Negotiating ‘Difference’: Representing Disabled Employees in the British Workplace

Drawing on qualitative interviews with disabled employees, union officers and disability‐related organizations, this article examines employee attempts to negotiate workplace adjustments and associated issues of workplace representation. UK employment law utilizes an individual medical model of disability, which conflicts with traditional collective approaches favoured by trade unions, which has implications for disabled employees and union representation. We explore the different strategies available to unions and conclude that, despite the role played by disability‐related organizations in supporting employees, unions are the only workplace actors who are capable of reconfiguring the ‘personal as political’ and integrating disability concerns into wider organizational agendas.     

Do Broad‐based Employee Ownership,Profit Sharing and Stock Options Help the Best Firms Do Even Better?

This article analyses the linkages among group incentive methods of compensation (broad‐based employee ownership, profit sharing and stock options), labour practices, worker assessments of workplace culture, turnover and firm performance in firms that applied to the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For in America’ competition from 2005 to 2007. Although employers with good labour practices self‐select into the 100 Best Companies firms sample, which should bias the analysis against finding strong associations among modes of compensation, labour policies and outcomes, we find that employees in the firms that use group incentive pay more extensively participate more in decisions, have greater information sharing, trust supervisors more and report a more positive workplace culture than in other companies. The combination of group incentive pay with policies that empower employees and create a positive workplace culture reduces voluntary turnover and increases employee intent to stay and raises return on equity.     

Twin Tracks—Employee Representation at Eurotunnel Revisited

The introduction of the European Directive on Information and Consultation and the recent implementation of the Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Regulations into United Kingdom (UK) law have increased the focus on workplace representation arrangements. This paper examines the interplay between nonunion and union representative arrangements at Eurotunnel (UK) and assesses their effectiveness in representing the needs of employees over a 5‐year period. Importantly, the paper also examines the opportunities and challenges of both nonunion representation (NER) and union voice arrangements. The findings show that the effectiveness of nonunion structures as bodies representing the interests of employees in filling the lack of representation is questionable. However, union recognition through an employer–union partnership agreement has also raised important issues regarding the effectiveness, impact, and legitimacy of unions at Eurotunnel. The main implication of this research is that the existence of a mechanism—union or nonunion—for communication between management and employees at the workplace may not be a sufficient condition for effective representation of employee interests. In addition, while trade unions may provide greater voice than nonunion arrangements (thus the reluctance of management to accept such voice arrangements), the strength of voice is dependent on the legitimacy and effectiveness of trade unions in representing employees’ interests at the workplace. And that in turn depends on the union being perceived by the workforce as both representative and able to act independently. If the union cannot, it will not meet the needs of either employees or management—and could run the risk of being supplanted under the provisions of the new EU Directive on Information and Consultation with tougher requirements for compliance in terms of procedures for consultation and information disclosure.     

Peering into the Black Hole: The Downside of the New Employment Relations in the UK

Using a national sample of 1,000 employees, this paper examines the proposition that those working in so-called 'black hole' organizations (i.e. where there is neither a set of progressive HRM practices nor a recognized trade union) will report more negative attitudes and work experiences than those in settings where there is either HRM, a trade union presence or both. The results lend some support to this hypothesis with respect to job satisfaction and organizational commitment and in judgements about experiences of fairness of treatment and trust in management. However, the most negative views about employment relations are reported by those who belong to a union in workplaces with little HRM. The findings indicate that it is HRM practices rather than trade union membership that have the major impact on attitudes and experiences. Even in black hole organizations some employees report satisfaction. This can be largely explained by a positive psychological contract between individual and organization. The implications for the role of trade unions in the promotion of fairness at work are discussed.     

Knowledge Sharing through Face‐to‐Face Communication and Labour Productivity: Evidence from British Workplaces

We investigate whether the adoption by workplaces of human resources management (HRM) practices that enhance face‐to‐face communication (FTFC) among employees is associated with productivity gains. The analysis is based on a nationally representative sample of over 500 British trading establishments drawn from the linked 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey and Annual Business Inquiry, for which objective measures of labour productivity (value added per employee) are available. We find a positive association between productivity and FTFC in problem‐solving groups, teams and meetings of senior or line managers and employees, provided that FTFC is adopted on a continuous basis. Our finding suggests that British workplaces in the trading sector could increase their productivity by implementing HRM practices in such a way as to enhance knowledge sharing through employees' personal interactions.     

Union Co‐operation in a Context of Job Insecurity: Negotiated Outcomes from Teamworking

This paper explores the ‘mutual gains’ argument that employees benefit when teamworking is introduced alongside employee involvement in problem‐solving and within a co‐operative industrial relations climate. It reports worker outcomes from negotiations to introduce teamworking across two steelworks. Moderate union branches and employees at one of the works (Scunthorpe) co‐operated with managers in joint problem‐solving teams to redesign work. However, contrary to mutual gains expectations, greater job insecurity at this works coerced union branches to accept teamworking agreements containing extensive demanning and a pay increase for fewer employees. Employees perceived greater job security at the other works (Teesside) and by rejecting joint problem‐solving with managers, militant union branches protected more jobs and extracted higher payment for teamworking. The findings indicate that job insecurity can lead co‐operative unions down a slippery slope of coerced co‐operation restricting employee benefits from teamworking.     

Automation,skill requirements and labour‐use strategies: high‐wage and low‐wage approaches to high‐tech manufacturing in the automotive industry

In light of debates about advanced manufacturing and concepts like Industrie 4.0, this article compares labour‐use strategies in highly automated automotive supplier plants in a high‐wage country (Germany) and a low‐wage region (Central Eastern Europe). It shows considerable differences regarding skill requirements on the shop floor and the use of precarious employment contracts and examines three potential factors that explain them: national institutional frameworks, the power of employee representatives and the role of the plant within the companies and value chains. The analysis shows that the labour‐use strategies depend less on process technologies per se, but rather on the institutional framework and the role of the factory in the rollout and ramp‐up of new products and new process technologies. Such a role requires close cooperation between employees in the manufacturing areas and in product development, which in turn requires particularly high skills. The role of employee representatives in influencing labour‐use strategies proves less important. The article uses quantitative data from a survey of employee representatives, as well as qualitative data from in‐depth company case studies.     

High-Involvement Management and Pay in Britain

High‐involvement management practices have well‐established benefits for employers, but what do they do for employees? Using a nationally‐representative survey of British private‐sector workplaces, high‐involvement management is shown to be associated with higher pay. The wage premium is little affected by the choice of employee involvement practices (e.g., teams versus quality circles), but it appears only where employee involvement practices are supported by job security guarantees. Powerful trade unions increase the premium.     

Decision Making in Employment and Labor Arbitration

This experimental study examined the labor and employment arbitration decisions of four groups of arbitrators: (1) employment arbitrators who resolve disputes involving nonunion employees, (2) labor arbitrators who arbitrate cases in which an employee is represented by a union, (3) arbitrators in the National Academy of Arbitrators (NAA), and (4) students as a comparison of nonarbitrator decision makers with experienced arbitrators. A 2 ×2 ×4 factorial design was used, crossing arbitrator group with discipline standard and sex of the grievant. Results indicate that employment artibrators reinstate the grievant significantly less frequently than other arbitrators; however, the findings also reveal that all arbitrators make more favorable decisions under a just‐cause standard than under the newer META standard of discipline.     

False Self‐Employment,Autonomy and Regulating for Decent Work: Improving Working Conditions in the UK Stripping Industry

A large‐scale study of working conditions in UK‐based strip dancing clubs reveals that dancers are against de facto self‐employment as it is defined and practised by management, but in favour of de jure self‐employment that ensures sufficient levels of autonomy and control in the workplace. While dancers could potentially seek ‘worker’ or ‘employee’ status within the existing legal framework, their strong identification with the label ‘self‐employed’ and their desire for autonomy will likely inhibit these labour rights claims. We propose an alternative avenue for improving dancers’ working conditions, whereby self‐employed dancers articulate their grievances as a demand for decent work, pursued through licensing agreements between clubs and local authorities and facilitated by collective organization.     

Hybrid social media: employees’ use of a boundary‐spanning technology

Improved employee collaboration and communication can be facilitated by social technologies that extend within and beyond organisations. These social technologies have increasingly come to be represented by social media sites, which are used to extend workplace relationships across personal and professional boundaries in a hybrid role. This presents opportunities and risks as those boundaries are collapsed. Using boundary management as a theoretical lens, we evaluate the associations of relationship initiation between colleagues at different levels of organisations with employees’ strategies and their well‐being. We also investigate relationships with social media usage, age and propensity to self‐monitor and group employees using cluster analysis. We consider implications of our findings for developing more sophisticated policies, training and guidance for employees on the use of social media as a workplace tool.     

Union Strategies,National Institutions and the Use of Temporary Labour in Italian and US Plants

This article analyses variation in the use of temporary labour based on a comparison of two plants of the same US automotive multinational corporation, one in Italy and the other in the United States. We argue that differences in the use of temporary labour are explained by union capacities to make trade‐offs between alternative forms of flexibility as well as trade‐offs in the protection of internal and external groups of workers. Union capacity is dependent on the availability of power resources within different national institutional environments. These resources are shown to influence not only the ways in which temporary workers are used but also bargaining outcomes — including employment conditions — benefiting them.     

A suicide survivor: the life of a Chinese worker

In 2010, 18 employees working for Foxconn in China attempted suicide. These shocking events focused the world's attention on the manufacturing supply chains of China's export industry and the experience of working within them. What had driven these young, migrant, assembly line workers to commit such a desperate act? This article provides a first‐hand account of the experiences of one of those who survived a suicide attempt, 17‐year‐old Tian Yu. Her personal narrative is embedded within the broader context of labour process, work organisation and managerial practice at Foxconn, the Taiwanese‐owned multinational that provides products and components for Apple and others. The factory conditions are further shaped by the company trade union and Chinese government policies. The paper concludes with additional contextualisation indicating the emergence of an alliance of workers, students, scholars and transnational labour movement activists who are campaigning for Chinese workers' rights.     

Labour Market Governance and the Creation of Outsiders

Using case‐study data, the article examines the contention that protective labour market policies and trade union action are responsible for growing divisions between labour market ‘insiders and outsiders’. Case studies are reported on developments in collective bargaining in the hospitals and engineering sectors from seven western and central European countries. The article finds that managerial strategies, and interactions between management and unions, have to be considered to give a full account of the growth of precarious employment.     

Pro‐Social or Pro‐Management? A Critique of the Conception of Employee Voice as a Pro‐Social Behaviour within Organizational Behaviour

For many years, the employment relations (ER) literature took the perspective that employee voice via trade unions could channel discontent and reduce exit, thereby improving productivity. In organizational behaviour (OB) research voice has also emerged as an important concept, and a focus of this research has been to understand the antecedents of the decision of employees to engage or not engage in voice. In OB research, however, voice is not viewed as it is in ER as a mechanism to provide collective representation of employee interests. Rather, it is seen as an expression of the desire and choice of individual workers to communicate information and ideas to management for the benefit of the organization. This article offers a critique of the OB conception of voice, and in particular highlights the limitations of its view of voice as a pro‐social behaviour. We argue that the OB conception of voice is at best partial because its definition of voice as an activity that benefits the organization leaves no room for considering voice as a means of challenging management, or indeed simply as being a vehicle for employee self‐determination.     

Path Dependency and Comparative Industrial Relations: The Case of Conflict Resolution Systems in Ireland and Sweden

This article uses the theory of path dependency to explain the evolution of employment conflict resolution systems in Ireland and Sweden. It argues that the traditional ‘voluntarist’ conflict management path followed in Ireland has fragmented as a result of a series of internal developments that have reduced trade union density, increased the importance of employment law in the settlement of workplace disputes and established social partnership as the main wage‐setting mechanism. By contrast, the Swedish system has experienced reform within the boundaries of the established conflict management path, which is largely attributable to the still powerful role played by trade unions within the country. Thus, while the operating rules of the system have changed, its core underlying principles — collectivism and self‐regulation — remain intact.     

Assessing the growth of remote working and its consequences for effort,well‐being and work‐life balance

This article critically assesses the assumption that more and more work is being detached from place and that this is a ‘win‐win’ for both employers and employees. Based on an analysis of official labour market data, it finds that only one‐third of the increase in remote working can be explained by compositional factors such as movement to the knowledge economy, the growth in flexible employment and organisational responses to the changing demographic make‐up of the employed labour force. This suggests that the detachment of work from place is a growing trend. This article also shows that while remote working is associated with higher organisational commitment, job satisfaction and job‐related well‐being, these benefits come at the cost of work intensification and a greater inability to switch off.     

Online,on call: the spread of digitally organised just‐in‐time working and its implications for standard employment models

This article questions whether the dominant policy discourse, in which a normative model of standard employment is counterposed to ‘non‐standard’ or ‘atypical’ employment, enables us to capture the diversity of fluid labour markets in which work is dynamically reshaped in an interaction between different kinds of employment status and work organisation. Drawing on surveys in the UK, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands that investigate work managed via online platforms (‘crowdwork’) and associated practices, it demonstrates that crowdwork represents part of a continuum. Not only do most crowd workers combine work for online platforms with other forms of work or income generation, but also many of the ICT‐related practices associated with crowdwork are widespread across the rest of the labour market where a growing number of workers are ‘logged’. Future research should not just focus on crowdworkers as a special case but on new patterns of work organisation in the regular workforce.     

It's all about games: enterprise and entrepreneurialism in digital games

This article aims to contrast benign notions of ‘free’ and ‘creative’ work in the context of labour market conditions and employment relationships. Empirical research reveals the exploitative and precarious nature of work in the experiences of self‐employed digital game developers and charts the responses of developers to unstable and insecure working conditions. Building on work by Pongratz and Voß, Haunschild and Eikhof, and Bergvall‐Kåreborn and Howcroft, this study finds that a typical response to increasing instability in the labour market is to adopt more enterprising and entrepreneurial behaviour in order to find work. This article illustrates the consequences for developers by highlighting examples of self‐exploitation, which is fuelled by a passion for work and is where entrepreneurial practices lead to long working hours, unpaid work and a blurring of work–life boundaries.     

Dominance Effects from Local Competitors: Setting Institutional Parameters for Employment Relations in Multinational Subsidiaries; a Case from the Spanish Supermarket Sector

Dominance effects are normally associated with multinational corporations (MNCs). However, we argue that a strong local competitor can create ‘dominance effects’ setting the institutional parameters for employment relations in multinational subsidiaries. Moreover such an effect can be persistent. In this case the Spanish‐owned El Corte Inglés (ECI) used its power and influence to establish an employer's federation and two ‘yellow unions’. These yellow unions infiltrated the French‐owned MNC Carrefour and most of the Spanish supermarket sector by the early 1980s and continue to dominate collective bargaining rounds and works council elections, marginalizing the main independent trade unions. This has resulted in poor pay and working conditions and a lack of effective employee representation across most of the Spanish supermarket sector. The fact that Carrefour established an international framework agreement to observe union rights in 2001 has as yet not changed this situation.