The Routledge Companion to Employment Relations

Adrian Wilkinson, Tony Dundon, Jimmy Donaghey, Alexander Colvin, Adrian Wilkinson, Tony Dundon, Jimmy Donaghey, Alexander Colvin, Adrian Wilkinson, Tony Dundon, Jimmy Donaghey, Alexander Colvin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317434870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Comprising five thematic sections, this volume provides a critical, international and interdisciplinary exploration of employment relations. It examines the major subjects and emerging areas within the field, including essays on institutional theory, voice, new actors, precarious work and employment. Led by a well-respected team of editors, the contributors examine current knowledge and debates within each topic, offering cutting-edge analysis and reflection.

The Routledge Companion to Employment Relations is an extensive reference work that offers students and researchers an introduction to current scholarship in the longstanding discipline of employment relations. It will be an essential addition to library collections in business and management, law, economics, sociology and political economy.

Part I

Perspectives on employment relations

2

The field of employment relations

A review

Niall Cullinane

Introduction

It is frequently observed that Employment Relations (ER) as a field of study is marked by a diversity of disciplinary and research traditions. Labour economics, sociology, political science, law, psychology and even geography all claim some authority over the study of work and employment. To do justice to such variety of interests in one chapter would be overly ambitious and confounded by the national-specific traditions of research characterising the field (Frege, 2007). Consequently, this chapter takes a more selective approach to its review. It begins by providing an account of dominant analytical traditions in the Anglophone literature, which have focused on the institutional regulation of the employment relationship, albeit with different degrees of emphasis. The chapter then turns to a particularly contemporary focus, reviewing the effects of the Great Recession on the institutional regulation of ER. The chapter concludes by returning to a concern that weighed heavily on earlier traditions in the field: the apparent ‘problem’ of labour and the associated ‘problem of order’. With the withering away of the strike in developed economies and the modest levels of industrial contestation in the recent period of economic disruption, this chapter considers whether the resolution of ER injustices has been supplanted to the political sphere.

Analytical traditions within the field

Employment Relations as a field of study emerged as a response to the arrival of an organised working class and the industrial unrest accompanying such developments (Commons, 1959; Webb and Webb, 1902). The fruit of this analysis was the promotion of regulatory institutions, at a political and industrial level, to ‘domesticate’ worker behaviour and curb employer unilateralism. Broadly put, this project involved a combination of liberal democracy with welfare supports as well as the recognition of trade unionism and collective bargaining (Ackers and Wilkinson, 2008; Kaufman, 1993). In the immediate decades after the Second World War, the emergence of John Dunlop’s (1958) “industrial relations system” in the United States and the British equivalent of “job regulation” (Bain and Clegg, 1974) heralded the cornerstones of the Anglophone field of study and gave it a distinctly pluralist character. Institutional economics, functionalist sociology and pluralist political theory were key influences, although these were quickly challenged by a more radicalised perspective offering Marxian interpretations of class conflict in capitalist society (Allen, 1971; Hyman, 1975).

Revisiting these traditions of pluralism and radicalism today reveals how both contained misplaced expectations for the trajectory of ER. The former tradition foresaw a future of pluralistic industrialism (Kerr et al., 1960), as if the Treaty of Detroit represented a microcosm of ER in mature capitalist societies. In contrast, the radical tradition assumed the long discontent of the 1970s would linger on as a symptom of class-divided societies (Goldthorpe, 1974). Both sets of expectations would need to be profoundly revised given the trajectory of later decades. Globalisation hollowed out the manufacturing zones that hosted unionised workers and progressively dismantled the post-war accord around which collective ER was constructed. Today, the source of ‘disorder’, to use a classic pluralist term (Maitland, 1983), is no longer found in the factories of striking workers, but is driven by the consequences of a heavily financialised capitalism (Glyn, 2006).

For contemporary pluralist and radical alike, this flavour of capitalism has not been welcomed. Although radicals tend to reject capitalism outright, there is also a mistrust of unfettered markets within the pluralist tradition (Heery, 2016). Such wariness stems from a conceptualisation of the employment relationship as marked by imbalances of power. Such imbalances are seen to be derived from employers’ monopoly over capital stock and the need for individual workers to access such stock to sustain a livelihood. Capital has more readily available access to a stock of individual workers than individual workers have to stocks of capital. The decision of when, where and how to invest provides employers with the power to permit or deny individuals the opportunity to become or remain workers at all. Imbalance is more than an initial condition and infuses the ongoing relationship. Capital is possessed of a mobility power inaccessible to the more geographically rooted worker. Such imbalances, left untouched by social oversight, expose the worker to arbitrary employer power and risk the degradation of employment conditions.

A tenet of the pluralist tradition is that countervailing sources of power cushioning workers from employers’ market superiority are not only desirable in shielding the weak from the strong, but necessary in protecting the strong from their own self-destructive tendencies (Commons, 1934, p. 143). Unregulated labour markets might offer quick returns to capital, but social costs may be inadequate pay, precarious work and a low-skill, low-productivity dynamic. These are said to rebound back on employers through ‘under-consumption’ problems or anti-establishment political trends seeking ‘populist’ solutions (Budd et al., 2004, p. 196). The desire for social regulation encouraged the defence of trade unionism. Trade unionism was said to not only protect workers’ terms and conditions of employment, but act as a “sword of justice” in providing citizens with the opportunity for industrial voice (Flanders, 1970, p. 38–47). For the pluralist tradition, the right of workers to form unions and engage in bargaining was seen as a measure of the ‘civilisation’ of the capitalist system in accommodating different interests. For the radicals, this dynamic was a double-edged sword. In empowering labour to act independently, unionism strengthens the position of the worker. Yet by serving to control and limit the scale of worker demands, (see for example, Darlington, 1994), unionism checks encroachment upon a power structure that favours the reproduction of employers’ dominance and labour’s continued subordination.

The pluralist tradition remains unmoved by such claims. Joint regulation through collective bargaining was, at one point at least, pluralism’s cause célèbre (Flanders, 1964). Yet experience has since led to some restraint in evaluating its achievements. Detached from wider institutional supports, autonomous islets of collective bargaining in deregulated seas of liberal capitalism are vulnerable to the fortunes of changing market tides. One of the lessons of the 1970s was that free collective bargaining at the point of production was ill-suited to ensuring stable macro-economic conditions (see Clegg, 1976a, p. 504–505). The insertion of the corporatist state as a coordinator between capital and labour was in some quarters deemed highly probable (Schmitter, 1974), though it was recognised that not all societies were endowed with a capacity to move in this direction (Goldthorpe, 1984). As the effects of product market competition, capital mobility and declining unionisation have taken hold, collective bargaining is no longer the defining regulatory mode in Anglophone ER. As detailed below, the retreat of this regulatory form has prompted a search for alternative modes of regulation to plug the gap in workers’ representative capacities and restore a measure of power to labour.

If (re)investing workers with power is a prerequisite for the radical tradition in reconfiguring society in a non-capitalist direction (Atzeni, 2014), pluralist motivations remain different. For a start, the pluralist sympathy for ameliorating labour’s position of weakness should not be taken to indicate a preference for workers’ interests to override those of the employer. A mutually beneficial accommodation between conflicting interests is favoured, reflected in Budd’s (2004) triptych of efficiency, equity and voice. Workers should have voice, but not so much that it disrupts ‘economic performance’. ‘Rights’ in the pluralist tradition come with ‘obligations’. As workers depend on the unit of capital that employs them for their livelihood, the pluralist tradition has sought to build co-operative employment relations that are not destructive of firm performance. Such sentiments prevail in the contemporary literature on state-led conflict resolution, for example (cf. Saundry and Dix, 2014). State employment tribunals provide workers with voice and a measure of equity in aiding remedial action against workplace wrongs. Yet ‘too many’ cases, in the face of scarce resources, is interpreted as a burden on ‘efficiency’, requiring the moderating effects of institutional reform.

Accommodating these different interests of capital, labour and society has been a long-running theme in the field. The classic literature pointed to high-trust informal reciprocity between management and sophisticated leader stewards as one route to moderating conflictual interests at workplace level (Batstone et al., 1978). Shop stewards were the ‘lubricants’ in managing workers’ discontent and minimising disruptions to production (activities which, in radical quarters, could be portrayed as a union elite collaborating with employers at the expense of the membership). For pluralism, the management of discontent was the added value of trade unionism and collective bargaining in reinforcing ‘order’ and enabling management to secure control by sharing it. More contemporaneously, what might be termed the ‘economic effects’ literature is deployed by pluralists to argue positive spin offs from unionised workplaces in the form of higher productivity gains (the classic study in this regard being Freeman and Medoff, 1984; cf. Doucouliagos and Laroche, 2003). Applebaum et al. (2000) have argued that unions are compatible with new forms of flexible accumulation, helping to embed ‘innovative’ practices associated with ‘high performance work systems’. In some accounts, the development of joint regulation with trade unions is said to promote sustained competitive advantage through generating inimitable firm-level characteristics like those articulated in resource-based views of the firm (Teague, 2005). Alternatively, work councils, ethical labour standards and/or state regulation are advanced as balancing competing interests. While such regulatory mechanisms may appear to employers as an encroachment on their prerogative, the pluralist tradition conceptualises these as ‘beneficial constraints’ (Streeck, 1997). Sources that circumscribe employer discretion push firms in the direction of ‘high-road’ employment practices that offer ‘mutual gains’ to capital and labour. Radical analysis, however, has countered that in a society with different class interests the optimal point of beneficial constraint varies for different classes, and that capitalist interests can be satisfactorily secured in ways that operate at the expense of other societal groups (Wright, 2004). The pluralist in response typically seeks to counter that such may be the case, but this is the best of all possible worlds in an otherwise imperfect world (Ackers, 2014).

Whatever differences remain between alternative traditions of pluralist and radical analysis, there is agreement regarding the desirability of constraint over the power of the employer. This consensus reflects a key demarcation between the field and alternative disciplinary traditions of work and employment found in neoclassical labour economics, human resource management (HRM) and organisational behaviour. These latter disciplines, in contrast, are comfortable with unilateral employer decision-making. Indeed, positive economic returns are seen to flow from such circumstances. The ER field is less sanguine. Take, for example, the HRM approach, which implicitly assumes that employer unilateralism is an unproblematic exercise in the strategic management of the firm’s employees. Employment relations scholars have remained unconvinced by such claims, not only because it often fails to work on its own terms, but because it reduces labour to a subordinate or purely economic ‘resource’ (see critiques by Edwards, 2008; Kaufman, 2010; Thompson, 2011).

This aside, the ascendancy of employer choice has shaped much of the field’s preoccupations in recent decades. While the power of employers waxes and that of labour wanes, existential questions have been presented to trade unionism. How unions may turn the tide and revitalise has been a pressing problem for many scholars in the field (cf. Frege and Kelly, 2004). In the radical tradition, scholarship has turned to long wave and global patterns in labour mobilisation to assess trends and prospects (Silver, 2003). The implications of such analysis suggest that treatments of union decline should avoid ‘end of history’ style, Western-centric assessments. If once Detroit and the UK’s West Midlands lay at the heart of trade union mobilisation and growth, the new seedbeds, given capital flows, are likely to be Guangdong and Zhongzhan (Silver, 2014). The argument is not exclusively structural for much depends on whether unions can generate growth momentum by giving collective expression to workers’ grievances and perceptions of injustice (Kelly, 1998; Lévesque and Murray, 2010). A closely affiliated offshoot of such analysis is an emphasis on ‘organising’ as a vehicle for revitalisation, which revolves around unions placing emphasis on the differences of interests between employers and workers to demonstrate the relevance of mobilising collectively (Milkman and Voss, 2004). Union-community alliances, new social movements and civil society organisations are part of these still largely experimental tools of workplace organising. In some cases, organising has taken on a transnational char...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures/tables
• About the editors
• The contributors
• General introduction
• Part I Perspectives on employment relations
• Part II Actors in employment relations
• Part III Core employment relations processes and issues
• Part IV Broadening employment relations
• Part V Contemporary reflections and future challenges
• Index