Works council introductions: Do they reflect workers' voice?

Michael Oberfichtner

No 83, Discussion Papers from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Chair of Labour and Regional Economics

Abstract: Using a large linked employer-employee dataset from Germany, the author investigates workers' decision to introduce a works council as an exit-voice consideration. Thereby, the author explores the collective voice face of introductions, while previous studies focus on the monopoly aspect. Controlling for unobserved plant heterogeneity, council introductions are more likely if workers have high plant-specific human capital or earn high wages, whereas no association between the labor market situation and introductions shows up. The findings on human capital and wages are consistent with the idea that workers trade off introducing a council against exit as well as with workers trying to protect an existing distribution of rents. Redoing the analysis for a sample of plants in which it is less relevant for workers to protect themselves against management decisions yields similar results supporting the voice interpretation.

Keywords: co-determination; works councils; works council introductions; workers' voice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J53 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Works council introductions: Do they reflect workers‘ voice? (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:faulre:83

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