The trade union response to agency labour in Britain

The growth of agency work in recent years has posed a challenge to trade unions, which must decide if they will accept agency workers as part of their constituency and accept employment agencies as legitimate labour‐market actors. This article analyses the reaction of British unions to agency work and identifies four main responses: exclusion, replacement, regulation and engagement. It concludes with an evaluation of union policies, which stresses the need for unions to secure broad regulation of the agency labour market either through multi‐employer bargaining or employment law.     

Work, Free Will and Law

American law conceptualizes work as an exercise of free will, as a choice rather than as a right. Work law is dominated by a freedom of contract analysis in which occupations, jobs, union representation, working conditions, and exit are seen as freely chosen. New Deal-era regulatory regimes are undermined by the pervasive influence of the work-as-free-will framework. Vast spheres of worker activity that benefit employers yet occur within the coercive context of an employment regime in which jobs are a choice and a privilege rather than a right are left unregulated. Worker agency is reduced as workers conform their aspirations, expectations and demands for workplace justice to the confines of the job as defined by the employer. Few question the prevailing meaning of work as freedom because it is consonant with our cultural commitment to the American Dream—but we should.     

The end of the Ghent system as trade union recruitment machinery?

During the past 15 years, membership rates in many unions have been declining in Denmark, Finland and Sweden. Reasons for this decline may be similar to what has happened in other countries—occupational change and neoliberal ideology and policies—but in the three Ghent countries, changes in the unemployment insurance system may also have affected trade union membership losses. The major part of the decline has taken place in a period of low unemployment, which may have reduced the employee incentive to take unemployment insurance, but will increasing unemployment rates mean more trade union members? At least for the LO‐ and SAK‐affiliated trade unions, it seems that trade union independent unemployment funds may be alternatives for workers who take unemployment insurance.     

Union effects on pay levels in Britain

The contraction of union representation in Britain raises the question of whether or not unions still achieve a wage premium. Analysis of matched employer–employee data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey shows that there is now no demonstrable premium for private sector workers in general. However, unions do achieve a wage premium of around 9% for about half of employees covered by collective bargaining arrangements. The effect of union bargaining spills over to other employees in the same workplaces. The paper identifies circumstances where union effects are strongest—employer endorsement of union membership, high collective bargaining coverage and multi-unionism.     

Union threat and non-union employment: A natural experiment on the use of temporary employment in British firms

This paper presents the first empirical evidence on the effect of the threat of unionisation on the use of a predominantly non-union type of employment, i.e. temporary employment. The identification strategy exploits an exogenous variation in union threat induced in the UK by new legislation enabling unions to obtain recognition even against the will of the management. The analysis finds no evidence of an effect on the probability that a firm employs fixed-term workers, and some weak evidence of a negative effect on the probability of using agency workers. Furthermore, estimates of the effect on the share of temporary employment are negative and statistically insignificant. Overall, therefore, there is no support for the hypothesis that firms under the threat of unionisation are more likely to use this type of non-union employment.     

Do cultural differences explain differences in attitudes towards unions? Culture and attitudes towards unions among call centre workers in Britain and India

This article adds to the literature on worker attitudes towards unions by investigating the impact of cultural attitudes and the call centre labour process on union attitudes among call centre workers in Britain and India. It is hypothesised that workers with egalitarian and collectivist cultural attitudes will be more likely to have pro‐union attitudes than other workers, although if the impact of cultural attitudes is mediated by history and institutions, it might be expected that this relationship is stronger for British than Indian workers. Conversely, if union attitudes are largely a function of the call centre labour process, we would expect union attitudes to be similar among workers in both countries. Our results only partially support our hypotheses. Collectivist attitudes are only weakly related to union attitudes among the British sample but are more strongly related in the Indian sample. There are significant differences between union attitudes among our British and Indian samples. The article concludes that relationship between cultural attitudes and union attitudes are heavily dependent on institutional context. Cultural attitudes are unlikely to be either a constraint or a facilitator of union efforts to organise workers.     

Agency workers and organisation's commitment to its workers

This study explores the understanding that Dutch agency workers (i.e. workers affiliated with a temporary-help service firm) have of organisation's commitment to its workers (OCW). Semi-structured interviews with 33 Dutch agency workers aimed to answer two questions: (1) what do agency workers believe the agency and the client should offer if they are aiming for perceived OCW and (2) who are the potential messengers of agency and client OCW? If agencies and clients want to get rewarded by agency workers with perceived OCW, they have to carry a shared responsibility for many aspects of fair and favourable human resource management. However, agency workers link some aspects exclusively to one of the two organisational parties: agency workers seem to associate promotion with the client organisation, and certain aspects of job characteristics (e.g. autonomy and performance feedback) solely with the client OCW. Other elements related to job characteristics were only associated with agency OCW (current and future person–task fit, job-satisfaction concerns and job-related problems), as well as keeping in touch and problem solving (e.g. job dissatisfaction) solely with agency OCW. Moreover, agency workers personify all the mentioned responsibilities: organisational member's actions concerning these responsibilities represent OCW. Agency consultants seem to be the sole representatives of perceived agency OCW, whereas several agents (e.g. top managers, direct supervisors, co-workers, clients' ‘clients’) serve as potential representatives of client organisations' commitment.     

On the job and co-worker commitment of Dutch agency workers and permanent employees

This article explores the relationship between employment status (agency workers vs. permanent employees) and affective and normative job and co-worker commitment. Our study was conducted on employees from four metal companies in the Netherlands. As HRM practices seem to influence employee commitment, we performed 89 interviews across all four companies and included blue-collar workers, their managers (direct supervisors, HR managers and production managers), as well as works council members. To test our hypotheses on commitment differences, we conducted quantitative research within the companies (permanent employees N = 167; agency workers N = 54), all blue-collar workers. Results show that permanent employees and agency workers express similar degrees of commitment to their job and to their co-workers, apart from affective commitment to co-workers, which is lower for agency workers than for permanent workers. We argue that national legislation, as well as managers' attempts to offer HR practices equal to those of permanent staff, play a prominent role in stimulating agency workers' commitment.     

Temporary Help Agencies and Occupational Mobility*

This paper analyses the effects of Temporary Help Agencies (THA) on occupational mobility by performing an empirical comparison of the job‐to‐job upgrading chances of agency and regular (non‐agency) workers in Spain. We estimate a switching regression model to allow for self‐selection into agency work because of, for instance, more motivated workers being more likely to search for jobs through a THA. We find evidence in favour of the existence of self‐selection in all qualification groups considered. Concerning mobility, we find that agency workers in intermediate qualification levels are less likely to experience demotions than regular workers. THA increase the probability of high‐skilled workers achieving a permanent contract in Spain.     

Absence management of migrant agency workers in the food manufacturing sector

Temporary workers in low-skilled roles often experience ‘hard’ HRM practices, for example the use of the Bradford Factor to monitor absence, rather than using incentives to reward attendance. However, this peripheral workforce has become increasingly diverse in the UK since the A8 European Union expansion, which has seen over a million migrants from central and eastern Europe register to work in the UK. Importantly, there is also heterogeneity within this group of workers, for example between those who intend to migrate for a short period of time then return, and those who are more settled and wish to develop a career. By considering the particular case of absence management, this paper examines how these different groups of migrants respond to HRM practices. The key contribution of the paper is to examine how different groups of migrants experience these practices, rather than simply comparing migrant and native workers as two homogeneous groups. The paper presents data from the food manufacturing sector in the UK. In total, 88 semi-structured interviews were conducted with operations managers, HR managers, union convenors and workers on permanent, temporary and agency contracts. In addition, data from informal interviews and observation at five companies are presented.     

工会组织做好职工思想政治工作的探讨

工会是职工凝心聚力、文化建设、维权的重要部门,也被称为“职工之家”,是党组织和企业、职工联系的桥梁和纽带。工会是坚持党中央领导,代表工人阶级队伍的组织,负责对党组织工作以及企业政工思想教育工作的实施。论文主要对工会组织在职工思想政治工作中的作用和对策进行分析。     

非公有制企业工会维护农民工权益的困境与出路——基于法视角的分析

在现有农民工权益保护体制下,工会维权责无旁贷。但目前非公有制企业的工会陷于监督缺失、维权乏力甚至"不在场"的困境之中。非公有制企业工会维护农民工权益的出路在于:进一步完善工会法制,确立非公有制企业工会"农民工权益代表者和维护者"的角色,将农民工组织起来,构建切实维权的体制。     

Client organizations and the management of professional agency work: The case of English health and social care

A growing reliance on agency workers can lead to significant risks for client organizations, especially in core organizational roles. It has been suggested while these risk can be mitigated through investments in human resource management (HRM) directed at agency workers, in reality these will be hard to implement. This article draws upon Lepak and Snell's (1999) HR architecture model and uses a comparative case study method to explore this issue, focusing on agency working in core nursing and qualified social worker roles. The findings illustrate how client organizations can become more involved in the management of agency workers than has previously been acknowledged. Our analysis also identifies the conditions that shape this client‐side involvement, including the nature of agency worker contracts, the role of temporary work agencies, competing organizational cost‐control priorities, and perceptions of the regulatory context. These conditions are brought together in a general model for understanding the largely neglected role that client organizations play in the HR management of agency workers.     

Paying to queue: a theory of locational differences in nonunion wages

Traditional theories of the effect unions have on nonunion wages are difficult to reconcile with firm and worker mobility. We show how differences in nonunion wages can persist in a two-city search model. Nonunion wage differences across cities are driven by transition rates into the union sector. Should union queues form in the nonunion sector, union power decreases nonunion wages as workers are willing to take lower wages to line up for union jobs. However, if queues are formed in the unemployed sector, union power increases nonunion wages as nonunion firms pay premiums to induce workers to leave the queue.     

Union Mergers; Some Questions Raised by a “Disorderly Breakup”

This essay discusses the 2004 merger between UNITE, a clothing workers’ union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant workers union. Many labor scholars and union proponents believed that this merger would revive a dormant US labor movement and lead to great success in union organizing. Although much was expected, there was very little accomplished by this merger. While union mergers can either be amalgamations or absorptions, the UNITE-HERE merger took the former form. Although successful amalgamations usually occur when the two unions share a common jurisdiction, additional problems occur when the unions are dissimilar in size and type of members. The UNITE-HERE merger displayed none of these three above-mentioned characteristics. This essay also discusses issues of the centralization/decentralization of union mergers, the negotiation and promotion of such combinations, local union and national union mergers while concluding with a discussion of whether union mergers are an appropriate strategy for dealing with a struggling US labor movement early in the twenty-first century.     

如何做好新时期企业工会工作

工会组织是中国共产党领导的职工自愿结合的工人阶级群众组织,是党联系职工群众的桥梁和纽带,是职工合法权益的代表者和维护者.切实发挥好企业工会工作的积极作用,可以为进一步做好新时期企业工会建设提供重要保证.     

Job insecurity and job satisfaction in the United States: the case of public sector union workers

We measure the association between perceived job insecurity and job satisfaction in the United States and focus on public sector union workers. Job satisfaction decreases with perceived job insecurity among union workers in the public sector and primarily when tenure with an employer is high.     

Gender Harassment and Negative Mental Health: What Labor Unions Can Do To Help Union Women

Few studies on sexual harassment and mental health have examined the stress-buffering question for union women. Our study examined the moderating effect of two perceptual moderators—perceived union tolerance for sexual harassment and perceived union support—as they relate to harassment and mental health with the intent of identifying conditions under which the toxicity of harassment is reduced. Our conceptualization of social support as a coping resource in conjunction with interpersonal support as a preferred coping strategy was used to explain reduced toxicity under conditions of low perceived union tolerance for harassment and high perceived union support in a sample of 150 women from multiple unions. Implications for future research and union policy and practice on harassment are discussed.     

Union wage premiums in Great Britain: Coverage or membership?

This paper presents estimates of union wage premiums for Great Britain and distinguishes between union membership and union coverage effects on wages. For this purpose a panel data system estimator is applied to data from the British Household Panel Survey.For female workers a coverage premium of 6.1% is estimated whilst no evidence of a union membership premium is found. This result lends support to the by-product theory of Olson (1965) [Olson Jr., M., 1965. The logic of collective action. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.)]: if female covered members receive other private benefits than a higher wage from the union the coverage premium could be viewed as a by-product. For male workers no evidence is found of a membership premium nor a coverage premium. To investigate potential bias in the estimated union effects particular attention is paid to measurement error in union membership and the inclusion of job-changes in the sample.     

Informal hierarchies among workers in low‐skill food manufacturing jobs

This article examines the creation of informal workplace hierarchies in the context of recent changes in the UK labour market. Previous studies have identified that deskilling of jobs has removed formal hierarchies among many production workers, and that informal hierarchies based upon factors such as contractual status have formed in their place. The aim of this article is to examine how changes in the labour force mean that new informal hierarchies have developed among migrant and immigrant workers who take these jobs through an agency. Research consisted of 50 semi‐structured interviews, coupled with lengthy observation of both work and social settings, at three food manufacturers. The article finds that language and cultural issues create a complex informal hierarchy not only between directly employed and agency workers, but also among and within different groups of migrant and immigrant agency workers.