Employment Relations Strategy
Employment relations strategy includes research on:
Employee voice, skills and high-performance works systems
Employee board participation effects on pay policies and CEO remuneration
Indicators of HR practices for the financial market
Representation strategies of precarious workers
Wage setting in the Eurozone
Responses to the national living wage in SMEs
Professionals’ voice and outsourcing.
Projects include:
- Manuela Galetto, Barbara Bechter (Durham) and colleagues across Europe, examined the role of social partners in health and safety policies in the hospital and care sector in Europe. The full report of the project - Health Risk Outlooks by Social Partners (HEROS) A multi-level analysis of health and safety policy interventions by social partners to identify effective ways to ensure better protection of employees at work- financed by the European Commission can be found here:
- Umar Boodoo considered the influence of unions on corporate social responsibility.
- Manuela Galetto, Deborah Dean, Melanie Simms (Glasgow) and Duncan Adam (Manchester Metropolitan) conducted research with Acas staff, employer organisations, trade unions and academics and produced a report for Acas on continuity and change in workplace conflict.
- Financial markets and HR: Achim Krausert, with Clint Chadwick at the University of Kansas as well as researchers from the CIPD, started a project examining whether, to what extent and how investors take into account HR-related information in evaluating companies – which has implications for companies’ incentives to make longer term investments in people.
- HR and leveraged buyouts: Kim Hoque, with Nick Bacon, Cass, and Mike Wright, Imperial, has conducted research involving matching Centre for Management Buyout Research data into WERS 2011 to explore the impact of leveraged buyouts on job security, training, communication and consultation and broader industrial relations outcomes.
- Representation strategies of precarious workers: a British Academy-funded project, led by Guglielmo Meardi and involving Duncan Adam at Warwick, Melanie Simms at Leicester as well as research partners abroad, compared the representation patterns of the groups that suffered most during the economic crisis of 2008-09 in the UK, Germany and Italy. Despite the different industrial relations structures and economic conditions, in all three countries, trade union forms of representation emerged as more popular than new organisations or social movements.