Redundancy Rights – Rights for Whom?
The 1965 Redundancy Payments Act was amended by the 1975 Employment Protection Act to give substantial rights to trade unions to challenge managerial decisions on redundancies. These included advance warning of impending redundancies, the right to make representations to the employer, and to receive the employer′s reply. Cabinet ministers, introducing the legislation, felt that it would generate negotiations either to quash the redundancies or to provide alternative solutions to impending job losses. In investigating 74 incidences of redundancy, covering 10,500 workers, it was found that these rights have, for the most part, merely oiled the process of managerial decisions over redundancies, by enjoining trade unions to such decisions; decisions on which they have no real impact. Rights for trade unions, then, in practice translate to gains for employers. An important caveat to this situation occurs where an agreement on redundancies exists, generally giving workers substantial benefits, although there ar...
Comparative Policies of Legal Provisions for Plant Closure: Strike a Balance?
The article aims to explore the extent to which and how plant closure laws strike a balance between job security and managerial prerogative and assess the practical effects of legal provisions. To achieve this aim, the forms of underlying doctrines of legal provisions, and substantial and procedural requirements are deliberately examined by cross-national (i.e. UK, Germany, and Japan) comparisons. The findings reveal that the legal provisions of the selected nations do not seek to diminish management rights to close plants down. Instead, they attempt to impose more democratic control over the liberty and mobility of capital by negotiating with and compensating the affected workers.
Measuring Functional Service Quality Using SERVQUAL in a High-Dependence Health Service Relationship
Although there is a growing concern about health care quality, little research has focused on how to measure quality in long-term care settings. In this article, we make the following observations: (1) most users of the SERVQUAL instrument reassess customers' expectations each time they measure quality perceptions; (2) long-term care relationships are likely to be ongoing, dependent relationships; (3) because of this dependence, customers in the long-term care setting are likely to reduce their expectations when faced with poor service quality; (4) by using this "settled" expectations level, service providers may make biased conclusions of quality improvements. We recommend various methods for overcoming or minimizing this "settling" effect and propose modifications to the SERVQUAL gap 5 measure to assess quality in a long-term care setting.