The Importance of Political Systems for Trade Union Membership, Coverage, and Influence

Here's the Twitter thread version of my new article:

Excited that “The Importance of Political Systems for Trade Union Membership, Coverage, and Influence: Theory and Comparative Evidence” with @jryanlamare is in the current BJIR issue. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12575
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Ideological links between the state & industrial relations have-of course-been recognized as important for a long time. We build on this to consider the influence of the structural nature of a country’s political system, irrespective of the ideological leaning of the state.
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By political system, we mean 1) the extent to which a national electoral system yields a legislative body that is (dis)proportional to the fraction of votes each party received, 2) effective number of parties, 3) multiparty ruling coalitions.
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We theorize that these can influence workplace-level unionism, holding state ideology constant, via incentives for inclusionary governance & legislative body diversity. In short, a pol. system that rewards compromise rather than competition may create similar workplace norms.
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Eg, in more representative & coalitional systems, unions have more opportunities to use their extra-parliamentary status to act as consensus-builders, increasing their legitimacy. Also, employers have incentives to influence as a social partner, so can't bust unions.
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Using @eurofound establishment data & @ESS_Survey individual data for 25+ European countries, increased political representativeness (lower disproportionality,  coalitions) is a statistically significant predictor of a greater likelihood of individual trade union membership.
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And competitive fragmentation, measured by greater numbers of political parties, is associated with weakened collective voice. Causal ambiguity is likely the strongest for the multiparty coalition outcomes.
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The importance of cross-national institutional differences in the nature of trade unions & workplace voice, supportive legislative policies, and varieties of capitalism needs to be complemented by a deeper understanding of the role of varieties of political systems.
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Article: https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12575
Non-paywall version: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3425452
9-minute animation (fewer details, more fun): https://youtu.be/K_mP-htYcok
And we are deeply touched by the care shown to us & our work by the late David Marsden who was the editor.
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Worker Voice and Political Participation in Civil Society: Lousy Work Is Bad for Democracy

The stories are familiar by now: businesses claim that there’s a labor shortage and others reply that they need to pay more. Pay is obviously an important part of a job, but we need to remember that the positive and negative aspects of work are complicated, which means that we must consider more than pay when evaluating job quality and worker well-being. Among many important things, this includes paying attention to how the quality of work affects society.  

Concerns with how workplace experiences affect the political arena are longstanding. Over 150 years ago, John Stuart Mill advocated for worker cooperatives and participatory economic systems because he believed economic democracy fostered political democracy. Most workers, however, do not work in cooperatives. But varying forms of worker voice can have elements of economic democracy, or more widely-speaking, at least some degree of autonomy. In a seminal book, Carole Pateman argued that individuals with autonomy in their work—e.g., the ability to control certain aspects of the job—develop confidence that they are capable of autonomous action. This confidence can spill over to the political and civic arenas leading to higher levels of participation in these arenas. In other words, workplace voice can create “psychological supports” for political and civic engagement. A second line of theorizing focuses instead on skill development. That is, exercising voice in the workplace can enhance skills pertaining to things like advocacy, negotiation, and communication, which can also be useful in the political and civic arenas. So workplace voice can lead to greater political and civic participation through skill enhancement.

Stronger forms of workplace democracy include being represented by a labor union or works council, and being involved with these forms of voice can also trigger both of these channels. That is, participating in a union or works council—and probably a worker center, too—can enhance confidence, instill beliefs about the importance of democratic decision-making, and develop skills that translate into greater political and civic engagement. 

If individual or collective voice prompts greater political and civic participation through these channels, it’s a happy byproduct of workplace voice rather than intentional one. But labor unions and other collective bodies can also intentionally try to increase political and civic participation through voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives, campaigns to contact politicians or join demonstrations, and training programs for political advocacy and running for political office. So unintentionally and intentionally, unions, works councils, and worker centers can build “democratic character: the willingness and capacity of individuals to engage in democratic politics and to do so in ways that are informed by judgements of the common good.” Conceptually, then, we should expect workers involved with these forms of collective voice to participate more readily in the political and civic arenas compared to workers that lack avenues of workplace voice.

But does this happen in practice? Ryan Lamare and I have recently reviewed the literature, and we conclude quite strongly that there are strong relationships between individual or collective voice on the one hand, and political and civic participation on the other. One of our favorite studies—because we authored it!—shows that across 27 European countries, workers with greater individual workplace voice are more likely to vote, contact politicians, work in a political party, and engage in other activities. This is just one of a number of studies on individual voice that have broadly similar findings across various samples and using diverse measures of individual voice and political participation. But spillovers are not guaranteed—supervisor support or suppression can also affect the workplace-political linkage. There is also a large literature on the effects of union voice. Empirical results show that union members are more likely to vote (in the US, Canada,  and Europe), engage in other political activities, and give to charity. There's also evidence that unions can also mobilize non-members to engage in protests. 

Admittedly, specifically identifying causal relationships can be challenging. For example, workers who are pre-disposed toward political and civic participation might look for jobs with individual and/or collective voice, so their observed participation was not caused by workplace voice. But the studies that are able to specifically address issues of causality typically find that non-causal explanations cannot fully explain the observed empirical relationships. In other words, it appears that individual and collective voice prompt some additional political and civic participation that would not have occurred in the absence of this workplace voice. In this way, having more individual and collective voice would be good for society.

Consequently, while individual and collective forms of worker voice are accurately viewed primarily as workplace phenomena, the interconnections to and ramifications for political and civic engagement should not be overlooked. Labor unions, with their own internal participatory, democratic systems and their incentives for political education and mobilization, are perhaps the form of worker voice in which it is easiest to expect there to be spillovers into the political and civic arena—including spillovers that are the byproduct of experiencing unionization and others that result from intentional union strategies. But even the experience of individual forms of workplace voice such as in-job autonomy can have spillovers by fostering democratizing attitudes and civic skills.

Across time and space, then, what happens at work is not expected to stay at work. Researchers and commentators often present this in a positive frame, as has been done here—that is, higher levels of workplace voice are associated with higher levels of political and civic participation. But it is important to remember that if this is true, then so is the corresponding negative framing—that is, dictatorial and authoritarian workplaces in which workers lack individual and/or collective voice likely lead to lower levels of political and civic participation, with consequent negative impacts on society. Pay might be the #1 concern of workers struggling to make ends meet, but societally we should be pushing not only for jobs that allow workers to support themselves and their families, but also that contribute to the broader health of our society.

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Source: John W. Budd and J. Ryan Lamare (2021) "Worker Voice and Political Participation in Civil Society," in Klaus F. Zimmermann, ed., Handbook of Labor, Human Resources and Population Economics (Cham: Springer). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57365-6_213-1 [free access to the pre-publication version here].

How the U.S. Political System Might be Bad for Labor Unions Regardless of Who is in Power

Speaking of elections….it’s fairly obvious that whether Democratic or Republican politicians control local, state, or federal policy-making has important implications for future outcomes on wide-ranging issues, including employment-related outcomes like labor union strength. But recent research with Ryan Lamare suggests that regardless of which party is in power, the structure of the U.S. electoral system might also shape the strength of labor unions.

In our research we look at three measures of a country’s political system: (1) disproportionality, measuring (the inverse) of representativeness as captured by the discrepancy between votes and seats received, (2) the effective number of political parties, measuring fragmentation in a political system, and (3) whether or not there is a coalitional government. France is an example with high disproportionality scores—for example, President Macron’s party has more than 50 percent of the seats in the French National Assembly even though it only received 28 percent of the votes—while Belgium is an example of a large number of parties—currently, twelve different political parties currently have seats in the Belgian Chamber of Representatives.

Using multiple European data sets at both the individual and establishment level, we generally find that countries that labor unions are stronger and have more members when a political system is more representative, less fragmented, and governed by a coalition—regardless of the ideology of the ruling party or parties. 

Why might this be the case? We can’t observe specific reasons in our analyses, but we articulate several possibilities. In more representative and coalitional political systems, it is difficult for any single party to govern or have outsized influence. In such systems, then, inclusionary governance arrangements are often required to attain political power, whereas in less representative and unilateral political systems, parties can be exclusionary in their governance. Under more representative and coalitional systems, unions have greater opportunities to use their extra-parliamentary status to act as consensus-builders, thus enhancing their legitimacy and value. Moreover, because it is difficult for any single party to govern in representative and coalitional electoral systems, employers have an incentive to seek influence as a social partner rather than relying on influence within specific political parties. In other words, there is a greater incentive for employers to embrace a culture of inclusion and compromise that recognizes rather than attacks the legitimacy of labor unions.  All of these mechanisms can happen when the ideology of the legislature or ruling coalition is either right- or left-leaning.  

On the other hand, when there are a large number of fragmented parties, smaller extremist parties can compete for relatively outsized power, this may make creating a spirit of consensus-building and compromise difficult. Instead we expect a competitive social climate in which unions are attacked. A large number of competitive parties could also create political gridlock, reinforcing an overall culture of competition rather than inclusion. 

In an earlier posting, I applied this to last year's UK election, and estimated that if the UK had proportional representation electoral rules, the chances of individual union membership would be higher by 2 to 9 percentage points than is currently the case under its highly disproportional system. 

But where does the United States fit in? Numerically, the two-party system suggests a lack of competitive fragmentation, but recent experience suggests a great deal of polarization in spite of only two major parties. So labor unions become a partisan combatant in vitriolic contests rather than a consensus builder. The lack of coalition governments further denies labor unions this avenue for enhancing its legitimacy. In terms of representativeness as captured by disproportionality, the picture is cloudy. The U.S. House of Representatives typically scores favorably (that is, high proportionality / low disproportionality). In 2018, for example, the Democratic candidates garnered 53.4 percent of overall votes and ended up with 54 percent of the seats. But over the previous three elections, Republican Senate candidates received 44 percent of the vote but Republicans control 53 percent of the seats, resulting in a high disproportionality score of 8. And for the presidency, the electoral college can lead to even greater discrepancies. Unfortunately, this complicated U.S. electoral system doesn’t fit well with the European systems we analyzed in our research. But the above-average levels of disproportionality in the Senate and electoral college are consistent with the U.S. political system not being one of compromise and inclusion that our research suggests indirectly benefit the legitimacy of labor unions.

Even though it might be a stretch to our apply our results to the U.S. context, we think it’s important to continue to consider how the nature of a country’s political system may impact issues that are not typically considered, such as the legitimacy of a country’s labor movement. Some have used the 2020 presidential election as a platform for arguing the need to abandon the electoral college. Our research highlights that election rule reforms can have effects far beyond the obvious. Consequently, reforms could be even more valuable than realized...or full of unintended consequences. Only by thinking through these deeper effects can we get a better handle on this. 

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Source: John W. Budd and J. Ryan Lamare (forthcoming) "The Importance of Political Systems for Trade Union Membership, Coverage, and Influence: Theory and Comparative Evidence," British Journal of Industrial Relations. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12575. [free access to the pre-publication version here]

Legislative Election Rules and Industrial Relations—Representativeness is Good

Last week’s UK parliamentary election has highlighted the importance for election rules for determining the representativeness of a legislative body. In particular, the Conservative party won 56 percent of the seats in Parliament while only receiving 44 percent of the votes cast. The Labour party’s representation better matches its vote share (a 32 percent vote share yielded a 31 seat share), but the Liberal Democrats were left with not even two percent of the seats in spite of receiving more than 11 percent of votes. So the composition of seats in Parliament is not very representative of the distribution of votes across the electorate.

These mismatches were further highlighted when the Electoral Reform Society simulated the results if the UK followed the proportional representation electoral rules used elsewhere in Europe. It found that the Conservatives would have won 288 instead of 365 seats, Labour 216 instead of 202, and the Social Democrats 70 instead of 11 (though the Church of Militant Elvis party still would not won any seats). Under these proportional representation election rules, the composition of seats in Parliament would be strongly representative of the nature of the votes cast (e.g., Conservatives with 44.3 percent of the seats based on 43.6 percent of the votes).

This is not a matter purely for the political sphere. Ryan Lamare and I have been working on a research project that analyzes the connection between election rules (representativeness) and industrial relations—specifically, linkages to the extent of workplace employee representation such as labor unions and union membership. Theoretically, we identify multiple ways in which political representativeness might shape employee representation, including enacting public policies, involving unions in peak-level corporatist initiatives, enabling direct relationships between trade unions and legislators, shaping attitudes around political inclusion that affect workplace agency, and giving social legitimacy to collective voice. Through all of these channels, a political system with greater representativeness is expected to have stronger workplace employee representation and higher rates of union membership.

But what happens in practice? Political scientists have developed measures of legislative representativeness, and we focus on a measure called “disproportionality.” In short, this measures the magnitude of the deviations between seat and vote shares. With a baseline of perfect proportionality (seat share = vote share) of zero, then greater deviations yield a higher disproportionality score. The disproportionality score for last week’s UK election is 11.9—this is actually lower than in recent UK elections but is much higher than in many European countries (for example, the disproportionality score is typically less than five in Belgium, and less than two in Denmark). France is another European country with high disproportionality scores—for example, President Macron’s party has more than 50 percent of the seats in the French National Assembly even though it only received 28 percent of the votes (maybe this is connected to all of the worker protests in France?). [Curious about other country's values? Choose any election here and look for “Disp” in the lower right corner.]

We can then statistically analyze the predictive power of disproportionality scores across European countries between 2002 and 2016. We generally find that disproportionality is negatively related to the presence of trade unions and other representative bodies in the workplace, the existence of a collective wage agreement, and the likelihood of individual union membership. In other words, consistent with the predictions of our theory above, greater representativeness in a country’s legislative body is linked to greater workplace representativeness. We can’t observe exactly why, but we think that it’s because a culture of compromise and inclusion at a legislative level spills into other spheres, including the workplace.

In fact, our results suggest that what happens at the electoral level is quite important for industrial relations. Returning to the recent UK election, using the distribution of hypothetical seats that the Electoral Reform Society calculated would have resulted using proportional representation electoral rules, we calculate that the disproportionality score would have been only 1.4 instead of the actual 11.9. This is a very low score indicative of a highly representative outcome. Using a back of the envelope calculation, then, our statistical results imply that this reduction in disproportionality (using the proportional representation election rules) would increase the chances of individual union membership in the range of 2 to 9 percentage points. Note that the union membership rate (“union density”) in the UK is less than 25 percent, so this hypothetical change is not trivial. Those interested in the world of work and employee representation should pay more attention to election rules.

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Source: John W. Budd and J. Ryan Lamare (forthcoming) "The Importance of Political Systems for Trade Union Membership, Coverage, and Influence: Theory and Comparative Evidence," British Journal of Industrial Relations. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12575. [free access to the pre-publication version here]

And Now for the Biden Labor Plan...Laudable But Still a Narrow View of High-Stakes, Worker Voice

Last month’s post was prompted by the release of  the labor plans by the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns. A couple weeks later, the Biden campaign released its labor plan (“The Biden Plan for Strengthening Worker Organizing, Collective Bargaining, and Unions”). Like the Sanders and Warren plans, the Biden plan contains an embrace of the traditional reforms to the National Labor Relations Act that you’d expect from a Democratic presidential candidate:

• Card check certification elections
• Ban on captive audience meetings
• Stronger penalties for labor law violators
• First contract arbitration
• Ban on permanent strike replacements
• An end to right-to-work laws allowing represented worker to free-ride by not paying union dues
• Extending coverage to domestic and agricultural workers.

The Biden plan also addresses some problematic areas that have emerged more recently, including:

• Restoring bargaining (and other) rights for federal workers
• Giving franchisors joint employer status (and thus bringing them to the bargaining table)
• Providing federal labor law protections to state and local government employees
• Giving independent contractors the right to unionize and bargain. 

Beyond labor law, the Biden plan also seeks to increase the national minimum wage, strengthen prevailing wage standards, ban most non-compete agreements and mandatory arbitration, give gig economy workers the legal status of employees, and remove harmful occupational licensing requirements. Maybe I’ve missed it, but I think this very last one is unique among the candidates’ plans, and I trust that my colleague Morris Kleiner will be pleased to see this issue recognized as he’s been the primary researcher in this area for years.

Except for the occupational licensing part, the elements of the Biden plan are pretty standard fare. In some respects, that’s not necessarily bad. These are all important issues, and that Biden is not unique in addressing them can be seen as a broad acceptance (on the left) of the problem areas. But as I argued last month with respect to the Sanders and Warren plans, there seems to be an unstated premise that workers want union representation but are unable to form unions because they are excluded from protections (e.g., gig workers) or because the election process favors employers. Research consistently shows that many nonunion workers—maybe even half of them—do indeed want union representation. But the same research also reveals that many others want other forms of voice.

The ”workers want to unionize but cannot” premise also overlooks the fact that the U.S. system is essentially all or nothing. You either have union representation in which case a union bargains for you over all terms and conditions of employment, or you do not and collective voice is probably completely lacking. All of the candidates’ plans seem to miss opportunities to promote localized, participatory forms of worker voice such as mandatory safety and health committees in which workers can gain firsthand experience with collective voice, which can grow into a desire for stronger forms of involvement and representation. Others have labeled this “training wheels voice,” and this should be included in plans to improve workers’ rights.

The all or nothing nature of the U.S. labor system also makes the certification process a high stakes affair for workers and managers. This is partly because of the big jump from no collective voice to the union as the exclusive representative over all terms and conditions of employment, but also because it can be difficult to remove an unresponsive union. So a bolder change would be to make certification elections an automatic, regular occurrence for all workers. As outlined by Samuel Estreicher,

“Every two years (unless the union achieved a collective bargaining agreement, in which case every three years) the employees in the unit, after an initial minimal required showing of interest [e.g., 5-10% of workers], would have an opportunity to vote in a secret ballot whether they wish to continue the union’s representation, select another organization, or have no union representation at all. Petitioning labor organizations and employers would be required to share certain specified information, in electronic form, with the voting employees.” 

Before this is dismissed as crazy, note that Republican legislatures in Wisconsin and Iowa have enacted requirements for regular recertification elections. If unionized workplaces should have to recertify in order to confirm that a majority of workers still support unionization, then the same logic should apply to nonunion workplaces to regularly determine what the majority support. The democratic process shouldn’t choose sides.

Indeed, having regular elections would bring certification elections into line with political elections, and would not only perhaps make it easier to gain certification but also to get rid of an ineffective or undesirable union. In other words, it might be better to have an “easy in, easy out” system for determining union representation and allowing for experimentation with different forms of collective voice. A risk is that conflict over unionization becomes a regular occurrence, but the hope would be that by regularizing this and reducing the stakes, the worst of the current process could be avoided. Moreover, if unionization became more widespread, this could reduce managerial opposition by weakening the perception of unionization as a significant competitive disadvantage.

Circling back to the Biden plan, it also uniquely calls for the creation of “a cabinet-level working group that will solely focus on promoting union organizing and collective bargaining in the public and private sectors.” Intriguing…but I would advocate for a broader scope that examines collective voice, including but not limited to collective bargaining.

Unsolicited Advice for Amazon: Keep Talking with Your Workers

Last month, the New York Times and the Star Tribune reported on conflicts between Somalian workers and management at Amazon’s Shakopee (Minnesota) warehouse. The workers’ concerns include increases in their workload, lack of advancement opportunities, and prayer breaks.

There are many interesting angles to this story, including the community built among Somalian workers (at least partly facilitated by the Amazon-provided bus that brings them from and back to downtown Minneapolis each day) and the role of the Awood Center  (a worker center for East African workers in the Twin Cities). But then there’s this from the New York Times article by Karen Weise:

“Now, tied together by a close cultural connection and empowered by a tight labor market, they appear to be the first known group in the United States to get Amazon management to negotiate. After modest protests over the summer, the workers have had two private meetings with management in recent months.”

Kudos to the workers for this achievement. I’m a fan of worker voice in many forms (and here, too). And these issues are probably particularly ripe for constructive conversations. It’s important to put a human face on workload demands, frustration with advancement could be a win-win issue to work through, and requests for prayer breaks involve obvious cultural differences that are hard to overcome without an understanding that comes from personal interaction. And this dialogue has resulted in what seems like some constructive changes, again quoting from the New York Times article:

“Last week, Amazon offered some compromises at its facilities in the Minneapolis area. The company said it would require a general manager and a Somali-speaking manager to agree on any firings related to productivity rates, designate a manager to respond to individual complaints within five days and meet with workers quarterly.”

But focusing solely on the process of employee voice, there is room for tremendous improvement. According to these reports, there have only been TWO meetings, and Amazon has only committed to a quarterly meeting with workers. As in four times a year? Employee voice should be ongoing rather than letting problems fester. And committing to respond to individual complaints within five days hardly seems responsive—that can be a long time for a worker to suffer. Employee voice should be embraced as something worthy of immediate attention whenever feasible.

In fact, the workers have scheduled a protest because they do not believe their concerns have been fully addressed. Employee voice is not a magical solution that will make these issues disappear, but dialogue is certainly worth trying more than once a quarter. For Amazon, further discussions could hopefully resolve these issues and avoid work disruptions. For the workers, voice allows them to participate in shaping their work life in ways consistent with human needs and dignity. So keep talking with your workers. No to your workers. With your workers.

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.

The Soul and Scope of Labor Union Strategies

The faculty organizing drive at the University of Minnesota has heated up with the recent launch of a website for faculty opposing the drive. The presence of an organizing drive anywhere naturally raises questions of what will a union do for the workers, and more broadly, how will they do it. Indeed, the traditional collection of union strategies is under great pressure to change in the 21st century, and the labor movement has been debating and experimenting with alternatives.

Unfortunately, these debates often confuse different dimensions of union strategies. The traditional collection of union strategies combines a workplace focus with passive rank and file participation. Alternative strategies can change only one, or both, of these dimensions. To understand these debates more clearly, then, it is important to clearly distinguish between what I call the scope and the soul of employee representation (see table below). The scope of representation describes the breadth of the representation activities—in particular, whether union activity is concentrated in the workplace or in the broader political and social arenas. A business unionism focus on collective bargaining is a workplace scope of representation; an alternative approach embracing community and social activism represents a broader social scope. The soul of representation captures how the representation is pursued or delivered, especially regarding the extent of rank and file participation. The rank and file are passive in the servicing model; alternative strategies seek to instead actively engage the rank and file in union activities.

The upper-left quadrant is where U.S. unions have traditionally been. Staying within a workplace focus (left-hand column) but moving away from a servicing approach in which union members passively consume union services yields a set of alternatives I have labeled "employee empowerment unionism." Rather than establishing standardized outcomes, such as tying wages to jobs or layoffs to seniority, employee empowerment unionism establishes the framework of procedures in which workers are then empowered to determine their own outcomes. Consider union strategies in professional sports. These unions focus less on negotiating specific outcomes and instead have established the parameters within which individual players negotiate their own salaries. These parameters include minimum standards and provisions for resolving disputes. A similar model is used for actors and might also be appropriate for college professors, doctors, and other occupations. Union involvement in establishing standards for a team to select new members or a team leader is another example in which the union’s role is not negotiating outcomes, but negotiating processes for empowering individual employees. As yet another example, the clerical workers union at Harvard University bargained for a problem-solving system that replaces a traditional grievance procedure with a framework that empowers employees to resolve their own workplace problems.

Some see labor unions as more than workplace mechanisms for winning economic gains; rather, unions are viewed as integral participants in a community’s and country’s civic and political activities. In the format of the table, the scope of representation is the broader social and political arena. The pursuit of equity and voice is not limited to negotiating favorable contract language governing the rules of the workplace, but extends to broader concerns of social justice throughout society. But what’s often overlooked is that even within social unionism, what I call the soul can be union leaders with passive rank and file participation, or it can be active union member participation. Union support for political candidates or lobbying for minimum wage increases without grassroots participation are examples of social unionism with a largely passive rank and file. In contrast, "social movement unionism" embraces labor unions as part of a broader social movement of community, social, and political activist groups that relies on active grassroots participation and mobilization. Organizer Jane McAlevey prefers the label “whole-worker organizing” because it seeks to integrate rather than separate out work issues from the rest of a person’s life and thereby “seeks to engage ‘whole workers’ in the betterment of their lives” (Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, 2012, p. 14).

Within each of the quadrants of the table, there are a variety of specific goals, objectives, and strategies that could be pursued. So unions and the workers they represent, or who are seeking representation, have lots of choices. In thinking about these choices, it's useful to distinguish between the soul and scope of representation.

Note: For the faculty organizing drive at the University of Minnesota, here are links to the websites of the supporters, those who oppose the drive, and the administration.

Deeper Lessons from Recent Employee Wellness Program Controversies

It’s no secret that employee wellness is an important issue today. As just one example, Honeywell’s wellness program penalizes employees if they don’t complete a biometric screening. According to newspaper reports, the penalties can include a $500 medical plan surcharge, the loss of up to $1,500 in contributions to health savings accounts, and up to $2,000 in tobacco-related surcharges. This has landed Honeywell in hot water because two employees complained to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the EEOC subsequently filed a lawsuit against Honeywell saying that these noncompliance penalties violate federal law. I’ll let others comment on the legal merits of this case, but I think there are at least three lessons here that go beyond Honeywell and the specifics of this dispute.

First, the emphasis on penalties rather than rewards in some employee wellness programs underscores the need for those who design corporate policies of any type to have a sound understanding of what drives human behavior. If one believes that employees are exceedingly rational (as is common in neoclassical economics), then it shouldn’t matter whether something is implemented as a penalty or a reward. For example, a $500 reward for complying is viewed by a dispassionate ultra-rational person as the same as a $500 penalty for non-compliance.

But research in psychology and behavioral economics demonstrates that real decision making isn’t dispassionately rational; rather, it’s shaped by a number of cognitive biases and limitations. Of particular relevance here is the phenomenon of loss aversion—that is, individuals are significantly more bothered by a loss than a gain. So it probably matters--maybe a lot--whether wellness plans (and many other policies) emphasize penalties or emphasize rewards. Admittedly this is complex. On the one hand, this might imply that companies should design policies around penalties because employees will work harder to avoid them than to achieve rewards. But what seems to have happened here and elsewhere (e.g., Penn State) is that the threat of a penalty seems more coercive than the possibility of a reward, so employees have a stronger negative reaction from the outset when the program uses a penalty-based approach. Maybe these are exceptional examples, but the fundamental point remains—corporate policy-makers need to have a deep understanding of human behavior in order to design effective policies.

Second, the Honeywell lawsuit can be a tale that illustrates the importance of employee voice. The opposition to the Honeywell wellness plan, at least by some workers, harkens back to a year ago when Penn State similarly launched a wellness plan that included a monetary penalty for employees who failed to complete a health questionnaire (a very invasive questionnaire, by the way, that included asking women if they intended to become pregnant, but that’s a story for another day). Unlike many U.S. corporations, U.S. universities have strong traditions of employee voice by key employees (in the form of faculty governance). There was an uproar on the Penn State campus in reaction to this plan, there was a special meeting of the faculty senate in which administrators were told of passionate employee objections, and the penalty part of the wellness program was withdrawn. Maybe it’s just coincidence, but I find it telling that Honeywell is facing a lawsuit because when workers lack a voice, they need to turn to other avenues for redress. Wouldn’t it be better for all involved to resolve many issues through employee voice rather than through the courts?

Third, on some level, it’s natural to have sympathy for Honeywell and other employers. Health care costs are obviously a major challenge, and something needs to be done. But I think the deeper lesson is that this is another symptom of a fundamentally broken system. The U.S. is fairly unique in having a health care system that is so closely tied to voluntary, employer-provided insurance. At its worst, this system can dampen overall employment, contribute to job lock (employees not leaving jobs because of the difficulty in switching health carriers), and burden American employers with anti-competitive costs. And this system isn’t necessarily good for health care delivery, either, because the private health insurance system can increase costs by dividing up risk pools and increasing administrative costs.

We need to remember, however, that corporate American was instrumental in shaping this system in the first place (see Jennifer Klein’s book, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State). From the 1940s on, business lobbied against national or universal health insurance so that employees would need to rely on employer-provided benefits, and therefore be loyal solely to their employers, not to the government or even worse, to a labor union! So we probably shouldn’t feel too sorry for Honeywell and other corporations as they grapple with health care challenges in the system that they largely created. More importantly, rather than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic by fussing with incentives (and even worse, penalties) through employee wellness programs, fundamental reform that decouples health care coverage from employment should be the real issue of the day.

The (Potential) Benefits of Employee Voice

Last week I had the pleasure of giving a keynote address at a program on "Strengthening Democracy at Work: The Promise of Employee Voice" organized by Andrew Timming and sponsored by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute. The theme of my talk was "The (Potential) Benefits of Employee Voice." To adequately assess the benefits of voice, it is important to avoid the common trap of narrowly defining voice simply as a complaint mechanism. Rather, employee voice should be seen more broadly as expressing opinions and having meaningful input into work-related decision-making.

This broad form of voice can be seen as having four key elements:

• Employee free speech--the right to freely express opinions and views


• Individual self-determination--Autonomy in one's job, e.g., influence scheduling of work and discretion over how tasks are done


• Consultation, codetermination, and social dialogue--Exchanges of views between employers and employees that stop short of formal bargaining


• Countervailing collective voice--A voice mechanism with sufficient power to act as a countervailing balance to employer power, e.g., a labor union

All four of these dimensions can, when conditions are ripe, benefit individuals, organizations, and societies. Employee free speech protections can benefit individuals by facilitating improved decision-making via the exchange of information while also promoting intrinsic benefits because "the ability to hold opinions and beliefs, and to communicate them with others, is what makes us fully human" (Lucy Vickers, Freedom of Speech and Employment, 2002: 17). Employees with higher levels of autonomy, locus of control, and self-determination have higher job satisfaction and greater psychological well-being. And strong forms of collective voice can yield higher wages, increased frequency of health insurance, pensions, and other employee benefits, the presence of protective work rules and grievance procedures with due process protections that promote respect for dignity in the workplace, as well as greater compliance with statutory regulations.

Employee voice can benefit organizations because all forms of voice can yield process improvement. Moreover, individual self-determination and collective consultation can improve employee engagement which can enhance productivity and organizational performance. Peak-level consultation can also foster macroeconomic stability and growth, as was seemingly the case when Ireland's social partnership contributed to the Celtic Tiger prior to the financial crisis. Lastly, it is possible that unions can boost productivity, promote economic stabilization by taking wages out of competition, and stimulate economic growth via increased purchasing power though in practice these effects are controversial and the evidence is mixed or debatable.

At a societal level, employee free speech can strengthen democracy because the workplace is one of the key locations in which individuals are exposed to diverse perspectives and debates. Employee free speech protections can also provide a balance to the political activities that employers are increasingly bringing to the workplace (e.g., using company e-mail systems to direct employees to sites that show candidates' business ratings). The greater well-being that can result from individual self-determination and collective consultation has benefits for local communities, and autonomous workers with a well-developed sense of agency presumably make better citizens. Employee voice mechanisms can also enhance the participatory and deliberative skills and norms needed for a healthy political democracy. Successful peak-level social dialogue that promotes macroeconomic stability and prosperity has clear societal benefits, as do labor unions when they promote greater economic and political fairness.

We don't need to look far to appreciate that these are important issues. To take just one example, the tragic Bangladesh garment factory collapse in April that killed and injured thousands of workers might have been prevented by stronger employee voice. And debates over employee voice are central to debates over ways to prevent future tragedies, with some lobbying for greater labor union rights while Wal-Mart and Target plan to rely on nonunion voice via confidential employee hot lines and "Worker Participation Committees."

But all of these benefits are contingent and contested, not universal. The conditions for employee voice to deliver these benefits are not yet fully known and are not always present. Indeed, these are highly contested issues because various forms of voice--especially labor unions--are frequently seen as serving some while harming others. So competing groups seek to structure the environment in ways that promote their desired models of employee voice (or lack thereof), such as when Republican politicians seek to shut down the National Labor Relations Board or when labor unions lobby for card check elections. As such, employee voice potentially has great benefits, but we need to continue to deepen our understanding of these benefits, and the conditions that make them possible.

Right-to-Request--Let's Give Dialogue a Try

An initiative was launched this week to include a ballot measure for San Francisco voters that would give caregivers and parents a right to request a flexible work schedule from their employers ("Family friendly SF? New measure would pioneer flexible work rules"). Employers would only be allowed to deny such requests if they posed an "undue hardship" for the company such as an increase in costs or a "detrimental effect on the ability to meet customer or client demands." According to the San Francisco Appeal, "the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce is already voicing opposition to the proposal because of its potential impact to the city's business community." But this type of flexible approach can provide a good model for balancing the needs and interests of employers and employees.

Indeed, Steve Befort and I called for U.S. policymakers to experiment with right-to-request policies in our book Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives: Bringing Workplace Law and Public Policy Into Focus that was published by Stanford University Press. As with many areas of employment and labor law, the U.S. lags behinds. In the Netherlands, after one year of working for an employer, a worker can request in writing an increase or decrease in their work hours by specifying the desired number of weekly hours and distribution of hours across the days of the week. Such requests can only be made every two years. The employer is required to consult with the employee and to grant the requested number of hours unless there are "serious business reasons" such as being unable to recruit another employee to fill the needed hours. Germany has a similar law that grants workers the right to request specific work schedules. Even though these laws are frequently associated with enhancing workers' work-family balance, workers do not have to provide a reason for their request because workers are seen as autonomous individuals with rights to individual self-determination.

The United Kingdom also has a right to request law and though it only applies to parents of young or disabled children, employers must meet with the employee to discuss their request and can only deny it on "clear business grounds." The British statute is particularly intriguing because it establishes a mandatory voice mechanism in the form of an interactive dialogue between employees and employers but does not impose any enforceable substantive standard relative to the outcome of those dialogues. Unlike the Dutch and German statutes, the U.K. version does not authorize any substantive judicial review of the employer's business judgment. Nonetheless, the British approach has achieved resounding success. During the first year of the statute's operation, 75 percent of all employees submitting requests received full voluntary approval from their employer, and most employers reported no significant compliance issues.

U.S. policymakers should adopt something similar to these European right-to-request policies. These policies facilitate employee voice by requiring employers to consult with individual employees, but also allow employers to reject onerous requests. Such policies therefore do not create a burdensome set of unwavering standards or rigid entitlements; rather, they create a participatory framework where employees and their employers can work out mutually-agreeable arrangements. In short, these statutes represent a flexible regulatory response to a work environment characterized by an increasing demand for flexibility by employers and employees.

Dilbert Completes an Employee Survey

In case you missed it, last Sunday's Dilbert comic skewered various of aspects of modern work:

Note the references to paper towels having a purpose (how many workers feel their work lacks purpose?), gross stuff getting to leave (how many workers feel trapped in their jobs?), and the juxtaposition of the organization thinking it values workers and treats them with dignity and respect while actually ignoring their views when it doesn't suit the organization's purpose. Great stuff! But unfortunately, all too real for too many workers.

Interview on Employee Voice

While a visiting professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, I was interviewed at Voice Project by my friend Professor Paul Gollan. Here are some excerpts.

Question. In one of your recent journal articles you mentioned that "there has been a sharp increase in interest in employee voice and participation among academics, practitioners, and policy-makers in recent years." Can you shed some light on that? Why is that happening?

Answer: Traditionally, employee voice was largely seen as a collective phenomenon delivered almost exclusively through trade unions. Consequently, academics, practitioners, and policy-makers who were interested in voice were primarily those whose research or areas of practice involved trade unions.

Over the past couple of decades, however, the power and reach of trade unions have declined in many countries. This has led many academics to explore alternative forms of voice, and today employee voice is seen more generally as the expressing of opinions and the ability to have meaningful input into work-related decision-making. This includes individual forms of voice as well as both union and nonunion forms of collective voice.

At the same time, policies for managing an organization's human resources have become more sophisticated in many private, public, and nonprofit organizations. Many organizations don't simply want workers who punch the time clock and do as they are told, they want committed employees who are engaged with their work and willing to share ideas for improvement. There is increasing recognition that giving employees a voice at work can create the higher levels of engagement that many organizations are seeking.

So we have witnessed increased interest in employee voice because of a broadening of how we think about voice combined with a greater recognition of the importance of diverse forms of individual and collective voice in practice.

Question: What do you see as the major value of employee voice for organisations and employees?

Answer: For organizations, the major value of employee voice is creating an engaged workforce that is committed to its work and to the organization, and that is willing to share ideas for improving organizational practices and products. A workplace without voice is likely to be one where workers simply put in their time and keep their ideas to themselves.

For employees the major value of voice is being able to participate in shaping one's work life. People generally dislike being told what to do. They want input, they want some degree of autonomy. They want to be able to make decisions. They want to be respected as human beings. Workplace voice allows all of these needs to be fulfilled.

Question: The purpose of Voice Project's "Change Challenge" is to motivate and measure real change in work practices, employee engagement and business outcomes. What do you see is the place of 'voice' in achieving change in organisations?

Answer: In many organizations, it's hard to force change from the top. Workers who have not been consulted and included are more likely to be resistant to change, will view the changes cynically, and might only go through the motions. Employee voice can allow for a more robust change process in which employees are consulted about the need for change, can share their ideas for improvement, and can take ownership in the change process.

Question: You talk in your book about balancing efficiency, equity and voice: Do you see them in competition? What are the factors working against Voice in organisations?

Answer: Ideally, efficiency, equity, and voice can be mutually-supportive. Productive organizations can afford to provide fair terms and conditions of employment along with robust voice mechanisms. Workers who are treated fairly and given opportunities to exercise voice can be committed and productive. But I also believe that there is a tension between efficiency, equity, and voice. Some organizations might want just a little more productivity at the expense of the workers, and workers might want more generous benefits and more extensive voice mechanisms at the expense of profits. So from my perspective, organizations and employees need to continually strive for a balance that supports efficiency, equity, and voice. This can be hard work, but that's what makes human resource professionals, and in some organizations, trade union leaders, so important.

One factor working against voice is a perception that participation and consultation can be time consuming, especially when compared to a traditional method in which a manager makes a unilateral decision. A second factor working against voice is a perceived loss of managerial control because employees have input into decisions.

Question: Voice Project's research has found two core organisational factors that drive employee engagement - 1. Purpose - a strong sense of organisational identity, purpose and values; and 2 - Participation - which includes involvement in decision-making (voice!), and a sense of belonging. Did these themes emerge in your research on the "Thought of Work"? How can we build more Purpose and Participation in work practices?

Answer: My research on the thought of work uncovers 10 fundamental ways in which we can think about what work is. For example, we can see work as a curse, as something we endure solely to earn income, as a source of personal fulfillment, or as a way to care for others. One key finding that emerges from this is that work can mean different things to different people. Moreover, work can mean multiple things to one person!

Sometimes my job seems like a curse, but more often it's rewarding. So what does this mean for building purpose and participation? It means that we need to create multiple strategies for building purpose and participation. Not everyone is looking for the same things from their work. We need to be careful not to homogenize a workforce; rather, we need to see workers as individual humans with different aspirations and goals, even within the same workplace or workgroup. Consequently, we need to create voice mechanisms that are diverse enough and robust enough to fulfill the different needs of individuals who are looking for diverse things from their work. More research on voice is needed to help make this happen.

Employee Free Speech: Protections Needed in the Social Networking World, and in the Real World

As the Presidential election campaigns heat up, we are likely to see increased political conversations by employees. Unfortunately, while corporations and other organizations have free speech rights, employees do not. In fact, in at least two recent cases, employees have been fired for the simple expressive act of liking someone on Facebook, such as the employees fired by a local sheriff after they "liked" the Facebook page of his political rival. And while speech-related conflicts are perhaps as old as employment itself, the explosion of social media has created new opportunities for expression, such as liking, following, tweeting, or blogging, and therefore has increased the need for protecting employee speech.

Freedom of speech means the right to freely express opinions and views. This should go beyond the literal voicing of opinions to also include expressive conduct such as tearing up a memo in front of co-workers, putting up a poster on your office door, picketing an employer, or liking a Facebook page. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of expression by restricting governmental limitations on freedom of speech, but not organizational limitations on speech. When the First Amendment was adopted more than 200 years ago, the United States was largely a rural, agrarian society. The workplace was not a significant aspect of daily life and social interaction. The few employers that existed were very small and not very powerful. How times have changed!

The chilling effect of a lack of employee free speech is revealed by the statement of a state forester in a newspaper story on a controversial plan to allow off-road truck trails in state forests: "I think it would be inappropriate to give my real opinion. We're good employees, we do what we're told." The denial of freedom of speech rights to employees is hard to justify when organizations enjoy these protections. Either this protection for organizations stems from the importance of political discourse in the workplace or from a deeper recognition that the free exchange of ideas is an essential part of being human and is beneficial for all decision-making. In either case, we must ask the same question--given the deep importance of freedom of speech, how can we exclude employees? At the same time, the extension of freedom of expression to workers does not imply unlimited rights to undermine an employer's business or harass co-workers. As in other areas of the employment relationship, a balance is required.

Steve Befort and I have therefore proposed that in the absence of legitimate business reasons or legitimate employee performance issues, U.S. employees should be entitled to a broad freedom of speech protection. The effectiveness of the political process as well as respect for human dignity require that employees be able to exchange ideas, complain, and blog or tweet about issues of either public or private concern. We believe that this can be accomplished in a straightforward fashion with statutory protections for employee free speech in which private and public employers are not allowed to violate an employee's freedom of expression either in or out of the workplace absent a legitimate business justification for a specific limitation. If a worker who has been disciplined or discharged can make a case that this stemmed from expressive activity, then the employer must demonstrate a "substantial and legitimate business reason" for the action to be legally acceptable.

Additional reading: Stephen F. Befort and John W. Budd, Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives: Bringing Workplace Law and Public Policy Into Focus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

The Value of Employee Voice

I write this from 30,994 feet over the North Atlantic on the way back from London where I had the pleasure of participating in the Voice and Value 2012 conference at the London School of Economics. This engaging conference brought together academics, human resources professionals, and trade unionists who believe in the importance of employee voice and share an interest in the role of employee voice in promoting not only workers' goals, but also organizational goals. This year's focus was therefore on voice and employee engagement. My presentation outlined the implications for engagement and voice that flow from the conceptualizations of work that I developed in my book, The Thought of Work. In return, I thoroughly enjoyed hearing HR professionals from several companies describe how formal voice arrangements in their organizations foster employee engagement.

The global technology consulting company Capgemini, for example, has a collective consultation unit called a "Forum" for each of its major business units in the UK. Where there is significant union membership, there are union seats in the Forum, and the rest of the seats are nonunion. The Forums, in turn, feed into a UK-level works council, which in turn feeds into an international works council. It is common for unionists to see nonunion consultation mechanisms and works councils as hollow exercises, and common for managers to see these bodies as unnecessary obstacles to effective decision-making. And yet the Capgemini experience seemingly disproves both views. There are examples where the works council has been able to exercise power, for example, by walking out and thus forcing corporate leaders to engage in more meaningful consultation. At the same time, the corporate leaders have come to see the value that the Forums and works councils can provide because the joint solutions that are reached have been better than the plans that the executives wanted to unilaterally implement before consulting with these bodies. And many at Capgemini apparently believe that the success of these voice mechanisms further enriches their efforts to achieve high levels of employee engagement. Yes, even at a technology consulting company with many professional employees.

Admittedly, these efforts face significant challenges. Representatives must be trained and supported. Representatives and managers must take time away from what's typically considered their "real jobs." There are meeting expenses, and delays in decision-making. There are risks to employees if works councils are manipulated by managers, and risks to managers if works councils become stepping stones to unionization. But as the presentations at the Voice and Value conference attest, they can be richly beneficial for companies and their employees where everyone is willing to put in the work necessary. Except in many sectors of the United States economy where they are illegal.