Suchergebnisse

The adverse employment effects that attach to disability are empirically well established. They are large and persistent. This is a conceptual article that investigates the source of this deep and enduring employment disadvantage. Debate begins by examining the origins of ideas that have shaped approaches to work study and have influenced concepts of what constitutes an ideal worker. Drawing on feminist critiques of organisational analysis that have highlighted the gendered character of processes, practices and values, it explores the relatively neglected position of disabled employees. With reference to transcripts from four Employment Appeal Tribunals brought under the Disability Discrimination Act, it illustrates how standard jobs, designed around ideal (non-disabled) employees, create a mismatch between a formal job description and someone with an impairment. We suggest this mismatch is central to the organisation's resistance to implementing adjustments and also to any radical approaches to include impaired employees in the workplace.

This article explores whether there is merit in a lesbian educator being 'out' in the classroom or whether her orientation should be invisible. Only part of what we teach is our content; the other part involves acting as role models and giving students more effective tools to interact in a diverse world; as such the question of 'out' or not begs an answer. This article is a conversation between two lesbians teaching at a rural northern college in Alberta, Canada, discussing whether to be 'out' or not in the classroom.

This article analyses relations between trade unions and the elected regional government in Wales as a hybrid form of `new social partnership' to manage change, using the case study of public service reform. Welsh unions have been able to achieve both improved consultative status and some bargaining aims, partly due to a stronger confluence of formal and informal political linkages than is evident on the wider national scene. Nevertheless, unions face longer-term resource and political threats to their ability to engage with regional government and to maintain their levels of influence within a more heterogeneous network of consultative stakeholders.

This article considers the attitudes to the single currency of public service trade unions, illustrating this through a number of nationally based case studies. We examine claims about the impact of EMU on welfare states and public expenditure, and particularly the extent to which the governance of EMU attests a 'neoliberal', marketising approach towards the public sphere. We find that any such tendency has been offset by the recent resurgence of forms of national-level bipartite or tripartite economic and social coordination, managing the effects of EMU through social dialogue. The subsequent section of the paper develops a categorisation of four main trends evident in European public service trade unions'response to the single currency: enthusiasm, altruism, scepticism and resistance. The dominant attitude to date has been acceptance. We highlight dangers for democratic legitimacy within public sector unions in cases where leadership support for EMU has exceeded that of the membership, and indicate some potential areas for future public service union influence in the EMU.

Work accommodations are generally understood to refer to individual solutions for older and disabled employees that have been tailored to their specific situation within a workplace. This article, however, argues that there is potential for collective employment relations to motivate and enable social partners to develop a role in implementing reasonable accommodations and supporting older and disabled employees in the labour market. Focusing on industrial relations and work accommodation systems in Estonia, Poland and Hungary, the potential role that social partners could play in creating more inclusive workplaces is explored. This is done by reference to the findings from an action research project that brought together social partners to discuss ways in which practices in providing work accommodations could help better to integrate underutilised sources of labour in these three countries. The industrial relations regimes in the three countries have potentially enabling characteristics that could facilitate work accommodations. Current knowledge of the work accommodation process and the integration of this issue into the collective employment relations agenda, however, needs further improvement.