The article examines the attitudes and strategies of a UK based employer as they developed their use of migrant labour in the latest manifestation of a strategy that targeted groups of vulnerable workers with lower labour market power. Management's celebration of the `good worker', based on the stereotyping of the perceived attributes of immigrant employees, resonated with the `business case' and `resource based view' debates within the human resource management literature.Yet terms and conditions of employment remained wedded to the bottom of the labour market. The article integrates analysis of the attitudes of employers with the views, experiences and aspirations of migrant workers. Micro level processes are also located in a wider analytical framework, incorporating the broader socio-economic context and key moments of regulatory intervention.

Abstract

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This paper assesses the record on job quality during the early term of office of the New Labour government by interpreting, from a political economy perspective, changes in a variety of subjective measures of job quality taken from several different data sources. We find some improvements in job quality over the period 1998-2004; however we argue that these improvements have arisen not because of New Labour's policies towards the workplace but because of low and falling rates of unemployment. Despite recent improvements, a large number of workers in Britain remain in low quality jobs and, without a radical change of policy direction, sustained and substantial progress in the quality of work will remain elusive.

Recent years have witnessed increased research on the role of workplace partnership in promoting positive employment relations. However, there has been little quantitative analysis of the partnership experiences of employees. This paper examines how the kinds of attributions employees make regarding indirect (union-based) and direct (non-union-based) employee participation in workplace partnership might influence the process of mutual gains. It uses employee outcomes to reflect partnership gains for all stakeholders involved (i.e., employees, employers and trade unions). The paper contributes to existing knowledge on workplace partnership by examining the potential role of the employment relations climate as an enabling mechanism for the process of mutual gains. The findings suggest mutual gains for all stakeholders are varied and mediated through the employment relations climate