Volume 50, numéro 3, 1995

FR :

Cet article présente les résultats d'une étude portant sur l'analyse des pratiques de gestion d'emploi des travailleuses et des travailleurs vieillissants en regard de la situation économique à laquelle sont confrontées les entreprises depuis quelques années. H traite des pratiques dominantes axées sur l'exclusion de la main-d'oeuvre vieillissante et met en lumière quatre facteurs permettant de mieux comprendre la stratégie d'éviction encore largement utilisée. Il présente en outre quelques pratiques novatrices mises de l'avant par les entreprises à l'égard de leur main-d'oeuvre vieillissante.

EN :

Because of the aging of the Canadian population, the accelerated aging of the workforce is a reality in the Canadian labour market. In such a context, firms that try to keep their workforce young will have some difficulty in doing so, and some may not succeed. Studies show that Canadian firms presently tend to get rid of their aging workforce, and this is generally done through early retirement policies. Some studies have indicated that it may be time for socio-economic actors to modify their strategics in the context of an aging population and workforce.

Our study seeks to identify innovative practices which firms have developed in the present economic context. As we found that few firms actually had developed innovative practices, and that very few try to retain their aging workers, we also explain what economic factors may have influenced firms to adopt the common early retirement strategy. The research is based on case studies carried out in six firms, firms that were considered to be performing well, and that have been solidly established for many years. Four of the firms are from the communications sector, one is a public health institution and the last is from the clothing industry. Five of the six are unionized and count more than 200 employees. Average age in these firms is older than the average age in the Canadian workforce, which indicates that these firms should be concerned with the aging of their workforces. Data were collected through two methods. General data on the workers, their careers, their employment situations, and their aspirations regarding retirement and the end of their working life were collected through individual questionnaires distributed to the workers in all of the firms. We also conducted interviews with human resources managers and union representatives in each of the firms, and studied firms' documentation on retirement policies, strategic planning, collective agreements, etc.

This completed the information on the firms' strategics, the reasons for these, the perceptions of management as regards the expeetations of workers, and union strategics on these issues. As we wanted to identify the firms' practices concerning aging workers, we used a typology of practices including the following: career management (planning and development, labour mobility); adaptation of the working environment (working time arrangements, work adjustment or changes in tasks, wage adjustments and marginal benefits); exclusion of aging workers.

As can be seen, the first two categories are strategics which aim at maintaining workers in the firm, while the last does the opposite. Our results indicate that there are few strategics adopted to maintain aging workers in employment. Measures aiming at early retirement are still more frequent even though the six firms have an aging workforce. Some managers and union representatives indicated that they were starting to consider the issue, but few innovative strategics were observed, and in most cases these were not used explicitly to manage aging, but rather to solve different problems such as labour shortages or high turnover. In any case, there were some firms which did some career planning and tried to introduce continuous training and multiskilling, elements which can permit aging workers' to stay longer in employment. Some firms did adopt some new working time arrangements, and these do correspond to workers' expeetations as was revealed by our survey. Arrangements to work part-time before retirement, and a leave without pay for educational purposes are amongst the examples observed. However, part-time or progressive retirement is offered in only one firm, the public health institution, and only on an ad hoc basis.

How can we explain why Canadian firms still tend to exclude aging workers when the economic and demographic trends indicate that they should start considering strategics to keep these workers? Our research indicates four possible explanations. First, the macroeconomic situation and policies of recent years created financial pressures which led firms to adopt strategics of minimization of labour costs. This meant reductions in personnel, use of temporary workers and subcontracting, as well as early retirement options.

The second factor influencing human resources management strategics concerning aging workers is the labour market situation. The chronic surplus of labour in the Canadian labour market may have led firms to use early retirement as a way to rejuvenate their workforce. This chronic surplus, composed largely of skilled youth and women, facilitates this rejuvenation process. Without such a chronic surplus, it can be hypothesized that firms would have to find ways to keep their aging workers, as is often the case in countries with close to full employment.

The employment System and work organization are the third factor influencing firms' practices. New product and technological innovation strategics are often accompanied by organizational changes such as a reduction in management, multiskilling and similar new production concepts. In such a context, firms often view their aging workers as less adaptable. Given the elements present in the collective agreement concerning work rules and worker mobility, it may be easier for a firm to do away with older workers rather than try to integrate them in the new organization.

As Canadian firms do not have a strong tradition of training and recycling human resources, the exclusion of older workers is often seen as an easier solution, all the more so since firms may worry about recuperating their investment in the training of older workers.

Finally the workers' expectations constitute the last element favouring the exclusion of aging workers. Firms' practices have surely influenced workers' expectations and there is therefore some interaction between the two. Nevertheless, workers are inclined to view themselves as "old" or "aging" at an earlier age than was previously the case, as was indicated in our survey. Public and private policies regarding early retirement have brought many workers to see retirement as a positive situation, a period of rest which is due to them; of course this is the case only for those who have good pension plans, but early retirement policies over recent years have tended to make this situation financially advantageous for those who retired. This in turn created expectations in the minds of other aging workers. In our survey, some 55.8% of respondents indicated they would like to leave their job before the normal retirement age, with financial compensation.

In conclusion, even if human resources management practices should obviously adapt to the demographic changes which are inevitable, a séries of factors, amongst which the macroeconomic situation and policies, the labour market situation, the changes in work organization, and workers' expectations, tend to favour the strategy of exclusion of aging workers.

EN :

Existing survey research in Britain has shown that there are notable differences between the characteristics of union and nonunion establishments. But at the same time case study research has indicated that the characteristics and employment practices of nonunion organizations vary quite widely. In order to try to reconcile these findings, this paper presents an analysis of some data contained in the 1990 national Workplace Industrial Relations Survey. The findings reveal that a sizeable minority of nonunion establisments have similar characteristics to unionized establishments which, in turn, make them particularly vulnerable to union organizing efforts and help account for the fact that it is these nonunion establishments which are most strongly opposed to a possible union presence. The implications of these findings for future research are then discussed.

FR :

Suite à la parution du livre de Freeman et Medoff intitulé What Do Unions Do? (1984), une bonne partie de la recherche en Grande-Bretagne a tenté d'évaluer l'effet des syndicats (comparé aux milieux non syndiqués) sur différentes mesures de performance organisationnelle. Cette recherche se basait sur les données de l'enquête nationale de 1984 (Workplace Industrial Relations Survey). Elle faisait l'hypothèse que les différences entre le secteur syndiqué et non syndiqué sont plus grandes que les différences intra secteur d'emploi.

Cependant, on reconnaît depuis longtemps que les caractéristiques et les pratiques d'emploi dans les organisations non syndiquées varient beaucoup. On a relié de telles variations au fait que certaines organisations non syndiquées se sentent particulièrement vulnérables aux campagnes d'organisation syndicale. Elles essaient alors d'annuler l'effet de telles initiatives en imitant les pratiques d'emploi des firmes syndiquées. Malheureusement, ces points de vue n'ont pas été examinés sur une large échelle. Conséquemment, nous ne pouvions répondre à des questions importantes, telles pourquoi certaines organisations non syndiquées se sentent particulièrement vulnérables aux campagnes d'organisation syndicale ? Sont-elles à cet égard semblable aux organisations syndiquées et, si oui, comment ? Quelle est la taille de ce sous-groupe particulier d'organisations dans l'ensemble du secteur non syndiqué ?

Afin de fournir quelques réponses à ces questions, nous analysons ici des données du Workplace Industrial Relations Survey de 1990. La présente recherche poursuit notre travail antérieur qui n'examinait que le secteur non syndiqué et qui concluait à des différences significatives entre les organisations non syndiquées très réticentes à une possible présence syndicale et celles qui avaient une position plus neutre à cet égard. Ici, nous étendons notre analyse pour inclure le secteur syndiqué. Nos principales conclusions sont les suivantes :

— une bonne minorité d'entreprises non syndiquées ont des caractéristiques relativement similaires aux entreprises syndiquées ;

— ces similarités visent essentiellement les caractéristiques organisationnelles de base de ces établissements et leur main-d'oeuvre;

— ce sous-groupe particulier de firmes non syndiquées se sentent (et sont) plus vulnérables aux campagnes d'organisation syndicale, et

— comme conséquence de ce qui précède, ce sont ces établissements non syndiqués qui sont le plus fortement opposés à une possible présence syndicale.

Malheureusement, les données existantes ne nous disent pas si ce sous-groupe particulier du secteur non syndiqué a crû avec le temps. Cependant, si tel devait être le cas, il en résulterait alors un secteur non syndiqué de plus en plus hétérogène. Tel résultat aurait des implications importantes pour les recherches visant à évaluer l'impact du statut syndical (opposé au statut non syndical) sur les mesures de performance organisationnelle.

FR :

Cet article traite de l'influence des systèmes nationaux de relations industrielles sur l'action syndicale dans la construction navale en France et au Québec durant la période de crise des années 1970 et 1980. Nos analyses révèlent que malgré la convergence des revendications présentées par les syndicats en France et au Québec pour atténuer les effets de cette crise sur l'emploi, les actions mises en oeuvre par les organisations syndicales dominantes dans les chantiers navals français et québécois sont de nature et de portée substantiellement différente.

EN :

This article deals with the influence of national industrial relations institutions on union action in the French and Quebec shipbuilding industries during the 1970s and 1980s. Our central thesis is that, to a large extent, legal and institutional structures determined the scope and nature of labour responses to managerial policies and practices during the crisis faced by the shipbuilding industries in the two countries beginning in 1975.

The analysis reveals that the decline in both production and jobs during that period elicited similar demands by unions for employment protection in both French and Quebec shipyards. However, union approaches to the ensuing conflicts over employment protection were very different in the two countries. The institutional framework of industrial relations, specifically the rules relating to the status and role of labour unions, and the legal framework for collective bargaining and dispute resolution, had a decisive influence on the range of options avallable to unions in the two countries.

The conceptual framework used to compare the determinants of union action in the two countries is based mainly on the theoretical contributions to the comparative analysis of industrial relations made by Dunlop (1958) and Poole (1986). The empirical evidence shows that, while the positions and proposals adopted by unions at the local and national levels were quite similar in the two countries, the points at issue and the conduct of conflicts in the shipyards were very different. In French shipyards, management attempts to reduce the labour force in a situation of declining production were generally opposed by all the unions present at the local level and very often culminated in work stoppages intended to modify or diminish the effects of job suppression. In contrast, in Quebec shipyards, the right of management to lay off workers and to reduce the labour force is usually recognized in the labour contract and conflicts thus related to monetary issues and job flexibility rather than to reduction of the work force.

The institutional framework of union action appears to be an important determinant of the level, focus and issues of labour conflict in French and Quebec shipyards. Our main conclusion is that union action is largely determined by the rules defining the identity and rights of the actors directly involved in the industrial relations System at different levels of interaction. Such action is also strongly influenced by the rules governing the interchange between employers and unions in the course of collective bargaining and industrial conflict. These rules are, according to Dunlop and Poole, the major factor in the continuing diversity among industrial relations Systems.

EN :

Current arguments about the causes of differing union density rates in the U.S. and Canada range from Lipset's public opinion hypothesis and differences in labour law, to increased U.S. managerial hostility. We use survey data on managers' and workers' attitudes in the two countries to examine the competing arguments. Using questions that probe opinions toward various aspects of union-firm relations, we find that managers' attitudes in the two countries do not differ. This finding suggests that increased U.S. managerial hostility is not the cause of the divergent unionization rates. U.S. workers are the most militant of the four groups, with Canadian workers in the middle, between managers and U.S. workers. Following literature which suggests that there may be important regional differences, we perform a similar analysis treating the South in the U.S. and Quebec in Canada separately. We find only minimal cross-regional differences.

FR :

Les explications les plus courantes sur les causes de taux de densité syndicale différents entre les États-Unis et le Canada vont de l'hypothèse de l'opinion publique de Lipset à l'hostilité croissante des gestionnaires américains en passant par les différences dans le droit du travail. Nous utilisons les données de l'enquête sur les attitudes des travailleurs et des gestionnaires dans ces deux pays tirées de Comparative Project on Class Structure and Class Consciousness pour faire l'examen des diverses explications. Cette enquête comprend des questions visant à mesurer les opinions eu égard à différents aspects des relations entreprise-syndicat.

Nous retenons quatre questions : qui des travailleurs ou de la direction devrait gagner à l'occasion d'une grève ? devrait-on prohiber l'embauche de briseurs de grève ? les travailleurs devraient-ils empêcher physiquement les briseurs de grève ? et les corporations bénéficient-elles indûment à leurs propriétaires aux dépens du reste de la société ? Cela nous permet de comparer les attitudes des travailleurs et des gestionnaires au Canada et aux États-Unis sur ces questions.

On a souvent conclu que c'est l'hostilité croissante des employeurs envers les syndicats qui expliquerait le taux beaucoup plus bas de syndicalisation aux États-Unis. Si cette hypothèse est correcte, on devrait alors retrouver des opinions anti-syndicales beaucoup plus fortes parmi les gestionnaires américains comparativement à leurs collègues canadiens. Si l'hypothèse de l'opinion publique de Lipset est juste, il devrait y avoir une plus grande hostilité envers les syndicats dans la population américaine que chez les canadiens.

Nous utilisons deux tests statistiques pour comparer les attitudes : l'un est le test de différence simple dans les moyennes et l'autre, une spécification probit ordonnée qui inclut des contrôles des différentes caractéristiques individuelles. Nous effectuons alors les comparaisons suivantes : les gestionnaires des deux pays, les travailleurs des deux pays, gestionnaires-travailleurs aux États-Unis et gestionnaires-travailleurs au Canada. Nous observons que les attitudes des gestionnaires dans les deux pays ne présentent pas de différences. Cela suggère que l'hostilité croissante des employeurs américains n'explique pas les taux de syndicalisation différents dans les deux pays. Les travailleurs américains sont ici les plus militants. Les travailleurs canadiens se retrouvent au centre entre les gestionnaires et les travailleurs américains. Certains suggèrent qu'il peut à ce sujet y avoir d'importantes différences régionales, nous avons répété notre analyse en traitant le sud des États-Unis et le Québec séparément. Nous n'avons trouvé que de minimes différences entre ces deux régions.

FR :

Cet article porte sur les approches utilisées dans les organisations pour amener les superviseurs à adopter un mode de gestion plus participatif de la sécurité au travail avec leurs employés. Les données présentées sont basées sur cinq études de cas réalisées selon un devis commun et analysées de façon comparative. Utilisant l'approche systémique du changement organisationnel, les auteurs développent le concept de stratégie de changement pour analyser les approches organisationnelles observées, en faisant l'hypothèse que ce sont les stratégies plus systématiques qui auront comme effets d'accroître l'utilisation de la gestion participative de la prévention par les superviseurs, et de réduire le taux de fréquence des accidents. Les résultats confirment largement les hypothèses, mais l'analyse montre aussi que les stratégies non efficaces, au plan des effets escomptés, ont néanmoins une fonction d'utilité qui est discutée.

EN :

Over the last few decades, various countries have adopted laws and regulations fostering joint regulation and labour participation approaches in occupational heath and safety through joint health and safety committees, safety representatives, and workers' rights to be informed about work hazards and to refuse dangerous work. In order to succeed, these mechanisms should not remain isolated, but should be accompanied by larger organizational changes in labour relations, union and management practices. This article is about one of these organizational changes, namely, the transformation of supervisory management practices in occupational safety towards a more participative approach.

Concepts and Hypotheses

Getting supervisors to adopt a participative management approach in occupational safety means changing their tasks and their way of doing them. From the perspective of a Systems theory of organizational change, it can be hypothesized that such a change will succeed only if consistent changes are brought about in other major components of the organizational System, namely : the individuals and groups involved; the formal organizational structures supporting and controlling individuals in their tasks; and the informal political and cultural dynamics of the organization. Each of these other components may present problems during the change process: resistance to change from individuals and groups; loss of control from formal structures; or loss of support from power groups and fallure of adjustment of cultural corporate values.

The concept of organizational change strategy is used to designate all actions taken in the organization to address the aforementioned problems. Consequently, change strategies, which are the independent variable in this study, may be more or less developed and systematic. It is hypothesized that when the change strategy is more developed and systematic, (1) supervisors will use a more participative approach in managing prevention activities (inspection, task analysis, safety meetings, design of corrective measures, etc.) that is, getting their employees to participate in these activities, and (2) the lost-time accident frequency rate will be reduced. Variations in participative supervisory management of occupational safety and lost-time accident frequency rate are, therefore, the dependent variables in the study. A third hypothesis is that a greater use of safety participative management by supervisors should be related to a lower accident frequency rate. Figure 1 in the article illustrates this conceptual model and the hypotheses.

Methods

The study was conducted in five industrial firms located in the province of Quebec, Canada. These firms were selected from a larger sample, using a quota method, in order to include (1) different industrial sectors, (2) different firm sizes, (3) unionized and non-unionized firms, and (4)various geographical locations. In each firm, data were collected through (l)semi-structured interviews (n = 55) with supervisors, workers' representatives, top and middle managers, safety managers and members of the health and safety committee, and (2) questionnaires filled out by all supervisors (n = 63) and various other managers (n = 29).

The development level of each change strategy (the independent variable) was measured using a scale (1-10) theoretically constructed by defining a total of ten dimensions referring to the three major change problems (resistance, control, and power and culture) that should be addressed and can be solved by consistent action steps during the change process. Data on actions taken, means and measures used by firms between 1988 and 1992 to encourage supervisors to use safety participative management, were collected and analyzed according to these ten dimensions.

Variations in the use of participative safety management by supervisors (the dependent variable) were estimated (+/-) using data collected from various sources, including supervisors, about the evolution of the latter's management practices between 1988 and 1992. The last dependent variable, variation in the lost-time accident frequency rate, was measured by comparing the rates between the first and last year of a given strategy during the period under study.

Results

Table 2 presents the main results of the study. On the left side of the table, each of the ten strategies observed is identified, its level of development is indicated, and the number of dimensions for which action steps were taken is mentioned for each of the three major problems of the change process. On the right side, data is provided about dependent variables. Generally speaking, results largely support the hypotheses. More developed and systematic strategies (A-2, D-2, D-4, E, B, C-2) are all followed by an increase in the supervisors' use of participative safety management and a decrease in the accident frequency rate, while three out of the four less developed and systematic strategies (A-l, C-l, D-3) have inverse results.

Discussion and Conclusion

Although the results provide strong support for the hypotheses and confirm the results of previous studies about the positive impact of participative supervisory management on accident rates, the case studies also shows that non-effective strategies have had an important function in the social construction of effective strategies of organizational change. In brief, all non-effective strategies are characterized by an important unsolved problem of supervisors' and workers' resistance to the change in the safety practices expected by the organization. It appeared that this resistance is not only psychosocial, as generally conceptualized in the Systems theory of organizational change, but is also sociological in terms of a strategy used by supervisors and work teams to negotiate their place in the new "organizational order" which is constructed in the change process. Actually, this social process of "implicit bargaining" appears to be the main mechanism for the social construction of more effective strategies, that is, strategies addressing the resistance problem by developing change ownership by supervisors and workers, the power and culture problem by raising the top management commitment in the change process, and the structural support problem by adapting formal Systems of management in a manner consistent with the desired change.

FR :

En France, comme dans la plupart des pays européens depuis les années quatre-vingts, se développe l'idée que face à un taux de chômage à deux chiffres une issue à l'état d'anomie dans lequel s'installe la société peut venir d'une flexibilité massive de la force de travail. L'article étudie comment émergent, dans les actions engagées autour des licenciements et des reconversions d'emploi, les éléments essentiels constitutifs d'un mythe des temps modernes énonçant la capacité des élites à produire une modernisation régulée de nos sociétés industrielles. L'auteur approche cette question en l'insérant dans le cadre plus large d'une sociologie du temps social.

EN :

In France as in the majority of European countries, a double-digit unemployment rate and its persistent growth have been dominating the economic and social scene since the 1980s. Thus, these facts almost naturally characterize all the approaches aimed at creating the conditions that will lead society out of its current state of anomie. Although the ideologies on which they are based and the economic rationalities they propose are diverse, they nevertheless all claim that this situation, described as a new phase in the transformation of industrial societies, can be overcome successfully. Therefore, the introduction of massive flexibility of labour power combined with an intensive and permanent effort to increase the level of training of the labour force are set out as necessary conditions for the success of this process.

In this context, the successive government mechanisms and social accords are presented as contributing to the creation of the conditions for managing the employaient crisis. Thus emerge the elements of a belief in the ability of political, economic and social actors to arrive at a positive outeome to the drama of economic redundancies as long as workers agree to commit themselves to cooperating in the processes of redeployment offered. Rejecting the period of social struggles and bitter confrontations that characterized industrial restructuring during the last twenty years, the discourse on this new belief declare the beginning of a more constructive period of management of occupational redeployment, a period in which the individual will be entitled to full recognition within the collective. Thus, the essential and constituent elements of a new myth of modem times that expresses the ability of the elites to manage the modernization of our industrial societies are brought together. Although the myth is defined as a symbolic representation influencing social life, the author hypothesizes that in France, since 1973 and especially since 1981, the elements of a powerful belief have emerged through a series of laws and public and private strategies. It serves to drive a process that attempts to convince people of the possibility of negotiating restructuring and redeployment calmly without social struggles, and of planning economic and social change through an equitable exchange for all actors. In practice, although the policies and measures proposed during the last twenty years have produced results, it must be observed that on the whole they have done nothing to stop the almost continuous increase in unemployment. Today, despite these successive fallures, many institutional and social actors still believe in and boast about these approaches in the hope that economic recovery can demonstrate their pertinence and effectiveness.

Underlying the strength of such a myth are two components: one suggests a representation of society in which the very forms of social confrontation and collective action can be dissolved and reified in a series of rational mechanisms; the other suggests convincing everyone that social adherence to the measures offered would be enough to see the declared fight against continuing unemployment to a successful conclusion.

The myth set forth and its underlying beliefs thus assert that a new specifie era in the life of industrial society is emerging. Therefore, to proceed to a critical analysis of the myth, our approach here is to consider it as part of a process of putting a major social issue into perspective: the planned, or negotiated, control of the volume of work and employment. The issue is studied in reference to the more general context of the sociology of social time.

To define the study of this issue, three social periods are analyzed. The first involves interpreting the determining role of the state. The second carries out a contrasting interpretation in terms of the social confrontation of the historical period covered. The third provides a process-based interpretation of the emergence of the myth and its constituent elements. Finally, the initial hypothesis is validated. The myth of the management of modernization has in fact well and truly established itself. It has involved union actors in a process in which they appear partly responsible for choices made with regard to redeployment, even when they fight against these decisions. In France this myth has functioned until now as a complement to diversified practices opposed to the emergence of the union movement as an economic factor with possible alternatives.

EN :

The present study utilized a stressor-strain framework to understand physician militancy in Canada. Data were collected from 2,584 physicians in 1986 using questionnaires. Four militant attitudes or activities were considered: approval of binding arbitration in the event of deadlocks in fee negotiations with governments, approval of withdrawal of services in the event of inadequate income settlements, approval of the reconstitution of medical associations as labour unions, and whether they had participated in an organized job action involving withdrawal of services.

FR :

Il résulte de l'introduction d'un système national de soins de santé au Canada un conflit régulier et croissant entre la profession médicale, les différents niveaux de gouvernement et d'autres acteurs politiques. Le cœur de ce conflit portait d'abord sur le contrôle des affaires médicales. Les médecins ont défendu leur autonomie face à ce qu'ils percevaient comme une intrusion gouvernementale non justifiée dans les affaires médicales.

La présente étude utilise un cadre que nous appellerons « agents stressants-tensions » pour mieux comprendre le militantisme des médecins au Canada. Le modèle de recherche comprend cinq types de variables antécédentes : les caractéristiques démographiques individuelles (v.g., âge et année d'obtention du diplôme), les caractéristiques de la pratique médicale (v.g., lieu de pratique, heures travaillées par semaine, spécialiste ou généraliste), les facteurs de stress au travail (v.g., formules à remplir, délai d'entrée des patients à l'hôpital), la satisfaction au travail (v.g., relations avec les patients, conditions de travail, temps disponible pour la vie personnelle et familiale) et la satisfaction professionnelle (v.g., si les médecins sont en perte de vitesse économiquement, évaluation globale du système de santé dans leur province).

Nous avons considéré quatre attitudes ou activités de militantisme : l'approbation de l'arbitrage obligatoire en cas de blocage lors de la négociation des tarifs avec le gouvernement, l'approbation d'arrêt de service à l'occasion d'ententes sur les revenus inadéquates, l'approbation du retour des associations médicales au statut de syndicat et la participation à une action concertée impliquant le retrait des services.

La collecte de données s'est fait par questionnaires en 1986 auprès de 2 584 médecins. Nous avons bâti un échantillon représentatif de médecins dans chacune des dix provinces. Près de 10 % des répondants étaient féminins. Suite à un rappel, le taux de réponse a atteint près de 70 %. Lorsque nous avons examiné l'information descriptive, les médecins canadiens, comme groupe professionnel, n'endossaient pas des positions militantes ni n'étaient prêts à recourir à l'action militante pour faire avancer leur cause. Les médecins désapprouvaient de reconstituer leurs associations médicales en syndicat ainsi que le retrait de leurs services. Moins de 20 % des répondants ont surfacturé et près de 20 % ont retiré leurs services au public en général. La plupart étaient inactifs à l'intérieur de leurs associations et ils approuvaient l'arbitrage obligatoire en cas de différends avec le gouvernement sur leurs revenus.

Des analyses de régression multiple hiérarchique ont été effectuées pour établir le pouvoir explicatif des cinq ensembles de prédicteurs. Les ensembles ont été entrés dans l'ordre indiqué dans le modèle de recherche. Nous avons trouvé un support empirique au modèle. Chaque ensemble de prédicteurs avait une relation unique et significative avec la plupart des mesures de militantisme chez les médecins. Les médecins se disant plus stressés et moins satisfaits exprimaient des points de vue plus militants.

EN :

This study explores the reactions of shareholders to layoff announcements. We examine shareholders' reactions to 137 layoff announcements by 57 Canadian firms over the period January 1989 to August 1992. Shareholders are found to react negatively to announcements of a layoff in their company. Shareholders have a greater negative reaction to a company's first layoff than to subsequent layoff announcements. Moreover, shareholders respond more negatively to large-scale layoffs than to those involving small percentages of the workforce. The implications of thèse findings for human resource management are discussed.

FR :

Il est de croyance populaire que les lienciements sont bénéfiques pour les investisseurs et que ce sont les employés qui subissent le fardeau des réductions corporatives. En fait, il y a peu de recherche sur le sujet, et celle qui existe vise surtout des firmes américaines. De plus, la recherche existante peut être biaisée par le fait qu'elle fait des moyennes de réactions aux réductions en temps de récession et en temps de prospérité. On sait très bien que les réactions peuvent varier entre ces deux périodes.

Conformément à la recommandation de l'Academy of Management d'étudier le comportement des actionnaires tant à l'intérieur qu'à l'extérieur de l'organisation, la présente étude examine l'effet des licenciements sur les actionnaires. L'échantillon utilisé inclut 137 licenciements par 57 entreprises canadiennes pendant la période de récession allant de janvier 1989 à août 1992. Nous avons utilisé la technique étude-événement, grandement utilisée en finances, pour vérifier si le prix des actions des entreprises qui annonçaient des licenciements variaient positivement ou négativement.

Les résultats indiquent que le prix des actions des entreprises qui annonçaient des licenciements décroissait autour de la date de l'annonce de ces licenciements, cette performance négative n'étant statistiquement valable que lorsque les annonces des licenciements initiaux de chaque firme sont examinées. Cette conclusion concourt avec la théorie du signalement qui veut que la bourse réagisse seulement aux annonces initiales. Les licenciements plus importants amènent des réactions négatives plus significatives sur le prix des actions (conformément aux conclusions de l'étude de Worrell et al. 1991). La performance financière antérieure des entreprises n'est pas un facteur significatif influençant l'effet des licenciements sur la performance du prix des actions.

Cette conclusion infirme la croyance populaire que les actionnaires profitent des réductions corporatives impliquant des licenciements. Ajoutant ici les conclusions d'autres études à l'effet que les employés sont affectés négativement par les licenciements, la preuve indique que les gestionnaires doivent trouver des voies alternatives pour demeurer compétitifs vu que les licenciements ne bénéficient ni aux employés ni aux actionnaires.

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Changements dans la législation du travail au Canada