“Imagine That—A Wildcat at Biomed!” Organizational Justice and the Anatomy of a Wildcat Strike at a Nonunion Medical Electronics Factory

Abstract

Although the occurrences of wildcat strikes are inextricably linked to violations of organizational justice, only a minimal amount has been written with respect to the relationship between the occurrence of organizational injustice and the presence of employee collective action. And while research on wildcat strikes in unionized settings is fairly extensive, there has virtually been no treatment of nonunion wildcat strikes in the scholarly literature. This paper presents an industrial ethnographic account of a nonunion wildcat strike in terms of analyzing the conditions and process under which a breakdown in organizational justice leads to employee collective action. In analyzing this nonunion wildcat strike, Sheppard, Lewicki, and Minton's seven propositions are utilized to understand the conditions under which a breakdown of organizational justice increases the likelihood of the occurrence of employee collective action (Sheppard, B. H., Lewicki, R. J., & Minton, J. W. Organizational Justice: The Search for Fairness in the Workplace. New York: Lexington Books, 1992). The paper concludes with a discussion of an inexpensive human resource management practice that can be implemented for achieving some type of organizational justice in order to minimize the occurrence of nonunion wildcat strikes.