New Trends in Employment Practices

A terse, well-written, up-to-date, and refreshing account of recent developments in employment practices across a sample of seven industrialized nations, including the Soviet Union, by an established scholar of comparative systems. The trends discussed are industrial democracy at enterprise and establishment level, quality of working life, job tenure and security of employment, personnel policy, and working time arrangements. . . . The book provides a useful and accessible introduction to a number of important themes in the management and maintenance of human resources. . . . Highly recommended. . . . Choice In recent years, fundamental economic forces have profoundly affected the labor markets of the industrialized nations. Among these forces are: the mass entrance of women into the labor market and major changes in work patterns designed to accomodate them; industrial restructuring due to the decline in manufacturing and the concomitant rise in service industries and advanced technologies; the shift in workers' objectives toward job security, improved quality of working life, and more adequate provision for post-retirement years; and, finally, employee demand for industrial democracy or increased participation in making business decisions, which has led to the implementation of economically viable participatory schemes. The policy innovations and experiments effected during the past two decades in response to these labor market developments are the subject of New Trends in Employment Practices. In addition to the United States, the author considers four major industrial nations of the democratic world, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan. Walter Galenson also looks at Sweden, a country long noted for its imaginative labor programs, and the Soviet Union, a nation where recent events have graphically illustrated the strength of the demand for greater democracy at the enterprise and political levels. The book begins with a discussion of the promotion of industrial democracy at the enterprise level, citing a State of Washington program in which the unemployed receive seed money to start small businesses instead of being sent unemployment benefits. Galenson also details British experience with this same scheme. In Industrial Democracy at the Shop Floor Level, employee representation on corporate boards and employee ownership of companies, increasingly common phenomena in the United States, are investigated along with the relevant experience under German codetermination. Chapter Three is devoted to the movement for an improved Quality of Working Life (QWL), which is based largely on Japanese and Swedish models and has many adherents in the United States and Canada. Chapter four illustrates programs that take into account increased desire for job security, and specifically the Japanese system of lifetime employment guarantees. Preserving jobs and finding new ones when layoffs do occur, and Sweden's two-decade, near-zero unemployment due to its active labor market policy, are reviewed next. Chapter Six's focus is on the altered patterns of work time and Chapter Seven describes how various aspects of Soviet employment were handled in the past and explains the impact of Gorbachev's reforms. A final chapter offers a summary and conclusions. This cogent treatment of labor market practices will be of vital interest to corporate labor administrators who are or will be engaged in collective bargaining over the subjects treated in these pages. The book is ideal for courses in labor economics, comparative labor institutions, and internationally oriented courses in business schools.