Stephanie Tailby

Workplace Partnership and Employee Voice in the UK: Comparative Case Studies of Union Strategy and Worker Experience

This article addresses the role of ‘employee voice’ in workplace partnership. Drawing on two organizational case studies from the UK’s aerospace sector, it analyses employee experiences of two key dimensions of worker participation in partnership environments: joint consultation and union representation. Specifically, it investigates what consultation and union representation actually mean for employees in the context of different union responses to employer-driven partnership agendas. The article finds predominantly negative patterns of employee experience and attributes this partly to management control strategies and the short-termist dynamic of British manufacturing capital.

Non-unionized young workers and organizing the unorganized:

Young workers are concentrated in low-waged, poorly organized industries. Although poorly unionized, evidence suggests that they are positively predisposed towards unions. Most research on youth and unionization is attitudinal, however, with little evidence on the kinds of problems they face and how they respond. This article contributes findings from a British survey in 2004 of 501 low-paid, unorganized workers and focuses on two groups of young workers: those between 16 and 21 years and those aged between 22 and 29 years. It shows commonalities and contrasts between these age groups in terms of typical workplace, types of problems encountered, responses to them, including collective action, views on trade union support and likelihood to join as a result of grievances. The older group is more active individually and collectively towards resolving problems at work. Yet both youth groups are as keen, or more so, on trade union help, than the wider sample.

The Realities of Partnership at Work

Partnership at Work What is Partnership The High Performance Workplace: Fact or Fiction? Gambling with Employee Voice in the Finance Sector Best Value in a Local Authority Partnership on Prescription in the NHS Goodbye Blue Sky: Partnership in the UK Aerospace Sector Whither Partnership?

Workplace partnership and professional workers: ‘about as useful as a chocolate teapot’?

The labour processes and employment relations that characterise the working conditions of many professional workers might be expected to generate the high-trust environment required for cooperative, partnership-style management–union relations. However, few studies have focused on partnership in ‘professional’ and ‘expert labour’ employment sectors. This paper assesses the efficacy of partnership through the lens of manager, union and employee attitudes at three cases studies notable for employing high numbers of staff in the professions and ‘marginal professions’. The analysis focuses on the nature of the cooperative relationship between union representatives and management (categorised as either ‘nurtured’ or ‘coerced partnership’), whether unions in these settings are able to expand the range and scope of their influence, and whether professional workers themselves display positive attitudes to cooperative union forms. The study finds that in all three cases the ‘partnership’ union is seen by its members as a weak, insubordinate entity in terms of collective influence over management policy though in the two ‘nurturing’ cases they see it to be more effective for individual member representation.

Under-Funded and Overwhelmed: The Voluntary Sector as Worker Representation in Britain's Individualised Industrial Relations System

The majority of British workers are non-unionised. They face grievances at work alone. For the low paid among them, the main source of advice and support is the voluntary sector, in particular the Citizens Advice Bureaux and Law Centres. This article presents findings from a survey of front-line employment advisers in Citizens Advice Bureaux and Law Centres that show how under-funding by government at a time of rising demand from workers has affected the service they are able to provide and the quality of their own working life.

Workplace Partnership and Work-Life Balance: A Local Government Case Study

This chapter explores the links between work-life balance and workplace partnership, principally through a local authority case study. This was one of six organisations studied in our research on ‘patterns and prospects for partnership at work in the UK’, part of the ESRC Future of Work programme.1 The local authority case study is of particular interest to the concerns of this book. In 2001, the Council introduced a work-life balance policy that was the product of a trade union — management partnership. It was among the ‘exemplars’ in the local government sector where the employers and trade unions identified workplace partnership as the means of extending flexible working practices to the benefit of employees, local authorities and users of council services. Our interest was in the benefits that employees stood to gain. This section sets the scene by introducing briefly the concept of partnership at work, sketching the public policy context of local government ‘modernisation’, and identifying the issues that guided our case study investigation.

Public Service Restructuring in the UK: The Case of the English National Health Service

This article overviews welfare state retrenchment in the UK under the Conservative-led coalition government that formed in May 2010 and has centred its response to economic crisis on rapid public deficit reduction through public expenditure austerity targeted increasingly on the welfare benefits budget. It locates the coalitions reforms of public services and public sector employment relations in the long trajectory of public sector restructuring in the UK: the policies of New Right governments in the 1980s and New Labour from 1997 to 2010 that installed marketisation and privatisation in a permutation of forms, intensifying challenges for trade union organising. Focusing on the English NHS, the article identifies the respects in which the coalitions reforms continue and depart from New Labours.

Capital mobility, job loss, and union strategy: the case of the UK aerospace industry

Drawing on case study data, this article analyzes contrasting workplace union responses to organizational restructuring in the United Kingdoms aerospace industry. It critically evaluates two distinct union strategies that resonate with contemporary debates governing the future role of trade unions in the British workplace. The first response is based on “partnership” with management while the second reflects traditional “oppositionalism” via the assertive defense of rank-and-file member interests. The article highlights inherent weaknesses in partnership strategies arising from problems of management intention and union incorporation. By contrast, while militant opposition was more successful in constraining the exercise of managerial prerogatives, the traditions of “sectionalism” (or “localism”) in plant-based union organizing meant that this strategy was limited to securing a partial and transient defense of jobs and labor standards.

The changing face of employment relations: equality and diversity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore what has happened to the notion and reality of equal pay over the past 50 years, a period in which women have become the majority of trade union members in the UK. It does so in the context of record employment levels based upon women’s increased labour market participation albeit reflecting their continued over-representation in part-time employment, locating the narrowed but persistent overall gender pay gap in the broader picture of pay inequality in the UK. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers voluntary and legal responses to inequality and the move away from voluntary solutions in the changed environment for unions. Following others it discusses the potential for collective bargaining to be harnessed to equality in work, a potential only partially realised by unions in a period in which their capacity to sustain collective bargaining was weakened. It looks at the introduction of a statutory route to collective bargaining in 2000, the Nati...

Union Organising and Partnership in Manufacturing, Finance and Public Services in Britain

More than ten years have now elapsed since the TUC launched its ‘New Unionism’ project in 1996. As has been well documented, in its early stages ‘New Unionism’ embodied an attempt to arrest the decline of union membership and influence at work by incorporating certain elements of an aggressive organising approach associated with the North American ‘organising model’ (Carter 2000, 2006; Heery et al. 2000c). In some quarters, early hopes for the potential of the organising model were influenced by the emergence of a distinctive ‘union renewal’ debate. In an essentially grass roots-based argument, great stress was placed upon the need to democratise union form and hierarchy by locating rank-and-file union activists as core agents in processes both of membership mobilisation at work and democratic practice within union structures and broader community activity (Fairbrother 1996, 2000). Thus, in the context of union decline in the workplace and civil society, looked at through the prism of renewal, the organising model was seen as containing the potential to reverse this decline by shifting the form of unionism to something less concerned with membership recruitment per se and more focused on unionism as process. That is, if strong workplace union organisation is to be built and sustained in the longer term, then union activity required re-constructing around principles of member participation at multiple levels.