Advances in Industrial & Labor Relations: Volume 13

Volume 13 of Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations (AILR) contains eight papers that deal with a variety of industrial relations topics. The first chapter, by Stephen Hills and Teresa Schoellner, analyzes the influence of the creation in 1999 of the European Monetary Union (EMU) on the deregulation of part-time work in each of the 13 EMU member nations. The second chapter, by Cynthia Gramm and John Schnell, provides a systematic review and analysis of the effects of flexible staffing arrangements (e.g. temporary employment) on individuals working under such arrangements, regular employees in the same organizations, organizational performance, and macroeconomic outcomes. The third chapter, by Alexander Colvin, analyzes the adoption, structure, and function of peer review and arbitration type dispute resolution procedures, respectively, for nonunion employees in two different business units of the TRW company. The fourth chapter, by Sue Fernie and David Metcalf, nicely complements the Colvin paper by examining the uses and implications for employee voice, conflict resolution, and fairness at work of ombuds arrangements in four British enterprises.

Decreased regulation of part-time work is one way a country responds to high rates of unemployment. Proponents of deregulation argue that a more flexible labor market is required to allow labor markets to clear. A more traditional response to high unemployment is change in monetary policy, where interest rates are lowered to stimulate the economy and increase rates of employment. Both policies have been tried in Europe, a good place to study the effects of the two policy responses, both because European unemployment has been high and because the trade off between monetary policy and the deregulation of part time work has varied from country to country. The establishment of the European monetary union (EMU) in 1999 created a natural experiment in which any one country’s ability to adjust its monetary policy was curtailed, creating pressure for deregulatory policies to come into play (Aaronovitch & Grahl, 1997; Pisani-Ferry, 1998).

Traditionally, hiring indefinite duration contract employees has been the dominant method used by U.S. organizations to staff their labor needs. Indefinite duration contract employees, hereafter referred to as “regular” employees, have three defining characteristics: (1) they are hired directly as employees of the organization whose work they perform; (2) the duration of the employment relationship is unspecified, with a mutual expectation that it will continue as long as it is mutually satisfactory; and (3) the employment relationship provides ongoing – as opposed to intermittent – work. When their demand for labor increases, organizations staffed exclusively by regular employees can respond by having their employees work overtime or by hiring additional regular employees. Conversely, when their demand for labor decreases, such organizations can either maintain “inventories” of excess regular employees or reduce labor inputs by laying-off or reducing the work hours of regular employees.

This paper investigates the adoption, structure, and function of dispute resolution procedures in the nonunion workplace. Whereas grievance procedures in unionized workplaces have been an important area of study in the field of industrial relations, research on dispute resolution procedures in nonunion workplaces has lagged behind. As a result, our knowledge of the development of nonunion procedures remains relatively limited. Similarly, with a few noteworthy exceptions (e.g. Lewin, 1987, 1990), our knowledge of workplace grievance activity is almost entirely based on research conducted in unionized settings. Given the major differences in the institutional contexts of union and nonunion workplaces in the United States, existing ideas about workplace dispute resolution developed in the unionized setting will likely require significant modification in order to understand dispute resolution procedures and activity in the nonunion workplace. Issues relating to dispute resolution in the nonunion workplace are of increasing importance to public policy given the combination of continued stagnation in levels of union representation and mounting concerns over rising levels of employment litigation in the courts. Knowing what nonunion dispute resolution procedures look like and how they function will help answer the question of what role these procedures may play in the future governance of the workplace.

In his review of theoretical and empirical research on grievance procedures, Lewin (1999) states that the “grievance procedure is widely regarded by scholars and practitioners as the centerpiece of union-management relations.” It is somewhat strange, then, that a trawl through British industrial relations publications for the 1980s and 1990s reveals very few dealing with the process for resolving employment disputes in unionised workplaces (usually articles about industrial tribunals, now called employment tribunals). Given this paucity of studies in unionised workplaces, it is less surprising that almost no research has been published recently on how employees and management in non-union firms go about dealing with individual conflict in the workplace today.

Since the 1980s the U.S. has experienced a variety of partnership arrangements between labor and management focused on improving industrial relations and organizational performance (Ichniowski et al., 1996; Kochan et al., 1986; McKersie, 2002; Rubinstein & Kochan, 2001). Yet there is an absence of research comparing these partnerships across industries and evaluating the factors that: (a) contribute to their success; (b) seem to be barriers to achieving their stated goals; or (c) predict which ones will stand the test of time. (For exceptions see Preuss & Frost, forthcoming 2003; Rubinstein, 2001b). This paper summarizes recent U.S. experience with partnerships; identifies factors that seem to influence the formation and sustainability of partnerships, including the development of network ties across traditional boundaries; and suggests theoretical and empirical implications of this experience in building and sustaining partnerships at work. We draw on a variety of types of evidence from the authors’ cumulated experience and research with more than 50 such partnerships in the U.S., spanning multiple industries and multiple decades.

Cluster analysis is applied to the union and employer tactics used in a sample of Ontario organising campaigns to identify the combinations of tactics or strategies that are used most often. Seven union organising strategies and five employer resistance strategies are revealed. Contingency table analysis shows that the union and employer strategies are not independent of one another. More active campaigns by one side (in terms of more tactics used) are met by more active campaigns by the other side. Regression analysis is used to estimate the effects of the strategies on the outcome of the organising campaign. The most active strategies, including intensive communication with workers and worker committees, work best for the employers. For unions, strategies emphasising personal communication through house calls are the most effective.

The campaign for striker replacement legislation, which began in the late 1980s and had effectively ended by the mid-1990s, was the most important political battle over labor legislation since the defeat of the Labor Law Reform Bill in 1978. Striker replacement was the AFL-CIO’s top legislative priority in the early 1990s and, coming quickly after the passage of NAFTA, which labor had opposed, the defeat of its campaign solidified organized labor’s reputation for failure in legislative battles. As yet, however, the political campaign for striker replacement legislation has attracted surprisingly little attention from industrial relations scholars.

The primary objective of this paper is to understand the extent to which Australian industrial relations academics took up the different heuristic frameworks from USA and U.K. from the 1960s to the 1980s. A second objective is to begin to understand why, and in what ways ideas are transmitted in academic disciplines drawing on a “market model” for ideas. It is shown that in the years between 1960s and 1980s a modified U.S. (Dunlopian) model of interpreting industrial relations became more influential in Australia than that of U.K. scholarship, as exemplified by the British Oxford School. In part this reflects the breadth, flexibility and absence of an overt normative tenor in Dunlop’s model which thus offered lower transaction costs for scholars in an emergent discipline seeking recognition and approval from academia, practitioners and policy-makers. Despite frequent and wide-ranging criticism of Dunlop’s model, it proved a far more enduring transfer to Australian academic industrial relations than the British model, albeit in a distorted form. The market model for the diffusion of ideas illuminates the ways in which a variety of local contextual factors influenced the choices taken by Australian industrial relations academics.