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For the past 20 years, job training has been promoted as the US Federal Government’s primary labour market policy for improving the employment opportunities of low‐income Americans. This essay provides new findings from the US labour market and from training programme evaluations to suggest that the focus on training as a primary anti‐poverty strategy is radically mistaken. Training has overwhelmingly failed, and its failure appears to be due to structural economic constraints rather than programme design or implementation problems. On close examination, US training policy seems to function less as an economic policy aimed at alleviating poverty than as a political strategy for insulating both private employers and public officials from the popular backlash against downsizing.

The question of why workers support unions is one of the most fundamental in employment relations. Using Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior we conduct a selective review of literature and evidence on union voting, joining, and participation. We focus primarily on the question of motivation as stemming from self-interest or from pro-social considerations. Secondary attention is given to the influence of others’ views (subjective norms) and worker perceptions that they can achieve desired behaviors (perceived control or self-efficacy). We find support for the notion that workers are concerned with neither member self-interest (“just us”) alone, nor pro-social (“justice”) alone, but rather that they are motivated to form, join, and participate by both considerations. This micro-foundation for considering unions as institutions suggests that unions are neither narrow self-interested institutions nor purely pro-social movements, but “a little bit of both.” We offer propositions and consider implications for theory, practice, and future research.

The purpose of this paper is to detail the origins (or antecedents) of employee wellbeing (EWB) in Brazil.

The paper examines and analyses historical data in diachronic mode to reveal the origins (antecedents) of EWB in Brazil, and details factors from them arising.

Numerous factors emerge regarding the origins of EWB in Brazil, including, inter alia, traditions of landed estates employing slaves and countryside workers; historical social protest movements; a lack of free association for labour movements and rights associated with them; union recognition providing freedoms and protections in the employment relationship; pro‐worker political institutions emerging; worker campaigns for better quality of working life; a history of exclusion of worker interests by state bodies (and worker resistance to it); a need for worker representatives to gain political office to increase worker‐related discourse; contradictory results arising from relatively recent government policies; and new concerns, and enabling/restricting factors in EWB.

The paper provides a backdrop within which the context of, and future prospects for, EWB in Brazil can be assessed. Limitations are issues of cultural translation apply to the Brazilian context.

Historical data to contextualise EWB in Brazil, an under‐researched topic, is provided in the paper.