Jimmy Donaghey

Reconceptualising employee silence: problems and prognosis

A growing literature has emerged on employee silence, located within the field of organisational behaviour. Scholars have investigated when and how employees articulate voice and when and how they will opt for silence. While offering many insights, this analysis is inherently one-sided in its interpretation of silence as a product of employee motivations. An alternative reading of silence is offered which focuses on the role of management. Using the non-union employee representation literature for illustrative purposes, the significance of management in structuring employee silence is considered. Highlighted are the ways in which management, through agenda-setting and institutional structures, can perpetuate silence over a range of issues, thereby organising employees out of the voice process. These considerations are redeployed to offer a dialectical interpretation of employee silence in a conceptual framework to assist further research and analysis.

Why has Irish social partnership survived

The present system of social partnership in Ireland is in its twentieth year. A range of explanations have been put forward to explain why social partnership has been so durable even though it does not possess the institutional endowments often considered necessary to sustain tripartite industrial relations arrangements. Although these accounts are considered to have merits, this article suggests that they also suffer from a range of weaknesses. The article suggests that the longevity of the social partnership regime is a result of it being part of an unorthodox system of institutional complementarities that triggered a spectacular period of economic and employment growth.

After Rana Plaza : building coalitional power for labour rights between unions and (consumption-based) social movement organisations

Global labour governance has typically been approached from either industrial relations scholars focusing on the role of organised labour or social movement scholars focusing on the role of social movement organisations in mobilising consumption power. Yet, little work has focused on the interaction of the two. Using an exploratory case study of the governance response to the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, this article examines how complementary capacities of production- and consumption-based actors generated coalitional power and contributed to creating the ‘Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh’, making it binding and convincing more than 180 brand-name companies to sign up. The research has implications for understanding how the interface between production and consumption actors may provide leverage to improve labour standards in global supply chains.

The Free Movement of Workers and Social Europe: Maintaining the European Ideal

The big EU enlargement of 2004 has fuelled the debate about whether labour migration from the east to the west is causing social dumping in the European economy, with the effect of upsetting established national systems of labour market regulation. This article reviews the effects of migration on EU labour markets. It also examines three recent industrial relations disputes which were about job displacement. It argues that there is little evidence of greater labour mobility causing new social dumping pressures on a widespread basis. However, it goes on to suggest that the situation may change if the EU adopts neoliberal policies such as the initial draft Services Directive at the same time as promoting greater labour market openness between the Member States. The article concludes by arguing for a better policy mix which would on the one hand involve the EU maintaining its commitment to the free movement of workers and on the other hand strengthen labour standard-setting mechanisms at both the EU and national levels.

The nuanced nature of work quality: Evidence from rural Newfoundland and Ireland

This article explores the relationship between job and work quality and argues that while it is important to examine job quality, to understand workers’ experiences fully, the focus should be on the broader concept of work quality, which places the job against its wider socio-economic context. Based on the experiences of 88 rural workers gathered via interviews in Newfoundland and Ireland, it appears that the same or similar jobs can be regarded very differently depending upon the context in which they are embedded, as people at different locations and/or stages of life have an individual set of aspirations, expectations and life experiences. The study found that the factors that affect work quality are moulded by broader aspects of life – family, friends, community, lifestyle and past experiences – that shape an individual.

Employer occupation of regulatory space of the Employee Information and Consultation (I&C) Directive in liberal market economies

This article shows how both employers and the state have influenced macro-level processes and structures concerning the content and transposition of the European Union (EU) Employee Information and Consultation (I&C) Directive. It argues that the processes of regulation occupied by employers reinforce a voluntarism which marginalizes rather than shares decision-making power with workers. The contribution advances the conceptual lens of ‘regulatory space’ by building on Lukes’ multiple faces of power to better understand how employment regulation is determined across transnational, national and enterprise levels. The research proposes an integrated analytical framework on which ‘occupancy’ of regulatory space can be evaluated in comparative national contexts.

Employee voice: charting new terrain

Voice is a term that has been widely used in the practitioner and academic literature on human resource management (HRM) and industrial relations in recent years. Freeman and Medoff (1984) associated voice with union representation and in particular with the role of unions in articulating concerns on behalf of the collective. As union density has fallen in recent years, analysis of voice in workplaces has often focused on how workers communicate with managers and are able to express their concerns about their work situation without a union, and on the ways in which employees have a say over work tasks and organizational decision-making. But researchers from different disciplinary perspectives often use voice in different ways. Some refer to involvement, others to participation, while yet others refer to empowerment or engagement as if they are interchangeable. As Kaufman (Chapter 2) makes clear, few appreciate the historical pedigree of employee voice, for instance, where Karl Marx and Adam Smith expressed interest in the ways and means through which labour expressed its voice. The deeper antecedents to voice have often been forgotten or eclipsed in a rush towards newer managerial fads, such as engagement or other equally abstract notions of labour offering discretionary effort. This book presents analysis from various academic streams and disciplines that illuminate our understanding of employee voice from these different perspectives. The following chapters show that research on employee voice has gone beyond union voice and non-union voice to build a wider and deeper knowledge base. As the introduction to the book, this chapter provides a guide to the debates about the different dimensions of employee voice and to the research findings in different areas. We review the meanings and purposes surrounding the definitions of voice; consider the role of key actors in the workplace; and evaluate the different forms and processes of voice in different spheres, contexts and organizational settings. We hope that the book will help the reader understand the debates associated with employee voice and appreciate the contribution of the different approaches to our understanding of what goes on in the workplaces that are at the heart of modern economies.

Non-union employee representation, union avoidance and the managerial agenda

Non-union employee representation is an area which has attracted much interest in the voice literature. Much of the literature has been shaped by a dialogue which considers NERs as a means of union avoidance. More recently however scholars have suggested that for NERs to work in such contexts, they may need to be imbued with a higher set of functionalities to remain viable entities. Using a critical case study of a union recognition drive and managerial response in the form of an NER, this article contributes to a more nuanced interpretation of the literature dialogue than hitherto exists. A core component of the findings directly challenge existing interpretations within the field; namely that NERs are shaped by a paradox of managerial action. It is argued that the NER failed to satisfy for employees because of a structural remit, rather than through any paradox in managerial intent.

Regulating for mutual gains? Non-union employee representation and the Information and Consultation Directive

Interest in ‘mutual gains’ has principally been confined to studies of the unionised sector. Yet there is no reason why this conceptual dynamic cannot be extended to the non-unionised realm, specifically in relation to non-union employee representation (NER). Although extant research views NER as unfertile terrain for mutual gains, the paper examines whether NER developed in response to the European Directive on Information and Consultation (I&C) of Employees may offer a potentially more fruitful route. The paper examines this possibility by considering three cases of NER established under the I&C Directive in Ireland, assessing the extent to which mutual gains were achieved.

Social Partnership and Democratic Legitimacy in Ireland

Social partnership has been a dominant feature of Irish industrial relations since 1987. However, sharply contrasting views exist about i ts democratic consequences. One argument is that social partnership is bad for democracy as it weakens the capacity of elected politicians to make economic and social policy (Durkan, 1992: O’Cinneide, 1998): only those who are accountable to the electorate should be responsible for governing the country. National social partnership agreements which give trade unions and employer organisations privileged access to government and influence over the direction of public policy are regarded as a distortion of proper democratic practice. An alternative argument is that the regime of social partnership has improved democratic practice by deepening deliberative democracy in the country (Sabel, 1996; O’Donnell, 2000). On this view, purely representative form s of democracy weaken active citizen engagement in public decisionmaking: Deliberative democracy is about opening up political institutions so that citizens can directly influence the rules by which they have to live (Fung and Wright, 2001). In addition, to promoting wider participation, deliberative democracy encourages less confrontational and adversarial fo rms of political decision-making: political dialogue which involves people defending their position through the use of evidence and reasoned argument is considered a much superior form of democratic practice. Exposing the strengths and weaknesses of different positions i s seen as creating the possibility of decisions being reached on the basis of consensus, resulting in more meaningful collaboration being forged between the participants (Elster, 1998; Bessette, 1994). Thus, from the standpoint of deliberative democracy, social partnership is far from an insidious process that devalues democracy. On the contrary, it is viewed as a process that enhances the Iri sh political system. The core argument of this paper i s that these two alternative views are flawed because they misrepresent the contribution social partnership has made to the legitimacy of Irish democracy. Democratic legitimation relates to the degree of popular support and engagement political institutions enjoy with citizens. Scharpf (1997) suggests that democratic legitimation has two dimensions. The first dimension is input oriented legitimacy, which refers to mechanisms and procedures that are used to l ink p olitical decisions with citizens’ preferences. The other is output oriented legitimacy which refers to the capacity of democratic processes to realise tangible outputs such as economic and employment growth, as well as high social standards. According to Scharpf, countries that have high levels of input and output legitimacy normally enjoy high levels of democratic legitimation. On the one hand, the claim that social partnership i s harmful to Irish democracy i s regarded as underestimating the contribution this process has made to the output side of democratic legitimation in Ireland: social partnership has helped ensure that Irish democracy is not an empty vessel by contributing positively to economic and employment growth. On the other hand, the view that social partnership has established a strong deliberative dimension to Irish democracy is regarded as over-estimating the impact of this system on the input si de of democratic legitimation: social partnership has led to new public policy experiments, but these have not led to the principles of deliberative democracy being embedded in the country to any significant extent.