EMPLOYEE VOICE AND THE REGULATION OF

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

Stewart Johnstone

Newcastle University Business School

Key points

• Collective employee representation & trade unions may be unfashionable but are as important as ever as a form of employee voice

• Union-management partnership strategies continue to have more potential than critics suggest, especially compared to the alternatives

The industrial relations perspective and employee voice

• The regulation of the wage-effort bargain

• “The employment relationship, the institutions or rules involved in its governance and their significance for a wide range of economic, political and social outcomes” (Sisson, 2008).

• Voice a longstanding IR concern• Language, practices and motives have changed

Employee voice: key issues & debates • How much ‘say’ should employees have in the running of organisations?

• What is the rationale for voice? • What is the scope of voice? • What are the most desirable forms of voice? • How can we evaluate whether these forms ‘work’?

• What works ‘best’?• How can voice be improved?

Main forms of voice Examples Assumptions Challenges

Self-managementCo-operatives

Workers Control

Radical: alternative to private firms run for shareholders

Limited support?Unfashionable?

Employee involvement

Profit-sharing; teamworking; empowerment; TQM; engagement

Unitarist: aligning interests; improving organisational performance

Employer-led; Tokenistic; Fads; Ephemeral; Voice Optional; Imbalance of power

Employee Representation

Trade unions, NER? Pluralist: regulating & balancing social, political & economic interests

Political; Contentious; Trade union decline; Union suppression/avoidanceUnfashionable?

The future of employee representation• Union decline especially in private sector• ‘Hollowing out’ where union presence remains• Low take up & questionable effectiveness of NER• For Unitarists, this is not a problem• But for Pluralists, a worrying trend for workers, workplaces & societies

• Union revitalisation a priority – but how can this best be achieved?

The pluralist partnership option

• Key challenge is effective regulation of (sometimes) competing interests and tensions

• Employer-sponsored EI alone is not enough!• Value of effective collective representation

• Scope for cooperation & constructive dialogue • ‘Problem-solving’ ‘Mutual gains’ (Kochan and Osterman, 1994) to ‘grow the size of the pie’

• Compatible with other HRM strategies & goals

Partnership & co-operation

• Evidence that partnership can deliver gains• Quantitative and qualitative evidence of benefits of partnership with unions, and of combining direct and indirect voice (Johnstone et.al, 2011; Johnstone, 2014; 2015; 2016)

• For unions: An opportunity (missed?)• For employers and governments: Unions as ‘lubricant not irritant’ (McCarthy, 1967)

• For workers: Compatible with ‘What workers want’ from representation (Boxall et.al, 2007)

The partnership critique

• Fundamentally contradictory (Kelly; Danford various dates)

• Possible but rare and very fragile in lightly regulated LMEs (Dobbins and Dundon, Simms, Heery various dates)

• Disconnected capitalism: even well-intentioned employers cannot keep their promises (Thompson, 2003; 2011)

The organising alternative• Organising: “collective interests of workers& collective action”

• Limited success without employer support (Simms, 2015)• “Spiral of mutually hostile activity” (Simms and Heery, 2010).

• Limited appeal to workers (Heery and Simms, 2008) – Never members– Apathy– Individualistic values– Poor image– Lack of support for ‘adversarial’ strategies

Conclusion • Evidence suggests partnership can work with appropriate supports in

LMEs (AU, IE, NZ, UK, US etc.)• Unions as constructive organisations that regulate & even lubricate

workplace relations & make a positive contribution to society• Partnership is not:

– Easy– A panacea – Unitarist – Universally applicable– Mutually exclusive

• Need more ambitious regulation of representative voice? [Institutions?]

• But also actor attitudes, skills & relationships [Culture?]

• Effective representative voice as important as ever and should be central to public policy & contemporary HRM

References • Freeman, R. B., Boxall, P. F., & Haynes, P. (Eds.). (2007). What workers say: Employee voice in the Anglo-

American workplace. Cornell University Press.• Kelly, J. (1996) Union militancy and social partnership in Ackers, P. Smith, C. and Smith, P. (Eds) The New

Workplace and Trade Unionism, London: Routledge, 77-109.• Heery, E. And Simms, M. (2008) Constrains on union organising in the United Kingdom, Industrial Relations

Journal, 39(10, 24-24.• Heery, E. And Simms, M. (2010) Employer responses to union organising: patterns and effects, Human Resource

Management Journal, 20(1), 3-22. • Johnstone, S., Wilkinson, A., & Ackers, P. (2011). Applying Budd’s model to partnership. Economic and Industrial

Democracy, 32:2, 307-328.• Johnstone, S. (2014) Wilkinson, A. Donaghey, J. Dundon, T. and Freeman, R. (Eds) Workplace partnership in

Handbook of Research on Employee Voice, Elgar, Cheltenham. • Johnstone S. (2015) The case for workplace partnership in Johnstone, S. and Ackers, P. (2015) Finding a Voice at

Work: New Perspectives on Employment Relations, Oxford University Press, Oxford. • Kochan, T. A. and Osterman, P. (1994). The mutual gains enterprise: Forging a winning partnership among labor,

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1967.• Simms, M. Holgate, J and Heery, M. (2013) Union voices: tensions in UK organising, ILR/Cornell Paperbacks, New

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