Can a Resurgence in Labor Unions Help Working Women, With or Without the PRO Act?

Happy International Women's Day!

First came the wave of teacher strikes led by women fighting the devaluing of their work, then Google employees walked out in protest of its handling of sexual harassment and (later) formed the Alphabet Workers Union, and now racial justice is a central theme as Amazon warehouse workers in Alabama vote on whether to unionize. In between have been innumerable other actions of protest, solidarity, and collective action spurred by concerns with racial justice, the she-cession and other pandemic-induced inequalities, and feelings of powerlessness.

Despite numerous obstacles, this newfound energy could lead to increased unionization. The prospects of a resurgence in labor unions would be dramatically magnified if Congress passes the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. The PRO Act brings together pieces of failed legislation over the past three decades and would drastically re-shape labor law by removing numerous employer advantages over unions and workers, making it easier for workers to form unions and giving them greater bargaining power. Greater unionization could result in important benefits for working women. Here’s why.

Boosting Women’s Pay

Perhaps the most obvious thing that unions typically do is negotiate for higher pay and better benefits. Recent research indicates that, on average, unionized women earn 12 percent more than similar nonunion women in the U.S. private sector. Unionization appears to increase pay for white women and Black women to a similar degree. So if more women become unionized, we’d expect their pay, on average, to increase. The union wage premium for women could even conceivably increase with the passage of the PRO Act because of its potential to increase union power. There could also be spillover effects that increase the pay of other working women because the threat of unionization can cause employers to preemptively increase pay.

Some things that labor unions commonly do—such as raise pay more aggressively among lower-paid workers, negotiate standardized pay rates and strong grievance procedures, and combat pay secrecy—could also close the gender pay gap. Indeed, when Wisconsin weakened teacher unions and allowed greater individual wage-setting, the gender pay gap increased. But systematically closing the gender pay gap requires greater intentionality among unions because men have a higher union pay advantage than women in the U.S. private sector, so increased unionization could benefit men even more than women without a more explicit focus on the gender pay gap.

Benefits Workers Can Use

Union contracts typically address wide-ranging issues relating to benefits, scheduling, and time off which are beneficial for individual and community well-being. Many of these can be particularly beneficial for working mothers trying to juggle multiple roles, though research paints a mixed picture with union members more likely to have stable hours but also more likely to have nonstandard schedules. Research from the UK highlights three ways in which unions help workers balance work and family: bargaining for policies that directly help working mothers, such as paid parental leave, job sharing or onsite child care; reducing the frequency of excessively long working hours, and fighting the typical manager’s belief that balancing work and family is solely the worker’s responsibility.

But bargaining for policies is not enough; workers need to be able to actually use them. This dynamic is captured by the four A’s: availability, awareness, affordability, and assurance. In other words, for a new mother, for example, to take paid parental leave: 1) the policy needs to be available, 2) if available, the worker needs to be aware of it, 3) even if aware of an existing policy, the worker needs to believe she can afford a leave, and 4) even if affordable, the worker needs to have assurances against negative consequences that might result from taking a leave (e.g., missing out on a promotion).

So beyond negotiating for better policies (availability), unions can also significantly help women use these policies—they can help spread awareness through newsletters, one-to-one interactions, and the like; make leaves more affordable through higher wages and better insurance coverage; and combat reprisals through bargaining, grievance procedures, and other means. In my own research, I label this the “facilitation effect” of labor unions. Through these various channels, union-represented new mothers are more than 15 percent more likely to use paid maternity leave than are comparable non-union mothers.

This facilitation role of labor unions can also help working women navigate the complex maze of federal, state, and local public policies on work. For example, in the first years after the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), hourly unionized workers were much more likely than others to have heard about the FMLA, and were significantly less worried about losing their seniority or their job if taking a family or medical leave. Eligible workers are more likely to receive unemployment insurance benefits if they were in union jobs, and unions help enforce workplace safety and reduce other labor rights violations. This assistance is likely particularly important for marginalized workers who otherwise don’t have the resources and connections to counter employer transgressions.

Ripple Effects on the Policy Environment

Unions also lobby for legislative protections for workers. The labor movement supports the $15 minimum wage that was controversially excluded from the federal stimulus bill last week. An increase in the federal minimum wage would particularly benefit women, workers of color, and especially women of color (though these workers are also disproportionately excluded from coverage). Passage of the PRO Act could further boost union influence that results in more favorable public policies for workers and working women. Right-to-work laws that allow union-represented workers to not pay union dues or fees weaken unions financially and politically, resulting in more conservative lawmakers and lawmaking. The PRO Act would abolish right-to-work laws, perhaps prompting the reverse cycle.

At an individual level, labor unions help equip members with advocacy skills and norms that translate into greater political and civic engagement. If more women are represented by unions in the future, these empowerment skills and norms could potentially translate to other areas of their lives, too, such as running for political office or negotiating the allocation of household responsibilities.

Putting the PRO Act in Context

A resurgence in labor unions, perhaps supported by the PRO Act, could have important benefits for working women—but there are multiple qualifications. What happens in any particular bargaining unit can reflect contested political dynamics that are not guaranteed to prioritize the concerns of working women or of workers with other identities. Also, even if the PRO Act is enacted, increased unionized would still require workers to successfully organize.

Additionally, the PRO Act would only apply to the private sector, where less than 6 percent of women are unionized; 60 percent of women union members work in the public sector, where most are subject to state-level regulation which is often unfavorable in conservative states. The PRO Act also fails to address labor law’s racist and sexist roots that excluded agricultural and domestic service workers from its protections.

As good as the PRO Act might be for some women workers, it’s only one piece of a broader set of policy interventions and new norms that we need to fully respect the dignity of labor.

---

Originally published in the Gender Policy Report.

What Do Industrial Relations Scholars Research? From the Traditional to the Emergent (and a Hidden Message)

Last week I attended the 56th conference of the Canadian Industrial Relations Association on the beautiful UBC campus in Vancouver, and was asked to give some closing remarks. I decided to capture the conference’s topic by creating a Wordle or Tag Cloud from the presentation titles that shows more frequent words in a larger font. After doing the best I could to combine French and English words, here is the resulting Wordle (click to see a larger version):

So what are industrial relations scholars researching? The big words capture the central areas of the field: work, workers, and jobs. But lots of disciplines research work. The particular expertise that industrial relations brings is on the role of institutions in shaping work outcomes, and we can see these traditional topics front and center, too: labor unions, law, policy, institutions, and regulation. Bargaining, collective, and global are also words that appeared multiple times on the agenda.

But industrial relations isn’t only about labor unions, collective bargaining, and laws. They are harder to spot because of the smaller font associated with fewer representations on the agenda, but some human resources and organizational behavior topics are also present, such as selection, mindfulness, organizational change, sales contests, stress, and job performance. And like other disciplines, industrial relations is not static. We are confronted with new theories, methodologies, and practices that we must grapple with. So unfortunately for this Wordle approach, in some ways the most interesting words are the smallest in that they reflect emergent topics, including: robotization, the gig economy, platforms, Uberizing, Twitter, industry 4.0, guaranteed basic income, cannabis, and others.

Industrial relations also embraces comparative research. So for a Canadian association’s conference in which most of the attendees are Canadian, it’s not surprising that the largest geography-related words are Canada and Québec, with British Columbia and Ontario also make appearances. But if you look carefully, you can see a large array of other countries and regions that provide the setting for the research that was presented, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Italy, Syria, Australia, Bangladesh, and China.

Here is the upper-right quadrant of the Wordle so that you can get a better view.

And if you look closely, hopefully you can see what I can see… (click here if the animation doesn't work or to see the final result)

That’s right…efficiency, equity, and voice are also (or should be) central constructs in industrial relations. I presented this at the conference as somewhat of an inside joke because I developed the trilogy of efficiency, equity, and voice along with the accompanying triangle imagery in my first book, Employment with a Human Face. So it was nice for my ego when the big reveal led to a great audience reaction as they associated this with my book.

But there’s a serious point here. Far too often, industrial relations can study and support institutions without really questioning what they are trying to achieve. For example, the traditional approach to studying U.S. labor relations often focuses on an uncritical exploration of how the existing labor processes work: how unions are organized, how contracts are negotiated, and how disputes and grievances are resolved. But what’s missing is the why. Industrial relations processes and institutions are simply a means to more fundamental ends or objectives. What are these objectives? Under what conditions are collectively bargained work rules a desirable or undesirable method for achieving these objectives? In the 21st century world of work, are there better ways of pursuing these objectives? These are the central and engaging questions of industrial relations.

This begins with explicitly defining the objectives of the employment relationship. As I wrote in Employment with a Human Face (p. 180),

Because work is a fully human activity, employees are entitled to fair treatment and opportunities to have input into decisions that affect their daily lives. In other words, equity and voice should be added to efficiency as the fundamental objectives of the employment relationship. Efficiency, equity, and voice are therefore the key analytical dimensions for studying the employment relationship. The study of employment—human resources and industrial relations—is the analysis of the contributions of individuals, markets, institutions, organizational strategies, and public policies toward the employment relationship objectives of efficiency, equity, and voice.

To me, this is point of industrial relations as an academic enterprise. Which then connects to a related normative agenda. Again quoting from Employment with a Human Face (p. 181),

The modern employment relationship and the corporation are purposeful human constructs. Humans have always had to work to survive, but modern employment—working for someone else in a limited-liability corporation—is a creation of society. In that corporations are created rather than natural institutions, society must determine their ends and the rights and obligations that accompany the modern employment relationship—they are not preordained, natural, or beyond control. Achievement of economic prosperity, respect for human dignity [and identity], and equal appreciation for the competing human rights of property rights and labor rights require that efficiency, equity, and voice be balanced. The question for research, policy, and practice is therefore how to structure the employment relationship—how to govern the workplace—to achieve this balance.

As seen by the topics presented at CIRA, these questions are the continuing concern of traditional subjects in industrial relations as well as new applications to emergent topics as the world of work continues to change and evolve.

The IR Curmudgeon's View on Identity in Employment Relations

This past weekend I was at an ILR Review-sponsored conference “Toward New Theories in Employment Relations.” A predictable theme was the gig economy. But more interesting were repeated themes of the importance of ideas (whether from the bottom up rooted in individual cognition (a paper I presented) or from the top down in the form of contested ideologies) and the importance of identity. Identity politics, of course, are everywhere today, even in superhero movies (Black Panther).

This presents a particular challenge for employment relations because traditional scholarship has emphasized material interests rather than identity needs, and traditional institutions (especially labor unions) have been organized around materialistic class interests rather than (non-class) identities. That is, workers are portrayed simply as workers, not women, Latinxs, and the like. 

Or at least that’s how the traditional perspective is now painted. In my view, this simplification of the past is more accurate for industrial relations scholarship than practice.

That is, scholarship has seen workers as generic in theory, but in practice it's a different story: real workers and institutions have been anything but blind to identity issues. Indeed, it would have been better if they were. Go back 100+ years and many AFL craft unions were discriminatory and openly hostile toward anyone except white men. The Pullman Company trained African American workers for skilled positions to keep the skilled labor force divided by racial tension. Worker solidarity across occupations was also weakened through racial and gender segregation—on Pullman cars, for example, conductors were always white and porters were always black; men cleaned the exterior of the railroad cars, women the interior. So when appreciating the importance of identity in today’s worker centers—as just one example—we should not overlook the importance of racial identity in the struggles and victories of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters all the way back in the 1920s led by A. Philip Randolph and others (this is captured by the movie “10,000 Black Men Named George”).

This is not to deny that identity has become both more central and more complex in contemporary society—and therefore in contemporary employment relations practice. So continuing to deepen the theorizing and evidence around identity issues in employment relations is needed. But I think this will be most productive if we see this as building on past practice, and even on past scholarship, rather than as something that is seen as a break from the past. 

OK, I will admit that I have self-interested reasons for believing this. In particular, in a recent blog post I (selfishly) argued that my trilogy of efficiency, equity, and voice continues to be a powerful way to capture the key objectives of the employment relationship. Some might see these as more materialistic and as ignoring identity issues. Indeed, in my own presentation of efficiency, equity, and voice I have not explicitly recognized identity concerns. But I assert that the framework of efficiency, equity, and voice is flexible enough to include shifting conceptualizations of these interests. 

Moreover, while identity is different from interests, I think the way that identity concerns are realized and satisfied in the employment relationship is through (a) being treated in desired ways consistent with one’s identity demands, and (b) being able to express yourself in ways consistent with your desired identity. The first of these falls under the category of equity, the second under the category of voice. Put differently, in the context of the employment relations, violations of individuals' and groups' identity needs by discriminating against certain groups and by repressing expressions of that identity are violations of equity and voice in the employment relationship. 

Indeed, both equity and voice as key objectives of the employment relationship stem from the essential qualities of being human, which, in turn, means that workers as humans are entitled to dignity and self-determination. Identity is an essential part of dignity and self-determination, and hence of equity and voice. So even in this era dominated by identity politics and identity theorizing, the key goals of the employment relationship remain efficiency, equity, and voice. In the future, I will try to do a better job of explicitly noting the identity aspects of equity and voice.

So let’s continue to seek ways to deepen our understandings of identity within employment relations theorizing and practice. But personally I think it’s most productive to do so in ways that build on rather than reject where we’ve come from. And that preserves my own desired sense of identity…

Employment Relations in a Post-Industrial Post-Democracy Era?

If one had to come up with a shorthand for the values of the field of employment relations, a strong contender would be “industrial democracy.” For starters, employment relations scholars seek to understand the rules of the workplace. Organizations are therefore seen as industrial governments that can be autocratic, technocratic, or democratic. The employment relations ideals of fairness and self-determination are best served by the democratic form of industrial government (“industrial democracy”) in which unilateral, unchecked managerial authority is replaced by orderly rules, participatory rule-making, checks and balances, and due process in dispute resolution. That (non-Marxist/critical) employment relations scholars see the employment relationship as analogous to a pluralist political society in which multiple parties (e.g., employers and employees) have legitimate but sometimes conflicting interests reinforces the preference for decision-making and dispute resolution processes that respect a diversity of rights and interests.  

The main vehicle for delivering industrial democracy has typically been labor unions  because imperfectly competitive labor markets and capitalist legal systems favor employers over individual employees. Labor unions that are legally and financially independent of management are the needed counterweight to managerial power, and are therefore necessary for giving employee voice legitimacy through the negotiation and enforcement of collective bargaining agreements. Consistent with this thinking, labor unions have a long history of promoting collective power as a way to bring democracy to the workplace, and to strengthen political democracy by creating independent and responsible rather than subordinate and repressed citizen-workers. 

We’ve already seen what happens to employment relations and labor unions when the “industrial” part of industrial democracy disappears. That is, the decline of manufacturing and traditional blue collar occupations have paralleled the steady decline in private sector U.S. union density. Though the relationship isn’t necessarily causal, it’s hard to deny that labor unions have struggled as the nature of the economy and the workforce have shifted, and probably not coincidentally, the size of the field of employment relations has simultaneously declined.  

But clearly there should be an important space for post-industrial worker voice as well as for employment relations scholarship. Unions are experimenting with different representation strategies, new institutions (especially worker centers) are emerging to give non-traditional workers a voice, and employment relations scholarship is broadening beyond a traditional focus on labor unions.

But perhaps a new challenge looms…the decline of support for democracy. In “The Democratic Disconnect” (Journal of Democracy, July 2016), Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk report disturbing trends from individual responses to the World Values Survey. For example, 26 percent of U.S. millennials characterize choosing leaders in free elections as unimportant and 24 percent indicate that democracy a bad way to run a country. These percentages are significantly higher than those reported by older generations. Similarly, 72 percent of Americans born before World War II say that it’s essential to live in a democracy, but among millennials that percentage plummets to 30 percent.

I incorporated these statistics into a presentation I made earlier this month entitled “Two More Problems Facing the Field of Employment Relations, and the Need for Inclusion” at the annual conference of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA). To be honest, I did this primarily to be provocative, and maybe we shouldn’t place much weight on attitudinal surveys. But other indicators keep popping up. In "Why Republicans (and Trump) May Still Win Big in 2020 —Despite 'Everything'," Grover Norquist outlines how the Wisconsin strategy to eviscerate public sector unions (via Act 10) provides a desired model "for Republican political dominance" because "if Act 10 is enacted in a dozen more states, the modern Democratic Party will cease to be a competitive power in American politics" (Ozy, May 28, 2017). In other words, Norquist is championing a blueprint for one-party politics. Other examples consistent with a decline in support for democracy include trends toward greater restrictions on free speech ("Under Attack," The Economist, June 4, 2016) and toward increased support for dictatorships ("America’s Foreign Policy: Embrace Thugs, Dictators and Strongmen," The Economist, June 3, 2017). 

The industrial change was a compositional one, not one in fundamental values. But if support for democracy is truly declining, this could be much more damaging for industrial democracy and for the field of employment relations. The tendency to defer to strong leaders in the name of efficiency and expediency is even stronger in business than in government. If democracy isn’t robustly supported in the political arena, it will presumably be even harder to generate support in the workplace. If achieving post-industrial workplace democracy has been a challenge, imagine the challenge of post-industrial post-democracy. 

So what's to be done? I don’t think there are any easy answers. We need to monitor these democracy-related trends, and if they are real, they need to be reversed. The industrial democracy values of employment relations continue to need champions. Whether post-industrial or not, the values and value of industrial democracy need to be explicitly recognized, not taken for granted.  

Thoughts on Uber and Its Psychological "Tricks"

Earlier this month, a New York Times article “How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks to Push Its Drivers’ Buttons” received a lot of publicity for revealing how Uber is using “behavioral science to manipulate [drivers] in the service of its corporate growth.” A company trying to get workers to act in the interests of the organization? Shocking.

The point of managing workers is to get them to do things that benefit the organization that is issuing their paychecks (or not even issuing paychecks as with diverse forms of slavery and unfree labor throughout history). I can’t be the only one tired of an “everything in the sharing economy is new” mindset. Sure, some of the specific tools might be different in the sharing economy, but the tools for managing workers have always been changing. In the industrial revolution, workers were organized together into factories to be watched more effectively. The famous Hawthorne experiments in the 1920s uncovered the importance of social factors in shaping worker productivity. I’m sure there are examples of various workplaces with real-time information on production goals displayed on a chalkboard for all to see long before there were LED or smartphone displays.

But back to the New York Times article: Good news for industrial relations, bad news for human resources. Why good news for industrial relations? “Underlying the tension was the fact that Uber’s interests and those of drivers are at odds on some level.” There you have it, a central industrial relations premise that employers and workers have some conflicting goals. And when employers have the upper hand (“Uber is continuing apace in its struggle to wield the upper hand with drivers”), we need to take seriously the need for various mechanisms for looking out for workers' interests and well-being, whether through unionization, laws, or other supports. More on this in a minute.

And why bad news for human resources? An MIT Technology Review article followed up the New York Times story with its own headline: “Uber Is Engaged in Psychological Warfare with Its Drivers.” Here is part of what's labeled as psychological warfare: “To stem that tide [of many new drivers leaving before completing 25 rides], Uber officials in some cities began experimenting with simple encouragement: You’re almost halfway there, congratulations!” That’s right, Uber is “exploiting” that well-known human “weakness” of responding to encouragement toward a concrete goal. When encouragement is seen as manipulation, that can’t be good for human resources.

This begs the question as to what people think human resources should be doing. Do we want human resources to simply be an administrative function that hires and pays people? Human resources can and should be doing more. For at least a century, the leading edge of human resources has been trying to take what we know about human behavior (at that time) to find hopefully win-win ways to benefit employees and employers. Can ethical lines be crossed? Certainly. But the principle of using the science of human behavior--rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and beyond--to design human resources policies that create mutual gain is longstanding and worthy. 

I’m not intending to be an apologist for Uber. The rise of Uber and other sharing economy arrangements raise serious issues—too many to address here. As just one example, an academic paper “The Taking Economy: Uber, Information, and Power” by Ryan Calo and Alex Rosenblat discusses a number of ways in which Uber could potentially exploit its drivers. My interpretation of many of these is that they boil down to intentional or unintentional wage theft. For example, a driver may think they accepted 100% of ride requests, but bugs or manipulation may lead Uber to report a lower number, leading to negative consequences for the driver. Or a driver may wait the required 5 minutes to get a cancellation fee, but Uber doesn’t pay because its data shows a lower waiting time, again either due to intentional programming features or unintentional problems with connectivity and the like.

So how to address serious issues that arise out of the gig economy? Meaningful debates over the role of behavioral science in shaping managerial practices should be welcomed. Though rhetoric around "psychological warfare" probably isn't very helpful. Additionally, everyone can probably agree that Uber drivers should be truly free to sign off when they want, though there are different perceptions of what "truly free" means in this context. 

And is this freedom enough? Certainly not for issues like wage theft that truly reflect unequal power and asymmetric information (what did you expect an industrial relations scholar to say??). Calo and Rosenblat argue for updating consumer protection laws for the digital age. That might be a good idea, but from an industrial relations perspective, we also should be talking about updating labor law. Rather than relying on government regulation to specify standards, identify violations, and remedy them, let’s figure out ways to empower workers—broadly defined to include Uber drivers and many others in the gig and contracting economy. Then they can act collectively with adequate power to give a meaningful voice to the material, psychological, social, and other concerns they identify as the most pressing in their own particular work arrangements.

Industrial Relations Sadly Chuckles on the Eve of the Election

It’s hard to find many people happy with the choices in tomorrow’s U.S. presidential election. Setting aside the troubling personal qualities that have been so apparent, it’s difficult not to be leery (at best) of Trump’s populism-at-its-worst and Clinton’s elitist-insider-insularity. If only both sides had paid more attention to industrial relations values and institutions over the past several decades rather than actively destroying them (Reagan, Thatcher, Walker, etc.) or just giving them lip service (Clinton, Obama, etc.), then maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Industrial relations values embrace the sanctity of human dignity for all workers and their communities, and respect the needs of stakeholders with distinct interests and unequal power. This means that markets—whether labor, financial, or otherwise—don’t work for everyone, and the sanctity of free markets should be rejected. Industrial relations institutions therefore seek to bring a greater balance to the marketplace to help them work better for all by balancing efficiency, equity, and voice, often in collective rather than atomistic ways. The classic example is collective bargaining which (ideally) brings solidarity to the workforce and empowers them with a voice, but requires bargaining, often at a local level, in which a business’s needs can be addressed and balanced with workers’ interests.  

But for whatever set of complicated reasons, these industrial relations values and institutions have been weakened over the past several decades, and the academic field of industrial relations has shrunken as well. Instead, individualism, personal responsibility, and free market thinking dominate. Workers were assured that the benefits of free trade, deregulation, and increased financialization would trickle down and lift all boats, and that everyone would have the opportunity to work with purpose and meaning if they adopted the right mindset.

Instead, many have been left behind as illustrated by the sharp increase in inequality since the 1980s, and we live in polarized and polarizing times. Economic insecurity seems to frequently bring out the worst in people. And thus we have a distasteful form of populism that seeks to blame other workers and shut others out rather than building solidarity, respect, and inclusion. And we have anti-elitism which becomes anti-intellectualism and contempt towards science, education, and the arts as well as towards good government. Again, rather than bringing society together, fault lines emerge.

At a fundamental level, this disaffection is what industrial relations seeks to avoid. The construction and maintenance of institutions that provide checks and balances would have provided greater equity so people don’t feel left out, and greater voice so that people feel more on equal footing with the elites. But this would have required an embrace of industrial values around solidarity, inclusion, voice, pluralism, and compromise rather than individualism, self-interest, and free markets driven by insider elites.

Perhaps the consequences of the marginalization of industrial relations are now coming home to roost. On the Republican side of the aisle, the threat to the Republican establishment presented by the popularity of Trump has arisen out of disaffection with the Republican Party’s inability or unwillingness to replace the earlier industrial relations system with something that provides equity and voice instead of just individualism and free markets. On the Democratic side of the aisle, the skepticism towards another Washington insider is similarly rooted in policy making that has been top down rather than inclusive, and seemingly benefiting financial interests more than worker and community interests. Indeed, were the seeds of each's side demise planted, at least partly, by their own marginalization of industrial relations? 

Those who embrace the industrial relations ethos are probably thinking “I told you so.” But it’s a sad chuckle indeed.

The Unique CTUL-Target Partnership: Filling a Vacuum

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a roundtable event sponsored by the Workers Lab that focused on the CTUL-Target partnership. CTUL (Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en Lucha which translates to The Center of Workers United in Struggle) is a Minneapolis worker center that, to quote from its own mission statement, “organizes low-wage workers from across the Twin Cities to develop leadership and educate one another to build power and lead the struggle for fair wages, better working conditions, basic respect, and a voice in our workplaces.” Worker centers have emerged in many cities over the past decade to try to improve working conditions outside the parameters of traditional labor law and traditional labor unionism, particularly for workers who fall in gray areas of labor law. For example, the cleaning of retail stores is commonly contracted out to third-party contractors so it is difficult to establish a collective bargaining relationship with the retail chain because technically the janitors do not work for the retailer.

As the result of a fortuitous set of factors, CTUL and Target have formed a unique worker center-corporate partnership that is highlighted by the development and adoption of Target’s Responsible Contractor Policy. There are many aspects of this story worth telling, and CTUL’s website has a lot of information. At a high level, I think it’s a fascinating model. It’s not abdication to the vagaries of the market or one side or the other finding a way to dictate its agenda. It’s not a central authority trying to find one-size-fits-all solutions. Rather, it’s a way of creating dialogue among the parties most affected, finding common interests, and striking a balance on challenging issues for which they have conflicting goals. In other words, it’s a new institutional way to create what I’ve called “Employment with a Human Face” by balancing central employer and employee objectives (such as efficiency, equity, and voice).

As I listened to representatives of CTUL, Target, and TakeAction Minnesota describe their roles in this partnership, two things struck me. One, to have a successful partnership requires not just shifting power so that low-paid, immigrant and minority workers have some influence, but it also requires shifting mental models and mindsets. For this to be a productive partnership, Target had to shift from a defensive posture that saw CTUL’s criticism of abusive working conditions by Target’s janitorial services contractors as an attack, to an opportunity for listening, understanding, and ultimately, valuable community engagement. And CTUL had to be willing to adopt a partnership rather than conflictual mindset, too. As I’ve often written and taught about, ideas are important.

The other broad theme that struck me comes down to one word: vacuum. By contracting out its janitorial work, Target had essentially created a legal vacuum where it’s difficult for workers to effectively enforce their legal rights—the avoidance of wage theft, the presence of a safe workplace and workers’ compensation coverage, and the ability to unionize if desired. CTUL essentially filled this vacuum and shifted Target’s terrain of compliance. Because of the vacuum, Target didn’t have a traditional legal compliance concern and could ignore the janitor’s plight, but CTUL raised the specter of negative publicity for Target. So while lawsuits were perhaps not a concern (the traditional focus of corporate “compliance”), harms to the corporate brand became a concern. And Target responded. But this was prompted by a legal vacuum that in simpler times would have been filled by the enforcement of employment and labor law.

Another aspect to this vacuum was connected to remarks by TakeAction Minnesota, a community organizing coalition of progressive organizations. TakeAction Minnesota said that it had learned from CTUL that transformational shifts aren’t about a single issue win or just getting to the table, they are about shifting power, dealing directly with employers, getting a deal with enforcement mechanisms, and recognizing that there won’t be agreement on every single issue. Wait a minute, this is classic industrial relations thinking, and labor law promotes labor unions for exactly these reasons. But for whatever reason, unions are unable to be successful in certain sectors. A vacuum has been created, and it was striking to me that without even realizing the parallel, TakeAction Minnesota was highlighting exactly what unions used to do. In the areas of the economy with such vacuums, new organizations like CTUL and new partnerships like the one with Target are needed in order to create employment with a human face, and to create employment relationships that are WIN-WIN-WIN: relationships that serve workers and their families (win #1), organizations (win #2), and society (win #3).

Update: On October, 13, 2016, CTUL announced that 600 retail janitors who clean Target, Macy’s and Best Buy stores in the Twin Cities would begin collective bargaining with the janitorial contractors. CTUL's campaign led the contractors to agree to a trigger mechanism in which they would bargain a contract after 60% of the janitors in the area's 300 big box retail stores unionized, a threshold that has now been reached. This story has been covered by the StarTribune, The Guardian, and Workday Minnesota.  

Everything you need to know about the employment relationship in one tweet

At the end of March, #ModernCollectiveNouns was a trending hashtag on Twitter. Here are some examples I saw:

A clutch of car mechanics.
A fraud of bankers.
A Kardashian of crap.
An avalanche of skiers.

My (ultra-academic) contribution to this was the following:

My tweet probably didn't make much sense to most people, but students and other scholars should recognize this as capturing what I assert are the four key frames of references (or ideologies) on the employment relationship. I repeatedly return to these four frames of reference in my teaching and writing because they provide essential insights by revealing the roots of different views on labor unions, HR practices, and the like.

The first model of the employment relationship is derived from mainstream (neoclassical) economic thought and rests on a view of rational agents pursuing their individual self-interest in economic markets (because of the importance of self-interest, I label this the “egoist” model). Labor is viewed as a commodity, and only differs from other commodities in its tendency to avoid exerting full work effort (“shirking”). As labor markets are generally seen as perfectly competitive, they are embraced as the primary driver of the employment relationship. Under these assumptions, the egoist employment relationship is characterized by employees and organizations engaging in voluntary, mutually-beneficial economic transactions to buy and sell units of labor based on what the labor market will allow (and therefore outcomes are seen as fair), and abuses are prevented by labor market competition. HR practices largely implement what the market dictates, and unions interfere with the ideal operation of competitive markets.

In contrast, the unitarist model of the employment relationship views employees as psychological rather than economic actors. This model is most closely associated with scholarship in industrial/organizational psychology, organizational behavior, and human resource management such that the egoist model’s material economic interests are de-emphasized in favor of psychological interests such as satisfaction and esteem. Moreover, economic markets are seen as imperfectly competitive so profit-maximizing employers can choose their strategies for pursuing their organizational goals. And in the unitarist employment relationship, the optimal organizational strategies are those that align the interests of organizations and employees because a key assumption is that organizations and employees share a unity of all of their interests; thus, the label “unitarist” employment relationship. For example, jobs that are designed to be fulfilling will be rewarding to the employees, and the private or public sector organization will also benefit because these employees will be productive. High-road or high-commitment human resource management strategies are therefore key, unions are seen as unnecessary and as adding unproductive conflict.

An alternative perspective, the pluralist model, rejects the egoist model’s view of labor as a commodity traded in perfectly-competitive markets; rather, employees are viewed as human beings entitled to key standards and rights consistent with human dignity and citizenship. The pluralist model also rejects the unitarist view of largely shared organization-employee interests; rather, organizations and employees are seen as having a mixture of common and conflicting interests. That is, the pluralist employment relationship rests on a belief of a plurality of legitimate but sometimes-conflicting interests in the employment relationship. The classic example of conflicting interests is higher wages versus higher profits. These assumptions mean that institutional interventions are needed to better balance the bargaining power inequalities generated by imperfect labor markets, and to protect workers when organizations prioritize their own interests. Hence the important of industrial relations institutions such as labor unions and labor legislation to supplement high-road HR strategies.

The fourth and final alternative model of the employment relationship reflects radical, heterodox, and feminist scholarship in sociology, economics, and industrial relations is therefore labeled the critical employment relationship. Like the unitarist and pluralist models, this model sees labor as more than a commodity and also sees labor markets as imperfectly competitive. But where the critical perspective differs is in its emphasis on sharp conflicts of interests and unequal power dynamics between competing groups. Marxist and related perspectives focus on unequal power relations between workers and organizations, feminist perspectives focus on unequal power relations between men and women, and critical race perspectives focus on segregation and control along racial lines. In all of these critical perspectives, the employment relationship is seen as one piece of a larger socio-politico-economic system throughout which elites are able to perpetuate or reproduce their dominance, albeit with some accommodation of the interests of the weaker party in order to foster compliance and consent.

Returning to the #ModernCollectiveNouns hashtag, a friend of mine responded with "a propaganda of HR managers." Provocative! But for those who understand the competing frames of reference, this reflects an important critique from a pluralist or critical frame.

OK, maybe this isn't all that you need to know about the employment relationship, but it's an essential foundation. And maybe my #ModernCollectiveNouns tweet will help you remember this foundation.

If you want to see more applications of this framework, take a look at some of my earlier blog postings, such as:

• Labor Relations Advice
• Why HR-OB Still Needs IR
• Will the Real HRM Please Stand Up

Or for a more academic treatment, see my book chapter titled "The Employment Relationship" with Devasheesh Bhave from the Sage Handbook of Human Resource Management. 

Labor Relations 101 as Told Through the Musical Newsies

I’m not sure whether to hope that my labor relations students saw the musical Newsies at the Orpheum during its stop in Minneapolis. On the one hand, it would be great if they had because it presents some enduring and important themes. On the other hand, how can my lectures compete with the highly-entertaining songs, dances, and staging? So maybe it’s better if they don’t see it…

In either case, an important labor relations theme brought to life is that a labor union is most fundamentally a group of workers who want to collectively improve how they are treated. In Newsies, the newspaper boys ("newsies") want to protest a hike in the price they are charged for buying papers to sell in 1899 in New York City. Someone points out that this would be a strike, but they think they can’t strike because they aren’t a union. They don’t have official leaders or rules. But lead character Jack Kelly corrects this mistaken view when he sings,

Even though we ain't got hats or badges,

we're a union just by sayin' so...

Another important labor relations theme is that wages and monetary items are important, but so too, are voice and dignity. The newsies sing this loud and proud:

Pulitzer and Hearst, they think we're nothin'.

Are we nothin'?

No!

…

Pulitzer may own the world, but he don't own us.

Pulitzer may crack the whip, but he won't whip us.

But why collective action? Jack reminds us of a key industrial relations assumption. The newsies are living day-to-day and can’t go without work very long, whereas owners and employers like Joseph Pulitzer have extensive resources and can hold out longer. So individual workers are typically at a distinct bargaining power disadvantage. Unionization is simply a way to try to balance this uneven playing field. Well, as illustrated in Newsies and in many real-life situations, maybe not so "simple." And a value or approach certainly not universally-shared. But seeing institutions as important mechanisms for helping remedy bargaining power imbalances is a key industrial relations principle.

Lastly, another lesson is that strikes and the threat of being replaced can be a deeply conflictual and highly emotionally-charged situation. Even in the artistic venue of musical theater, this energy is channeled into probably the most powerful dance numbers I’ve seen—not only in Newsies, but even more so in Billy Elliot. Yes, the alignment-of-interests-unitarist-HRM numbers in Kinky Boots are highly entertaining. But not as powerful. Now if only I could figure out how to write Hormel: The Musical. Wouldn’t “Cram Your Spam” be a catchy number?

Walton & McKersie Help an Economist Mature into an Industrial Relations Scholar

I cannot attend today's 50th Anniversary Celebration of  Richard Walton and Robert McKersie’s seminal 1965 book, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations. But a conversation last week with Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld prompted me to start thinking about its impact on me. In my final year as an economics Ph.D. student at Princeton in the early 1990s, I was lucky that Craig Olson—then a Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin, now at the University of Illinois—spent a year there as a visiting professor. I had little knowledge of the then-mysterious field of industrial relations, but as a leading scholar in that field, Craig kindly introduced me to the key works in the field. I can’t remember everything he recommended, but I certainly remember that A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations was high on the list.

This soon made an impact on my thinking. On a specific level, Walton and McKersie’s insights on intraorganizational bargaining—developed not only in A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, but also elsewhere—were important for my dissertation. I was analyzing UAW pattern bargaining. The standard economic explanations for pattern bargaining are, unsurprisingly, market-based: wage patterns as 1) taking wages out of competition, or 2) as “rough-and-ready guides whereby the working of supply and demand is anticipated,” as John R. Hicks put it in his 1932 A Theory of Wages (p. 80). But even as a budding economist, no pun intended, I was skeptical about these economic-based explanations. Indeed, archival evidence of union memos and records pointed, in my mind, to internal union political considerations, not market forces. I was familiar with Ashenfelter and Johnson’s model of strikes that was rooted in internal union dynamics (of course, since we would routinely have lunch meetings in Ashenfelter’s large Princeton office, in the shadow of a large portrait of another Hicks: Clarence J. of Standard Oil fame). And I was familiar with the famous Ross-Dunlop debate in which Arthur Ross championed the political side of union wage determination. But Walton and McKersie’s framework provided a much stronger foundation for understanding the role of internal union political dynamics in the context of the entire negotiations process.

On a deeper level, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations made a more lasting impact on my thinking in at least two ways. One, though economists at Princeton and a few other places study labor unions with some eye toward institutional realities, the general approach in economics is not to give a lot of attention to how things really work within and across organizations. A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations opened up this space to me through its classic development of the four subprocesses of negotiations. Through these subprocesses, I could now start to understand how labor and management negotiators actually interacted, and how decisions were made. This helped me recognize the importance of real-world institutions in understanding the employment relationship. And the need to do so in a rich, multidisciplinary way. These are, of course, two hallmarks of industrial relations scholarship.

Two, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations introduced me to mixed motive conflict; and as such, to another fundamental principle of industrial relations scholarship—that the employment relationship is best characterized as a mixed-motive bargaining relationship, something I would end up writing about multiple times (eventually). In these ways, then, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations helped me grow from a young economist into an industrial relations scholar with a deeper, multidisciplinary understanding of institutions and the employment relationship.

Like too many others to count, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations has also shaped my teaching. And hopefully in some modest way I am helping to continue its influence on future generations. In particular, Walton and McKersie’s four subprocesses form the core of the negotiations material in the bargaining chapter of my textbook, Labor Relations: Striking a Balance (McGraw-Hill). Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve even retained their original terms and have explicit subsections devoted to each one. Nowhere else in my textbook does one piece of work receive such extended discussion. And other key insights on labor negotiations and labor-management relationships are a byproduct of their seminal work, especially Walton and McKersie’s book with Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Strategic Negotiations: A Theory of Change in Labor-Management Relations (Harvard Business School Press), and Raymond Friedman’s Front Stage, Backstage: The Dramatic Structure of Labor Negotiations (MIT Press).

For me personally, then, Walton and McKersie’s work has been influential in significant ways that might not be readily apparent beyond my textbook. But more broadly speaking, the true testament to the enduring importance of A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations is that its insights and the follow-up work it has spawned are still so useful 50 years later, not only for academics seeking to understand labor relations (or negotiations more generally), but also for practitioners who negotiate and manage relationships in diverse organizations.

Why HR-OB Still Needs IR

Professor John Godard of the University of Manitoba has just published a very stimulating article that should be read by anyone in employment relations, human resource management, and organizational behavior ("The Psychologisation of Employment Relations?," Human Resource Management Journal, 2014). I have witnessed the trends that John describes--indeed, in my administrative roles at the University of Minnesota I have, with mixed feelings, contributed to some of them--and I share his concerns.

In this posting, I want to expand upon what he raises in this quote:

the growing psychologisation of employment relations means that there is less and less possibility for actually understanding these relations. The problems of motivation and control, and the dysfunctions to which they may give rise, tend to be attributed to individual or interpersonal phenomena that can be avoided through careful selection and training/socialisation procedures if not more directly through 'performance management'. Often, the assumption is not that these practices and innovations are flawed, or that it is the institutional design of the employment relation that is the problem, but rather that they are just not being implemented properly. (p. 7)

For starters, I think this particular problem is even worse than Godard conveys it. To see this, we need to distinguish between a human resources (HR) approach and an organizational behavior (OB) approach. The HR approach (or what some might see as a high-road, high-commitment HR approach) uses organizational policies and practices to align employee-employer interests to boost performance. In this paradigm, problems of subpar performance are assumed to reflect poorly-designed policies or flawed implementation. Sometimes the blame might be ascribed to employees (e.g., the organization selected the wrong kind of individual), but there is at least the scope for questioning whether the policies were appropriately designed, which means that there is some scope for questioning the underlying, structural nature of the employment relationship (albeit in limited ways, more on this in a minute).

But increasingly within academia (at least in North America), I assert that this HR approach is being supplanted by an OB approach that seeks to manage interpersonal dynamics, not organizational policies and practices, to boost performance. In this paradigm, subpar performance or other negative outcomes are largely seen as the product of interpersonal dysfunction among co-workers or between a worker and her manager. In this way of thinking, organizational policies such as selection systems or compensation plans are largely off the radar so there is even less cause for considering them than in the HR approach. So there is even less of a chance that the structural nature of the employment relationship will be considered.

In contrast, industrial relations perspectives focus attention on power relations between employers and employees as shaped by the allocation of resources and rights in modern capitalist societies. Problems of motivation and performance, then, might be rooted in systematic inequalities which in turn raise questions about the structural nature of the employment relationship. It is typically through industrial relations scholarship and coursework, then, that one confronts--or should confront--alternative models of the employment relationship, such as unitarism and pluralism (see my earlier blog posting). Industrial relations perspectives are therefore critically important for understanding employment relations and need to remain an important part of the field.

But there is another element to this story. Not only does the psychologization of employment relations draw attention to certain private policies and practices and away from public policies and institutions (notably protective labor standards and labor unions because their need is rooted in structural power imbalances not commonly recognized in the HR and OB approaches). But it also implicitly focuses attention on certain outcomes and objectives of the employment relationship--primarily economic performance and psychological well-being. As I show in my book Employment with a Human Face: Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice, industrial relations perspectives embrace broader objectives of the employment relationship that I term equity (fair employment standards for both material outcomes and personal treatment) and voice (the ability to have meaningful input into decisions). In the industrial relations tradition, equity and voice are key objectives rooted in human dignity and citizenship, even when they don't enhance employee or organizational performance. So this causes us to question the nature of employment relationship on a broader basis. In other words, concerns with low pay or a lack of employee voice, for example, are problematic in industrial relations thought, but perhaps not in HR and OB as long as employees are satisfied and productive--and IR scholarship looks to the structural nature of the employment relationship as at least partly responsible for these problematic outcomes.

So the psychologization of employment relations makes it less likely that the nature of the employment relationship will be questioned not only because when there are problems, the blame will placed on specific policies or individuals (Godard's point), but also because the scope of important outcomes is narrower. Putting this a little differently, OB generally concerns itself with individual and team-level outcomes and HR highlights organizational outcomes; IR adds a concern with societal outcomes.

With that said, I want to be clear that I have great respect for the OB scholarship pursued by my University of Minnesota colleagues and others in the field. So the problem isn't with this scholarship per se, the problem, as I see it, is when one perspective becomes the sole approach to understanding the very complex world of work. The house of employment relations scholarship needs to be large enough to include diverse intellectual paradigms, adherents to different paradigms need to respect and learn from others, and the degree programs we offer need to educate students in diverse ways of thinking, even if some of these ways might seem a little old-fashioned. HR-OB still needs industrial relations.