Saul A. Rubinstein

THE IMPACT OF CO-MANAGEMENT ON QUALITY PERFORMANCE: THE CASE OF THE SATURN CORPORATION

Using data from surveys, interviews, direct observation, and records of quality performance, the author examines the system of co-management created through the General Motors-United Auto Workers partnership at the Saturn Corporation. Under this partnership, each department, or module, is jointly managed by union-represented and non-represented advisors. The author credits the union with building a dense communications network throughout Saturns management system. Compared to non-represented advisors, union advisors showed greater levels of lateral communication and coordination, which had a significant positive impact on quality performance. Also positively associated with quality outcomes at the module level were balanced time use, with each advisor engaging in both production and people management, and alignment between union-represented and non-represented advisors regarding their priorities, responsibilities, practices, and job definition.

The Local Union Revisited: New Voices from the Front Lines

This article revisits the description of local unions published in 1953 by Sayles and Strauss to see if locals in firms now transforming to meet the needs of the current economic environment also are changing in important ways. Locals are increasingly involved in areas of work previously considered the exclusive domain of management. These additional roles and responsibilities have required local leaders to develop new capacities that better fit current institutional needs.

Getting it Right: Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications from Research on Public-Sector Unionism and Collective Bargaining

The United States is in the throes of a public-policy debate about public-sector unionism and collective bargaining. The ostensible trigger of this debate is the fiscal crises that state and local governments have been experiencing since 2008. The debate largely centers on the extent to which public employee unions have contributed to this crisis through the pay and benefits they have negotiated for public employees. The role of government as employer is connected in this debate to the role of government as a taxing authority and provider of public services. These roles are often claimed to be in conflict with one another — that is, governments as employers are seen as not exercising the same due diligence in setting pay and benefits as private-sector employers. The research evidence indicates, however, that these claims about public employment are based on incomplete and in some cases inaccurate understanding.

Public School Reform Through Union-Management Collaboration

Over the past decade the policy debate over improving U.S. public education has focused on market solutions (charter schools, privatization, and vouchers) and teacher evaluation through high stakes standardized testing of students. In this debate, teachers and their unions are often characterized as the problem. Our research offers an alternate path in the debate, a perspective that looks at schools as systems – the way schools are organized and the way decisions are made. We focus on examples of collaboration through the creation of long-term labor-management partnerships among teachers’ unions and school administrators that improve and restructure public schools from the inside to enhance planning, decision-making, problem solving, and the ways teachers interact and schools are organized. We analyzed how these efforts were created and sustained in six public school districts over the past two decades, and what they can teach us about the impact of significant involvement of faculty and their local union leadership, working closely with district administration. We argue that collaboration between teachers, their unions, and administrators is both possible and necessary for any meaningful and lasting public school reform.

Balancing Acts: Dynamics of a Union Coalition in a Labor Management Partnership

This paper analyzes the experience of a set of unions that formed a coalition to engage in coordinated bargaining and to build and sustain a labor management partnership with Kaiser Permanente, a large healthcare provider and insurer. We use qualitative and quantitative data, including member and leader surveys, to explore the experience of the coalition in confronting five key challenges identified through theory and prior research on such partnerships. We find that the coalition has been remarkably successful, under difficult circumstances, in achieving institutional growth for its member unions and in balancing traditional and new union roles and communicating with members. The unions have been less successful in increasing member involvement.

The effects of high-involvement work systems on employee and union–management communication networks

The authors link High-Involvement Work Systems (HIWS) with social network research both theoretically and methodologically by conceiving of these work systems as networks and by using network methods to better understand and evaluate these arrangements. Their approach is to integrate the institutional perspective of industrial relations with the analytical methodology of social network analysis. They use a longitudinal data set collected before and after the introduction of an HIWS in a pharmaceutical company to measure the impact on patterns of employee communication as well as communication between the union and management. Improvements were found in customer satisfaction, and positive effects were seen in the pattern and structure of organizational communication with an increase in the density of lateral and vertical interdepartmental communication, and a decrease in hierarchy. These results were confirmed using survey data on employee perceptions of particular types of communication and interviews with employees at various levels of authority.

Innovation in Isolation: Labor-Management Partnerships in the United States

In the United States, as in other advanced industrial countries, worker participation in management has taken on increasing importance, placing pressures on employers and unions to change how they deal with employees/members, and with each other. This paper examines two of the most impressive cases in the U.S.: the partnerships between General Motors (G.M.) and the United Autoworkers union (U.A.W.) at Saturn and between BellSouth and the Communication Workers union (C.W.A.). We outline the evolution and the basic features of these innovations, as well as highlighting certain ongoing problems. These problems, we argue, confront the parties to employment relations in the U.S. more generally, reflecting profound ambivalence about such experiments, and their continued isolation as ‘islands of excellence’. As such, these cases both illustrate the vast potential for labor-management partnerships as well as the dampening effect of the employment relations context in the U.S.

Union–Management Partnerships, Teacher Collaboration, and Student Performance

Using data from surveys, interviews, and student performance, the authors examine collaborative union–management partnerships between local union representatives, teachers, and school administrators working together in innovative ways to improve teaching quality and student performance. Based on data from 27 schools in a southern California school district, the authors find that the strength of formal union–management partnerships is a significant predictor of greater growth in student performance over time, and that this relationship is mediated by stronger educator collaboration at the school level, after controlling for poverty. The findings suggest that student performance can be significantly improved by institutional union–management partnerships and the increased school-level collaboration that results from them.

Labour-management partnership in the USA: Islands of success in a hostile context

The current context for labor–management partnerships in the USA is unfriendly in almost all ways. Union density, at 11.1 % overall and 6.6 % in the private sector, is at a modern low (US BLS 2015). With few exceptions, there is no significant encouragement of partnerships from either the federal or the state governments. There is no organization or forum that regularly brings together leaders of the labor and business communities for social dialogue about economic or other policies. And many of the “best examples” of partnerships in the last couple of decades have not been sustained. There are still “islands” of success, but they function in spite of the system rather than because of it.

The Mutations of Professional Responsibility: Toward Collaborative Community

Professionals are distinctive insofar as in their primary activities they are oriented by what Max Weber called “value-rationality”—by their responsibility to ultimate values such as education or health or justice. But it is difficult to organize large-scale collectivities in such a way as to sustain value-rationality. Historically, the professions relied on guild-like traditionalistic structures based on status and loyalty to ensure their cohesion and solidarity; but this often came at the expense of those ultimate values. Under performance and accountability pressures to overcome this shortfall, many professional occupations have been shifting from the guild form toward bureaucratic and market forms of organization, thereby replacing traditionalistic ties with instrumental-rationality. But these latter organizational forms afford professionals little relief from growing pressure to improve efficiency, quality, and responsiveness. We argue that over the past few decades, a cluster of innovative organizing techniques have arisen that allow professionals to respond more effectively to these pressures by giving value-rationality much-needed organizational robustness and resilience. Deploying these new techniques, numerous professional collectivities have begun to reshaping themselves into what we call “collaborative communities.” We illustrate the distinctive features of value-rational collaborative community with examples drawn from prior research on medicine and we show some of its promise with results from a survey of teachers in one public school district.