation to promote competition among programme
makers has transformed the industry from a bureaucratic duopoly to a
highly competitive market place. Research into the effects of
restructuring on the workforce has focused on explaining new
organisational structures and labour market practices in terms of
flexibility, highlighting the distinction between 'core' and 'peripheral'
workers. This paper suggests that the explanatory power of the
core/peripheral framework in relation to the television industry is
limited by its failure to recognise the power of a number of individuals
whose skills are in demand, but who remain outside the core labour market.
Hence the peripheral labour market is divided between those who are able
to profit from flexible employment and those who spend their time
searching for a succession of short-term contracts. Moreover, there is
interesting evidence to suggest that these new divisions in the labour
market are gendered, with men more likely than women to become
self-employed. The core/peripheral framework obscures a second source of
power in the television industry, that of the Producer. Flexible
employment has placed responsibility for recruiting workers in the hands
of individual Producers, allowing new types of discretionary decision
making to enter the recruitment process. Where recruitment decisions are
based on reputation, women are often at a disadvantage if they have
suffered past discrimination, or interrupted their careers. Hence
organisational restructuring may serve to both reinforce existing gendered
divisions in the television industry and to introduce new ones. Author(s): Zemfira Kalugina The paper
focuses on the transformations in the Russian agrarian labor market. Over
the last two decades it has passed through three periods: soviet (labor
quasi-market), intermediate ("wild capitalism") and the present
period when the preconditions for a real civilized labor market are being
formed. The hypothesis of the study is that it is just the conditions on
the labor market or quasi-market which determine the behavior of its
participants. It can be assumed that if the labor market is stable and
non-tight, the participants have strategic patterns of behavior with a
long-term motivation, but if the labor market is depressive and tight,
tactic patterns with a short-term motivation prevail. The employees pursue
survival tactics, while the employers turn to making money and to
strengthening the achieved status. In the coming period the appearance of
long-term anti-crisis strategies can be anticipated based on the
understanding of the flaws of short-term strategies and start of positive
transformation of the labor market. The analysis of the current state of
the labor market goes along the following lines: dynamics and employment
structure, length and rate of unemployment, tightness of the labor market,
qualitative makeup of the labor, vulnerable groups in the labor market.
Special attention will be paid to the situation of the youth and the women
and to informal labor relations, secondary employment, including shadowy
sector of the economy. The labor market will be regulated (and
self-regulated) by new fundamental principles relevant to the changed
forms of ownership, new areas of employment, development of the non-state
economic sector such as self-employment, secondary employment,
entrepreneurship, wage labor and unemployment. The rural labor market
behavioral patterns examined by use of cluster and regressions analysis
include: active market strategy typical of young people, inherited
strategy oriented to socialist values inherent in old-age people, and a
strategy of prudent rationality pursued by the middle-age generation. In
conclusion, the state of the rural labor market and the behavioral
strategies are evaluated from the viewpoint of transition from the central
state planning to the market regulation.