Search results

Randy Hodson’s categories offer an ambitious, comprehensive framework for analysing the objective and subjective conditions that shape dignity and resistance at work. In this chapter, we engage with Hodson and his collaborators work through exploring its potential usefulness in helping understand the experience of low-skill and low-paid factory workers at the end of supermarket supply chains in the United Kingdom. In emphasising the purposeful and strategic actions of workers to attain and maintain dignity within work, and management-influenced conditions that destroy or deny it, Hodson’s perspectives overlap with themes in more recent labour process theory that elaborate expanded notions of labour agency. While we share such concerns, we also identify some limitations to the framework and its explanatory powers, particularly where threats to dignity are associated with concepts of abuse and mismanagement. Our investigations of the supermarket supply chain reveal that management, authority and work organisation in these plants is not, by and large, ‘abusive’, ‘chaotic’ or ‘anomic’. Such terminology creates the unavoidable impression of pre-rational workplaces based on arbitrary, personal power. In our cases, the plants are not much ‘mis-managed’ as managed rationally according direct and indirect pressures exerted through supply chain power dynamics. Hodson’s framework for addressing issues of dignity and to a lesser extent resistance, remain an indispensable but incomplete entry point for understanding its dynamics.

The paper will offer a work in progress report of a three year research project, which started in February 1991, at the Local Economy Research Unit, Hatfield Polytechnic. The project is concerned with an exploration of industrial relations and work organisation in the primary suppliers of firms who are in the process of introducing Just‐in‐Time (JIT) systems of work organisation and buyer:suppliers. Thereby, investigating a largely unresearched area. The initial stage of the research, which the paper reports, is concerned with the implementation and utilisation of JIT/TQM within the buyer company. An analysis of the changes in work organisation of the buyer company will provide the framework for considering how these demands/changes are translated into demands on the supplier, in what form and with what rationale

Analyses the UNI‐Europa Graphical Sector (UEGS) agreement on European co‐ordination of collective bargaining initially made in 1999. Explains the purpose of the agreement, its objectives, its main components, the principles underpinning it and the mechanisms by which it is reviewed. Provides empirical data on the extent to which graphical trade unions (all affiliated to the UEGS throughout Europe, in their 2000 collective bargaining round with graphical employers, were able to make accommodations consistent with the spirit of the co‐ordination of collective bargaining agreement. The research is based on official publications of UEGS, the Minutes of its Collective Bargaining Committee, the reports of its annual general meetings and attendance at its Annual Collective Bargaining Conference for Negotiators.

This article is concerned with exploring changes in the organisation of work in the graphical industry. The aim is to examine the link between employer attempts to restructure work and resilience of the prevailing machinery of collective regulation within the sector. It is structured around three main areas of work organisation change, notably the search for organisational flexibility, attempts to recast the nature of work and finally the intensification of work. It concludes by arguing that threats to union organisation emanating from the restructuring of work currently appear to be at the “edges”. The argument is that a “community of interest and identity” predicated upon strong levels of union organisation has created the necessary apparatus to redress or resist attempts to dilute unionism. However the article closes by highlighting the continuing gender segregation within the sector and argues that this community of interest must extend to cover all workers within the industry.