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The Interrelationship between the Labor Union System and the Employee Participatory High Performance Work Practices (노동조합체제와 노동자참여적 작업관행의 상호관계)

Bai, Jin Han
- Journal of Labour Economics
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- v.29 no.3
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- pp.75-112
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- 2006
We found following evidences from our empirical analysis with the Workplace Panel Survey data of the Korea Labor Institute with reference to 'discord hypothesis' which insists that employee participatory high performance work practices would strengthen not only an enterprise focus in labor-management relations but also the enterprise unionism in the labor union system or collective bargaining structures, so they would probably come into conflict with the superenterprise-oriented industrial solidarity spirit in labor unionism. First, even though there are significant positive management performance effects of high performance work practices, especially in case of mining and manufacturing industries, the positive performance effects of employee participatory work practices such as job rotation ratio of workers and 6-sigma activities were much strengthened relatively in case of non-unionized establishments. Second, the superenterprise-oriented collective bargaining system is also found to give very strong and statistically significant negative performance effects to the introduction and implementation of work teams and performance-related payment systems such as profit sharing, group incentive pay system and so on. Although there are some careful reservations in interpreting the results of our analysis because of data insufficiency, they may have important implications that the industrial labor unionism or the superenterprise-oriented collective bargaining practices exercise the bargaining power to make individual firms be negative or feel it nearly impossible to introduce the employee participatory work practices which can be very favorable to improving those management performance.
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