Strikes and slowdown in a theory of relational contracts

Gary-Bobo, Robert; Jaaidane, Touria

doi:10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2014.07.002

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Ashenfelter and Johnson, 1969;McConnell, 1990), union concentration (e.g., Korpi and Shalev, 1979;Lindvall, 2013), and political composition of the parliament (e.g., Hibbs, 1978;Humphries, 1990). On the other hand, the theoretical literature on bargaining has explained labor strikes in terms of irrational behavior (e.g., Bishop, 1964) or asymmetric information (e.g., Hayes, 1984;Gary-Bobo and Jaaidane, 2014;Brunnschweiler et al, 2014). To our knowledge, our paper is first in establishing a theoretically and empirically consistent link between income inequality and industrial conflict.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 86%

Inequality and conflict outbreak

Vesperoni

Yildizparlak

2019

Soc Choice Welf

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We model conflict as a multi-prize contest which takes place if a minimum number of players (which we interpret as social classes) reject the status-quo prize distribution. In the event of conflict, the status-quo prizes are reshuffled across players depending on their efforts. We first show that, for a broad family of contest models, equilibrium rent dissipation takes the form of a Generalized Gini coefficient of the prize distribution (also tackling the well-known issue of existence of an equilibrium). Secondly, we show that conflict occurs when inequality is low and deprivation (a concept that we define) is high, where these measures are computed with respect to the prize distribution. Thirdly, we find empirical evidence that supports our predictions using an unbalanced panel of 41 high and middle income countries, taking the number of labor strikes per capita as a proxy for the occurrence of conflict and measuring inequality and deprivation with respect to the income distribution.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 86%

Inequality and conflict outbreak

Vesperoni

Yildizparlak

2019

Soc Choice Welf

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“…Shirking differs from strikes and trade unionism due to its informal and covert characteristics. A more analogous case is forms of resistance such as slowdowns and work-to-rule actions aiming “to obtain improvements of working conditions and pay” (Gary-Bobo and Jaaidane 2014, 90). Slowdowns might similarly be covert and informal (Hammett, Seidman, and London 1957, 126).…”

Section: A Reality Check: Shirking As An Act Of Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, shirking seems to be a broader category, including the ways in which workers directly access certain goods—for example, more leisure through time theft or avoiding alienating tasks. Second, if slowdowns and work-to-rule actions are understood as functional equivalents of strikes (Gary-Bobo and Jaaidane 2014), it is reasonable to conceptualize them as discrete, periodic events organized around campaigns, whereas shirking is more continuous, mundane, and embedded within the organization’s everyday culture (Johnson 2011). Following from the second point, one can also say that shirking, when it is collective, requires a much less advanced level of conscious coordination as the organizational culture and social norms can go a long way in aligning workers’ beliefs and expectations about how much to work.…”

Section: A Reality Check: Shirking As An Act Of Resistancementioning

confidence: 99%

In Defense of Shirking in Capitalist Firms: Worker Resistance vs. Managerial Power

Aytac

2023

Political Theory

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Shirking, the act of avoiding the demands of one’s job, is generally seen as unethical. Drawing on empirical evidence from the sociology of work, I develop a normative conception of shirking as a form of worker resistance against illegitimate managerial power. In doing so, I present a new approach to the political theory of the firm, which is more adversarial and agent-centered than available alternatives. It is more adversarial as it recognizes the political value of counterproductive and disruptive behavior in capitalist firms. It is more agent-centered because it theorizes the firm from the perspective of workers, asking what pro tanto reasons they have to shirk. I show that shirking under the structural domination of capitalism has diagnostic, agential, and epistemic values. The paper contributes to the wider methodological ambition to tailor political theorizing to the positionality of social actors by shifting attention from the institutional design of the firm to the methods of worker resistance.

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Optimal contracting with private military and security companies

Fahn¹,

Hadjer

2015

European Journal of Political Economy

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Strikes and slowdown in a theory of relational contracts

Cited by 6 publications

References 49 publications

Inequality and conflict outbreak

Inequality and conflict outbreak

In Defense of Shirking in Capitalist Firms: Worker Resistance vs. Managerial Power

Optimal contracting with private military and security companies

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