Markus Helfen

Employment relations in global production networks: Initiating transfer of practices via union involvement

International Framework Agreements (IFAs) represent a still small but growing and particularly interesting contribution to the global regulation of employment relations. IFAs enable global union federations (GUFs) to become actively involved in co-designing employment relations within transnational corporations (TNCs) and their global production networks. Based upon theoretical insights into the challenges of transferring practices in and across organizations, we present and discuss a model of practice transfer for global production networks based on empirical data from a content analysis of IFAs and from interviews with representatives of TNCs, GUFs, and other experts. Our study contributes to an organizational theory of practice transfer. But more importantly, it aims at a better integration of IHRM and international industrial relations by looking more closely at the particular role of GUFs as external actors.

Negotiating as Institutional Work: The Case of Labour Standards and International Framework Agreements

Although institutional work has recently attracted considerable attention from organization research, there is a surprising neglect of inter-organizational negotiations as a form of institutional work. This neglect is astonishing, since negotiations provide a unique opportunity both to study institutional change in settings characterized by diverging institutional logics and to illustrate how institutional constraints and strategic agency are linked in interaction processes. Based on a combination of the literature on institutional work and the theory of strategic negotiations, we examine in detail three illuminating negotiation processes taking place around International Framework Agreements on global labour standards. This examination reveals three types of (proto-)institutional outcomes produced by these processes: institutional creation, modification and stagnation. Whereas institutional creation and modification, albeit differing in quality, show how integrative negotiation practices of global unions might engage management in a joint endeavor for institutional change, institutional stagnation illuminates some of the pitfalls of negotiation work.

Building Transnational Union Networks across Global Production Networks: Conceptualising a New Arena of Labour–Management Relations

Academic interest in Global Framework Agreements (GFAs) has grown considerably over the past several years, but the focus has largely been limited to comparing their various clauses and provisions. More recent research has centred on case studies of their implementation. In this article, we move beyond an exclusive analysis of GFAs to a broader conceptualization of steps towards globalizing labour relations, in which GFAs are fundamental. In our heuristic model, a GFA is the negotiated result of interest representation. A GFA creates an arena for the pursuit of global labour relations by defining the content, selecting the actors, delineating the processes and setting the boundaries of labour–management interaction. As a political space undergoing institutionalization, all of these dimensions of arenas are still contested. Although the structural boundaries are fuzzy at the periphery, such arenas reach beyond the organizational entities of the signatory transnational corporation (TNC) to encompass the global production network (GPN). Furthermore, we show how Global Union Federations (GUFs) and their member unions operating in regard to particular GPNs have begun building Transnational Union Networks (TUNs). Using two very different case studies, we argue that structural contingencies and strategic choices intertwine to bring about divergent TUN trajectories: one favouring a limited company‐specific internal approach, the other a broader, GUF‐led union‐building approach. As exemplified by these findings, TUNs in our construction of an arena linking key elements of transnational labour relations are still ‘work in progress’. Our concluding hypotheses reflect this contingency and the need for further research.

Institutionalizing Precariousness? The Politics of Boundary Work in Legalizing Agency Work in Germany, 1949–2004

The legalizing of agency work in Germany is used as an illustrative case for exploring and theorizing how contests about regulating organizations’ labor practices are played out through the politics of boundary work. By combining the idea of inter-field relations from the theory of strategic action fields with considerations about boundary work within and between organizational fields, this paper explains the recent proliferation of agency work as the outgrowth of a long-term legalization contest. By taking a historical perspective, it illuminates how the boundary work of (former) incumbents and (new) challengers modulates institutional dynamics. Based on qualitative primary and secondary material, the findings reveal how the politics of boundary work facilitate power reversals in organizational fields by allowing defeated parties to survive in a field’s niches, to cross a field’s boundaries, and to rebuild their intervention capacity as well as by making incumbent coalitions erode over time.

Going Local with Global Policies: Implementing International Framework Agreements in Brazil and the United States

The impact of the recent worldwide financial and economic crisis has made abundantly clear that the market-creating, regulation-avoiding core of globalization has had far-reaching consequences for the world of labour. Within a neoliberal framework, the spreading of cross-border labour processes through the globalization of production has fostered both the ‘economic integration of countries and the disintegration of production processes’ (Wood 2001: 41). Spatially dispersed and network-like economic structures have facilitated shareholder value maximization by allowing MNEs to distribute financial risks and, at the same time, control the streams of value added by local production (Sydow 1992; Fichter and Sydow 2002; Gereffi et al. 2005).

Implementation of Global Framework Agreements: towards a multi-organizational practice perspective

Over the past decade Global Union Federations have signed an increasing number of Global Framework Agreements, most of which – over 80 per cent – have been with European-based Transnational Corporations. But while Global Framework Agreements are slowly, but continually, increasing in numbers, the results of our empirical research reveal extensive deficits in their implementation. This article begins with a review of these implementation problems and challenges. Drawing on two exemplary case studies, we introduce our multi-organizational practice perspective to illuminate how the contents of Global Framework Agreements as negotiated are linked to implementation, conflict monitoring and resolution procedures. We conclude that there is a need for a systematic and integrated implementation procedure as a means of dealing with the complexity of the Global Framework Agreement process. Our proposal is built on three sets of practices – information dissemination and communication; training programmes; and operational measures – and encompasses both unilateral and joint policies and actions pursued by Global Union Federations and the management of Transnational Corporations.

Translating European Labor Relations Practices to the United States Through Global Framework Agreements? German and Swedish Multinationals Compared

Extensive research has shown that European multinational enterprises (MNEs) have a propensity to avoid collective employee representation when going abroad. This study investigates whether Global Framework Agreements (GFAs) can reverse this pattern by comparing how four European MNEs—two from Germany and two from Sweden—implement GFAs in the United States, a country with weak collective representation rights. The authors find that an MNE’s home country labor relations (LR) system mediates whether GFAs support collective representation in the United States. Sweden’s monistic LR system, in which unions are the dominant organizations legally representing workers, gives unions the power to directly influence the negotiation and implementation of GFAs. By contrast, Germany’s dualistic LR system, in which unions and works councils share worker representation, weakens the influence of unions on implementing the GFA. MNEs’ home country LR systems thus influence how transnational instruments are used to improve collective representation in host countries.

The Foundations of Social Partnership

‘Social partnership’ between capital and labour is a distinctive characteristic of German industrial relations. Based on a survey of 142 German employers’ associations, we investigate differences in their support for partnership with unions. We find that organizational characteristics (e.g. membership density) as well as positive experiences with their union counterparts explain why employers’ associations adhere to the norms of social partnership. Building on an analysis that combines political and organizational institutionalism, we find that the positive evaluation of social partnership held by employers is associated with their positive experiences in more recent interactions with unions in collective bargaining, a more encompassing definition of an associations policy domain and a long-term history of mutual collaboration.

Legitimation Strategies of Corporate Elites in the Field of Labor Regulation: Changing Responses to Global Framework Agreements

Abstract Corporate elites are increasingly held responsible for issues of sustainability including working conditions and workers’ rights in global production networks. We still know relatively little about how they respond to concrete stakeholder initiatives aiming to restrict corporate voluntarism through transnational regulation. In this paper we report comparative findings on corporate legitimation strategies in response to requests by labor representatives to sign Global Framework Agreements (GFAs). These agreements are intended to hold multinational corporations (MNCs) accountable for the implementation of core labor standards across their supply chains. We propose to broaden management-focused analyses of corporate legitimation strategies by applying a field-oriented perspective that considers the embeddedness of management in a broader web of strategic activity and variable opportunity structures. Our findings suggest that legitimation strategies are developed dynamically along with the rules, positions, and understandings developing around specific regulatory issues in sequences of interactions between elites and challenging groups.

Institutional continuity in German collective bargaining: Do employer associations contribute to stability?

Employer associations’ organizational capacity to extend collective bargaining coverage (CBC) beyond unionization levels is one important factor contributing to the stability of multi-employer bargaining in Germany. Based on a representative sample of 142 German employer associations, this article carries out an empirical examination of the characteristics influencing this capacity. The major results are that a wider political domain and adherence to social partnership positively contribute to associations’ static capacity to extend CBC, as approximated by membership density. Yet, in a dynamic perspective – approximated by membership growth rates – a paradoxical trend is revealed by which organizational stabilization of associations is achieved at the expense of decoupling firms’ membership status from collective bargaining arrangements, weakening employer associations’ future capacity to extend CBC.