Graham Symon

Collective bargaining unity and fragmentation in Germany: Two concepts of trade unionism?

In recent years established collective bargaining arrangements in some sectors in Germany have been challenged by an upsurge of sectional union activity that has contested the status of industry-level incumbents. Gauging the impact of this development has proved difficult for both observers and insiders, with a range of responses from labour market actors and government. This article explores recent developments and actor responses and locates them in the wider context of the German political economy. It argues that of all these actors trade unions, in particular in organized forms of capitalism, are confronted by strategic dilemmas related to managing the difficult ‘variable geometry’ of mobilization and systemic accommodation.

Urban Labour, Voice and Legitimacy: Economic Development and the Emergence of Community Unionism

Community unionism has emerged in the past decade as a growing strand of industrial relations research and is influencing trade union strategies for renewal. This article seeks to further develop the concept, while exploring the potential roles for unions in communities subject to projects of urban regeneration.

Insertion as an alternative to workfare: active labour-market schemes in the Parisian suburbs

Many governments have tightened the link between welfare and work by attaching conditionality to out-of-work benefits, extending these requirements to new client groups and imposing market competition and greater managerial control in service delivery – principles typically characterized as ‘workfare’. Based on field research in Seine-Saint-Denis, we examine French ‘insertion’ schemes aimed at disadvantaged but potentially job-ready clients, characterized by weak conditionality, low marketization, strong professional autonomy and local network control. We show that insertion systems have resisted policy attempts to expand workfare-derived principles, reflecting street-level actors’ belief in the key advantages of the former over the latter. In contrast with arguments stressing institutional and cultural stickiness, our explanation for this resistance thus highlights the decentralized network governance of front-line services and the limits to central government power.

Creaming and parking in marketised employment services: an Anglo-German comparison

The delivery of public services by nonprofit and for-profit providers alters the nature of services and jobs, often in unintended and undesired ways. We argue that these effects depend on the degree to which the service is ‘marketized’, that is, subjected by the funder to price-based competition. Using case studies of British and German employment services, this article scrutinizes the link between funding practices and service quality. Of particular concern in marketized employment services is the problem of ‘creaming and parking’, in which providers select job-ready clients for services and neglect clients more distant from the labour market. We explore three questions. What are the mechanisms through which marketization produces creaming and parking? What are the differences between these mechanisms in commercial and non-commercial service providers? Which national institutions might serve as a buffer for the landscape of service provision facing price-based competition?

Making Sense of Public Sector Employment Relations in a Time of Crisis

The purpose of this book has been thematically to illuminate and analyse an aspect of our society that is in the midst of a particularly turbulent phase of reform and transition: the public sector and more specifically the experiences of its many millions of workers. From Plato through Hobbes and Mill to Hayek and (Ralph) Miliband, the role, function and ideal extent of the State has been debated and contested. To some, a strong, democratic, redistributive state is the hallmark of a civilised society. To others, it is a constraining authority and the taxation it requires to operate is, an unjustifiable imposition. Nevertheless in the modern era, the world’s industrialised democracies have found themselves with a significant proportion of the workforce employed in the delivery of the State’s various activities. Yet the scope and nature of the public sector workforce have become more contested than ever over the last three decades as the influence of the ‘neoliberal turn’ has come to dominate policy discourses (Harvey, 2007). This has been driven by crisis and the shifting forces and relations of production, which have in turn impacted on the political economy of the State and the citizens’ relationship to it.

Organised Labour and State Employment

The extent of the collective organisation of workers is both a crucial distinguishing feature of employment in the public sector and a focus for modernising critiques. In the UK and most of the industrialised world, the contrast between the fortunes of unions in the public and private sector can be illustrated by the fact that not only does union density in the public sector generally dwarf that of the private sector, but the actual numbers of union members in the public sector tends to be greater than that in the private sector (see Bryson and Forth, 2010). This is despite typically around a quarter of the aggregate workforce being employed by the state (Fredman and Morris, 1989; Matthews, 2010). It should be stressed that the resilience is relative, as both, membership levels and density are arguably on a negative trajectory; the union movement in the public sector has faced considerable challenges in the past three decades, which it has not managed to counter with unqualified success. These challenges are complex and stem from both tendencies in the wider milieu of work organisation and more specifically from the restructuring of state apparatus that has been ongoing since 1979. It is argued that, unless the unions can put in place sophisticated and coordinated strategies of organisation and campaigning, unions’ future prospects are more bleak than many decision makers in the movement have fully acknowledged (see Bryson and Forth, 2010).

From New Labour to a New Era

Like Zeus, the ancient Greek King of the Gods, the public sector changes its shape. Thirty-five years ago, the United Kingdom’s public sector included, for instance, water, telecommunications and transport services, but they are all now in the private sector. The trajectory is not, however, one way. Thus at the time of writing, some banks — Northern Rock and Royal Bank of Scotland Group — and rail infrastructure — Network Rail — are in the public sector, having previously been in the private sector. Moreover, central and local governments and the National Health Service (NHS) commission private sector organisations to provide some of their services. Also, just as Zeus’s lovers may not always have appreciated who he was, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate what is in the public sector. For instance universities are classified by the Office for National Statistics as private sector organisations, although many a bystander — and even university employees — would consider that they are part of the public sector.1