October 2005 (No. 9)
Editor: Terence K. Huwe
Contributors: Elizabeth del Rocío Camacho, Janice Kimball


IIR News & Events
IIR All Staff Breakfast: Wednesday, October 12, 2005
Faculty Research Focus: Margaret Weir’s MacArthur Research
New Minimum Wage Research and Reports on the IIR Web
Former IIR Director Jim Lincoln Named Associated Dean at Haas
Visiting Scholar Tsuyoshi Tsuru Invites IIR Affiliates to Economics 190
IIR Seminar Series: Fall 2005
Labor and Education Fund Grant Awards: Katie Quan and Arin Dube
Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society: New Issue Just Published
IIR Graduate Student Researchers, Fall 2005
Top 2004-2005 IIR Working Papers by Downloads

IIR Unit News
Labor Center News
CPER News
IIR Library
Labor Project for Working Families
Center for the Study of Child Care Employment News

Campus Events
Center for Latin American Studies
Center for Latino Policy Research
Economics Department: Colloquia and Seminars
Haas School of Business: OBIR and Sponsored Conferences
Sociology Department



IIR NEWS & EVENTS


IIR All Staff Breakfast: Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Mark your calendars for the first all-community event of the fall. Faculty, staff, students and student employees are all invited to the IIR All Staff Breakfast, from 9:30 to 11:30 on October 12. This event will be a chance to get to know new faces and socialize–without a meeting agenda. RSVP to Myra Armstrong, zulu2@calmail.berkeley.edu.



Margaret Weir’s “Building Successful Regions” Project: A Multi-Disciplinary Study of “Resilient” Regions

Margaret Weir has been leading a large-scale working group that is studying how metropolitan regions become resilient. “Building Successful Regions”, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, has created a cross-disciplinary network of scholars, who are exploring the following questions: What makes American metropolitan areas resilient in the face of major economic and demographic challenges? What political processes and institutions at the local, state, and federal levels help create policies that can address region-wide issues? Among the challenges they are examining are rapid economic growth, large scale immigration, deconcentration of urban poverty, and long-term economic decline. Each of these shifts produces benefits as well as strains. For example, rapid economic growth creates new pressures on traffic, the environment, housing and infrastructure; prolonged economic decline typically accompanied by lower tax revenues, job losses, and a decline in the number of skilled workers. How can regions respond to shocks in ways that open new opportunities for growth and inclusion?

The 18-month initial phase of the work, which began in spring 2005, is surveying the academic and policy literature to assess what we already know about regional resilience. The network is meeting bi-monthly as it sets in agenda, inviting additional scholars and practitioners to share their perspectives with the group. This initial work will set the stage for proposing a second phase of primary empirical research.

The research team members come from a range of fields -- including economics, planning, sociology, and political science. Participating institutions include UC Santa Cruz, Harvard University, Cornell University, the Brookings Institution, State University of New York at Buffalo, and Cleveland State University.



New Minimum Wage Research and Reports on the IIR Web

The IIR Web has a newly updated resource for minimum research, with an important new IIR policy brief available for downloading. The policy brief is titled, “Minimum Wages and the California Economy.” The URL for this resource page is:

http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/research/minimumwage.html


Former IIR Director Jim Lincoln Named Associate Dean as the Haas School

Former IIR Director James R. Lincoln has been named Deputy Associate Dean for Academic Affairs this Fall. Starting in January 2006 he will be Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Faculty Chair at Haas for a 1.5 year term.

Jim has also had a busy research and lecture schedule recently. Last year he gave talks at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Yonsei University in South Korea, and Beijing University. I also gave a paper at a conference on corporate governance in Shanghai in July.

From mid-May through Mid-July of this summer, Jim was a visiting professor at Doshisha University. While there he conducted at Toyota and Toyota electronics supplier Denso. This was part of his general research program on business networks in Japan and how they are changing. Jim has followed Toyota's relationship with Denso over time, and has studied how the relationship was strained by: (a) Toyota's effort to produce its own electronics; and (b) Denso's success in selling to Toyota's competition. The interviews specifically concerned the collaboration between Denso and Toyota in developing and producing the Prius Hybrid automobile. Denso had been excluded from the 1st generation Prius but had a big role in the 2nd generation Prius. The 2nd generation Prius is a much better car than the first generation model, in part because Denso is better at automotive electronics than Toyota.



Visiting Scholar Tsuyoshi Tsuru Invites IIR Affiliates to Economics 190

Tsuru-San teaches Economics 190 every Wednesday afternoon at the IIR Director's room. He I will invite HR practitioners from Japan as well as IIR colleagues to participate in this lecture series. Tsuru-San welcomes interested IIR researchers and staff to attend:

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/webfac/tsuru/e190_f05/index.shtml

9/28 Wed 3:40-5 pm Case Presentation by Maki Sato, HR dept staff of Advantest Corporation (Japanese high-end manufacturer of test systems of semiconductor)
"Business Strategy and Personnel/ HR systems of Advantest"

10/5 Wed 2-3:30 pm Guest lecture: "Recent changes in the U.S. personnel/HR system ," by Prof. Clair Brown, UC Berkeley

10/19 Wed 2-3:30 pm Guest lecture: "Recent changes in the U.S. employee participation and representation ," by Prof. David Levine, UC Berkeley

10/26 Wed 3:40-5 pm Case Presentation by Yoshihiko Masuda, President & CEO of Fujitsu Computer Products of America, Inc.

11/16 Wed 2-3:30 pm Guest lecture: "Recent trends in Japanese firm organization : Keiretsu networks," by Prof. James Lincoln, UC Berkeley



IIR Seminar Series: Fall 2005

Some final details are still forthcoming, but the IIR Seminar Series will be posted on the IIR Web soon. The following information gives a preview of who is speaking, and what their topics will be.

SEPTEMBER 26, 2005
IMPLICATIONS OF THE NEW MODEL OF EMPLOYER ASCENDANCY
Daniel Mitchell
Ho-su Wu Professor, Andersen Graduate School of Management, U.C.L.A.

Daniel J.B. Mitchell, chaired the Department of Policy Studies (now the Department of Public Policy) during 1996-97. Prof. Mitchell was formerly director of the U.C.L.A. Institute of Industrial Relations (1979-90) and continues to serve on the Institute's advisory committee. During Phase II of the federal wage/price controls program of the early 1970s, Prof. Mitchell was chief economist of the Pay Board, the agency that administered wage controls. He was twice associated with the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., including a stint as a senior fellow in the economic studies program (1978-79), and participated in several Brookings-sponsored research projects.

Prof. Mitchell is the author of Pensions, Politics, and the Elderly: Historic Social Movements and Their Lessons for Our Aging Society (M.E. Sharpe, 2000). The book uses California's colorful experience with "pensionite" movements of the state's seniors during the period from the 1920s through the 1940s to draw implications for the upcoming retirement of the baby boom".

OCTOBER 10, 2005
“PHYSICAL” SPACE, “DIGITAL” SPACE: A NEW VISION FOR THE INSTITUTE OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS LIBRARY
Terence K. Huwe
Director of Library and Information Resources, IIR

IIR Librarian Terry Huwe discusses current plans to reconfigure the IIR Library in the context of systemwide goals and priorities that are underway within the University of California Libraries. These include the University’s commitment to the Open Access movement; responding to the crisis in scholarly communications; print and digital collection strategies that extend the UC Libraries reach; and the growing importance of dim and dark archives. From this context, he will describe the Library’s plans for an Electronic Commons and other community-enhancing features, which will improve access to digital resources while retaining the core print collections. He concludes with some forecasts about the roles libraries may play within research universities, and how the IIR Library can advance the Institutes overall objectives as a print-plus-digital library.

OCTOBER 17, 2005
TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED
Manuel Pastor
Director of the Center for Justice, Tolerance, and Community, at the University of
California, Santa



OCTOBER 24, 2005
TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED
Rucker Johnson

OCTOBER 31, 2005
THE DISSIPATION OF MINIMUM WAGE GAINS FOR WORKERS THROUGH LABOR SUBSTITUTION
David Fairris
Professor of Economics and Associate Dean of Student Academic Affairs, College of
Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, U.C. Riverside

NOVEMBER 7,2005
OFFSHORING INTERFACES & INCENTIVES: The Case of Automotive Product
Development
Sue Helper
Professor of Economics, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio

NOVEMBER 14, 2005
OFFSHORING: OUTLOOK AND IMPLICATIONS
Ashok Bardhan & Cynthia Kroll
Senior Researcher, Haas School of Business; Senior Regional Economist, Haas School
of Business

NOVEMBER 14, 2005
PROMISING FUTURES?: WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT & MODES OF REGIONAL GOVERNANCE
Karen Chapple
Visiting Assistant Professor, City & Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania

DECEMBER 5, 2005
TOPIC TO BE ANNOUNCED
Alexandre Mas



Labor and Education Fund Awards: Katie Quan and Arin Dube

The following two sponsored projects were not listed in the September eNews issue, which covered recent UC Labor and Education Fund grant awards.

Katie Quan
“Documenting the Effects of the Phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Agreement”
Summary:
This award is to fund part of a larger project that CLRE is conducting to document the impacts of the end of the Multi-Fiber Agreement, a system of global textile quotas lifted on January 1, 2005. They will be documenting these effects by carrying out surveys among 600 garment workers in Los Angeles, China and El Salvador over a 2 year period. The intent is to provide stakeholders such as workers, unions, businesses and government with information necessary to understand the economic and social consequences of the MFA termination and to generate policy solutions.

Arin Dube
“The Dynamics of Job-Quality Transformation: Health Benefits in the Unionized Grocery Sector of California”
Summary:
This study will analyze how the restructuring of health benefits and compensation among unionized grocery workers in California in 2004 and 2005 affected employee turnover, workforce demographics, and health care coverage and utilization in the industry. The changes that Dube will be studying are critical to understanding the evolution of labor relations in the state. Health care coverage and costs have been a central issue in labor relations conflict in the state and the country as a whole over the past five years. This case study will provide a unique window into understanding how large-scale changes in the structure of compensation affect the workforce and health insurance outcomes for modest wage earners.



Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society: New Issue Just Published

Volume 44, Issue 3 (October 2005) has just been published. Titles, authors and abstracts follow below. IIR’s top-ranked journal is accessible electronically via the University Library’s Web site, which provides access to the Blackwell Synergy database.

Not Yet Dead at the Fed: Unions, Worker Bargaining, and Economy-wide Wage Determination
Volume 44 Issue 4 Page 565 - October 2005
DANIEL J. B. MITCHELL and CHRISTOPHER L. ERICKSON
Transcripts of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the Federal Reserve and related documents provide new insights into how macro-policy makers characterized the labor market. Over the period of the 1980s and the 1990s, the Federal Reserve seemingly overemphasized the significance of union settlements, characterizing them in wage-push terms out of proportion to declining union density. Fed policy makers expressed surprise that the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) dropped during this period and offered various ad hoc explanations to explain the drop. The underlying common element of these explanations is that they were based on a rhetorical bargaining framework, explicit or implicit, that workers bargain as active agents for wages. Along with ongoing direct discussion of union settlements, this tendency suggests a view of worker bargaining power that seems at variance with union decline and the reality of an increasingly nonunion labor market. While worker bargaining models can be reconciled in a formal sense with various theories of nonunion wage determination, the ability of such models to realistically explain the macro outcomes that puzzled and challenged policy makers can be questioned.


Trade Union Decline and Union Wage Effects in Australia
Volume 44 Issue 4 Page 607 - October 2005
C. JEFFREY WADDOUPS
Union density in Australia fell precipitously in the 1990s. This study investigates how union wage effects may have changed as a result. The findings from 1993 data suggest that union/nonunion wage differentials were very small, especially among workers in high-density industries. By 2001 the overall union wage effect had increased significantly; however, the union/nonunion wage differential was no longer correlated with union density at the industry level.


Unions and the Duration of Workers' Compensation Claims
Volume 44 Issue 4 Page 625 - October 2005
MICHELE CAMPOLIETI
This paper examines the effect of union status on workers' compensation claim duration in Canada. I find that unionized workers have shorter claims than nonunionized workers and that relatively little of this difference can be attributed to differences in worker or job characteristics. I interpret this as being consistent with a strong union effect that reduces union member's claim duration. Plausible explanations for this finding and directions for future research are also discussed.


Changing Administrative Practices in American Unions: A Research Note
Volume 44 Issue 4 Page 654 - October 2005
PAUL F. CLARK and LOIS S. GRAY
This note presents findings from the first longitudinal study of the administrative practices of American unions. Our surveys, conducted in 1990 and 2000, gathered information on the hiring, human resource, and financial/strategic planning practices of U.S.-based national and international unions. The results indicate that American unions are changing their criteria for hiring staff and moving toward more formal human resource policies and systematic financial and strategic planning practices.


Opening the Black Box: The Internal Labor Markets of Company X
Volume 44 Issue 4 Page 659 - October 2005
MING-JEN LIN
This paper sets out to analyze an internal data set on a Taiwanese auto dealer employing three distinct types of workers. The effects of jobs and levels are positive on both the salary and bonus equations, albeit smaller under a fixed effects than under OLS; however, when factoring in individual fixed effects, the reductions in the bonus equations are greater than those in the salary equations. With changing economic conditions, any consequent variations are greater in bonuses than in salaries, with the most extreme variations being felt by higher ranking employees than lower-level workers. Promotion premiums between levels are smaller than the average differences in pay, and although wage variations do exist within and between levels, the greater effect is on bonuses rather than salaries. The variations in both salaries and bonuses, defined by the coeffficient variations, are also greater in those years when demand is high, as opposed to years of low demand. Entry and exit behavior is observed at all levels, although it is more likely to occur among the lower levels of the hierarchy. Finally, we present strong evidence in support of the cohort effect. Overall, our findings confirm the prevalence of internal labor market (ILM) theories.


International Framework Agreements: A New Model for Securing Workers Rights?
Volume 44 Issue 4 Page 707 - October 2005
LONE RIISGAARD
A rapidly growing number of international unions are signing international framework agreements with multinational enterprises (MNEs), securing their commitment to respect fundamental workers' rights. This article explores the agreement between the global banana giant Chiquita and the Latin-American Coordination of Banana Workers Unions (COLSIBA) signed in 2001. The study shows how the banana unions employed innovative tactics of regional coordination and of alliances with nongovernmental organizations in the major consumer markets. Fieldwork on the implementation of the agreement further reveals an overall poor use of the agreement potential but also how the agreement was used as leverage for local organizing activities. This article argues that such international agreements show a promising way to defend and advance workers rights within MNEs, creating space for union organizing, collective bargaining, and social dialogue.


Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society
Recent Publications
Internet Resources
Volume 44 Issue 4 Page 740 - October 2005
Selected by the Institute of Industrial Relations Library University of California, Berkeley
TERENCE K. HUWE, JANICE KIMBALL



IIR Graduate Student Researchers, Fall 2005

The following students are working as Graduate Student Researchers, and being supported by IIR during Fall 2005. Their faculty sponsors or supervisors are also listed. Welcome to all!

Samuel Handlin (Ruth Collier, Political Science)
Sasha Hauswald (Arin Dube, IIR)
Naomi Hsu (Irene Bloemraad, Sociology)
Sara Levine (Veronica Carrizales, The Labor Center)
Benjamin Lum (Veronica Carrizales, The Labor Center)
Jason Meggs (Arin Dube, IIR)
Beth Pohlman (Carol Zabin, The Labor Center)
Jodi Short (Neil Fligstein, Sociology)
Jessica Sondheimer (Carol Vendrillo, CPER)
Manuel Vallee (Neil Fligstein, Sociology)
Gina Vickery (Michael Reich, Economics)
Zongshi Chen (Katie Quan, The Labor Center)
Cynthia Czerwin (Raahi Reddy, The Labor Center)
Lingyun Nie (David I. Levine, Haas School of Business)
Ryan Rideau (Steven Pitts, The Labor Center)
Jane Rongerud, (Margaret Weir, Sociology)
Teresa Sharpe (Micahel Reich, Economics)
Margaret Salazar (Katie Quan, The Labor Center)
Claudia Sitgraves (Rucker Johnson, Goldman School of Public Policy)
Lanwei Yang (Lloyd Ulman, Economics)



IIR Working Papers: The Top 20 from 2004-2005 by Number of Downloads

The IIR Working Paper Series received a total of 23.383 downloads from the eScholarship Repository (http://repositories.cdlib.org/iir). Here are the top 20 papers within the series by number of downloads, for the 2004-2005 academic year.

Recent Authors, Please Note: if your latest papers were added in the few months just past, they do not have a twelve month history of downloads yet, even though traffic may be steady.

Prospective IIR Faculty Authors: To submit a paper, contact Terry Huwe.


Top 20 Papers by Download, 2004-2005
George Strauss
The Future of Human Resources Management: 1099

Jonathan S. Leonard and David I. Levine
Diversity, Discrimination, and Performance: 722

Christina L. Ahmadjian and James R. Lincoln
Keiretsu, Governance, and Learning: Case Studies in Change from the Japanese Automotice Industry: 715

Charlan Nemeth and Jack Goncalo
Influence and Persuasion in Small Groups: 688

Barry Eichengreen
Unemployment in Interwar Britain: 572

Ximing Wu, Jeffrey M. Perloff, and Amos Golan
Effects of Government Policies on Income Distribution and Welfare: 564

James R. Lincoln and Christina Ahmadjian
Shukko (Employee Transfers) and Tacit Knowledge Exchange in Japanese Supply Networks: The Electronic Industry Case: 556

Jeffrey A. Alexander, Joan R. Bloom, and Beverly A. Nuchols
Nursing Turnover and Hospital Efficiency: An Organizational Level Analysis

Clair Brown, Michael Reich, and David Stern
Becoming a High-Performance Work Organization: The Role of Security, Employee Involvement, and Training: 532

George Strauss
HRM in the USA: 488

Lloyd Ulman and Knut Gerlach
An Essay on Collective Bargaining and Unemployment in Germany: 468

James R. Lincoln and Didier Guillot
Durkheim and Organizational Culture: 468

Joan R. Bloom, Jeffrey A. Alexander, and Beverly A. Nuchols
Staffing Patterns and Hospital Efficiency: 407

Charlan Jeanne Nemeth, Marie Personnaz, Bernard Personnaz, and Jack A. Goncalo
The Liberating Role of Conflict in Group Creativity: A Cross Cultural Study: 404

Kathy Baylis and Jeffrey M. Perloff
Price Dispersion on the Internet: Good Firms and Bad Firms: 279

Barry Eichengreen and Tim Hatton
Interwar Unemployment in International Perspective: 276

Michael Kevane and David I. Levine
The Changing Status of Daughters in Indonesia: 252

Barry Eichengreen
Unemployment and Underemployment in Historical Perspective: Introduction: 333

Amos Golan, Larry S. Karp, and Jeffrey M. Perloff
Estimating a Mixed Strategy: United and American Airlines: 314

Trond Petersen and Thea Togstad
Getting the Offer: Sex Discrimination in Hiring: 313