The concept of trust in employment relations is underpinned by a persistent concern with the ‘problem’ of low productivity that besets the UK economy (ACAS, 2015). One ‘solution’ is argued to rest on high-performance, high-trust workplace relations that realize employees’ full potential (CIPD, 2013). There are some insightful and useful contributions about both the nature of, and the potential impact of high performance work (HPW) regimes with regard to trust as debated by Searle earlier in this text. At the same time, the UK labour market is characterized by low-autonomy work and increased reliance on ‘flexible’, zero-hours contracts and other casualized forms of employment (Rubery, 2015; Adams & Deakin, 2014; TUC, 2014; Van Wanrooy et al., 2013). These labour market developments hardly signify employers’ commitment to high-trust relations between employers and employed. As the CIPD itself admits, ‘job insecurity is associated with distrust’ (CIPD, 2013:11). Wider empirical evidence of UK developments paints a bleak picture of job insecurity and work intensification for those in work and of generally low-trust workplace relations (Worrall et al., 2016). Several detailed studies also highlight work intensification and work pressure trends that are particularly apparent across the public sector: in the civil service (French, 2014); among prison governors (French, 2015); in the NHS (Mather, 2014); in further education (Mather & Seifert, 2014) and in schools (Carter & Stevenson, 2012). Perhaps unsurprisingly then, there is a reported ‘crisis of trust … that cuts across politics and public and private sector organisations’ (Royles, 2010:239).
This chapter aims to offer a critically informed contribution to this complex debate about trust in the sphere of employment relations. The discussion draws on the UK context to discuss the ways in which employers, workers, trade unions, and state policy interact and what this may all mean for how trust might then be conceptualized. It takes as its starting point the nature of the employment relationship to explain the inherently low-trust-based arrangements around which work is contractually and practically organized at the outset. There are three caveats to note. First, in line with Williams (2014) it is acknowledged that not all workers are directly employed. As noted above, the UK economy is increasingly characterized by casualized employment forms including zero-hours and (sometimes bogus) self-employed arrangements (ONS, 2015). Second, some commentators suggest that the term ‘employment relations’, as distinguished from ‘industrial relations’ more accurately depicts the field of study under discussion. The view taken here, again in line with Williams is that the terms ‘can be, and are often used interchangeably’ (2014:xxiv). The value of taking an industrial relations (or indeed, employment relations) perspective, following Edwards (1995a), is that it enables a discussion of trust that captures the concepts of power, control and job regulation. Third, it is not the intention here to provide an analysis of employment relations and trust in comparative context. The chapter draws on insights from the UK employment relations landscape as any serious comparative study would need to reflect the different political, historical, economic and legal trajectories that frame different countries’ institutional arrangements. This is beyond the scope of this chapter.
While many mainstream HRM-style accounts of employment relations hinge on how best to cultivate ‘high trust’ relations between managers and managed (Albrecht & Travaglione, 2003; Tzafrir, 2005; Saunders et al., 2014) and, on occasions, along ‘partnership’ lines between employers and trade unions (Ackers & Payne, 1998; Dietz, 2004), less attention is afforded to (a) why employers seek out such trust and (b) the institutional and policy factors that impact on the nature of these relations between employers and employed. Nor do such accounts reflect the material circumstances of shared working experiences that give rise to the trust that may surface between workers. This is essentially the logic of worker solidarity that stimulates workplace trade unionism and which employers may seek to dismantle and then attempt to reconstruct in terms of ‘happy teams’. The chapter seeks to develop these arguments by establishing the nature of the labour problem (Kaufman, 1993) as this explains managerial interest in cultivating ‘high trust’ in the employment relationship. It also highlights contradictions in the basic premise of the employment contract itself – a contract that perpetuates an assumed equality between the parties, but which effectively underwrites the subordinate position of employees in this exchange, while at the same time obscuring what is effectively an open-ended or ‘indeterminate’ deal.
The industrial relations perspectives offer ways of analysing all that flows from this set of relations. While the preferred managerial (unitary) view offers important ideological support to claims about the right to manage employees, it also relies on unrealistic assumptions about the employment relationship and therefore of how to cultivate trust. These same ideological underpinnings have framed various labour management interventions, HRM included, to address the productivity problem. The pluralist perspective explains the inherently conflictual nature of the employment relationship while allowing for a discussion of how workers respond to their material conditions as waged labour, especially through the logic of collectivism (Crouch, 1979). Both accounts afford little attention to the imbalance of power between the parties, and a Marxist perspective offers one way forward in this debate.
Threading through this discussion is the inherent low trust that pervades both employers’ views and dominant state policy on how best to cultivate a ‘productive’ employment relations climate. The state provides the regulatory framework within which employers, workers and their organizations interact, as well as being a major employer in its own right (Williams, 2014). As this chapter observes, the increasingly restrictive legal framework that applies to trade union activities, particularly with regard to industrial action, casts trade unions as part of a problem to be dealt with in the UK industrial relations landscape, rather than as part of the solution. The inference is that unions (and therefore their members) interfere with the right to manage and they cannot be trusted. And here is the conundrum. As Emmott observes, ‘in order to establish and maintain high-trust workplaces, the challenge for employers going forward is to develop a deeper understanding of employer engagement, conflict management, and the values and mechanisms needed to support them’ (2015:667). This implies a genuine willingness on the part of employers and the state to legitimize and welcome trade unions as integral to decision-making processes. This chapter concludes that evidence of such willingness is hardly encouraging.
Central to the discussion about trust is a need to understand the employment relationship and the associated ideological assumptions that arise from how we chose to frame this. In economic terms, and regardless of the precise terms on which labour is engaged in work, the employment relationship is a ‘wage-work bargain’ (Flanders, 1970; 1988) wherein the employer pays a wage in return for purchasing the capacity of workers to labour (their labour power). The employment relationship is therefore a market-based transaction, that is, an economic exchange. This implies a freedom on both parties to engage in the relationship and to freely (and equally) agree its terms, although workers are seldom in the position of being able to choose between alternatives (Cohen, 1991). The terms of employment reflect the market relations between the buyer (employer) and seller (worker) of labour (Flanders, 1975) and will therefore reflect claims to a special skill, labour market shortages, or a ‘going rate’ for the job that may derive from extant industry/sector-based collective agreements.
The employment relationship is then underwritten by an employment contract that also assumes equality in law of both parties to the agreement. It is actually predicated on the subservient position of the employee at the outset, in what is an unequal contractual set of relations (Wedderburn, 1986; Cohen, 1991). The contract upholds the right to manage in what is termed ‘the prerogative contract’ with its historical antecedents rooted in master and servant laws and in property rights (Selznick, 1969). Among other things, this means employees are subject to an implied common law duty to obey reasonable instructions, thereby enshrining the legal principle that enables employers to command work subordinates (Davies & Freedland, 1993). This plays out in practice through claims to the rights of managers to manage unimpeded. For example Hallier and James’ 1997 study in an air traffic organization (in Cullinane and Dundon) notes:
employee compliance with management decisions was perceived to arise primarily from a legal transaction underpinned by the notion of managerial ownership and their assumed right to redirect resources. It can be argued that management, far from accepting the obligation of reciprocal promises and inducements between employer and employee, seemed more inclined to conceive of the relationship in a manner that could be regarded as owning the employees’ time and effort.
(2006:120)
It is the realization of labour power that adds value in the production process (Marx, 1976 edn; Braverman, 1974) but herein is the problem. This is an indeterminate contract: ‘the worker’s wage buys only the capacity to work, with this capacity being translated into actual labour within the process of production’ (Edwards, 1995a:9). The precise quantities of worker effort are ambiguous as the employment contract neither guarantees the quantity (productivity) or the quality (performance) of labour that will be delivered. This gives rise to the labour problem (Kaufman, 1993) that is how to maximize the productivity and performance of labour in relation to unit labour cost. Management must therefore find ways of both controlling (maximizing) labour effort, while also securing an element of worker cooperation in the production process. This is potentially problematic when considering the concept of trust as workers must on the one hand ‘be trusted’ to exercise their skill in the execution of their tasks (Fox, 1974), while at the same time being subjected to close supervision and, at times, close surveillance while at work (Mather & Seifert, 2014; Carter et al., 2011; Taylor & Bain, 1999).
Workers therefore find themselves in an inherently contradictory set of contractual relations – they sell their labour power – and they must, for all alternatives are worse (Cohen, 1991) in return for wages that they will rationally seek to maximize, but such wages represent a cost to employers. The wage–work exchange effectively orientates each party to the cash nexus, emphasizing the calculative basis of the relationship that cuts across notions of mutual high trust (Salamon, 2000; Rousseau et al., 1998). This plays out on a daily basis at the point of production through a contested and uncertain set of arrangements between managers and managed, so the workplace is characterized by ‘the negotiation of order’ (Edwards, 1995b:45). Both parties therefore observe what the other is doing to ensure the terms of engagement are met, as far as both expect at the outset, or as Fox (1974) explains, both parties guard their side of the bargain.
Once employed, the employee is subject to the rules contained within the employment contract and must subscribe to the authority of superiors. These rules are what Flanders (1970) termed the managerial relations concerned with the regulation of workers’ behaviour, effort and attitudes at work. Unitary assumptions suggest that this is an unproblematic endeavour as employers and employees are presumed to coexist harmoniously on the basis of shared or ‘common interests’ (Fox, 1966) or perhaps, high trust. This, then, provides the bedrock of management exaltations to the common good, happy teams and, more recently, ‘can-do’ cultures and myriad culture change initiatives (Mather et al., 2012). From this perspective high-trust relations are therefore simply assumed into existence, with any deviance or conflict attributed to miscreants and trouble-makers.
The unitary perspective also provides an important ideological underpinning to the managerial prerogative and the right to unilaterally regulate the labour process (Storey, 1983). From this perspective, trade unions have no legitimate role to play – if there is no conflict and employees are ‘on message’, then there is no need for trade unions in the workplace. For example, the CIPD’s (2013) prescription for addressing the low-trust employment relations rests on improved communications and building a culture that cultivates employee behaviours in line with corporate values. This and other such HRM-style accounts of trust tend to be driven by normative assumptions and unestablished causal links between management activity, employee behaviour and performance outcomes (Guest, 2011). The concept of trust is then constructed so that it accords with a top-down, managerially driven philosophy of how employment relations should look, rather than as a reflection of the contested nature of the employment relationship. This is not to suggest that HRM interventions are inherently problematic, but rather, that they are underpinned by unitary assumptions and, as such, they tend to assume common rather than alternate interests in the workplace (Legge, 2005). This has implications for how trust is subsequently conceptualized and managed.
The problem is that unitarism tends to ‘oversimplify the intricate network of power-based relationships between employees, employers, unions, management and the state’ (Mather, 2011:205). For example, workers may define their obligations rather more narrowly that their employers (Baldamus, 1961). While they may share an interest in the success of the organization (for reasons of job security, pay and so on), there are inevitable antagonisms arising from the contested, uncertain parameters of the employment relationship already outlined here. The pluralist perspective acknowledges the legitimacy of these alternate interests and thus the emphasis shifts towards a management model that incorporates mechanisms for institutionalizing conflict and the procedures for its resolution. This denotes, at least in theory, a clear shift from management by right to management by consent (Fox, 1966). The same antagonisms around workers’ interests provide the material basis of trade unionism. From this perspective, trade unions are then cast as part of the solution, rather than the cause of the problem, and they there fore have a legitimate role to play in protecting workers’ interests (Williams, 2014; Crouch, 1979). Embedded within the pluralist position is an acknowledgement of two key issues that can deepen our understanding of the complexities of trust in employment relations. First, the logic of solidarity that evolves between groups of workers around their shared material circumstances and second, the inherently low-trust relations that characterize the unequal employment relationship (Mather, 2011). Some do argue that unionized workplaces are characterized by low trust in management (Holland et al., 2012; Guest & Conway, 1999). However such accounts focus on culti vating a positive psychological contract between employers and employees and, while valuable, the psychological contract is itself a deeply ambiguous concept. For example, Cullinane and Dundon ‘unpick the construct of the psychological contract as portrayed in much of the extant literature and argue that, in its present form, it symbolizes an ideologically biased formula designed for a particular managerialist interpretation of contemporary work and employment’ (2006:113).
More broadly, a Marxist perspective roots its analysis in the nature of work as an exploitative activity as workers are paid less than the value of the product of their labour (Marx, 1976 edn.; Hyman, 1975). Braverman (1974) develops this analytical device, arguing that the profit imperative drives managerial efforts to control all aspects of a labour process through division of labour and task routinization, thereby deskilling and cheapening labour. Workers become alienated from the product of their labour (Hyman, 1975) and this provides the material basis for worker solidarity and the objective basis of trade unionism. This suggests a number of issues impacting on workers and for how trust is then conceived: the extent of routinization of a task; the rate of exploitation; autonomy and the limits set on workers’ discretion around task performance.
The preferred managerial view rests on unitary assumptions and this gives rise to a range of labour management approaches, notably HRM and interest in cultivating ‘high-trust relations’, with high trust often assumed to be the product of ‘good’ HRM (Ashleigh et al., 2012; Gould-Williams, 2003; Boxall & Purcell, 2011; Young & Daniel, 2003). The overarching logic is that if managers do things ‘right’, then the labour problem is solved. Management authority is buttressed in this respect by the legal foundations embedded in the prerogative contract, the ideological trappings of unitarism, and claims about functional expertise (Storey, 1983). Each of these is limited with regard to solving the labour problem, not least on account of the unitary assumptions on which they rest. Hence there is a need for labour management techniques to control all aspects of workplace behaviour, so ‘management desires three responses from workers: (1) subordination, (2) loyalty, and (3) productivity … in all its relationships with workers, management is continuously confronted with the question of where to use the carrot and where to employ the stick as it goes about the task of building a subordinated, loyal and productive workforce’ (Harbison & Myers 1959:48–49). These general prescriptions offer a useful lens through which to view the concept of trust in employment relations. They need to be understood in the context of labour market developments, and in particular, the precarious nature of employment for some workers that has already been outlined in this chapter (Rubery, 2015; Adams & Deakin, 2014; TUC, 2014; Van Wanrooy et al., 2013).
Labour management strategies embracing scientific management (Taylor, 1911); human relations (Rose, 1975) and more recently human resource management are all predicated on solving this same labour problem through a combination of carrot and stick approaches. Recent workplace studies bear testament to the resilience of Taylorism (Noon et al., 2013; Mather & Seifert, 2014; Carter et al., 2011; Taylor & Bain, 1999; Bain et al., 2002; Gale, 2012) and its modern day variants that aim to secure more productive, compliant labour (Mather et al., 2012). These accounts do not point to high-trust employment relations. It is the case that trust is an two way street, but much of the mainstream literature tends to focus on how to garner trust from employees. So,
the characteristic top management exhortation to rank and file employees to trust the company is often received with cynicism. In the very way it structures work, authority, and rewards it excludes them from its own high discretion, high-trust fellowship, yet asks them to submit to its discretion in handling their interests and destinies. In other words: ‘we do not trust you, but we ask you nevertheless to trust us.’
(Fox, 1974:76)
This raises important questions about HRM practices that can dismantle any notion of trust such as presenteeism cultures (Taylor et al., 2010), appraisal and performance management regimes (Bain et al., 2002; Mather & Seifert, 2011; Winstanley & Stuart-Smith, 1996) and skill mix changes that close down task discretion (Gale, 2012; Mather & Seifert, 2014). These measures are hardly conducive to building high-trust-based relations between managers and managed.
However, there are employers who are heavily reliant on skilled labour. The more highly skilled the job, then the more discretion will need to be afforded to these workers in discharging their tasks. There is therefore a direct relationship between skill and the degree of trust that managers cede to workers in completion of their tasks, as it is the skill that will ultimately add the value in the production process. Fox’s (1974) wide-ranging analysis of low discretion (low skilled) and high discretion (skilled) jobs is helpful here in highlighting the complexities of trust in relation to skill and task discretion embedded within particular jobs and their subsequent bearing on labour management strategies. While skill is a multi-valent construct, it encapsulates overlapping debates around the skill required to actually perform the task, and the means by which groups of workers may seek to control their own occupational interests, and therefore their wages (Wood, 1987; Turner, 1962). These debates also throw light on the deskilling tendencies identified by Braverman (1974) of ever more detailed division of labour arrangements that reduce task discretion, deliver more control to managers and reduce dependence on skilled (and therefore more expensive) labour. Recent studies have revealed employee resourcing strategies focussed on precisely this trajectory (Carter et al., 2011; Mather & Seifert, 2017).
Some empirical evidence reveals widespread patterns of distrust and ‘broken’ promises wherein downward pressure on costs impacts negatively on employees through job insecurity (Rubery, 2015) and/or downward pressure on wages and pensions (ONS 2015; Whittaker & Hurrell, 2013), work intensification and extensification and the erosion of workers’ control over their own labour (Burchell et al., 2005) and declining levels of reciprocal trust (ibid.; Worrall et al., 2010). These trends have also extended to include junior management, professional and public service work (Worrall et al., 2016; Sitala, 2013). So while the notion of reciprocal trust is much vaunted, it runs counter to some important empirical evidence that points to a widening gap between the trust rhetoric and reality within organizations (ibid.) The same evidence suggests that while senior managers call for everyone to ‘get on board’ and ‘trust us’, the views and experiences of those lower down the organizational hierarchy can be sharply juxtaposed with these espoused views from the top. As employers have sought to cut costs through reorganization, restructuring and change initiatives, this has negatively impacted on employees and they are then less likely to exhibit trust, goodwill and cooperation at work (Hudson, 2005).
Furthermore, financialization and its impact on corporate regimes has led to the externalizing of employment for many workers and this means the risks get passed from employers to employees (Thompson, 2011; 2013; Vidal, 2013; Rubery, 2015). These circumstances render trust particularly difficult to create and sustain. Likewise, temporary and zero-hours contracts (ONS, 2015; TUC, 2014) represent precarious contractual arrangements that are difficult to align with proclamations of ‘valuing our employees’. The key questions become, why would workers on these contracts trust their ‘employer’? And why would such employers seek out high-trust behaviours? If an employer is unhappy with the commitment and engagement of these workers then one solution is to simply replace one zero-hour contract worker with another. Of note then is the observation from recent ACAS research that the problems with these insecure contracts are
deep-rooted, and revolve around a more profound fear of raising concerns or questions about access to rights. This hints at a significant loss of trust in the employment relationship, characterized by a sense of power imbalance which makes workers fearful of asserting their employment rights.
(Gee, 2015:2)
Labour utlization strategies therefore have a direct bearing on trust and how this is actually operationalized and experienced. In this sense, the ways in which work is organized shapes social relations in the workplace that are then marked by ‘patterns of trust and distrust generated by men’s [sic] exercise of power over others in the pursuit of their own purposes’ (Fox, 1974:15). Decisions about job design, job hierarchies and organizational structures that in turn influ ence the distribution of rewards, status and extent to which individuals are included (or indeed excluded) in decisions that affect their working lives runs to the heart of how workers actually perceive and experience trust: ‘some, as a consequence see themselves as trusted; others see themselves as distrusted’ (ibid:14). Labour management decisions therefore reflect the skills (and therefore the labour market position) of certain categories of labour. As has already been argued, skilled labour may command a premium in relation to pay, job controls and autonomy, rendering deskilling tendencies potentially attractive for employers when circumstances permit. These same highly skilled workers may be employed for their expertise – and this is a mark of professional work. The implication is that such expertise does not need to be closely managed. However, there are reports of ever closer surveillance and supervision regimes that are the hallmark of low trust (Mather & Seifert, 2014). As a consequence, employees who lack trust in managers spend time ‘covering their backs’ while managers invest much of their time in systems for monitoring and checking employees – ‘which are likely to erode trust in management further because they are visible signs of a lack of trust in employees’ (CIPD, 2013:18).
This is not to suggest that employers are omnipotent in their enactment of chosen labour management approaches. Workers can and do resist both formally and informally, and via collective and individual responses to their material experiences of work. There is therefore a dialectical interplay of management efforts and workers’ responses that are symptomatic of ongoing negotiated settlements and contested terrain between the two parties (Edwards, 1979). For example, ‘key ways of developing trust include training, indoctrination and assimilation’ (Edwards, 1995b:53). This is revealed in Beale and Mustchin’s (2014) study of Royal Mail’s attempt to use an employee involvement (EI) programme to secure greater control over the content and method of communication with the workforce, while undermining well-established trade union traditions. This study reveals the inherently adversarial, low-trust relations between the two parties.
Workers also engage in their own informal work rules and behaviours to best serve their own interests (Flanders, 1970:89). This provides the basis for inter-worker solidarity and the roots of collectivism that are predicated on high trust between workers (Mather, 2011). The point is that workers can and do resist and thus the employment relationship is characterized by this uneasy balance of conflict and accommodation (Edwards, 1995a) and the dialectics of management action-worker reaction. Trust, and low trust, needs to be understood in this context. Essentially, then, the employment relationship rests on a web of rules (again both formal and informal) that are generated, interpreted, broken and recast as part of these ongoing dialectics. Historically, any meaningful restraint on employers has emerged from trade unions and collectivism.
While trade unionism transcends national boundaries, the focus of this discussion is with the UK context, not least on account of the diffuse institutional arrangements affecting trade union activity in different countries, as well as the different historical, political and social policy trajectories underpinning each country’s trade union development, organization, structure, governance and overarching legislative framework. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to debate the origins and development of UK trade unionism, but suffice to note that its roots are embedded in both the material circumstances and sectional interests of discrete worker groups and also within the UK voluntarist tradition (Davies and Freedland, 1993). The main method is collective bargaining and
this is not just an economic process, concerned with setting conditions on which workers are hired (i.e. market relations) but it is also a political activity since it enables workers … to influence and thus regulate jointly with managers, workplace decision-making.
(Williams, 2014:176)
Another important aspect of UK union activity is its representational role through workplace shop stewards who act as the primary source of support for workers at the point of production. Unions also have a political arm in relation to pressing the government on broader employment rights and political issues, as articulated in TUC policy and campaigning activities.
UK trade unionism is uniquely a product of the voluntarist tradition. This historical preference for voluntarism is captured in the concept of collective laissez faire (CLF) and the system of trade union immunities (Kahn-Freund, 1964). CLF was the dominant theory in the post WWII period for describing government policy towards labour law and indeed towards the trade union movement (Davies & Freedland, 1993:8). The basic policy position underpinning CLF rested on the removal of legal obstacles to override common law barriers or impediments to trade union activities. While CLF effectively cleared the way for free collective bargaining, it did this through a system of negative law that on the one hand provided immunities from the law, but did not establish positive legal rights. Importantly then, ‘there is no legal right to strike in the UK. Instead unions have immunity against legal liability for actions committed in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute’ (Lyddon, 2015:739).
So while CLF infers a form of benign state abstentionism, it has involved a unique UK state role with regard to how trade unions were initially ‘accommodated’, and have subsequently been dealt with in the industrial relations framework, largely reflecting the relative, or at least perceived, power imbalance between capital and labour at a particular moment in time. Regulation of the employment relationship was thus historically cast as ‘not a matter for law and legal institutions, but for the social institutions of IR (Industrial Relations), especially collective bargaining … self-regulation rather than legal regulation’ (Davies & Freedland, 1993:10). The implication of this was that the state effectively delegated regulation to the social institutions created by employers and workers and the system of immunities provided the two parties with the freedom to engage in collective bargaining. This meant that the body of labour law concerning employment protection rights was very limited – a position that prevailed until the end of the twentieth century.
The problem is that the potential effectiveness of these self-regulatory measures, at least in so far as workers themselves are concerned, is essentially predicated on the presence and involvement of strong trade unions. State policy since 1980 has been dominated by a neoliberal discourse that has followed the Hayekian logic (Hayek, 1984) in reframing trade union ‘immunities’ as union privileges. This policy shift, although in evidence long before 1980 (Lyddon, 2015), presaged a raft of laws throughout the 1980s and early 1990s that among other things, significantly curtailed the ability of trade unions to engage in industrial action (ibid.). This point is important in underlining the inherent lack of trust at the level of state decision-making that pervades the fabric of UK industrial relations, particularly with regard to the role, perceived legitimacy and, indeed, active engagement of trade unions in regulating the employment relationship.
Much of the political rhetoric since 2010 has been concerned with removing the ‘burden of the red tape’ in the sphere of employment relations – for red tape, read protective legislation and collectivism (Rubery, 2015). The Conservative government from 2015 has subsequently mounted a further ‘crackdown’ on trade union activity (Wintour, 2015). The 2016 Trade Union Act underlines a clear ministerial intent to curb ‘the problem’ of over-powerful unions. The legal changes contained within this Act were legitimized in policy terms as being in the interests of modernizing trade union law (Pyer, 2015), with the introduction of ‘representative’ mandates for industrial action (higher thresholds for industrial action ballots) and provisions to enable employers to more readily make contingency plans in the event of industrial action. Interestingly as Pyer himself observed in the House of Commons Briefing Paper (2015) during the passage of the Act, there has been a general decline in strike activity apart from a spike during 2013/14 across parts of the public sector.
The propositions that underpin the Act therefore seem clear with regard to both their intent and also their inherent mistrust of trade unions and collectivism. The ministerial rationale was that threshold ballots address the perceived democratic deficit inherent in current voting arrangements with regard to industrial action, but here is the rub. There are currently no planned changes to voting arrangements to accommodate on-line or workplace ballots, so de facto the legislative changes are likely to make it more difficult for unions to achieve both the desired turnouts and indeed the voting thresholds. Arguably this is the intention. The point is that the ability of trade unions to engage effectively in collective bargaining is predicated on their ability to engage in industrial action. This offers the only means by which workers may exert their power and attempt to redress the power imbalance between employers and employed. This is not about high-trust relations between the two parties but is concerned with providing the means by which workers may combine in collective action in order to counterbalance the greater power of employer (Deakin & Morris, 2012). Essentially there appears to be little trust in the unions.
There has also been a decline in both union membership and collective bargaining coverage in the UK over the last twenty-five years (Van Wanrooy et al., 2013; Williams, 2014). At face value this may indicate that the material bases on which trade unionism was initially predicated have somehow dissipated. However, the trends in casualized, deskilled and intensified work experiences of many workers hardly bear testament to any significant material improvements in working conditions that would negate the need for collectivism. Nor are such trends any indicator of high-trust relations in the workplace. There are a range of explanations for the changing fortunes of trade unions in the UK (Bain & Price, 1983; Mason & Bain, 1993), all of which highlight factors external to the trade unions. Such explanations imply that the unions have been passive bystanders in their own misfortunes, but this is not the case.
UK trade unions have pursued a range of strategies to address membership decline and these can give rise to paradoxical outcomes. For example, on the one hand, partnership (with employers) purports to cultivate high-trust industrial relations, which is then linked to positive organizational performance (or mutual gains) (Butler et al., 2013). The basis of such arrangements is the promotion of cooperative, rather than adversarial industrial relations (Terry, 2010). The stated benefits of partnership working are therefore based on ‘business benefits’ attaching to the potential mutual gains it offers to employers and employees. It is supposed to enable managers to more easily gain support for organizational change, while securing greater commitment from employees. For employees there is an opportunity, via the involvement of their trade union representatives, for them to gain influence over decisions affecting their working lives. From this perspective the real essence of partnership in industrial relations should be predicated on meaningful employee participation whereby employees, via their representatives are able to influence these decisions. However such arrangements remain highly variable in practice (Williams, 2014; Terry, 2010).
While high trust may therefore be the espoused outcome of partnership deals, such agreements may actually reflect trade union weakness rather than strength (Danford et al., 2002). This then infers a more circumscribed, weakened union role that may have damaging consequences for trust between union members and their union as ‘partnership relations detach senior activists from union members and restrict member participation and mobilisation’ (ibid., 2002:1). As a consequence, ‘partnership’ agreements may simply offer the means by which trade unions become assimilated into the managerial decision-making process. They then enhance managerial control while restricting workplace trade unionism activity – so, unions engage in ‘high-trust’ partnership deals and union members become disaffected (ibid.). In summary, the argument is put that partnership arrangements ‘serve managerial interests’ and tend to be driven by a largely unitary perspective (Williams, 2014:198).
As an alternative, unions may pursue an organizing strategy that is based on recruiting members in new areas. The aim is to mobilize workers into union membership to articulate collective grievances, thereby challenging the managerial prerogative (Heery & Simms, 2011). This marks a departure from simply recruiting new members. Rather, its focus is on galvanizing prospective members through building a sense of collective grievance as articulated by lay activists at workplace level. This may build membership numbers and cultivate high-trust relations between members and their union, but may run counter to high trust with the employer because it is predicated on contesting employers at the point of production. Prospects for organizing were initially revitalized by the statutory recognition procedure introduced in the Employment Relations Act 1999 (one relatively recent legislative intervention that moved marginally in favour of trade unions). On the one hand, one might argue that such developments should have positively promoted employee participation among hitherto unorganized workers through the focus on new areas of work, thereby securing greater employee participation and therefore the scope for higher trust. However, the key obstacles are reported to be employer opposition and, also, some barriers internal to the unions, not least the very real pressures they face in having to represent existing members, rather than diverting scarce resource into mobilizing potential new recruits (Byford, 2011).
Although trade union membership remains relatively robust in the UK public sector (Van Wanrooy et al., 2013; BIS 2015), this sector has also been the site of significant change since the 1980s in the wake of public policy interventions driven by neoliberal ideals (Seifert & Mather, 2013). The embedding of neoliberal ideals about how best to organize, deliver and manage public services has been witnessed in the general ascendancy of New Public Management (NPM) (Hood, 1995). The importing of ‘business-like’, unitary-framed models of financial and labour management has had a detrimental impact on the experiences of many who work in the public services, as evidenced in reports of fragmented employment relations (Martinez-Lucio, 2015), job insecurity, work intensification and low-trust relations (Sitala, 2013; Worrall et al., 2010; Worrall et al., 2016), stress and work overload (French, 2014) and low levels of morale and dissatisfaction with pay (Mather, 2014). The more recent austerity measures have been associated with spending cuts, wage restraint and attacks on pensions, job losses, reorganizations and a ‘them and us culture that increases further the distance between public sector workers and their managers’ (CIPD, 2013:12). More broadly, while government policy emphasizes the need for flexible, highly skilled labour markets, the current economic conditions are characterized by ‘structural demand for low-autonomy work’ and the displacement of any notion of decent wages delivered by strong unions and collective bargaining (Vidal, 2013:605). All of this would suggest that trust in UK employment relations is at best a deeply ambiguous state of affairs.
This chapter has sought to throw light on the contested concept of trust in the sphere of employment relations. Trust is often reified as the silver bullet that will deliver highly competitive, productive, ‘high-performing’ organizations and that is that. It has been suggested here that these accounts are potentially problematic for several reasons: first, they disregard the nature of the employment relationship and how this is predicated on an unequal relationship between employers and employed at the outset; second, there is a need to engage with a range of perspectives on this relationship if we are to understand why shared interests and ‘high trust’ cannot simply be assumed; third, the wider UK labour market evidence highlights trends of work intensification, insecurity and low trust. All of this suggests that high-trust relations are at best contestable. It is also the case that employment relations are multi-faceted, comprising relations between employers and employed, employers and trade unions, trade unions and their members, the sectional interests of different groups of workers, and the state. This chapter has sought to provide an overview of these overlapping and interlocking strands to the trust debate – it is by necessity brief, but it serves to highlight the complexity and, indeed, the scope for alternate views in the field.
The chapter began with a brief contextual discussion of rising job insecurity and work intensification in order to sketch out the territory within which to understand the complex construct of trust between employers and employees. The argument is put that while ‘high performance’ is a laudable aim, there needs to be some understanding of the essence of the employment relationship itself. Its basis in the wage-work exchange is based on securing maximum labour utilization in relation to unit labour cost. This provides at the outset the basis of structured antagonisms between employers and employed. The problem is twofold. First, managers must cede control to workers at the point of production in order to realize labour potential. Second, workers can and do respond to managerial efforts to manage them. It is also the case that the objective experience of work for some is characterized by short-term, insecure contracts, low pay and attacks on pensions, as well as changes in work organization that effectively intensify their work and close down their task-based discretion.
There has therefore been an attempt here to illuminate the debate on trust through a focus on the employment relationship and a concern with the lived realities of work and with the institutions and processes that have an impact. In so doing, the discussion has reflected on how trust and, indeed, low trust can be construed in a wider sense through consideration of the interaction of a range of interrelated and overlapping factors: management attempts to secure productive workers, workers’ responses to these activities, and the role of the state in shaping the framework within which these two parties engage. Against the backdrop of falling union membership levels and a decline in collective bargaining coverage, this discussion has contemplated two of the unions’ strategic responses, noting some of the paradoxical outcomes with regard to trust that may flow from both partnership and organizing options. There also remain deep-seated structural factors that work against the traditional institutions and mechanisms of worker voice. For example, the chapter has highlighted how the hostile legal environment contributes to difficult terrain for trade unions and for their members. Indeed the whole fabric of state policy with regard to collective labour law appears to rest on inherent low-trust – and high-blame–stakes.
Following Edwards (1995a), the argument has been put that exposition of industrial relations as a field of study makes clear that workers’ experience of employment cannot be divorced from the politics of the employment relationship and its inherently contested nature. This general proposition needs therefore to underpin any analysis of trust from an industrial relations perspective. Employers and workers (and their trade unions) engage in a process of mutually reinforcing and contested relations on a daily basis. This is played out in a context of shifting expectations and ‘low levels of self-interested trust’ (Mather, 2011:205). The implication is that the nature of the relationship between employers and employees is essentially predicated on low trust but there is potential to cultivate productive, high-trust relations where they incorporate meaningful independent representative structures. This is hardly achievable in a context of antiunion laws that are intent on further curbing the influence of those same representative bodies. Nor do vulnerable workers in flexible labour markets on precarious contractual arrangements necessarily buy into the high-trust, high-involvement mantra.
The focus of this chapter has been with how trust may be conceptualized within the UK context. Clearly, there exist different historical, political, legal, economic and social frameworks within which employment relations are enacted and experienced, and this renders generalizability of specific UK evidence to other countries problematic. For example, the scope for trade union engagement is variable from one country to another, dependent upon extant and historical legal interventions. Likewise, both product and labour markets may be differentiated from one country to another. It is therefore beyond the scope of this chapter to provide an account of trust in employment relations outside of the confines of the political economy and the legal framework of the UK. That said, in essence the underlying debates about the structurally determined and antagonistic nature of the employment relationship still resonate outside of the UK’s geographical boundaries.
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