ContentsAcknowledgements iv List of tables vi List of figures vii Reporting conventions viii

Over the last two decades, there has been a switch in British workplaces away from union voice and representative worker voice more generally toward direct employee involvement and nonunion representative forms of voice. This article assesses the implications of this switch for the effectiveness of worker voice, as measured by employee perceptions of managerial responsiveness. In general, perceptions of managerial responsiveness are better among employees with nonunion voice than they are among employees with union voice.

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We investigate the effect of union membership on job satisfaction. Whilst it is common to study the effects of union status on satisfaction treating individual membership as given, in this paper, we account for the endogenous selection induced by the sorting of workers into unionised jobs. Using linked employer-employee data from the 1998 British Workplace Employee Relations Survey, we address the question of how the membership decision is related to overall job satisfaction and to satisfaction with pay. Once the endogeneity of membership is accounted for, the marked difference in job satisfaction between unionised and non-unionised workers characterising raw data disappears, indicating that a selection effect, rather than a causal effect, explains the relationship.JEL classification: J28, J51

Debates about Britain's productivity performance have often drawn attention to the roles played by working practices and employment relations. In the 1980s and 1990s, trade unions were a prime focus; more recently, attention has turned to high-involvement management (HIM) practices (also referred to as 'high-performance work systems'). We combine the two to investigate the relationships between work organisation, trade union representation and workplace performance. We find that HIM has a positive impact on labour productivity. However, this effect is restricted to unionised workplaces, and seems more readily explained by concessionary wage bargaining than 'mutual gains', given the absence of any association with financial performance. These findings raise questions about the universal applicability of HIM as a route to improved workplace performance. Copyright (c) Scottish Economic Society 2005.

The Covid-19 pandemic has induced worldwide natural experiments on the effects of crowds. We exploit one of these experiments that took place over several countries in almost identical settings: professional football matches played behind closed doors within the 2019/20 league seasons. We find large and statistically significant effects on the number of yellow cards issued by referees. Without a crowd, fewer cards were awarded to the away teams, reducing home advantage. These results have implications for the influence of social pressure and crowds on the neutrality of decisions.

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This paper uses linked employer-employee data to investigate the relationship between employees' subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. The analyses show a clear, positive and statistically-significant relationship between the average level of job satisfaction at the workplace and workplace performance. The relationship is present in both cross-sectional and panel analyses and is robust to various estimation methods and model specifications. In contrast, we find no association between levels of job-related affect and workplace performance. Ours is the first study of its kind for Britain to use nationallyrepresentative data and it provides novel findings regarding the importance of worker job satisfaction in explaining workplace performance. The findings suggest that there is a prima facie case for employers to maintain and raise levels of job satisfaction among their employees. They also indicate that initiatives to raise aggregate job satisfaction should feature in policy discussions around how to improve levels of productivity and growth.