Productivity Bargaining Research Articles

Productivity, craftwork and flexibility: the Mobil agreements

ABSTRACTUsing original documents, this paper describes and analyses the case study of one of the productivity bargaining agreements from a leading exponent of productivity bargaining, Mobil’s Coryton Refinery. As well as being important in the UK oil industry these agreements spread throughout the economy. They resulted in major concessions by the unions to relax inter-craft and craft-production trade boundaries and to changes in work methods. These are illustrated in detail and placed in context. Such changes were heralded as ‘new look industrial relations’ and as such were based on a conception of joint regulation. However, other interpretations are possible, and these are then explored and discussed.

British Collective Bargaining : The Challenges of the 1970’s

In the 1960's Britain’s traditional industry-wide collective bargaining system was modified significantly by the growth of local bargaining, the introduction of an incomes policy and government recommendations for the general reform of industrial relations. Other important innovations were long term agreements, status agreements and productivity bargaining. The Conservative Governments new Industrial Relations Act will have a significant impact on the industrial relations system, particularly with regard to union recognition, internal unions affairs and the protection of the rights of individual employees. However, the Acts restrictions on the right to strike are likely to have only a minimal impact on established bargaining relationships. As Great Britain enters the 1970's the industrial relations system's main challenge is for unions and management to voluntarily respond to the problems which continue to be posed by the uncoordinated growth of plant bargaining.

Searching for the hospital yardstick: a case study of private hospital productivity bargaining.

The decentralisation of Australia's centralised wage fixation system has been seen as providing opportunities for employers and trade unions to tailor working arrangements to suit the needs of the workplace and to provide better paid long-term jobs. This paper details the productivity bargaining between the Private Hospitals' Association of Queensland and The Australian Workers' Union in 1995-97 in Queensland that led to the introduction of a number of productivity-based enterprise agreements. The case study shows that productivity bargaining in the private hospitals studied remains focused on 'bottom line' issues where cashable savings can readily be generated. The paper concludes with an examination of the lessons drawn from the productivity bargaining process.

Disclosure of Financial Information - Are New Zealand Employees and Unions Missing Out?

New Zealand policymakers have to date paid scant attention to the disclosure of financial information to employees and unions. However, there are signs this could change. Current trends under the Employment Contracts Act towards enterprise and productivity bargaining may well see access to financial information emerge as a domain of increasing interest and significance. The Labour Party's policies for industrial relations reform incorporate proposals for a good faith bargaining requirement, including a statutory duty to supply relevant information. Should any future government contemplate action on industrial democracy, this would also have implications for disclosure. This paper examines existing legislative requirements in the United States, United Kingdom and Europe. It is suggested that these provide a useful starting point for those interested in pursuing some New Zealand disclosure iniliatives and that so1ne valuable lessons can be drawn from overseas experiences.

Accord VII: Collective Bargaining In a Labourist Framework

Abstract The Accord of 1983 gave substance to Australian labourism as a partnership in government between the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Hawke Labor Government to deliver real wage maintenance ‘over time’ for all workers through a system of centralised wage-fixing and full wage indexation. Accord VII, on the other hand, offers a decentralised system of enterprise bargaining that delivers variable wage outcomes across and within industries. The paper finds limited coherence between the outcomes of Accord VII and corporatism in the Panitch/Winkler mode of labour subordination and the greater association with the Crouch concept of bargained corporatism because it delivers some positive benefits to labour. The paper concludes that the political linkage between the ACTU and the ALP places Accord VII more in the context of traditional Australian labourism predicated on union support for wage restraint in return for select benefits to a ‘labour aristocracy’, continuation of the safety-net and a protective Labor government. In 1990 I described the Accord as ‘an alliance or partnership in government between the Australian trade union movement and the Australian Labor Party’ in the ‘labourist tradition’, a strategy to achieve their economic, electoral and social objectives through Labor in government (Singleton 1990). The several configurations of the Accord since 1983 have seen the original agreement transformed from centralised wage indexation to the current Accord VII two-tier system of decentralised enterprise-based productivity bargaining, supported by a safety net based on maintenance of the award system and increases for those unable to secure a result through enterprise bargaining. The original Accord sought equitable outcomes from centralised wage-fixing. Accord VII, while claiming the advancement of equity is central to its wages policy, is premised on equal access but variable outcomes across and within industries. The paper will examine the capacity of Australian workers to achieve wage increases under Accord VII and analyse whether the outcomes give credence to a corporatist critique of this latest version of the Accord as the tool of capital to induce wage restraint from labour or alternatively, whether the two-tier system embodied in Accord VII upholds the labourist underpinnings of the original Accord that sought to manage the capitalist state to the advantage of working people through Labor in government (Singleton 1990, Chapter 11).

High performance work organization — A promising future for American industry and organized labor

Abstract With the advent of new technologies and worldwide competitive manufacturing, management and labor must create a new collaborative and co-equal relationship that increases worker skill and productivity, while ensuring employment security, quality wages and benefits. This paper offers a new labor-management paradigm—High Performance Work Organization—that includes such innovations as activity-based costing and productivity bargaining. It compares HPWO with traditional and total quality management practices.

Women's Productivity: Productivity Bargaining and Service Workers

The change in emphasis from centralized to decentralized bargaining has sharply increased the attention being paid to bargaining over productivity at the workplace level. Bargaining outcomes for womert may be adversely affected by the problem of defining productivity in service work, and by women's industrial weakness. In this paper both problems are examined, in isolation and as they may interact with each other. The experience of women with decentralized arrangements in the United States of America is used to illustrate the issues raised. Finally, the concerns identified in the paper are tested against early survey results of productivity measures and bargaining outcomes in Australian workplaces.

Analysis and Measurement of Productivity at the Workplace

Abstract The Australian Industrial Relations Commission is now committed to the development of productivity bargaining as an integral part of the formal industrial relations system. Its ‘Enterprise Bargaining Principle’ makes future wage increases contingent upon measures designed to effect ‘real gains’ in productivity. Yet there is no agreed approach to measuring productivity gains at the workplace, let alone the contribution of employees to productivity gains, for the purpose of determining the size and distribution of wage increases. This paper analyses the rationale of productivity bargaining, and presents two possible approaches to productivity measurement in this context. The first is the conventional approach based upon the neoclassical production function, and the second is an alternative approach based upon performance indicators. The conclusion of the paper is that a ‘balanced scorecard’ of performance indicators can be used to provide not only a superior approach to measurement but also a more ...

The Quest for Productivity: A Case Study of Fawley after Flanders.

Reviews a management's attempt to regain control over the process of work in post-war Britain, through a study of Esso's Fawley refinery. Here the system of productivity bargaining, subject of a classic study by A. Flanders 25 years ago, was first used.

Lessons from Labor-Management Cooperation

A growing number of unions and employers during the 1980s have implemented various programs centered on labor-management cooperation in response to economic problems brought about by declining productivity, poor work quality, deregulation, and international competition. Such programs include QWL, employee involvement, productivity bargaining and gainsharing, and area-wide labor-management committees. This article identifies insights gained from experience with labor-management cooperation during the past 30 years. The authors then identify a number of steps that can be taken to enhance the possibility of success in joint problem-solving efforts.

Contrasting Perspectives on Productivity Bargaining: Managers and Union Officials in the Post Office

Contrasting Perspectives on Productivity Bargaining: Managers and Union Officials in the Post Office

ADOPTING PERSONNEL PRODUCTIVITY INNOVATIONS IN AMERICAN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

Improving the productivity of public employees has increasingly attracted the attention of urban policymakers and administrators concerned about the quality, cost, and efficiency of governmental service delivery. A national survey of local personnel managers was undertaken to ascertain the degree of jurisdictional receptivity to personnel‐based management tools, preferred approaches, and the most serious policy and institutional barriers to the implementation of these changes. Research findings concerning the adoption of personnel reforms are generally consistent with those reported in prior studies except for an increase in the utilization of job enrichment techniques by local administrators. The reluctance of labor organizations to accept productivity bargaining and the unwillingness of local authorities to consider financial incentive plans for governmental executives are cited b y our respondents as the chief obstacles to greater managerial effectiveness.

Productivity bargaining: A rose by any other name

AbstractProductivity bargaining heralds mainly a change in attitude toward collective bargaining on the part of a small segment of management and labor.

PRODUCTIVITY BARGAINING IN THE AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC SECTOR: A CASE STUDY

Abstract: Standard hours of work have been relatively uniform throughout the work force in Australia. Reductions have occurred only after careful consideration by the industrial tribunals and/or the parliaments. Provision of special treatment in this matter for particular groups of employees has been limited. The use of productivity bargaining techniques to secure reduced standard hours of work for a relatively small proportion of the work force — as occurred in the public sector in the mid‐1970s — represented a significant departure from previous practice. This is a study of the first of these cases which, in effect, set the ground rules for a series of similar cases conducted later within the Commonwealth public sector. It sets out the steps which were necessary to have the productivity agreement accepted and points out novel features which arose in the application of the productivity bargaining technique.

Evolving Local Government Dependency

Members of the Board of County Commissioners, December 4, 1979. The first Sunset Review was done on the Administration Program. Savings amounted to $750,000. 25. Progamming, unit cost data, productivity analysis, economic impact analysis, sunset review, performance based compensation, management by objectives, productivity bargaining, decremental budgeting. 26. These figures have been supplied by the Metro-Dade budget

Productivity and Productivity Bargaining: The Environmental Context

Productivity and Productivity Bargaining: The Environmental Context

Class struggle and the transformation of the labor process

The reorganization of work in the early decades of this century was not the simple product of a group of far-sighted industrial engineers any more than it was the direct result of an omniscient capitalist class. The basic need for this reorganization (as well as the limits of its development) was set by a broad process which can best be termed capital accumulation. But, as I have argued in this paper, the particular forms, timing, and ideological effects of this reorganization in the United States were conditioned by the patterns of interacting organizations including the state and emergent occupational groups as well as the constitutive formal and informal organizations of the capitalist class and the working class. Relegating these patterns to the status of only epiphenomenal effects of an underlying and determinant process of capital accumulation obscures important political consequences which arise from these patterns themselves. To identify only a few: The contemporary system of American “industrial relations” finds its origins in the forms and timing of the reorganization of work examined in this essay. Although they did not spring into existence in their fully developed forms (and although their patterns did not evidence an uninterrupted unilinear development), many of elements — and the relations between them — of contemporary American labor relations were prefigured during the period studied here. For we find, especially during the crucial period of World War I, the American labor movement in a situation of double jeopardy — heavily dependent on the state to provide the basis legal conditions for organizing, but without a party of its own to struggle politically to maintain these conditions in periods when state managers find it less expedient to continue or extend these arrangements. With a significant part of the organized labor force concentrated in war-related industry, with collective bargaining defined as a set of technical operations in which legal and engineering experts from both sides engage in processes of productivity bargaining, and with the routinization of tasks and erosion of traditional work rules conducted under the aegis of conservative trade unions, we observe, in that period, a pattern of labor relations closely corresponding to that of our own.

Productivity bargaining: A panacea for the public sector?

As the cost and size of government continues to escalate, there is a growing concern over increasing the efficiency and effectiveness in the delivery of public services. Productivity bargaining as one tool has Cained the attention of a small but growing number of public officials who see this technique as one rational method of resolving the conflicting pressures generated by the demand for government services on the one hand and limited resources on the other. The experience of one large metropolitan area with productivity bargaining is reviewed at some length.

Guidelines to Productivity Bargaining in the Health Care Industry

A potential conflict exists between the recent growth of unionization in the health care industry and management efforts to increase productivity. One method of managing this conflict is to link employee rewards to employee productivity through productivity bargaining.

Guidelines to Productivity Bargaining in the Health Care Industry

Health Care Management Review (HCMR) disseminates state-of-the-art knowledge about management, leadership, and administration of health care systems, organizations, and agencies. Multidisciplinary and international in scope, articles present completed research relevant to health care management, leadership, and administration, as well report on rigorous evaluations of health care management innovations, or provide a synthesis of prior research that results in evidence-based health care management practice recommendations. Articles are theory-driven and translate findings into implications and recommendations for health care administrators, researchers, and faculty. Annually, HCMR publishes the Best Theory to Practice paper chosen by the Health Care Administration Division of the Academy of Management.