scholarly journals Power Imbalances in Collective Decision-Making: The Study of Minimum Wage Setting Cases

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 201
Author(s):  
Elisa Susanti ◽  
Heru Nurasa ◽  
Ida Widianingsih
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Industrial Sector ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Wage Setting ◽  
Collective Agreements ◽  
The Government

This paper aimed to empirically describe the power imbalances issues in setting the minimum wage in Bandung Regency and West Bandung Regency. Formally, Regional Wage Council has been established based on equality. However, several power imbalances have occurred within it. This paper also aimed to figure out the way to balance the power in collective decision making in the case of minimum wage setting. Furthermore, the research method used in this research was based on qualitative approach. Also, informants in this research were members of Regional Wage Council, employers in the industrial sector, and trade unions/labor unions in Bandung Regency and West Bandung Regency. The results of this study showed that power imbalances empirically existed in the setting of minimum wage. These imbalances were due to the issues of representatives, the number of members, information resources, and uncertainty. Moreover, power imbalances in the setting of minimum wage have led to the government’s more dominant role. Under these conditions, the effort required to overcome the problem of imbalance is by increasing trust in the government and the commitment of each party to the rules and collective agreements.

Political Science and Changing Politics

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Adolescent Daughter ◽  
Football Coach ◽  
Power And Influence

Politics is about conflict, struggle, decision-making, power and influence. But not every conflict and not every situation in which power is exercised is widely regarded as politics. A football coach who decides to leave a player on the bench because he has given him a bit of lip, is exerting power, and there is conflict here, too. However, few people would consider this a political issue. The same applies to a mother who quarrels with her adolescent daughter about going to a house party, a schoolteacher who gives a student detention, and so on. But if we were to limit our understanding of politics to official decisions that are taken by governments, in parliaments or on municipal councils, we would fail to recognise the political meaning of trade unions, lobbyists, protest groups, corporations and other more-or-less organised groups that influence collective decision-making.

Learning to Love the Government

2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 538-575 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Minimum Wage ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
Social Democratic Party ◽  
Wage Setting ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Uk

One counterintuitive variation in wage-setting regulation is that countries with the highest labor standards and strongest labor movements are among the least likely to set a statutory minimum wage. This, the author argues, is due largely to trade union opposition. Trade unions oppose the minimum wage when they face minimal low-wage competition, which is affected by the political institutions regulating industrial action, collective agreements, and employment, as well as by the skill and wage levels of their members. When political institutions effectively regulate low-wage competition, unions oppose the minimum wage. When political institutions are less favorable toward unions, there may be a cleavage between high- and low-wage unions in their minimum wage preferences. The argument is illustrated with case studies of the UK, Germany, and Sweden. The author demonstrates how the regulation of low-wage competition affects unions’ minimum wage preferences by exploiting the following labor market institutional shocks: the Conservatives’ labor law reforms in the UK, the Hartz labor market reforms in Germany, and the European Court of Justice's Laval ruling in Sweden. The importance of union preferences for minimum wage adoption is also shown by how trade union confederation preferences influenced the position of the Labour Party in the UK and the Social Democratic Party in Germany.

Islands of Stability: Engaging Emergence from Cellular Automata to the Occupy Movement

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Pickering
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Cellular Automata ◽  
Black Box ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Occupy Movement ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

"Instead of considering »being with« in terms of non-problematic, machine-like places, where reliable entities assemble in stable relationships, STS conjures up a world where the achievement of chancy stabilisations and synchronisations is local.We have to analyse how and where a certain regularity and predictability in the intersection of scientists and their instruments, say, or of human individuals and groups, is produced.The paper reviews models of emergence drawn from the history of cybernetics—the canonical »black box,« homeostats, and cellular automata—to enrich our imagination of the stabilisation process, and discusses the concept of »variety« as a way of clarifying its difficulty, with the antiuniversities of the 1960s and the Occupy movement as examples. Failures of »being with« are expectable. In conclusion, the paper reviews approaches to collective decision-making that reduce variety without imposing a neoliberal hierarchy. "

Corruption and Anticorruption in Democratic Athens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Collective Decision ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Collective Decision Making ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Individual Judgment ◽  
Collective Judgment ◽  
Hidden Knowledge

The chapter examines a major corruption scandal that involved the Athenian orator Demosthenes and an official of Alexander the Great. This episode reveals how tensions between individual and collective decision-making practices shaped Athenian understandings of corruption and anticorruption. The various and multiple anticorruption measures of Athens sought to bring ‘hidden’ knowledge into the open and thereby remove information from the realm of individual judgment, placing it instead into the realm of collective judgment. The Athenian experience therefore suggests that participatory democracy, and a civic culture that fosters political equality rather than reliance on individual expertise, provides a key bulwark against corruption.

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