Side by Side We Battle Onward? Representing Workers in Contemporary America

As collective bargaining in the United States declines, diverse forms of worker representation are proliferating. Strategic dilemmas of representation are central to the diverse organizations and coalitions representing disparate aspects of workers' interests. Unions continue to bargain collectively, while forming alliances with other groups and providing an array of services to members. Other organizations and loose associations represent specific aspects of workers' interests and advocate on their behalf while stopping short of collective bargaining. This article compares the scope, objectives and methods of worker representation by unions and non‐bargaining actors. It argues that the key dilemmas of which workers to represent, over what issues and through which organizational forms, apply both to unions and to non‐bargaining actors, such as community organizations, and advocacy groups, which represent select interests of particular workers. These non‐bargaining actors are key strategic allies for unions. While these organizations do not take on collective bargaining, they are sometimes better positioned to represent other key needs and interests of workers. The legal‐political and mutual insurance needs of workers are sometimes well met by these emergent groups. However, these organizations do not, and cannot, provide the advantages of traditional collective bargaining.     

如何促进农民工定居城市

农民工选择非永久迁移是在约束条件下的一种理性选择，而这种非永久迁移却给经济增长带来许多负面影响，促进农民工定居城市已成为急需解决的问题。文章通过分析在促进农民工定居城市过程中的利益格局，从协调城乡间利益矛盾，减少制度变迁摩擦成本的角度，提出了促进农民工定居城市的路径选择。     

Straight to the Core — Explaining Union Responses to the Casualization of Work: The IG Metall Campaign for Agency Workers

The existing literature provides different accounts on the strategies of unions regarding marginal workers. It has been argued that under increasing labour market segmentation, unions have either to prioritize their core constituencies and to seek compromises with management, or to adopt inclusive strategies towards peripheral workers to counterbalance eroding bargaining power. This article shows that both strategies represent equally viable options to protect the interests of unions' core members. The strategic choice depends on the (perceived) competition between core and peripheral employees related to employers' personnel strategies; this affects the possible alignment of interests between unions' core members, on the one hand, and either management or peripheral employees, on the other. Our historical analysis of union strategies towards agency workers in the German metal sector illustrates this mechanism, and identifies institutional change towards liberalization as the trigger for aggressive segmentation strategies by employers and for inclusive union strategies.     

Works Councils and Separations: Voice,Monopoly, and Insurance Effects

Using a large linked employer–employee data set for Germany, we find that the existence of a works council is associated with a lower separation rate to employment, in particular for workers with low tenure. While works council monopoly effects show up in all specifications, clear voice effects are only visible for low tenured workers. Works councils also reduce separations to nonemployment, and this impact is more pronounced for men. Insurance effects only show up for workers with tenure of more than 2 years. Our results indicate that works councils to some extent represent the interests of a specific clientele.     

Managerial Control of Employees Working at Home

Places of work constitute processes of management by facilitating ‘visibility’ (the possibility for supervisors and others to observe workers) and ‘presence’ (the ability for workers to participate in relations with co‐workers and others). Working at home creates problems for both these aspects of managerial control. We suggest that managers seek to compensate for the relative lack of visibility and presence of home‐located workers by generating a range of devices and social disciplines that together comprise loose networks of control. However, these responses are only partially successful since they are founded on contradictory assumptions and practices.     

Taiwan: An Exploration of Labour Relations in Transition

This paper explores the emerging relations between workers and employers in Taiwan. The lifting of martial law in 1987 and other reforms have set in motion a basic restructuring of the industrial relations system. A union movement dominated by the interests of employers and the ruling political party has given workers little leverage in the employment relationship. Constrained collective bargaining plus consultation with employers offers the best long-term prospect of providing a systematic basis for worker participation in the workplace and broader business and economic decision-making.     

Changing Patterns of Industrial Relations in Taiwan

This article examines changing patterns of industrial relations (IR) in Taiwan. Although trade unions have become more autonomous since the lifting of martial law in the mid-1980s, trends such as the privatization of state-owned enterprises, industrial restructuring, flexible employment practices, and importation of foreign workers hinder union development. The millennium may represent a turning point for workers and their organizations because the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) replaced the Kuomintang (KMT) as the ruling party. This may further union independence and power because the DPP tends to be a more pro-labor party. However, balancing the interests of workers and employers will still be a challenge for the DPP, particularly given employer opposition to many of the DPP's labor policies.     

Migration,Ethnicity and Solidarity: ‘Multinational Workers’ in the Former Soviet Union

We investigate migrant construction workers’ experiences in the Former Soviet Union, examining their attitudes to other ethno-national groups, unions and collective action. Industrial relations and migration studies view migrant workers’ hypermobility and diversity, under conditions of low union coverage and rising nationalism, as potentially obstructing consciousness-raising and mobilizing. Workers in our study faced union indifference, ethno-national segregation and discrimination. However, managerial abuses, informality and contestation from below led to spontaneous mobilization. Lack of institutional channels to solve these disputes drove workers’ further mobility. Complex mobility trajectories and collective action translated into increased awareness of collective interests and rejection of nationalist ideologies. The outcome is ‘multinational workers’ potentially resistant to nation-state politics and capital's logics but also aware of the value and usefulness of collective solidarities. Thus, previous arguments solely associating exit with individualistic attitudes, and post-socialist legacies with workers’ quiescence present only partial pictures.     

How Can New Players Establish Themselves in Highly Institutionalized Labour Markets? A Belgian Case Study in the Area of Project‐Based Work

How can new players seeking to serve nonstandard worker categories (such as project‐based workers) establish themselves into labour markets that are highly institutionalized? This paper explores the case of SMart, a Belgian community‐based labour market intermediary that successfully developed solutions to better represent the interests of project‐based workers and secure their discontinuous careers. Using an organizational legitimacy approach, we find that labour market entry and growth involve different types of boundary‐crossing when addressing the needs of workers that do not fit into established categories. However, to justify boundary‐crossing, the new player must complement its pragmatic work on delivering new services and tools with conceptual (cognitive) and structural (moral) legitimation work.     

制度短缺与劳工短缺——"民工荒"问题研究

本文认为,在劳动力市场信息不充分的条件下,外来工（农民工）主要（只能）通过私人网络关系去寻找工作。利用网络寻找工作不一定能使他们得到工资较高的工作岗位．却可以节省找工成本。由于外来工工资较低,所以,他们不能安心在所在企业工作,因而有较高的流动率。高流动率造成了劳工短缺即“民工荒”。作为群体的外来工之所以工资低,主要是最低工资标准丧失了调节作用,这是基本的、直接的制度缺陷。外来工的高流动性还塑造了劳资关系双方的短期行为。本文还进一步讨论了农民工高流动率和不能转化为真正的职业工人的制度背景．这就是“半工半耕”和城乡二元户籍划分的正式制度、乡土社会的传统社会规范和社会公众（包括农民工自身）对农民工的认知心理等非正式制度。     

Divided we fall: The breakdown of gig worker solidarity in online communities

The ‘gig economy’ presents a contested new work arrangement where freelancers find work on digital platforms. Subsequently, previous research has investigated how gig workers develop solidarity and take collective action against the exploitative practices of the platforms. However, this research is limited by mostly focusing on solidarity in contexts of local gig worker communities. We investigate whether freelancers who work on a global platform, Upwork, which hires people for diverse and complex jobs, can build up solidarity in a global online community. Applying a mixed-methods research design, we analysed how gig workers responded to a policy change by Upwork that affected their working conditions negatively. In doing so, we outline how solidarity breaks down in an online community of gig workers, due to them realising different interests and identities. We contribute to recent discussions on solidarity in the gig economy, and online communities as tools for organising.     

Mobilizing crisis management networks — Entrepreneurial behavior in turbulent contexts

Severe socio-economic issues that threaten peace, life or wellbeing of humans in specific regions of the world cannot be solved by any single actor. Wide networks of political, business, governmental, non-profit and humanitarian organizations are to be involved to change existing practices. Despite conflicting interests and competing behavior, involved organizations need to act collectively to initiate the change of commonly accepted practices, i.e. institutions. This is the space in the present study for examining network mobilization as a collective means to change institutions. Our aim is to answer the question: How are networks mobilized in crisis management to initiate institutional change processes in socio-economically turbulent contexts? We provide a framework of network mobilization for institutional change built on the IMP rooted network mobilization research and institutional entrepreneurship discussion. The framework is reflected upon by means of insights from an interview-based case study with representatives of governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in worldwide humanitarian peace-building. We identify, firstly, incentivizing, reticent and adaptational behaviors of network mobilizers to utilize legitimacy and relationship sediments as mobilization enablers. Secondly, these behaviors help network mobilizers to overcome actor visibility and unpredictability as mobilization obstacles in turbulent contexts.     

Nine Years of New Labour: Neoliberalism and Workers’ Rights

Since it was first elected in 1997, a large Commons majority won in three general elections and a benign economic environment have combined to give New Labour the authority and opportunity to implement its programme for industrial relations and employment law. This paper offers an appraisal of New Labour’s neoliberalism, and its relevance for understanding the scope and limits of its reform of employment law. The conclusion calls for a campaign to restore and extend trade union rights as a prerequisite for safeguarding workers’ interests within the labour market, employment relationship and society.     

Service Delivery Networks and Employment Relations at German Airports: Jeopardizing Industrial Peace on the Ground?

In this article, we ask how organizational restructuring towards a network form of service delivery challenges an established form of employment relations in Germany, that is labour–management collaboration. Building on a theoretical discussion of the marketization hypothesis, we develop a structuration perspective on the relationship between network restructuring and labour–management collaboration, which highlights the political economy of inter-firm networks. Empirically, we focus on two major airport authorities in Germany. Our findings show how these authorities at the core of service delivery networks face a strategic trade-off between short-term labour cost reductions and more adversarial employment relations. Apart from coinciding with a deterioration in working conditions for service workers, the handling of this trade-off depends on managers’ and worker representatives’ commitment to collaboration across the network. While unions and works councils initially continued with social partnership-type practices, the more adversarial management practices for enacting the network restructuring cause a fragmentation on the workers’ side and increase the conflict potential. We conclude that the agency of management and worker representatives in the enactment of inter-firm networks oscillates between more partnership-like and more conflictive practices, which turn the network restructuring into a political process with divergent outcomes for employment relations.     

The Organization of Organized Discontent: The Case of the Postal Workers in Britain

The case of the postal workers in Britain is examined in order to develop our knowledge of intra‐union oppositional groupings. Such groupings within the postal workers are shown to have influence as the result of the 'strategy' of a small number of activists within largely conducive circumstances of internal strife and worker combativity. However, they do not accord to our normal understanding of factions, being better characterized as shifting and temporary networks and alliances.     

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.     

Social Capital and Union Revitalization: A Study of Worker Networks in the UK Audio‐Visual Industries

This article examines Jarley's contention that trade union revitalization is conditional upon the generation of social capital through the systematic creation of networks. It draws on a qualitative study of freelance workers in the UK audio‐visual industry to consider two propositions. The first, that ‘social capital within networks is forged on “bonds” that are conducive to trade union identity’ was not sustained by the data, which instead suggested that social capital is more likely to be generated by networks outside trade union structures. However, the data did support the second proposition that ‘trade unions can harness social capital in order to achieve concrete industrial relations outcomes’ by linking networks to reservoirs of expertise and influence.     

农民工市民化进程中养老保险制度融合研究

本文首先运用较为详实和权威的数据对农民工养老保险的现状进行了分析,然后从制度因素、经济因素、农民工自身因素等多个方面对制约农民工社会保障融合的因素进行了详尽论述。最后对养老保险融合机制的构建进行了有意义的探索和研究,以期能在决策层建设农民工社会保障的实践操作中提供建设性建议。     

A Trade Union Congress Perspective on the Company Law Review and Corporate Governance Reform since 1997

This article examines the Company Law Review and other corporate governance reforms introduced by the Labour government since 1997. It argues that an opportunity has been missed to implement fundamental change by giving employees and other key stakeholders rights in companies equal to those of shareholders. However, reforms that aim to make the existing system work better by promoting responsible shareholder activity have been introduced, and proposals to increase company disclosure on employee and other stakeholder relationships are in the pipeline. The potential of the reforms to offer trade unions new tools for promoting workers’ interests is examined.     

Evading Surveillance and Making Time: an Ethnographic View of the Japanese Factory Floor in Britain

A core element of the debate surrounding Japanese manufacturing transplants is the capacity of management to suppress employee resistance. This paper reports a study based on an eight-week period of participant observation of a particular form of resistance, fiddles. It argues that the opportunity for fiddling stems from the organization's inability to control its buyer–supplier relationships, temperamental technology, and the ability of workers to manipulate standard operating procedures. Moreover, it suggests that fiddles operate mainly with the consent of supervisors, and ultimately are not in conflict with interests of management as they contribute to production targets.