18 Industrial Relations: Changing Trends Across Theory, Policy and Practice
Introduction
The pioneers of the field used the term industrial relations (IR) in a broad and interdisciplinary sense, covering the practice and study of all aspects of work and employment. In the UK, the field developed from the work of Fabians Sydney and Beatrice Webb (1894; 1897), while, in the USA, it was developed by institutional economists, notably JohnR. Commons (1909; 1934). These public intellectuals and their associates sought to understand and influence IR in ways that distinguished their normative, theoretical, and methodological approaches from Karl Marx (1849) on the one hand, and classical or neo-classical economics (Marshall, 1920) on the other.
Subsequently, the field has developed considerably by incorporating concepts and methods from other disciplines too, for example accounting, history, law, management, political science, psychology and sociology. This has made the field multidisciplinary. Yet, a central feature of the specifically IR contribution flowing from the Webbs and the US institutional economists has been to develop an understanding of the role of collective activity in workplaces – particularly through unions of workers – and of collective bargaining. Nonetheless, as the field developed along broad lines, it also addresses situations where these two phenomena are not present.
We too view IR as a broad field, one that deals with all aspects of the employment relationship, including its legal, institutional and market contexts and the interactions among them. It also therefore necessarily includes labour–management relations (the US term for collective IR), human resource management (HRM) and the nature, conditions and outcomes of employment and work. The field therefore stretches from factors influencing individual decisions – like on absenteeism, turnover or rostering – through the workgroup level, and into workplace andorganizational-level phenomena. In this, it shares much with overlapping fields like HRM and organizational studies (OS). In recent years, many IR scholars have embraced a much greater engagement with the concerns and perspectives of these other fields. In particular, this has generated combinations of HRM and IR into ‘employment relations’ (ER), an approach that contributes to interpenetration of ideas between the two fields (Boxall and Dowling, 1990).
Yet, differences in perspective and focus remain. First, the IR field treats labour market structures and institutional settings as important research subjects in themselves – for social science and policy – rather than solely as contexts or inputs as is the case for HRM and OS. Moreover, attention to law, institutions and markets extends to national and international arenas to include, for example, international labour standards, UN instruments,1 European Union law, and cross-border collective bargaining and social dialogue. IR's domain can include the interests and concerns of workers and unions, employers and their organizations, legislators and policy-makers, social movements and society as a whole.
As mentioned, another central defining element is normative. In contrast to much HRM and OS, the IR field accepts the legitimacy of workers having independent, collective voice in relation to their world of work, through a representative union or workers’ organization, and access to collective bargaining (Kaufman, 2004). This has had international expression through ILO Conventions 87 and 98.2 These meet notions that, in a modern, democratic society, the world of work needs to provide mechanisms for expressing and managing grievances, formulating and channelling employees’ collective demands and that these need a degree of legitimacy and independence from both employers and the state. As separate chapters of this Handbook discuss a range of more narrowly HRM and OS-related themes, we focus more specifically on the institutions and processes associated with collective bargaining and job regulation, including via unions and other workers’ organizations.
The next two sections, respectively, introduce the field's intellectual foundations and compare them to contemporaneous competing approaches. We then focus on collective bargaining through three sections explaining, respectively: its nature and purposes; its early developments across countries; and variations in its structure and processes. This facilitates discussion of cross-national diversity in collective bargaining experiences. We then discuss links between collective bargaining and some IR theories, before explaining major patterns of discontinuities for IR and collective bargaining since the 1980s. Before our conclusion, we examine contemporary policy debates facing IR. Throughout the chapter we try to integrate academic insights into the field and the changing realities of IR policies and practices. Our main foci are the UK, USA and Australia, which can be seen as (varied) examples of liberal market economies (LMEs). We also refer to some coordinated market economies (CMEs) in Western Europe and also to Asia.3
There have been many attempts to develop theories in IR (Martin and Bamber, 2004). While some sub-disciplines contributing to IR, for instance labour economics and organizational psychology, have heavily directed themselves towards deductive theorizing, mainstream IR research can often be descriptive rather than theoretical and, where theoretical, largely inductive. There are several reasons for this, including IR scholars’ concern to contribute to practitioner and policy debates. There has also been a tendency to focus on formal institutional and legal structures and outcomes, which are context-specific, rather than on more complex informal intra-organizational practices permitting greater generalization. Nonetheless, the field has influential theoretical and intellectual foundations, to which we now turn.
Intellectual Foundations of IR
Marx provided one intellectual rationale and stimulus to the IR field. He argued that labour was more than just a commodity or factor of production subject to deterministic laws of supply and demand. This insight is an enduring normative premise in IR and has motivated much of the research in the field. That is, while affected by market forces similar to other production factors (such as natural resources, finance, technology, tools and machinery), labour deserves special treatment in theory and practice. Workers, as human beings, have a personal stake in the treatment they receive and, with the capacity to exercise free will, can take individual or collective actions to influence outcomes within and outside the market. As a result, their work and employment relationships are value-laden activities with importantpsychological, social as well as economic consequences.
IR research, public policy, institutions and practices may therefore be as concerned with equity as efficiency and may seek to balance economic and social outcomes, at work and more broadly in society (Meltz, 1989). In addition, across countries and over time,policy-makers and judges have sought to strike a balance between free flow of commerce and the developing human rights of workers. This is reflected in increasing recognition that workers’ rights to freedom of association (to form and join independent and representative unions) and to bargain collectively are fundamental human rights in democratic societies. An important underlying assumption of much IR scholarship then is that these rights are crucial for workers to be able to determine their terms and conditions of employment and work (see Dundon et al., 2004; Bamber, 2005; Bamber et al., 2009; and the chapter by Budd and Bhave in this volume).
Although Marx provided a point of departure, many IR scholars have challenged elements of Marxist analysis. Marx saw conflict at work as inevitable and all-encompassing, emanating from the class conflict inherent in the capitalist system of production. That conflict could be eliminated only by the revolutionary overthrow and replacement of that system. This became a major point of differentiation between, on the one hand, Marxist approaches to IR (Hyman, 1975) and pluralist approaches, including a radical (equality-oriented) pluralism, which have been particularly influential in IR research in LMEs (Fox, 1971; 1974; Kochan, 1980; Gold, 2017: 132–5). Yet, arguably, even pluralism was a radical choice during those early periods when in many industrializing democracies, law and government policies made union activism and strikes either illegal or extremely difficult, while employers and the state were prone to using violence against union activists and strikers (see various chapters in van der Linden and Rojahn, 1990).
For the Webbs, those historians, sociologists and historical economists of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century UK IR (Kaufman, 2004: 164), unions were necessary to provide employees with increased social support and bargaining power. In due course, however, they expected unions to develop into institutions promoting state regulation, working for the common benefit of all workers and for the wider community. Thus, rather than through the revolution predicted by Marx, societies would develop gradually to balance better the interests of workers, employers and the wider communities.
In the USA, IR scholarship emerged from frustration with the mathematical analysis of economics research. In 1886, Robert Ely tried to bring a more empirical and institutional form of economics to bear on current issues. Under the leadership of Ely's protégé, Commons, the emerging IR field focused on the study of labour and working conditions using inductive methods. It too focused particularly on the collective institutions and organizations of workers and employers governing work and employment.
Such institutionalists also saw labour as more than a commodity. But, unlike Marx, Commons and those who followed saw the conflicts between employers and employees as a legitimate reflection of differences in economic interests, rather than as a more fundamental product of the capitalist system. Workers had the right to pursue their own interests collectively, to improve their living standards by negotiating a fairer share of the value they create, and to improve other aspects of their working lives.
For pluralists, such conflicting interests are not absolute. Employers and employees also have common interests that link them in interdependent relationships. Both parties usually want to generate value from their relationships so that there is more value to share. Thus, IR involves an inevitable mix of divergent, perhaps conflicting goals, as well as common or shared goals. Challenges for pluralist IR theory, therefore, focus on finding equitable and efficient settlements of differences, and ways to support value-creating solutions where interests overlap (Walton and McKersie, 1965; Fox, 1971; Gold, 2017).
The early institutionalists were strong proponents of research and involvement inpolicy-making and institution building, studying labour markets and IR, more through fieldwork than deductive model building. Their research and personal involvement provided a foundation for policy proposals in the USA in the 1930s’ New Deal labour legislation (Katz and Colvin, 2016) and the UK welfare state from the late 1940s: unemployment insurance; workers’ compensation; labour protections for children and women; minimum wages; and social security (Waddington, 2016). Such experiences helped to shape national models in newly developing economies. For example, with US military occupation of those countries after the Second World War, the US New Deal model influenced IR legislation in Japan (Suzuki et al., 2016) and South Korea (Lee, 2016). Australian arbitral models, born in the wake of major industrial disputes in the 1890s (Wright and Lansbury, 2016), influenced those of Malaysia and Singapore in subsequent decades (Sheldon et al., 2015).
Comparing Early IR Thinking and Competing Approaches
According to Thomas Kuhn (1970), a new paradigm for the study of a phenomenon must be judged by whether it is better able to solve problems than its alternatives. Across the social and behavioural sciences, attempts to explain the world of work have involved disagreements as to the identity of the main problems, and hence which phenomena require study and explanation. We briefly compare different approaches to IR during its early development.
Scientific Management
Scientific management dominated the study of US management and the design of work systems in the early twentieth century. The objective was to use engineering principles to find the optimal, most efficient methods for carrying out tasks to maximize output. For F.W. Taylor, the founder of this field, controlling labour through systematic planning, controlling and measuring of inputs and outputs plus appropriate pay incentives would generate worker satisfaction and therefore eliminate conflicts of interests at work (Taylor, 1895). This view of management and IR saw no rationale for worker voice, representation or practices that might try to balance power between workers and managers. Thus, scientific management theory contrasted with the normative assumptions of IR (Conti, 2013).
Industrial/Organizational Psychology (I/O Psychology)
Industrial psychology developed in parallel with scientific management. By contrast with institutional economics and IR, individuals, not groups or organizations, were the central unit of analysis. Most industrial psychologists seemed to assume that enterprises were closed systems where managers control workplace decisions. This again left no legitimate role for worker collective action, whether formal – through unions – or informal.
Human Relations
The field of human relations developed in the USA during the 1920s. It offered another paradigm for the study of employment and work, which has influence on IR thinking. The human relations school focused on workgroups as the key unit of analysis and the social dynamics that shaped worker attitudes and behaviour. Human relations theorists also countered scientific management by proposing that worker satisfaction drove efficiency at work, rather than the other way around (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939). These ideas fostered the development of welfare capitalism from the 1920s. Large enterprises based in mature capitalist economies sought to provide a set of benefits and positive working conditions to achieve efficiency. At least in the USA, a motive for employers was to eliminate incentives for workers to join unions (Jacoby, 1991).
Personnel Management/HRM
The field of personnel management built on human relations and industrial psychology. Fostering the development of personnel management thinking and practices were the management of the armed forces as well as paternalist legacies from British pioneers in Quaker enterprises like Cadbury, Rowntree and Lever Brothers (Child, 1969). Unlike IR, early approaches to personnel management (which later became HRM) sprung mainly from an identification with management priorities and concerns. While some variants of HRM have been, to some degree, pluralist, many embrace a ‘unitarist’ frame of reference. This means they do not accept as legitimate that employees had separate and also countervailing interests to management, not to mention employees acting on those interests.
By contrast, IR scholars generally do not ignore employees’ interests. Rather, most IR scholars have seen employees as exerting important influences, at various stages, on managers’ thinking and on public policy. They have thus contributed to the IR field's forging of its history of ideas, including those with unitarist frames of reference as well as pluralist and more radical ones (e.g. Fox, 1974; Dufty and Fells, 1989; Kaufman, 2004). Crucial to the expression of pluralist IR has been the development of collective bargaining.
Collective Bargaining: Definition and Purpose
What is collective bargaining? For the International Labour Organization (ILO),4 collective bargaining extends to all negotiations which take place between an employer (or a group of employers), on the one hand, and one or more workers’ organizations, on the other, for the purpose of:
- determining working conditions and terms of employment; and/or
- regulating relations between employers and workers; and/or
- regulating relations between employers or their organizations and a workers’ organization or workers’ organizations.
Without access to collective bargaining, employees may be vulnerable to exploitation as the employer unilaterally determines the terms and conditions of their employment and work. The only constraints employers face are from labour market dynamics and from legislative protections, for example for minimum pay or maximum hours, holidays and workplace health and safety. Without collective bargaining, employee voice may be absent.
Collective bargaining, therefore, provides a mechanism to reconcile many of the most important aspects of people's lives. Whether they are always aware of it or not, it shapes people's lives at work, their opportunities – and those of their family members – as a function of their income gained through work, employment security and careers, access to training and career development, the balance between their work and non-work lives, health and safety, post-employment security and a range of other issues, which, in some countries, are related to broader social security provisions (Kochan, 2012; Sheldon et al., 2014).
For economic and social policy, collective bargaining can be an important mechanism through which to reduce inequalities of income. Indeed, there is strong evidence, including from the ILO, that countries with high collective bargaining coverage – the proportion of the workforce whose employment and work conditions are governed by a collective agreement – experience lower rates of inequality, determined by the ratio of the wages received by the top and bottom 10 per cent of workers (ILO, 2016: 21). Research evidence particularly suggests that multi-employer (collective) bargaining (MEB) – where one or more employer associations represent employer interests in bargaining with one or more unions – promotes greater economic equality by limiting wage dispersion and reducing skill/education-based and gender-based pay differences, particularly where this bargaining is coordinated (Aidt and Tzannatos, 2002; Dell'Aringa and Pagani, 2007).
Through collective bargaining, the parties aim to reach an agreement that will regulate terms and conditions of employment. These agreements are popularly (and also formally) known by diverse names like collective agreements (UK), labour contracts (USA and Italy), labour contracting (China) and enterprise bargaining agreements (Australia). While the aim is mostly a written, enforceable collective agreement, the parties may reach an impasse, rather than an agreement. In some circumstances, informal collective agreements can generate accepted custom or practice, despite being unwritten.
There is usually some conflict of interest between the IR parties, but they choose to negotiate, since they see bargaining as preferable to other means of deciding the issues at stake – like litigation, open conflict without communication, walking away from the relationship entirely or just conceding. Collective bargaining may take place in the context of continuing industrial conflict – like a strike or lockout – or might give rise to such conflict if bargaining reaches an impasse. However, because they accept the idea of give and take, the parties expect that they can make gains (or stem losses) through bargaining. These processes can also offer more than just conflict management. They can be a mechanism whereby parties can ‘create something new that neither could do on its own’ (Lewicki et al., 2015: 3).
Early Developments in Collective Bargaining
In the UK in the mid-nineteenth century, governments and employers did not recognize unions, and collective bargaining rarely played an important role, apart from among select groups of craftsmen. Some early worker collectives would simply make demands and strike if the employer did not concede. They did not want the delays that came with negotiations. Those negotiations that did take place often emerged in an atmosphere of crisis under pressure of sanctions (e.g. strikes, dismissals or lockouts); many of them were creations of temporary combinations of employees that subsequently disbanded. Collective agreements reached had only de facto validity, enforced simply by threats of industrial action.
The UK tradition emphasized the voluntary character of negotiations and autonomy for the bargaining parties, with little legal intervention and often a high degree of informality. In a divergence from their UK heritage, and following a wave of industrial strife in the 1890s, Australia and New Zealand experimented with the notion of compulsory and legally binding, state-controlled arbitration, which its advocates saw as an effective method of preventing and settling industrial disputes. This remained the dominant pattern until the late twentieth century. Although it is often assumed that there is a clear distinction between collective bargaining and arbitration, many arbitration awards follow on from bipartite collective bargaining and/or formalized conciliation processes (Isaac and Macintyre, 2004).
By the late nineteenth century, in some countries in continental Europe, once unions had grown in strength and recognition, the parties developed more extensive collective bargaining. These processes continued, albeit not smoothly, in the following decades in most other mature capitalist economies. In continental Europe, the growth of collective bargaining was facilitated by national legal systems’ incorporation of collective agreements as a new source of IR rules or was hindered by restrictive legal regimes (van der Linden and Rojahn, 1990). This stood in contrast to the IR voluntarism of the UK.
In more recently industrialized economies, the (varied) roles of authoritarian governments have also conditioned how and when collective bargaining emerged. In Singapore, it emerged from the 1960s but increasingly became channelled into a supportive, strong-state tripartism (Sheldon et al., 2015; 444–5). In South Korea from the mid-1980s, it emerged when the military dictatorship was no longer able to suppress popular workplace mobilizations. For post-Maoist China, state-sponsored development of something akin to free collective contracting has been gradually more evident since supportive legislation in 2008 (Lee et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2016; Cooke, 2016; Jun et al., 2018).
Variations in Collective Bargaining Structures and Processes
Collective bargaining can take place at one or more levels (or scales). The higher – more centralized – levels involve multi-employer bargaining (MEB) while enterprise or plant-level bargaining only involves one employer or one workgroup. In countries with mixed systems, industry-wide agreements may contain more detailed provisions than national-level agreements, which may create a general framework. In other circumstances, the higher-level agreements have a broader scope and are more detailed while enterprise-level agreements remain heavily circumscribed in what they add. The main levels, then, are:
- National-level: between economy-wide national (peak) associations (mostly federations) of unions and of employers. National agreements can set a framework for bargaining at lower levels, and/or deal only with specific issues of national policy import (e.g. pensions, occupational health and safety), and/or directly establish pay and conditions of employment and work throughout the economy.
- Industry-wide: between sectoral (industry-level) employer associations and unions, such as for the finance industry, road transport, health sector or mining. These collective agreements may regulate the whole sector or simply the members of signatory organizations.
- Regional/territorial: between one or more territorially defined employer associations and unions, whether for a city, a province or state.
- Occupational/craft: between craft or occupational unions representing groups such as journalists, hospital doctors or electricians and relevant employer associations or informal employer groupings.
- Enterprise/plant: between the management of that company (or plant/branch/subsidiary) and a collectivity of workers who may be represented by one or more unions or an informal committee.
The predominant bargaining level varies between countries and sectors. It largely depends on policy choices although inter-industry diversity in bargaining levels may reflect different levels of capital intensity, product market competition and technological vulnerability (Bean, 1994). Generally, centralized bargaining systems allow for collective agreements to cover those workplaces represented in the bargaining process. In countries with broad, representative unions and employers’ organizations, this can include the majority – or all – of a given sector. This is particularly so where legally-based extension provisions, such as in Australia, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain, can mandate a collective agreement's provisions to cover an entire sector or territory (Sheldon et al., 2014: 709–13; Visser et al., 2015; Hayter and Lee, 2018). In this way, national, industry or territorial bargaining ensures more inclusive labour protection is afforded to the entire workforce, by enabling broader bargaining coverage and associated lower pay inequalities and other protections.
Where bargaining takes place at multiple levels, coordination can be very important. Bargaining can be coordinated vertically, that is between higher- and lower-level institutions, especially when there is a relationship of dependency. It can also be coordinated horizontally, within or across sectors. In horizontally-coordinated bargaining, peak-level organizations coordinate pay demands, with agreements often taking into account macro-economic indicators and productivity, providing a range within which pay negotiations can take place in all sectoral negotiations (Eurofound, 2016).
In recent decades, employer associations and pro-business governments have campaigned to decentralize bargaining to the enterprise level, at times via legislative fiat (Sheldon and Thornthwaite, 1999; Katz and Darbishire, 2000). More recently, this has also been evident following the 2008 economic crisis, as decentralization became one of the mandatory conditions accompanying international financial assistance packages (Visser et al., 2015; Visser, 2016). Claimed rationales for forcing decentralization have included devising collective bargaining – and IR more generally – to align outcomes more closely with (the employer's) organizational strategy and performance. The UK, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, for example, have joined the USA, Canada, Japan and South Korea as having most of their remaining collective bargaining at this lowest level. An unanticipated outcome has been that the effects of decentralization severely threaten the organizational sustainability of employer associations themselves (Sheldon et al., 2016).
As Table 18.1 suggests, decentralization tends to shrink coverage of collective bargaining to larger enterprises and more unionized sectors, as in manufacturing, mining, construction, transport and, in some countries, the public sector. This process may also shrink union membership to those workers covered by enterprise agreements, weakening national unionization levels overall and encouraging widening inequality in some instances. Thus, union density levels and collective bargaining coverage are similar – and low. Exceptions include France where the effects of legislation allow very wide bargaining coverage despite very low union density (Sheldon et al., 2014: 710–12; Visser et al., 2015: 3–6).
Sources: IRData (ILOSTAT); Hayter and Visser, 2018; Hayter, 2015; Visser, 2016; Grimshaw et al., 2017; Global Deal, 2018.
Bargaining activity, at whatever level, requires some bargaining coordination: for workplace-level bargaining within a multi-workplace organization, this falls to union delegates (or local managers) across work units in one workplace or among the union (or managerial) negotiators responsible. Where enterprise bargaining is prevalent, unions (or employers) may seek to generalize gains made in one enterprise to others by ‘pattern bargaining': coordinating a bottom-up campaign using the same set of claims at other workplaces (Sheldon et al., 2014). More centralized bargaining requires higher-level coordination between employer associations and member enterprises, peak unions and their affiliates and, sometimes, those parties and government.
Global union federations have also tried to promote international collective bargaining. This is particularly the case in sectors dominated by large multinational enterprises, as in chemicals and car manufacturing, or where the sector itself is inherently global and suffers from a ‘race to the bottom’ regarding employment and work conditions. This is the case with shipping (Sheldon et al., 2014: 694–6).
While a narrower definition of collective bargaining implies only bipartite negotiations between employers and unions, a broader view also includes the state as a (potential) third party. Such practices have been very evident in Western Europe, South Korea and Singapore, for example, and were previously evident in the UK and Australia. Such state involvement in political bargaining and tripartite negotiations mostly occurs at the national level. Issues negotiated range from skills and training, pay, social protection, occupational safety and health, legal and institutional reforms as well as broader macro-economic policy areas like employment policies and taxation. Such national tripartite social dialogue – sometimes leading to broad tripartite agreements and social pacts – can represent an important element in macro-level, participatory labour market governance (ILO, 2018).
Collective Bargaining and IR Theory
The Webbs (1897) viewed collective bargaining as an alternative to ‘individual bargaining’ and ‘autonomous regulation'. For them, it was one of three union regulation strategies to protect and improve their members’ employment conditions; the others were ‘mutual insurance’ and ‘legal enactment'. Commons (1934) investigated negotiations and compromise among the divergent interests of unions, employers and the public, while Slichter et al. (1960) saw it as a system of industrial jurisprudence. Alan Flanders (1975) pointed out that it is misleading to contrast collective bargaining with individual bargaining. Indeed, Flanders (1975: 213ff.) saw collective bargaining as a political process, involving joint rule-making and power relationships, which could enhance the dignity of employees. Workers starting a new job enter an individual employment contract, not a collective one, but coverage by a collective agreement can provide a minimum-rights framework or foundation for individuals in employment. For example, an employment contract cannot specify a pay rate below that in the collective agreement.
Hugh Clegg (1976) used six ‘dimensions’ of collective bargaining structures to explain the comparative historical experience of union behaviour, whether expressed internally or externally. These dimensions are: the ‘level’ at which bargaining takes place; the ‘extent’ or inclusiveness of coverage of the process and outcome relative to the potential population of employers and employees; the ‘scope’ or range of issues bargained; the ‘depth’ or the degree of involvement of local or plant level union officials in bargaining; ‘union security’ or support from employers for union recruitment and retention of members; and the ‘degree of control', which refers to the extent to which a collective agreement includes obligatory standards and effective grievance procedures. To these can be added the ‘form’ or type of bargaining structure related to the degree of institutionalization or state involvement in collective bargaining (Thornthwaite and Sheldon, 1996). Focusing on changes to at least some of these dimensions is an effective method for analyzing comparative changes to collective bargaining structures over time and space. Clegg (1976) argues that his dimensions of collective bargaining are themselves mainly determined by the structures of management and of employer organizations.
Roy Adams (1981) examines, cross-nationally,employer behaviour within the development of collective bargaining. Adams’ starting point was the significant difference, historically, in Western European employers’ responses to unionism compared to those in North America. In the former, typically, employers are organized into strong associations that have engaged in collective bargaining with unions (and with the state). By contrast, in North America, employers have generally not formed strong associations, and particularly not in the major manufacturing industries. Even where they have, those associations mostly do not engage in collective bargaining. Adams attributes these differences to the different early political, economic and organizational strategies of the various labour movements and how these induced differing degrees of state intervention and employer concessions.
When comparing the role of employers and their organizations in the development of collective bargaining in seven countries, Keith Sisson (1987) also concludes that differences between the countries were rooted in their historical experiences, particularly flowing from diverse impacts of industrialization. In Western Europe and Australasia, multi-employer bargaining emerged as dominant largely because employers in their metalworking industries were confronted with the challenge of national unions organized along occupational or industrial lines. In contrast, single-employer bargaining developed more strongly in the USA and Japan because the relatively large employers that had emerged at an early stage of industrialization in both countries were able to exert pressure on unions to bargain at the enterprise level.
Transformations in IR and Collective Bargaining Since the 1980s
In several countries, pay determination and IR practices changed fundamentally during the 1980s. There was a decline in the power of strike threats and, in countries like the UK, Australia and Italy that previously had many strikes, strike levels dropped precipitously. Moreover, there was a general weakening of unions. Since 1980, union densities declined in many countries, if unevenly (Schnabel, 2013: 256–7). Yet, even in countries like Australia, New Zealand and the USA, where unionism has declined to low levels, there is evidence of a large ‘representation gap': non-union workers express a preference to join unions (in proportions outstripping actual union density) but they view membership as not readily attainable without potential negative implications for their own job security (e.g. Freeman and Rogers, 2006; Haynes et al., 2006; Kochan, 2012: 304).
From the 1980s, in LMEs like the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand, these trends can be largely attributable to concerted efforts by employer interests to undermine collective IR – unions and collective bargaining – and, in some cases, statutory individual employment protections. In all these cases too, those employer campaigns – whether coordinated or fragmented to the corporate level – received support from governments (Gall and Dundon, 2013). Most famously, in the USA, support came from President Reagan's administration and, in the UK, that of Margaret Thatcher.
Employers in the USA became more openly and aggressively hostile towards unionism, embarking on pervasive union substitution and/or suppression. They were able to avoid new union organizing by moving operations from union to non-union contexts, for example in Southern (right-to-work) states or overseas. They interfered aggressively in union representation certification campaigns and used the threat of moving production to non-union contexts in ‘concession bargaining’ that forced cuts in pay in unionized workplaces in new contracts (Kochan, 2012; Logan, 2013). These developments influenced conceptual development of an expanded IR model (Kochan et al., 1986) that emphasized the role of management strategy in employment relationships and IR processes and outcomes. In particular, it brought a new focus on the influence of high-level business/competitive strategies and strategic choices on many aspects of IR.
Thatcher's government rewrote IR and employment legislation to weaken the rights of workers and unions in the UK. Further, it intervened in major disputes, aiming to curb the power and role of unions, particularly the miners’ union, formerly one of the UK's most powerful and militant. Unions and collective bargaining struggled following deindustrialization of union heartlands and the arrival of overseas MNEs seeking enterprise unionism or non-union workforces and ‘flexible’ labour markets. The subsequent New Labour government's National Minimum Wage Act 1998 reflected a failure of collective bargaining to eradicate low pay (Waddington, 2016).
By contrast, Australia had a federal Labor government from 1983 to 1996 with close links to unions. Together with the national union council (federation), it agreed on a series of (corporatist) socio-economic ‘accords’ that followed from national-level collective bargaining. This reflected the direct influence of Western European corporatism within coordinated market economies. Nevertheless, heavily influenced by the collective voice of big business, Labor governments induced a decentralization of bargaining to the enterprise level and, in 1993, introduced a formal non-union enterprise bargaining stream. An anti-union conservative government (1996–2007) intensified these trends, introducing tough anti-worker and anti-union laws, including, effectively, an outlawing of pattern bargaining (Sheldon and Thornthwaite, 1999; Wright and Lansbury, 2016).
These trends in the USA, UK, Australia and New Zealand, some of the most dramatic and pessimistic for pluralistic IR, followed economic crises of the 1970s that had greatly weakened manufacturing industries in many mature capitalist economies – historical heartlands of unionism and collective bargaining. Manufacturing enterprises and workers subsequently became vulnerable, from the 1980s, to the seemingly inexorable rise of low-cost East Asian competition, initially from Japan, but then from South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. From the mid-1900s, it was the turn of cheap, mass manufacturing from mainlandChina – produced in a context largely devoid of individual and collective labour rights – to destabilize further manufacturing markets, workforces and IR around the world. Similar internal and external pressures on employment and IR have also become increasingly evident in more coordinated market economies. Indeed, employer campaigns, in many countries, for increased ‘flexibility’ have directly targeted unionism, employee-protection legislation and collective bargaining coverage and depth. Given the relationship between collective bargaining and more equal wage distribution which we mentioned earlier, falling bargaining coverage, evident in many but not all countries, may be leading to widening inequality in wages.
These trends meshed with longer-standing shifts, some of which technology-induced and some reflecting government policies: from larger to smaller enterprises; from public to private employment; from manufacturing industries to services, and in particular to private services; from secure to insecure employment or labour hire. Large enterprises are easier to unionize than small, public sectors easier than private, and manufacturing easier than private services. And private services, particularly those using precarious employment and many younger workers, have generally been the most difficult for unions and collective bargaining to penetrate (Schnabel, 2013: 258–63).
In the meantime, MNEs – including those from emerging economies like China and India – have been greatly increasing their economic footprints. Part of this process has involved their reconfiguration of production processes through global supply (or value) chains. Increasingly, MNEs’ foreign subsidiaries contract, produce and sell (e.g. components) to their other subsidiaries rather than to local markets. The greater ease of locating work and trade across national borders affects a wide range of work and employment issues. MNEs have used this production architecture to choose localities presenting advantages that they desire (Beugelsdijk and Mudambi, 2013; Haworth, 2013).
Many choices, by MNEs and other employers, reflect low-cost IR preferences for non-union workforces, no collective bargaining, and minimal statutory labour protection. Thus, globalization has been associated with, among other things, reductions in workers’ labour market power in ‘home’ countries, growth in income inequality and more widely distributed job insecurity. These feed into a broader pattern of enterprises raising their own rates of saving to invest in new technologies, an effect of which has been declining income shares, paid to labour, of global corporate gross value added (Karabarbounis and Neiman, 2012). Yet, MNEs also prioritize qualities like access to political stability, highly-skilled workforces, social cohesion as well as good education, research and development infrastructure.
While many of these developments make it more difficult to regulate IR and collective bargaining through national laws and enterprise-centred rules and policies, their impacts on union density and collective bargaining access vary cross-nationally (Schnabel, 2013: 266–7; Visser et al., 2015: 8–10). In some other contexts, and sometimes with union complicity, these changes have left ‘core’ (largely older and unionized) workers protected, while tolerating precariousness for new labour market entrants or the less skilled. Yet, apart from the longer-term implications of this strategy for union movements, research strongly suggests that precariousness can produce a range of negative outcomes for workers (Bohle et al., 2001; Barbieri, 2009; Lewchuck, 2017).
In response, in North America and North-Western Europe (in particular), unions, policy-makers and academic researchers have promoted new frameworks to overcome any dichotomy between, first, enterprise-oriented flexibility measures and, second, employee security and voice. There has been substantial research on the processes and outcomes of different choices in terms of employee outcomes, productivity and profitability. Moreover, to extend inclusive employment protection to such workers, certain unions are investing organizational resources, reaching out to new groups, including vulnerable groups, migrant and non-standard workers, as well as others who traditionally may not have been unionised.
By the end of the twentieth century in the USA, flexible work systems and employee involvement in production and workplace decisions increasingly served as positive complements to investments in technology and training, producing significant improvements in productivity and service quality (Ichniowski et al., 1996). Theory and evidence from various countries suggest that high-performance work systems (HPWS) – a high-pay–high-productivity equilibrium using innovative practices – is possible across diverse sectors. The international literature paints diverse pictures and is influenced by varied thinking from the fields of OS and HRM as well as from IR. Nonetheless, there is some consensus that areas for management action on HPWS should include organizational innovations such as employee involvement in workplace decisions, quasi-autonomous teams, training for multi-skilling and communication skills. These require support like timely information disclosure and problem-solving groups – and from employment practices such as job security, internal promotion and, perhaps more controversially, performance-related pay. For Kalmi and Kauhanen (2008: 431), this can be summarized as ‘participation, incentives and skills'.
Although they have generated much commentary, HPWS have not been widely deployed. Where they have been deployed, they may have included only a few of the main HPWS characteristics, and in haphazard combinations. Rather, as mentioned earlier, many employers in the USA have maintained an aggressively unitarist frame of reference, rejecting workers’ access to unions and collective bargaining when adopting HPWS. Persistent competition from low-pay/low-cost approaches has also encouraged preferences for ‘low-road’ approaches (Kochan, 2012). Exceptions include ‘high-road', pluralist approaches, for instance at Southwest Airlines and the Kaiser Permanente managed healthcare organization (Bamber et al., 2009; Kochan et al., 2009).
In other countries, the introduction of HPWS has sometimes been part of pluralist experiments that may be more inclusive of unions and collective bargaining (Bryson et al., 2005; Kalmi and Kauhanen, 2008). Indeed, Bryson et al. (2005: 467) argue that: ‘In effect, union bargaining can either lower or raise the costs of … [HPWS] introduction.’ They suggest that the UK evidence of increasing use of HPWS has not come at the expense of unionization. Therefore, the interaction of IR and HPWS may be much less negative for employees and their unions than US-based research suggests.
Seeking similar outcomes but through different design and implementation strategies, European labour movements, most prominently in Denmark and the Netherlands, have sought, through legislation and collective bargaining, to introduce forms of ‘flexicurity’ that build worker and union security protections into flexible employment and production systems (Madsen et al., 2016). This is more possible in CMEs than LMEs, as CMEs much more readily lend themselves to developing government policies that underpin forms of employee security necessary to reach consensus on enterprise-level flexibility (Marginson and Galetto, 2016; Paolucci, 2017).
Conclusion
For many decades, collective bargaining provided crucial mechanisms for redistributing income in society towards equality as well as in protecting and advancing workers’ employment, incomes, career, and health and safety interests. It also proved a constructive support for management planning, employee retention and conflict settlement. IR, as a field of knowledge, focused on these structures, processes and outcomes, together with a host of linked themes and trends; around the world, the field also played an influential role in the design and implementation of these processes.
In many countries, there has been a significant decline in the percentage of people covered by collective bargaining and other formal IR institutions (particularly unions) in comparison with twentieth-century high watermarks. This change reflects a range of influences, depending on the country. In LMEs in particular, there have been changes to employment structures including a dramatic growth of the private services sector, SMEs and self-employment via ‘freelancing’ and ‘digital platform work’ (Johnston and Land-Kazlauskas, 2018); employers and managers shifting their rhetoric and practice towards more ‘individualized’ and less collective relations with employees; and governments changing their rhetoric and legislation in a similar direction.
Together these factors have contributed to the fragmentation of secure employment, incomes and life chances for increasing numbers of people working in low-paid, largely unprotected, non-standard employment, or in sham self-employment and subcontracting. These have become areas of ‘the working poor’ and pay theft by employers (Ilsøe, 2016). They have contributed to widening income, wealth and health disparities in some mature capitalist economies that may remind us of the not-distant era before the emergence of unions, collective bargaining and protective legislation, developments that greatly reduced poverty and provided improved life chances to the many at work and outside.
Such effects have provoked necessary debate about how to adapt policies and institutions to cope, not only union revival strategies, but also other forms of employee representation and mobilization. Most formally, these include European-style works councils legally embedded in enterprises. From outside the workplace, there have also been social movements with and on behalf of low-paid, insecurely employed immigrant workers for decent minimum pay. These movements, often having union support or involvement, include Justice for Janitors (USA) and London Citizens (UK) (Waldinger et al., 1998; Holgate, 2015). There have also been large campaigns by NGOs against abusive employment and deleterious work in global supply chains. These have generated (unevenly successful) forms of public and private protective labour regulation (Mayer and Gereffi, 2010; Anner, 2012).
The outcome of such debates could have important consequences for the design of institutions of worker voice in employment relationships. Much twentieth-century labour law was premised on workers having the right to collectively bargain about employment and working conditions, while employers and managers had the prerogative to make strategic business decisions. If, by investing their human capital, workers become a residual risk bearer similar to financial investors, then there is no logical basis for excluding them from a voice in strategic decisions and corporate governance. Thus, some scholars have extended the study of IR and collective bargaining to include issues of corporate strategy and governance and theories of the firm/enterprise (e.g. Gospel and Pendleton, 2003).
The field has also expanded in response to changes in relationships between work and family/personal life (Kossak, 2006; Fong and Bainbridge, 2016). With the growth in female labour force participation and changing expectations of parental roles, there has been a rethinking of what makes for family-friendly employment. This has brought calls for changes to legislation, collective agreements and to employers’ HRM policies and workplace practices in order to provide flexibility in hours and career options for women and men.
In some ways, the IR field has returned to earlier approaches. Many contemporary researchers are focusing on a broad proposition that the type of economy, workforce, the nature of work and its relationship to other institutions such as family life have all changed dramatically, yet public policies and institutions still reflect the legacy of a declining industrial-based economy. New and interesting areas of research reflect some of the major changes underway, whether it has to do with knowledge work and workers (e.g. Benson and Brown, 2007); ‘emotional labour’ and services jobs; IR and the ‘gig economy’ (Stewart and Stanford, 2017; Wright et. al., 2017; Johnston and Land-Kazlauskas, 2018) or the spread of IR institutions and processes to countries in the ‘global south'. The gap between policies and institutions and contemporary realities of work and family life lies at the heart of the tensions and pressures building in workplaces around the world. Much of this also encourages renewed cross-fertilization with other fields, including HRM, OS, law and sociology. Yet, a central task of those investigating contemporary work and employment issues, as for their IR forerunners, is to conduct research and policy analysis that prepares for opportunities to improve theory and practice.
Acknowledgements
The responsibility for views and opinions expressed in this chapter rests solely with its authors. In particular, the contribution of Chris Land-Kazlauskas to this publication does not constitute an endorsement by the International Labour Office of the opinions expressed therein.
Notes
1 Such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) and perhaps most well known, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).
2 The Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention, 1948 (Convention 87) and the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (Convention 98).
3 On the differences between LMEs and CMEs, see Hall and Soskice (2001) and Bamber et al. (2016).
4 Collective Bargaining Convention, 1981 (Convention 154).
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