Acknowledgements: we are grateful to the british council and the french ministry for foreign affairs for financial support under the alliance programme.

Technology, Work Organisation and Absence Control Joseph Lanfranchi (ERMES, Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris 2)) John Treble (University of Wales, Bangor) Studies of sick pay and absenteeism have traditionally treated absence as a worker-related phenomenon. There are good reasons to suppose, though, that firms’ incentives to controlabsenteeism are not uniform. This paper presents what we believe to be the first evidence forrelationships between the nature of a firm’s technology and its personnel policies, particularly asthey are directed towards absence control. Such evidence is hard to assemble because data sourcescontaining information about both technology and monitoring and incentive schemes are rare.
Indeed, as far as we know the French data we use here are unique in this respect.
The results suggest strongly that firms’ choices of personnel policy are driven in a significant way by reliability considerations. Firms who might be expected to value reliabilityparticularly highly (those adopting JIT technology) are seen to have workforces with ademographic profile different from other firms. They also a more likely to monitor absence andtend to be more concerned to provide appropriate incentives, in the form of additional and/or moregenerous sick pay.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We are grateful to the British Council and the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs for financial support under the Alliance programme.
Technology, Work Organisation and Absence Control Joseph Lanfranchi (ERMES, Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris 2)) 1 Introduction
Studies of sick pay and absenteeism have traditionally treated absence as a worker-related phenomenon. There are good reasons to suppose, though, that firms’ incentives to control absenteeism are not uniform. Theoretical arguments pointing to a relationship between observed absence rates and wage rates, which is technologically determined are presented by Weiss(1986), and Coles and treble(1993, 1996). Those papers only tangentially consider the issue of control of absence. For instance, in Coles and treble(1996), firms are able to control the impact of absenteeism on profits by employing a buffer stock of additional workers. Although employing (or retaining) more workers than are strictly necessary to operate a firm’s capital equipment is costly, it can be less costly than the alternative of leaving oneself at the mercy of an unreliable stream of labour input. The provision of sick pay is modelled in Coles and treble(1993) As well as protecting itself from the impact of absenteeism on its profit stream in this way, a firm can also, of course, try to manage its labour force in such a way as to manage the incidence of absenteeism itself. There exist many ways in which this can be done. They include hiring workers with known reliability characteristics, monitoring attendance, and providing financial (or other) incentives. The point made in the present paper, is that just as firms are likely to differ in their attitudes to absenteeism, so are they likely to differ in their modes of absenteeism control. The argument is supported by evidence from France. The data used are, as far as we know, the only extant data broad enough in coverage to enable us to identify the effects that we seek. They provide information about firms’ technology, their labour force management (including absence-related incentive schemes), and the recorded absence rate.
The conjecture that there are technology-related patterns in the human resources policies of firms is broadly confirmed by the empirical evidence presented here. For reasons that are made clear in the next section of the paper, we focus on the adoption of just-in-time (JIT) production methods as our main indicator of the technology used by firms. We show that those firms that adopt JIT have lower absence rates that those that do not. In addition, we show that firms who adopt JIT, also display employment patterns that are concentrated on those demographic groups (the male, the young) that typically have lower absence rates than others. In addition, the generosity of the sick pay regimes offered by JIT firms is less than for their non-JIT counterparts.
The next section presents the theoretical argument. Following that, we describe our data source and the indicators that we have developed from it. A fourth section presents the results, and The main idea of the paper by Coles and treble(1996) is that the observed rate of absence is not a simple consequence of a labour supply function, but a rather complex outcome generated by market interaction between the interests of workers and their households and the interests of firms.
The outcome involves sorting of workers with differing tastes for absence between firms with differing costs of absence. A conventional compensating differential story yields the conclusion that firms should offer more generous remuneration to more reliable workers. In addition, they showed that firms will maintain a buffer stock of workers, that will be larger, the higher the cost of Both these arguments rely on the idea of a cost of absence. Coles and treble show that this cost is dependent on the extent of complementarity between inputs in the production function. In particular, if workers contribute jointly to production, then the absence of one of them will involve the loss, not only of that worker’s output, but also of productivity of his/her partners. The same is true of complementarity between labour and capital inputs. If stocks of semi-finished goods can be maintained cheaply, then they can be used to buffer absence. If not, firms are less likely to tolerate absence, and will attempt to control it more stringently. One particularly interesting aspect of these ideas is a reinterpretation of just-in-time production, which is often claimed to be associated with lower absence rates. Our interpretation of this is that since just-in-time aims to reduce stocks of semi-finished product, it makes absenteeism more expensive. The incentive for the firm to control absence rates is therefore increased.
The arguments made by Coles and treble depend on the idea that there is an `acceptable’ level of absence that is enforced by the firm as part of its workers’ conditions of work. From both practical and theoretical viewpoints, it is convenient to make the distinction between the actual level of absence and the efficient level. The efficient level can be seen as a target of human resource management policy. The difference between the actual level and the efficient level can be What techniques can firms use to manage absence towards the efficient level? They fall into three broad categories: hiring, monitoring and incentive systems. That these are not independent is highlighted by the Coles and treble argument where firms offer employment packages that compensate more reliable labour supply with higher wage rates. The standard sorting argument (Rosen (1986)) suggests that this will tend to attract reliable workers, but this mechanism is unlikely to be perfect. Workers may not be fully informed about the nature of the job, their circumstances may change, or the firm itself may decide to change its attitude to absence. To the extent that sorting through the usual mechanisms of hiring, probation and firing fails to deliver the efficient level, the firm will benefit by devoting resources to enforcement.
Many different kinds of schemes have been used for enforcement, and it is these that are the focus of management manuals on absenteeism. The advice given in the management literature usually involves some kind of monitoring scheme: make sure that the workers know that their behaviour is being watched; it also involves a variety of incentive schemes: sometimes financial in nature, sometimes not. Ultimately, most firms will reserve the right to fire an employee whose reliability is unsatisfactory. All of these policies involve the use of resources.
The starting point for this paper is that just as a firm’s efficient level of absenteeism is determined in part by its technology, so are its incentives to control deviant behaviour on the part of workers. Firms for which absenteeism is cheap will neither be prepared to pay a wage premium for very reliable workers, nor will they be prepared to devote substantial resources to absence control.
On the other hand, firms for which absence is expensive will find it worthwhile to attract reliable workers by paying a wage premium and also to devote resources to enforcing desired standards of The claims made in the previous paragraph are direct consequences of the pattern of iso- profit frontiers derived in detail in Coles and treble (1996). An isoprofit frontier can be drawn for any given level of profit. For each absence rate, the isoprofit frontier shows the wage rate the firm could pay while maintaining profits at the given level. Clearly, the higher the absence rate, the lower the wage rate for a given profit level. But there are other properties of the relationship between the three quantities that are just as important. In particular, the slope of the frontier can be shown to be determined by the nature of the firm’s technology. In the present paper, we do not go into details, but simply point out that the slope of the isoprofit frontier measures the wage premium that a firm would be prepared to pay to secure a given, small reduction in the absence rate. We describe firms for which this premium is small as having technology that is robust to absenteeism (or just robust for short). Firms for which the premium is large have technologies that are not Now consider firms that are in a competitive labour market. Firms with different technologies can survive, even though they may pay different wages, by offering compensating employment packages. For the purpose of the present paper, we focus on the reliability characteristics of the workforce. Firms that do not have robust technologies will offer a high wage and expect reliable attendance. Firms with robust technologies will offer a low wage and will not expect their workers to be so reliable. The theory therefore predicts that reliable attendance will command a wage premium, and that workers who are able to supply reliable attendance will be employed by firms with non-robust technology. Since high-wage/low-absence firms are also those with robust technologies, their isoprofit lines are steeply sloped, and the cost of deviations from the prescribed reliability will be high too. It is this idea that we pursue empirically here.
What kind of technologies are robust, and what kind non-robust? This distinction depends crucially on the extent to which productivity of the production process hinges on the attendance of any particular worker. In a craft workshop where workers are assigned individual projects to work on, the cost of an absence is limited to the consequences of the absent worker not working, because his or her absence does not affect the productivity of any other worker. If work is organised in teams, the cost of an absence is higher, since the absence of an individual not only means the loss of that person’s product, but that the productivity of others will be affected, too.
Aspects of a worker’s relationship with capital equipment are also important. In particular, note that the storage of semi-finished product is important in determining the costs of an absence. A half-finished chair will still be a half-finished chair, even if it is not worked on for six months. A half processed chicken is waste if it is not frozen within a matter of hours.
In the empirical work that follows, our criteria for choice of measures of technology are twofold. First, we are constrained by the data that are available in the source that we use. Second, we concentrate on measures that capture aspects of team work and inventory-holding. Our claim is that firms who have a robust technology should have an employment structure that is biased towards those demographic groups that display high levels of absence, that they should be more likely to monitor absence and that they should be more generous in sick pay provision.
3 The Data Source
The Enquête sur le coût de la main d’oeuvre et la structure des salaires is a large scale survey of French industrial establishments and their workers carried out by INSEE in 1992. For each firm included in the survey a sample of employees was selected. There are therefore two sets of responses to the Enquête questions about the firm and questions about individual employees. In addition, a supplementary questionnaire, known as Répons was administered to about 10% of the firms to elicit more detailed information for this subset of firms. All responses were provided by the firm without reference to employees.
In this paper we are concerned with the structure of the workforce, the provision of sick pay benefits, the monitoring of attendance, and the nature of technology. For most of these aspects information is solicited directly from the firm, but we have had to construct our own measure of the A summary of all variable definitions is given in Table I. Means and standard deviations of all variables are given in Table II.
Work organisation variables
For our preliminary investigation of the relationship between sick pay provision, work organisation and absence, we use a variety of right-hand side variables. For work organisation measures we rely mainly on questions asked in both the main questionnaire of the Enquête, and the supplementary Répons questionnaire. Two questions are asked about cooperation between workers.
Some establishments practice work rotations. Type A. Within work groups, workers rotate between tasks during the course of their usual work: Is this the case in your establishment? YES or NO. - is this the case for just some work groups? - or for the majority of work groups? Type B. Some multi-skilled workers rotate between certain tasks (independently of team organisation): Is this the case in your establishment? YES or NO Is direct cooperation between workers in different sections encouraged. (For establishments comprising a single branch, answer ``Not applicable’’) We interpret the existence of flexible working as being a method by which firms can reduce the cost of absenteeism. This should therefore increase the generosity of sick pay.
The second group of work organisation variables concern production methods. We use responses to Répons: C3 and C4. They are all on a 4-point scale C3. Let’s talk now about working methods. For each change that I list, would you please tell me how important it has been in your firm in the last 3 years? Diminution of stocks and inventories C4. For each method of organisation that I cite, please tell me whether it has already been introduced, whether it is about to be introduced, being considered or not under consideration at all in your establishment: Just-in-time? flow, production on demand Thirdly, we use a group of questions about union activity. These are important since supplementary sick pay arrangements are usually the outcome of bargaining between firms and unions, either at branch or at firm level. Respondents are asked if the majority of the firms workers are covered by a collective agreement. These will normally be agreements at branch level. In addition, we use a question from Répons about whether there exists union representation at establishment level. We take this as a (rather weak) indicator of the probability of a establishment Fourthly, a detailed set of questions about shift working have been collapsed into a single variable as to whether shift working is part of the contract for 25% or more of the workers. The variable is important because shift work schemes imply a more rigid form of working than non- shift work, and we suppose that absenteeism is thus more expensive when there is a shift work Finally, we use the size of the firm. This has been shown by many investigators to be associated with absence. Coles and treble argue that the phenomenon can be understood in the 1 See, for example, Barmby and Stephan(1996).
context of their theory, since larger firms have greater flexibility in rescheduling production than Measures of absence
The last group of variables that we use attempt to capture the importance of absenteeism to the firm. Firms are asked directly if absenteeism was a problem in 1992 for the four main categories of workers: White-collar and blue-collar in manufacturing and services; whether it is one of three criteria used in determining pay increments; whether they keep records of absenteeism and whether they regard absenteeism as an indicator of social relations.
Sick pay in France is regulated by the Social Security law. This lays down minimum levels of provision, and a division of responsibility between the state and employing firms. The Régime Général specifies state payments at a replacement rate of 50% for 60 days, following a three day waiting period (délai de carence). Qualifications for the state benefits imply that virtually all workers will be eligible. In addition, employing firms must make complementary payments, of 40% for the first 30 days of a spell of sickness and 16.66% for the next 30 days. These payments are subject to a ten-day délai de carence and are payable only to workers with at least 3 years tenure in their job. The system is illustrated in Figure I. For workers with tenure in excess of 8 years, the period over which sick pay is payable is extended according to the schedule shown in the The Régime Général provides a minimum level of replacement, but employing firms are free to exceed these provisions if they wish. They can make more generous provision in a number of ways: by increasing the replacement rates, extending the period covered, reducing the délai de 2 Workers must have had at least 200 hours of work in the 3 months prior to the spell of sickness, or have been paid atleast 1.015 times the minimum wage in the previous 6 months.
carence, or reducing the 3 year tenure qualification. The actual provision for the employees of a particular firm may therefore be quite different from the provision specified by the Régime Général The element of choice that French firms have in sick pay provision, and the availability of data describing the choices firms have made, provide a unique opportunity to investigate some of the issues surrounding the incidence of absence, the moral hazard involved in sick pay provision, and the costs of absence to the firm.
We investigate these ideas in the present work by modelling two variables: i) an indicator of whether or not firms have a supplementary system; ii) the mean replacement ratio.
The dependent variables are constructed from a sequence of questions concerning sick pay provision. Firms are asked whether the majority of their employees are affiliated to the Régime Général or not. This is necessary, because some industries have special arrangements that replace the Régime Général. We have ignored firms in such industries. Next they are asked if they have a complementary system of sick pay. The first of the variables modelled is derived from the Those firms that report the adoption of a supplementary scheme are asked to describe its provisions for up to four groups of workers, distinguished by their seniority in the firm. If the scheme adopted is too complex to be described by four sets of parameters, the four most frequent sets are supposed to be reported. In the present paper we have used information only from the first The replacement ratio is a useful measure of the generosity of a benefit system. It measures the proportion of normal income that is paid to a person eligible for sick pay. In the case of the French sick pay regime, this idea is not easy to make operational because of the complexity of the Consider the Régime Général illustrated in Figure I. It is clear that because of the délai de carence, the replacement ratio changes as a spell of sickness absence proceeds. Thus for the first three days the ratio is zero, for the next seven it is 50%, it then rises to 90% for eligible workers, and falls again after 60 days. Eligibility depends on seniority. There are three degrees of freedom that firms have in providing more generous coverage than the state scheme allows. They can vary the rates, the minimum seniority requirement, or the délai de carence. Our aim is to develop as parsimonious a representation of the generosity of a scheme as possible. The measure we use is the mean replacement rate throughout a spell. This measure is not unique, since it varies with spell Begin by defining, for each worker (indexed by i ), a sequence of variables: {τ (d ), d = 1,.,T}.
τ (d) is the replacement rate for the i ’th worker on day d of a spell of absence. Our data includes all the information necessary to compute these for each sampled worker. For each firm (indexed by j ), n workers are sampled and we calculate the sequence of mean replacement ratios. That is: 3 One of our priorities for future work is to incorporate the information in the remaining three lines into the measure ofreplacement ratio, although we do not think it will make a great deal of difference to the outcome.
The τ (d ) measure the mean replacement ratio on each day of a spell (that is, the mean marginal replacement ratio), but to measure the generosity of a scheme it seems more natural to think of mean replacement ratios throughout a spell. These can be computed as: We have computed these measures for T = 29 , which covers absences up to one month in duration.
Mean values (across firms) of the measures for d = 4,11, 20 are tabulated in Table II.
4 Analysis and Results
Three sets of results are reported in the Tables at the end of the paper. The first, Table III, examines the relationship between the adoption of Just-in-Time methods, the structure of the workforce, and absence monitoring. The relationship is very clear with adopting firms employing a smaller proportion of women than non-adopting firms, and also having workforces that are younger than average. Since there is considerable evidence pointing to higher rates of absenteeism among women and older people, this finding supports the presence of the selection effects suggested by The remaining Tables are concerned with an analysis of the adoption and generosity of sick pay arrangements in addition to the legally required minima. Tables IV and V contain logit estimates of the influence of a number of variables on the probability of adopting a supplementary scheme. Eight different specifications are used, each of which include a selection of the variables described above, plus industrial dummies. We have not reported the estimated coefficients of the Three variables are included in all the specifications. These are: the existence of a collective agreement; the size of the firm; and the existence of union representation in the establishment.
Unions and collective agreements are clearly important in determining the adoption of supplementary schemes. Both variables enter all specifications with significant coefficients. Firm We have four dummy variables to represent aspects of the production process. They are: the use of just-in-time methods; the development of methods to reduce delays in production and stock-holding; and the development of products with short production runs. The Coles and treble 4 See, for example, Barmby et al.(2002), this finding is consistent with the idea that firms adopting JIT have lowerexposure to absenteeism induced by the structure of their workforces. It is also true that firms that monitor absencecarefully are more likely to be JIT adopters.
thesis suggests that all these should have a negative impact on the adoption (and generosity) of supplementary sick pay. Table IV, columns a-c present specifications of the logit in which the first three of these variables are introduced singly, and then, in column d, all three together. None of them enter with effects that are significantly different from zero. However, the introduction of shorter production runs does have a significant negative effect as expected.
The next group of variables capture the influence of flexible working methods: the use of rotation of workers between tasks within teams; rotation between teams; the encouragement of cooperation between departments in the establishment; and the existence of multidisciplinary teams. These measures all fail to have a measurable impact on the adoption of supplementary sick Shift-working is introduced to increase the capital utilisation rate, by rotation of workers.
Table IV suggests that it has a positive effect on the probability of introducing supplementary sick Table V, columns a-d report estimation of the same specifications as Table IV, columns a-d with a set of indicators of the establishment’s self-reported valuation of absenteeism. The pattern of estimates described above is not altered by the introduction of these variables. The firm was asked directly if absenteeism had been a problem among various group of workers. We include the responses to the two questions referring to blue-collar workers in the production and service sectors. These again produce estimated coefficients that are not significantly different from zero.
Despite this, in firms for which absenteeism is an important consideration in awarding pay rises, adoption of supplementary sick pay is significantly less likely. This suggests that high pay is associated with low absence (as predicted in Coles and treble), and also that firms seek to discourage absence by providing less generous sick pay.
Finally, firms were asked if they regarded absenteeism as an important feature of the social climate in their firm and if they recorded it. Both these variables appear to be important in determining the probability of adoption. The second of the effects is rather difficult to interpret, because firms with a sick pay scheme are almost certain to maintain a record of absence for Table VI reports the results of a similar analysis of the generosity of the sick pay provided.
We do this by using the mean replacement ratios for 4-day, 11-day and 20-day spells as dependent variables in tobit regressions. The adoption of the tobit technique reflects the idea that each firm will have an optimal sick pay scheme, but they are constrained by the imposition of the Régime Général The optimal scheme for constrained firms is thus the Régime Général which imposes a lower bound on the replacement ratio, we observe a large number of firms clustered on this lower bound on each day. It is under these circumstances that a tobit is an appropriate estimation method.
The analysis of the three generosity measures, τ (4), ( the adoption of sick pay schemes other than the Régime Général may not be very sensitive to the kinds of influences suggested by the analysis of Coles and treble, the generosity of such schemes is.
We have estimated tobit equations for each of the specifications described above, but we do not burden the reader with a full presentation of these results. Table VI gives the final set of regressions, which is sufficient to convey the flavour of our results. The three parts of the table correspond to the three mean replacement ratios: for 4, 11 and 20-day spells respectively.
The most striking feature of these results is the strong influence of just-in-time and the work organisation variables. These apply to all three durations reported. As expected, the influence of just-in-time methods on the generosity of sick pay provision is negative. Rotation of multi-skilled workers and the existence of multi-skilled groups are both expected to have a positive influence, because these kinds of work organisation imply greater flexibility on the part of the workforce, and hence a reduction in the cost of an absence to the firm. Firms can therefore afford to be more Once again, shift-working has a positive effect, but only on short term replacement rates.
Similarly, the introduction of shorter production runs is associated with lower replacement rates, 5 Conclusion
This paper presents what we believe to be the first evidence for relationships between the nature of a firm’s technology and its personnel policies, particularly as they are directed towards absence control. Such evidence is hard to assemble because data sources containing information about both technology and monitoring and incentive schemes are rare. Indeed, as far as we know the French data we use here are unique in this respect. Certainly, no similar data exist for Britain.
Even given the limitations of the data, the results suggest strongly that firms’ choices of personnel policy are driven in a significant way by reliability considerations. Firms who might be expected to value reliability particularly highly (those adopting JIT technology) are seen to have workforces with a demographic profile different from other firms. They are also more likely to monitor absence and tend to be more concerned to provide appropriate incentives, in the form of additional and/or more generous sick pay.
We believe that the importance of this work is rather wider than simple illumination of what determines firms’ policies. Absence research has been dominated by the idea that absenteeism is a supply-side phenomenon: workers decide when and how often they are going to be absent, and thus determine the observed absence rate. The present research suggests that this view is excessively restrictive. Although workers themselves make the decision to be absent, the decision is moderated by the policies of the firm. In seeking explanations of the observed absence rate, we must look beyond models of worker behaviour, to consider the interests and actions of the firms in which they Appendix
The Enquête sur le coût de la main d’oeuvre et la structure des salaires is a large scale survey of French industrial establishments and their workers carried out by INSEE in 1992. For each firm included in the survey a sample of employees was selected. There are therefore two sets of responses to the Enquête questions answered by the firm and questions answered by employees.
In addition, a supplementary questionnaire, known as Répons was administered to about 10\% of the firms to elicit more detailed information for this subset of firms.
The information about sick pay comes from both the firm questionnaire and the individual questionnaire. Firms are asked firstly if they follow the Régime Général or not. They are then asked if they have a complementary system of sick pay. This is an ambiguous question. It is intended to find out if firms have any provision over and above the Régime Général, but respondents who are conversant with the Social Security law will know that the firm’s contribution to sick pay within the Régime Général is referred to as the système complémentaire. Such responses are easily Respondents who say they operate a complementary system are finally asked to specify its provisions. Up to four systems can be described by each firm. Respondents who have more than four are asked to report details of those that cover the four largest groups of workers. The systems are described by the minimum tenure qualifying a worker for sick pay, the number of days of carence, and the replacement rates month by month for up to six months of absence.
Cleaning: i) some respondents did not enter their responses in the correct lines of the form.
Such responses are easily identified by the pattern of missing values, and also easily corrected.
ii) some respondents entered replacement rates as proportions rather than as percentages.
Again, these are easily identified and corrected by multiplying by 100.
iii) those respondents who reported the firm’s contribution to the Régime Général as a système complémentaire are also easily identified, since their reported replacement ratios are recorded as 4000 for the first month and 1600 (or 1666) for the second month. Once again these cases are easily recognised and amended. If such a response appeared as a single système complémentaire we also altered the response to the question asking if such a system was in use.
iv) a number of other changes (and a few deletions) were made in cases where the coded responses were either obvious nonsense or inconsistent with the law.
5 The STATA program used to clean the data is available from the authors on request.
References
Barmby, T.A., M.G. Ercolani and J.G.Treble (2002): ‘Sickness Absence: An International Comparison’ Economic Journal v112(480) ppF315-331.
Barmy, T.A. and G. Stephan (2000): ‘Worker Absenteeism: Why Firm Size May Matter’ The Manchester School v68(5) pp568-77 Chatterji, M and C. Tilley (2002): ‘Sickness, Absenteeism, “Presenteeism” and Sick Pay’ Oxford Economic Papers, (forthcoming).
Coles, M.G. and J.G. Treble (1993) ‘The price of worker reliability’ Economics Letters v41(1993),pp149-155.
Coles, M.G. and J.G. Treble (1996) ‘Calculating the cost of absenteeism’ Labour Economics 3,(1996), pp169-188.
Rosen, S. (1986) ‘The Theory of Equalizing Differences’ in O.C. Ashenfelter and R. Layard (eds) The Handbook of Labor Economics, Volume 1, North-Holland, pp. 641-692.
Weiss, A. (1985): ‘Absenteeism and Wages’ Economics Letters, 19, 277-279.
Figure I
Marginal replacement rates in the Régime Général
In the Régime Général the replacement rate of sick pay depends on the length of the spell of absence. Up to 3 days, no sick pay is payable. From 3-11 days, the replacement rate is 50%. Forlonger spells, the replacement rate rises to 90%, and entitlement depends on tenure in the job asindicated in the Figure.
Replacement Rate
Extra provision forworkers caring for threeor more children.
Years of seniority 18-23
Variable
Type
Definition
if collective agreement at branch level exists if developing methods of reducing delays in production has beenimportant rdimstoc
if developing methods of reducing stockholding has been important if multidisciplinary work groups are used rracseri
if shortening of production runs has been important if rotation of tasks within workgroups is practised if rotation of tasks between workgroups is practised if interdepartmental cooperation is encouraged if absenteeism of blue-collar production workers was a problem in 1992 rabsempl
if absenteeism of blue-collar service workers was a problem in 1992 if absenteeism was a criterion in setting individual pay rises if absenteeism regarded as indicator of social climate rsabsent
Mean replacement ratio for a spell of 4 days Mean replacement ratio for a spell of 11 days Mean replacement ratio for a spell of 20 days Table I: Variable Definitions
Variable
Observations
Mean
Std. Deviation
Collective Agreement
Collective Agreement
Delay Reduction
Inventory Reduction
Just-in-Time
Multidisciplinary Workgroups
Shorter Runs
Rotation within workgroups
Rotation between Workgroups
Interdepartmental Co-operation
Absence of production workers a problem
Absence of service workers a problem
Absence used in setting pay rises
Union Representation
Indicator of social climate
Absenteeism regularly monitored
Table II: Summary Statistics of Dependent Variables Variable
Coefficient
Z
Constant
Proportion Female
Proportion Married
Mean Number of Children
Absence Recorded
Number of Observations
Pseudo-R2
Log-likelihood
Table III: Logit Regression of Adoption of Just-in-Time Methods on Employment
Exogenous Variables
5a
5b
5c
5d
Collective Agreement
Establishment Size/1000
Union representation
Just-in-Time
Delay Reduction
Inventory Reduction
Rotation within workgroups
Rotation between Workgroups
Interdepartmental Co-operation
Multidisciplinary Workgroups
Shift Working Used
Shorter Runs
Log Likelihood
Observations
Table IV: Logit estimation of the probability of adopting a supplementary sick pay scheme
Exogenous Variables
6a
6b
6c
6d
Collective Agreement
Establishment Size/1000
Union representation
Just-in-Time
Delay Reduction
Inventory Reduction
Rotation within workgroups
Rotation between Workgroups
Interdepartmental Co-operation
Multidisciplinary Workgroups
Shift Working Used
Shorter Runs
Absence used in setting pay rises
Indicator of social climate
Absenteeism regularly monitored
Absence of production workers a problem
Absence of service workers a problem
Log Likelihood
Observations
Table V: Logit estimation of the probability of adopting a supplementary sick pay scheme
Exogenous Variables
4 days
11 days
20 days
Collective Agreement
Establishment Size/1000
Union representation
Just-in-Time
Delay Reduction
Inventory Reduction
Rotation within workgroups
Rotation between Workgroups
Interdepartmental Co-operation
Multidisciplinary Workgroups
Shift Working Used
Shorter Runs
Absence used in setting pay rises
Indicator of social climate
Absenteeism regularly monitored
Absence of production workers a problem
Absence of service workers a problem
Log Likelihood
Left-Censored Observations
(censored at)
Total Observations
Table VI: Tobit estimation of the mean replacement ratio throughout a x days spell of

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