Industrial Relations Scholars Research Articles

A Tale of Two Locals: The Strategic Choice of a Trade Union during the 2019 GM–UAW Strike and Member Satisfaction

Industrial relations (IR) scholars emphasize the strategic choices of industrial relations actors to explain IR processes and outcomes. This article asserts that union member satisfaction is critical to realize unions’ objectives and that the local union and work context shapes satisfaction. The authors study the 2019 national UAW strike against General Motors in two, at first sight, very similar union locals. Union members of one local approved the agreement while the other local rejected the agreement. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors explain the different outcomes. Their analysis of a unique worker survey conducted during the strike shows that general member satisfaction was an important dimension for supporting the union’s strategic choices. Qualitative case studies of the two locals highlight the importance of shares of transfer workers—“invisible divides”—when examining member satisfaction. Broadly, findings contribute to the strategic choice literature and emphasize the local union context as a key locus for producing successful outcomes.

Explaining Union Decline: Remaking Power Relations in the Pilbara Iron Ore Industry

How have scholars tried to explain marked union membership decline in the Global North, and how have they assessed consequent “union renewal” strategies? In this journal in 2020, Bowden argued that most accounts of unionism failed to explain decline, relied too much on state policy as causation and were too optimistic about those renewal strategies. One way to respond to these important general claims is to assess, as this article does, a striking and important local instance of decline and unsuccessful strategy – Pilbara unionism, once an archetype of mining workers’ power – and to do so over the entire history of an industry. In explaining the fall of the Pilbara mining unions, which for 20 years until 1986 had seemed so strong, “power resources” and geography itself were remade by capital in ways that were entwined with, but did not always rely on, state action. This argument recasts debate about decline in two ways: by drawing on a longer timeframe than is common in industrial relations scholarship and by adopting a more theoretically explicit, and inter-disciplinary, framing than is usual in the labour historiography addressing these issues. The explanation offered here shows how, after just 20 years of mining, union power in the Pilbara unravelled. Employer strategy, the precise nature and timing of state intervention, and the geographically textured nature of employer and union power explain the rise and fall of these unions.

The new political economy of public sector wage-setting in Europe: Introduction to the special issue

This special issue (SI) brings the industrial relations scholarship on the public sector into dialogue with the comparative political economy (CPE) literature on growth models/regimes. While the former has paid great attention to the public sector, in CPE the public sector has been analysed less, and mostly as subaltern to the export-sector’s actors, interests and institutions. We posit that the public sector matters for CPE in its own right for three reasons. First, the state remains today the single largest employer in virtually every European economy, providing incomes to a large segment of the middle class. Second, public employers’ wage bill – one of the largest items of governments’ current expenditures – is funded by the taxpayers. Hence, public sector wage policy is fiscal policy, ultimately pursued by public/political employers. Third, public employers are simultaneously public managers and political sovereigns acting in the shadow of hierarchy. Case-study contributions to the SI detail how these insights matter within different European growth regimes: (1) the Mediterranean demand-led growth regime (France, Italy, Spain and Portugal), (2) the German export-led growth regime, (3) the Nordic balanced growth regime (Denmark and Sweden) and (4) the FDI-led Eastern European growth regime (Czechia and Slovakia).

Elizabeth Gaskell: An overlooked political economist and proto theorist in the field of industrial relations

AbstractThis polemical essay argues that Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and her novels North and South, and Mary Barton, portray her as an overlooked, early political economist. The objective of the paper is three‐fold: (1) to dismantle taken‐for‐granted truth claims that Alan Fox is the preeminent thinker on pluralistic forms of employee engagement (2) encourage further development and enlargement of the field and what constitutes its history, and (3) to argue for the recognition of Elizabeth Gaskell as an early political economist. Guiding this exploration is the question: How do we also make sense of Fox’s privileged situatedness in scholarship and the absence of potential early theorists like Gaskell? The paper adopts a feminist reading and polemical writing to engage in feminist critical historiography. The author draws on audience theory to help readers reorient themselves to Gaskell and to help see her as an overlooked political economist. Feminism is conceptually presented as ontology, epistemology, method, and style of writing. Despite the ongoing credit Alan Fox receives as first theorizing the frames of reference and pluralistic forms of engagement starting in the 1960s, Elizabeth Gaskell was contemplating and critiquing the employment relationship starting in the 1850s. She not only provided a rich historical understanding of the inequalities of class and wealth, but her ideas and insights remain unacknowledged in industrial relations scholarship. The paper offers a unique feminist perspective on Elizabeth Gaskell and makes the case that she is neglected early political economist. Further, the paper makes a link between the world of Victorian era fiction as historical understanding of early capitalist society and demonstrates how ideas are taken up by the field in unconscious and unjust ways.

The Future of Unions and Worker Representation: The Digital Picket Line

The Future of Unions and Worker Representation, written by Professor Anthony Forsyth, thoroughly examines four countries and industrial relations systems—Australia, the UK, the USA, and Italy—to assess and contrast their similarities and differences. The choice of these systems is not accidental. The author compares three industrial relations systems that are rooted in the common law and currently share a very fragmented collective bargaining structure with that of a civil law-based system that, despite recent attempts at decentralization, still maintains a more centralized structure. The interest of Anglophone scholars towards industrialized non-English speaking countries is relatively uncommon, making this element of the study original and valuable in itself in recent labour and industrial relations scholarship. In the book, Professor Forsyth offers a detailed and insightful description of the trends and developments in unionization and labour regulation in all four countries. His comparative analysis shows a deep understanding of the structures of their systems, their recent historical evolution, and the challenges they currently face, both shared and unique.

Socio-ecological value chain resilience and cleaning workers

ABSTRACT Examining the ways that industries survived the COVID-19 pandemic can teach us a great deal about the resilience of value chains, the ways value chain dynamics shape worker resilience, and the measures states can adopt to support both. In this paper we critically examine the thriving body of theory known broadly as supply chain resilience and explore a branch that embraces socio-ecological perspectives. We first develop a theoretical model that takes what we perceive to be the most fruitful elements of these literatures for industrial relations scholarship and bring it together with approaches tangential to industrial relations concerned with value chain actor and worker agency and resilience. We then apply this model in an analysis of the Australian commercial cleaning sector during the pandemic. Finally, we assess federal and state measures to assist and “buffer” employment and the economy in Australia, including JobKeeper and JobSeeker. We find that these government measures, combined with earlier restructuring of the labour market and restrictive immigration policies, provided the institutional scaffolding for the failure of the cleaning industry during the pandemic, exactly when cleaning became an essential service for the resilience of the whole of society.

Climate change and industrial relations: Reflections on an emerging field

What does climate change mean for the field of industrial relations? In this article, we argue that a meaningful disciplinary response to climate change requires more than simply widening the scope of industrial relations scholarship to include environmental dynamics. It demands recognition of the ways in which the categories of analysis and intellectual preoccupations of the discipline have been shaped by what we term the ‘fossil capitalist inertia’ exerted by their largely 20th-century origins. Climate change requires critical reflection of the extent to which industrial relations processes that were introduced to increase fairness and equality in a fossil capitalist context have the potential to contribute to different kinds of unfairness and inequality in an era of climate instability. The article identifies four frontiers of the scholarly development already underway that give effect to this conceptual enlargement: critical engagement with the concepts of (a) ‘sustainable development’ and (b) ‘just transition’ (c) analyses of reconfigured union identities and strategies and (d) discussions of the roles and influence of employer associations and state actors in labour and environmental relations and transitions. The article concludes by introducing five new articles that advance existing scholarly reflections on the challenge of a changed climate for industrial relations along each of these frontiers.

The power of the economic outlook: An ideational explanation of the distinct pattern of Finnish wage setting within the Nordic context

Industrial relations scholars are paying increasing attention to the role of ideas in explaining shifts in bargaining systems and wage policies. This article contributes to this growing body of literature by conducting a meso-level analysis of the uses and impacts of ideas in wage regulation policy processes in coordinated market economies. Through our in-depth case study of the Finnish policy process leading to the Competitiveness Pact of 2016, we argue that certain ideas – which we call the ‘economic outlook’ – prescribed and legitimized exhausting institutional resources in wage regulation and enabled temporary consensus among divergent interests regarding wage policy. The economic outlook linked and enabled compromises between wage policy and wage regulation interests and effectively solidified a commitment to an uncertain policy process. The case study suggests that an ideational analysis of policy processes can offer explanations for shifts in wage policy and regulation that deviate from macro-level regime shifts. While all Nordic countries have faced similar economic and institutional reform pressures, Finland’s readoption of centralized bargaining shows that national policy ideas can drive distinct industrial relations patterns within the Nordic context.

The language of integrative collective bargaining

AbstractAlthough collective bargaining is essentially a communication process, the role of language (as distinguished from discourse) in bargaining exchanges has received little attention from industrial relations scholars. Building on the work of Karl Popper, this article proposes a decomposition of language into functions and values and analyses their relevance when parties to a collective bargaining encounter engage in an integrative process. The proposed framework provides labour negotiators seeking integrative outcomes with linguistic guidelines and scholars with a tool to analyse bargaining exchanges.

Labor‐Management Partnerships' Effects On Unionists' Interaction Networks: Evidence From Us Public Schools

Industrial Relations scholars have argued that labor‐management partnerships influence union leaders' communication patterns within organizations. To date, however, these arguments have lacked theoretical clarity, as well as strong empirical support. We address this gap by developing and testing hypotheses that concern how the emergence of labor‐management partnerships shape union leaders' communication patterns within and between worksites (Study 1), as well as how these communications patterns associate with frontline workers' attitudes about their jobs and their union leader (Study 2). We test our hypotheses using multi‐source, multi‐year data from the context of U.S. public schools.

Recentralizing Industrial Relations? Local Unions and the Politics of Insourcing in Three North American Automakers

Since the auto industry’s 2008 crisis, the decades-long trend toward outsourcing by the Detroit Three automakers has stalled. During and after the crisis, original equipment manufacturers moved work inside their corporate boundaries, including the purchase of eight previously spun-off parts plants. Why has this happened? Drawing on 77 interviews in the United States and Canada and 27 insourcing cases, the authors explore how and why insourcing has taken place. Past literature has considered the costs and benefits of creating the vertically integrated corporation, the managerial politics behind vertical disintegration, and the labor–management relations that shape both. While much industrial relations scholarship points to decentralized plant-level partnerships as a union strategy to win investment, the authors find that local unionists are intervening in the politics of the corporation above the plant level to influence the purchasing, manufacturing, and engineering functions that determine the sourcing decision.

The emergence of coercive federal Australian labour law, 1901–2020

Over the past two decades, industrial relations scholarship has observed a trend towards an increasingly punitive industrial environment along with the ‘re-regulation’ of labour law. Absent from much of this literature, however, has been an empirical and historical measurement or comparison of the scale and quality of this systemic change. By surveying coercive and penal federal industrial legislation over the period 1901–2020, this study shows empirically that over the last 40 years, there has been a steep increase in the amount of coercive federal labour legislation in Australia. It further measures and compares the volume of coercive labour legislation enacted specifically against ‘labour’ and ‘capital’ or both throughout the same period (1901–2020). Analysis reveals a correlation between a high volume of coercive labour legislation with low levels of trade union power and organisation. Argued here is that coercive labour legislation has been crucial to transitioning from a liberal conciliation and arbitration model of Australian industrial relations towards a neoliberal framework of employment legislation. In the former, regulation was more collective, informal and egalitarian (embodied by the sociological concept of ‘associative democracy’). Under a neoliberal framework, regulation is now more individualised, technical, punitive and rarely enforced, resulting in less equal material outcomes.

Safeguarding women at work? Lessons from Aotearoa New Zealand on effectively implementing domestic violence policies

Although domestic violence is increasingly acknowledged as a workplace issue and a gender equality issue, a gap remains in the effective implementation of domestic violence policies in workplaces. The Domestic Violence – Victims Protection Act passed in 2018 in Aotearoa New Zealand was a global landmark for holding workplaces accountable for safeguarding victims through a codification of employer responsibility. While the legislation is a milestone, such moves are nascent compared with other workplace gender equality initiatives. In this article, we assess ‘where we are now’ in relation to domestic violence policy initiatives, arguing that knowledge necessary for successful policy implementation is limited by the historical ‘gender blindness’ of industrial relations scholarship. For successful implementation, scholars and practitioners must understand domestic violence as a public issue embedded in broader patterns of gender inequality, reinforced by a gendered labour market. Drawing upon vignettes of victims’ experiences from empirical data on intimate partner stalking in Aotearoa New Zealand, a research and practice agenda is proposed to consider ‘where to next’ for implementing domestic violence policies. Our agenda proposes recognising domestic violence as a gendered, public issue which blurs boundaries between work, home and society in order to truly safeguard women at work.

Framing work and welfare: Insights from the growing relevance of company welfare in Italy

This article applies the concept of frames of reference to contemporary work and welfare dynamics by focusing on the growing relevance of company welfare in Italy after the 2008 crisis. The analysis considers how this occurred along three phases: in the first, a path-breaking case, Luxottica, demonstrates the potential of company welfare; then, Renzi’s government promotes company welfare through tax breaks; finally, trade unions try to affect the diffusion of company welfare, displaying contrasting ideologies as well as pragmatic joint solutions in the process. Overall, two contiguous sub-frames – consultative unitarism and collaborative pluralism – offer the mainstream justification to the events and the policy debate around them, a debate in which the industrial relations scholarship played a key role. However, a critical interpretation is present too, suggesting that the relevance of company welfare is driven by the mobilisation of a political and economic elite and results in few cases of positive employment relations alongside broad social and economic imbalances.

Future conditional: From just transition to radical transformation?

Within the context of an accelerating climate emergency, the introduction frames the strategies and actions adopted by labour and unions to reduce carbon emissions that are presented in the articles contributing to this special issue. Industrial relations scholarship, which has been slow to address the climate emergency, has focussed on the jobs versus environment dilemma, the role of unions, technical innovation versus social unionism, and just transition approaches. While labour and union approaches in different sectors across Europe are largely confined to variants of ecological modernization, a more proactive transformative strategy opening up an alternative eco-socialist vision for the future is emerging. The issue highlights the contradictions in union strategies, the drivers of change and the way forward in pursuance of a green economy through a focus on the roles of government and the public sector, the organization of labour and the labour process, and education and training.

Research Handbook on Labour, Business and Human Rights Law, edited by Janice R.Bellace and Beryl terHaar. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, 2019, 528 pp., ISBN: 978‐1‐78642‐310‐7, £195.00 (US$290.00)

Research Handbook on Labour, Business and Human Rights Law, edited by Janice R.Bellace and Beryl terHaar. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK, 2019, 528 pp., ISBN: 978‐1‐78642‐310‐7, £195.00 (US$290.00)

Australian Union Transformation and the Challenge for Labour Historians

The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it confronts misconceptions that explain union decline in Australia; misconceptions that are entrenched in labour history and industrial relations scholarship. We are told that decline “commenced in the early 1980s,” when in fact it began in 1948; that union decline primarily results from attacks by conservative governments “bent on their destruction,” when the rate of decline has often been steepest under Labor governments; that unions invariably redress the plight of society’s poorest, when union agreements negotiated in retail and hospitality routinely leave workers in a worse position than those employed under relevant awards. The article’s second purpose is to trace the sociological consequence of union decline. While unions claim to speak for society’s battlers, more than 40 per cent of unionists today are managers and professionals. In terms of wage cohorts, the propensity to join increases with wealth. Although unions retain representation rights for society’s battlers, and publicly advocate their cause, the fact remains: society’s poorest members are no longer found in much number in union ranks. In part, at least, the unwillingness of labour historians to confront harsh realities stems from an understandable desire to defend labour’s cause, rather than serve primarily as dispassionate academic observers.

Does Modernizing Union Administrative Practices Promote or Hinder Union Revitalization? A Comparative Study of US, UK and Australian Unions

AbstractCan a union be both democratic and administratively efficient, or are these goals always at odds? Building on the Webbs’ focus on this critical question, this article analyses and compares the changing administrative policies and practices of US, UK and Australian trade unions over a 25‐year period. We conducted surveys of unions in all three countries to gather information on union policies and practices involving the unions’ human resources, hiring, budgeting and strategic planning. Using these novel longitudinal data, we contribute to industrial relations scholarship by showing that unions have increasingly adopted formal, systematic practices in these areas. The article is grounded in theory and also has practical relevance given the important implications that our findings may have for the revitalization of unions in the three countries and beyond.

Re-inventing the self: Implications of trade union revitalization

Although trade union revitalization processes have been thoroughly examined by industrial relations scholars, less is known about the implications of such processes on unions’ self-image. This article addresses that gap in knowledge by investigating how the self-image of a major Swedish public-sector trade union, the SKTF/Vision, changed after a thorough revitalization process took place. The findings indicate that due to pressure resulting from public-sector privatization, the union abandoned much of its former self-image and replaced ideas of ‘the collective’ with individualism. This article analyzes these changes and discusses the implications for the union movement.

Evidence on Trade Union Members’ Dissatisfaction with Inequalities at a Scottish University

The present paper includes insights on trade union members’ perceptions of job dissatisfaction related to inequalities at a Scottish university. Research spanning more than five decades has consistently shown that trade union member employees report higher levels of job dissatisfaction than non-union employees, although industrial relations scholars have been unable to agree on as to why that is the case. Prior research of trade union membership and its link to job dissatisfaction has largely been quantitative. The present study therefore added much needed, individual-level insights to the industrial relations literature through its use of a qualitative approach that included interviews with 23 individuals. This research is part of a wider project in which trade union membership and job dissatisfaction were explored, and that led to the author being awarded a PhD from the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom.