Labor Relations Commons^™

2011-12-05 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for December 5, 2011.

Is There Deadweight Loss In Holiday Rewards?, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

An interesting and provocative study was conducted by Joel Waldfogel of the University of Minnesota some 20 years ago. He wrote "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas." Waldfogel was not only discussing Christmas but noted that the ideas could apply to other holidays with gift-giving rituals. The study noted that although gift giving is generally applauded by economists since it is a way to help the macro economy, there is another side to the story. A problem with gift giving (or non-monetary rewards) is that the gift giver often does not perfectly know the preferences of the person receiving the gift. …

2011-11-07 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for November 7, 2011.

Pay System Gender Neutrality, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

It was Francine Blau's "Equal Pay in the Office" (1977) that laid out some of the seminal research on gender differences in labor market outcomes. Blau and other pioneering researchers established decades ago that the gender pay gap (then around 40%) could not be ignored by academic economists. Many organizations are concerned with whether their individual pay systems are gender neutral, but it is not easy to test robustly a pay system's gender neutrality. To build such a test requires consideration of several issues, including control variables, occupational patterns, statistical specifications, and the often-overlooked difference between wage and salary income …

2011-10-03 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for October 3, 2011.

Does More Education Cause Higher Earnings?, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

College graduates earned roughly 67% more per hour than high school graduates in the US in 2010. Those with more education earn more because the world of work measures in some manner that they are simply more productive in dollars and cents terms. Some signaling theory advocates argue that if the return to education were due to learning, then the returns should be smoothly proportional to the time spent in school. However, researchers have detected a larger jump in earnings for those who complete the final year of college. Whether different schools return differently is an extension of the learning …

2011-09-12 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for September 12, 2011.

Cutler-Hammer, Inc. (Sc 2468), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 2468. Correspondence and miscellaneous items related to the "Cutler-Hammer News," an employee newsletter of the Cutler-Hammer Bowling Green plant. Includes a list of potential newsletter topics as well as a list of "Corner Talk" articles written by the plant manager.

2011-08-01 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for August 1, 2011.

2011-07-11 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for July 11, 2011.

Linking Compensation And Job Losses During A Recession, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

For more than 60 years, no permanent Lincoln Electric employee has been laid off for lack of work. 2010 marked the 10th consecutive year year that the company increased its dividend and stock price gains have fairly consistently outperformed the S&P 500 during the past five years. For most organizations, when costs need to be cut, shedding some workers is part of the solution. Work Sharing Unemployment Insurance tries to mitigate the negative repercussions of layoffs. Under WSUI, workers are eligible for a prorated fraction of unemployment insurance benefits. Proponents of WSUI contend that hiring, firing, and retraining costs are …

2011-06-06 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for June 6, 2011.

Does That Pay Practice Really Have Any Impact?, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Few organizations take the time to credibly study whether some pay, benefits, work-life balance or other total rewards practices have any impact on the organizations' bottom line or employee outcomes like productivity or turnover. It's too difficult to do well, organizations don't actually want to know the answer, and/or organizations don't have the know-how or time. One successfully executed, evidence-based study of a new compensation practice is Safelite AutoGlass. Edward Lazear compared the productivity change worker by worker, for only those employees present under both pay arrangements. Lazear found that not only did productivity increase after the change from hourly …

2011-05-02 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for May 2, 2011

Pay Ratios And Pay Inequality, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Some argue that reporting the ratio of CEO pay to that of the median-compensated worker in the organization is useful since it highlights the sometimes large discrepancy between the pay of an average worker and that of corporate executives. One argument against reporting the ratio of CEO pay to median worker pay is that this is much more difficult to calculate in practice than in theory. The hourly earnings of workers at the bottom have been incredibly flat for the last generation. Only the top 5% have seen large gains over time. For CEOs, the gains are substantial. the multiple …

Who Should Talk? What Counts As Employee Voice And Who Stands To Gain, Aditi Bagchi

All Faculty Scholarship

This symposium piece responds to an article by Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt titled "Promoting Employee Voice in the American Economy: A Call for Comprehensive Reform." Professor Schmidt argues in favor of increasing employee voice in corporate governance. In this reply, Professor Bagchi distinguishes between "hard voice," "soft voice" and information rights as three variants of employee voice. She casts doubt on the material benefits from Professor Dau-Schmidt's proposals, which focus on hard and soft voice, to either employees or corporate stakeholders more broadly. The present focus of corporate governance on the relationship between shareholders and managers, to the exclusion of employees, …

2011-04-04 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for April 4, 2011.

Unfinished Business: Building Equality For Women In The Construction Trades, Susan Moir, Meryl Thomson, Christa Kelleher

Labor Resource Center Publications

This review and analysis of over one hundred and twenty published and unpublished sources on the unfinished business of increasing women’s participation in the construction workforce over the past thirty-plus years aims to:

• Provide a definitive assessment of the consistency of evidence on the daunting challenges facing women who seek to enter and advance in the construction workplace and
• Examine the failure of a critical social policy intended to address occupational segregation and ensure access to high-paying jobs to women.

Using the wide array of available sources, this report provides a historical overview of policy efforts to integrate women into …

2011-03-07 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for March 7, 2011.

Motivating With Efficiency Wages And Delayed Payments, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

In the delayed payment system, companies motivate workers to work hard year after year by paying them less than the value they create for the company early in the workers' tenure and more than the value they create for the company later in the workers' tenure. With efficiency wages, workers are essentially paid a wage that is higher than the next-best offer they could get. A paper by Alan Krueger found that at company-owned fast food restaurants, employee compensation is higher and the delayed payment profile is steeper than at franchised outlets. In a recent paper, Matthew Freedman and Renata …

2011-02-07 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for February 2, 2011.

2011-01-03 Meeting Minutes, Morehead State University. Staff Congress.

Staff Congress Records

Staff Congress meeting minutes for January 3, 2011.

Finding The Right Fit: How Alternative Staffing Affects Worker Outcomes, Françoise Carré, Brandynn Holgate, Helen Levine

Center for Social Policy Publications

This report reviews our findings from two and one-half years of monitoring and evaluating the activities of four alternative staffing organizations (ASOs). ASOs are worker-centered, socialpurpose businesses created by community-based organizations and national nonprofits. These fee-for-service organizations use the model of temporary staffing services to help job seekers who face labor market barriers access work experience and potential employers. They place job seekers in temporary and “temp-to-perm” assignments with customer businesses, charging their customers a wage-based markup fee. This field of practice first emerged in the 1970s and grew rapidly in the 1990s; it now includes over 50 ASOs. Alternative …

The Truth About "Right To Work" Laws, Bureau Of Labor Education. University Of Maine

Bureau of Labor Education

There are many misconceptions about “right-to-work” laws. This sounds like it would be a plus for working people. However, this term is misleading, and a distortion of the reality underlying it. Despite its name, right-to-work laws do not guarantee anyone a job, protect against unfair firing, guarantee equitable wages, or decent working conditions. By undermining unions and the ability of labor and management to bargain freely, right-to-work laws weaken the best job security protection workers have -- the union contract. Maine has rejected such a law a number of times in the past, including a 1948 referendum in which state …

Do Work Benefits Affect Employee Morale?, Angela Franklin

A with Honors Projects

Survey of how Schnucks employees feel about their work benefits and research paper as to whether this affects their morale.

Do Major League Baseball Hitters Come Up Big In Their Contract Year?, Heather M. O'Neill, Matthew J. Hummel

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

In sports, especially baseball, there is a lot of talk about contract year performance. Beginning in spring training and continuing throughout the season, sports journalists and fans converse about how players in the last year of their contract will perform. Experts in the media, often ex-baseball players themselves, speculate contract year players will have break-out seasons in order to secure a better contract in upcoming contract negotiations. This leads to the question: do baseball players increase their effort and performance during their contract year to increase the value of their next contract?

The Disconnect Between Employer Costs And Employee Value, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

There is a tremendous disconnect between the cost of compensation to employers and the value employees place on that compensation. Companies pay a lot more for workers than workers see in their paychecks. The average worker in the US costs his/her employee $29.52 per hour. But only $20.50 of that appeared in the worker's paycheck as wage and salary. The other $8.96 is attributable to other employer costs that employees do not immediately see. Of the $8.96, $2.04 is for paid leave, $0.71 is for supplemental pay, $2.60 is for insurance, $1.31 is for retirement savings, and $2.30 is for …

The Important Role Of Change Management In Environment Management System Implementation, Mary Eileen Graham, S Ronnenberg, F Mahmoodi

Falk College Research Center

No abstract provided.

Italian Militants And Migrants And The Language Of Solidarity In The Early- Twentieth-Century Western Coalfields, Stephen Brier, Ferdinando Fasce

Publications and Research

This article uses the life and experiences of an Italian immigrant and labor militant, Carlo Demolli, to examine a range of issues, including: the intersection of ethnic and national identity and labor militancy and solidarity in the organizing efforts of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) among the ethnically diverse workforce of coal miners in the American West at the turn of the 20th century; the role of a "language of solidarity" as expressed in an Italian language version of the UMW Journal, Il Lavoratore Italiano, in sustaining a militant Italian immigrant workforce in the coal mines; and the …

A Moral Contractual Approach To Labor Law Reform: A Template For Using Ethical Principles To Regulate Behavior Where Law Failed To Do So Effectively, Zev J. Eigen, David S. Sherwyn

Faculty Working Papers

If laws cease to work as they should or as intended, legislators and scholars propose new laws to replace or amend them. This paper posits an alternative—offering regulated parties the opportunity to contractually bind themselves to behave ethically. The perfect test-case for this proposal is labor law, because (1) labor law has not been amended for decades, (2) proposals to amend it have failed for political reasons, and are focused on union election win rates, and less on the election process itself, (3) it is an area of law already statutorily regulating parties' reciprocal contractual obligations, and (4) moral means …