ABSTRACT

One would expect such very different 'adjustment regimes' quite powerfully to condition workers' and unions' responses to managerial attempts at downsizing. The crucial intervening variable is the degree of anxiety or insecurity among the remaining employees that it produces. Canada and Sweden offer a highly favourable combination of socio-institutional contrast and industrial similarity for testing our Hypotheses. According to first hypothesis the degree to which downsizing causes 'surviving' employees to worry about their own employment prospects should primarily be a function of the quality of labour-management relations at the firm level, in Sweden as well as in Canada. If Hypothesis 2 is valid, downsizing should have a significantly more negative effect on workers' employment worries in relatively 'insecure' Canada than in Sweden. Third hypothesis predicts that due to the generally adversarial character of labour relations in Canada the presence of a union will have a negative effect whereas in neocorporatist Sweden the effect should be positive.