Industrial Relations Journal 30:5 ISSN 0019-8692 Job regulation and the managerial challenge to trade unions: evidence from two union membership surveys Colin Whitston, Alan Roe and Steve Jefferys Data from a survey of union activists in twelve unions, and from a survey of members of the Communication Workers Union, are used to argue that changes in labour management and work organisation do not provide scope for social part- nership at work, but do represent new difficulties for collec- tive representation. This article presents evidence from two surveys of trade union members and acti- vists. It argues that changes to work organisation and the management of labour represent a challenge to union workplace controls. They do little to win workers commitment to corporate goals, or to provide a grounding for social partnership. At the same time, however, the ‘frontier of control’ at the workplace is not only con- tested terrain between workers and employers. It is also the site of differences among workers in respect of how they see their interests represented. These differences are one ground on which management fights its battle for hearts and minds. Discussions of the labour process were dominated for many years by the issue of ‘resistance’. This idea has been criticised for its indiscriminate usage, underestimating the degree to which it ‘. . . was confined to the terms of labour’s subordination to capital’ (Whitston, K. 1997: 4). More recently the tenor of discussion has shifted, with recession, restructuring, and new managerial initiatives challenging a supposed entrenchment of job controls. Thus, Metcalfe (1989) argued that the 1980s saw a pro- ductivity boom based on the erosion of unions’ ability to qualify managerial preroga- tive, and the ‘fear factor’ of unemployment. ❒ Colin Whitston is Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, Keele University, and Associate Fellow of the Industrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick, Alan Roe is Education Officer, MSF, and Steve Jefferys is Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, Keele University. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA. 482 Industrial Relations Journal
Transcript
Industrial Relations Journal 30:5ISSN 0019-8692
Job regulation and themanagerial challenge to
trade unions: evidence fromtwo union membership
surveys
Colin Whitston, Alan Roe and SteveJefferys
Data from a survey of union activists in twelve unions, andfrom a survey of members of the Communication WorkersUnion, are used to argue that changes in labour managementand work organisation do not provide scope for social part-nership at work, but do represent new difficulties for collec-tive representation.
This article presents evidence from two surveys of trade union members and acti-vists. It argues that changes to work organisation and the management of labourrepresent a challenge to union workplace controls. They do little to win workerscommitment to corporate goals, or to provide a grounding for social partnership. Atthe same time, however, the ‘frontier of control’ at the workplace is not only con-tested terrain between workers and employers. It is also the site of differences amongworkers in respect of how they see their interests represented. These differences areone ground on which management fights its battle for hearts and minds.
Discussions of the labour process were dominated for many years by the issue of‘resistance’. This idea has been criticised for its indiscriminate usage, underestimatingthe degree to which it ‘. . . was confined to the terms of labour’s subordination tocapital’ (Whitston, K. 1997: 4). More recently the tenor of discussion has shifted,with recession, restructuring, and new managerial initiatives challenging a supposedentrenchment of job controls. Thus, Metcalfe (1989) argued that the 1980s saw a pro-ductivity boom based on the erosion of unions’ ability to qualify managerial preroga-tive, and the ‘fear factor’ of unemployment.
❒ Colin Whitston is Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, Keele University, and Associate Fellowof the Industrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick, Alan Roe is Education Officer,MSF, and Steve Jefferys is Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, Keele University.
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA.
482 Industrial Relations Journal
In many ways these findings are unsurprising. The relationship between workorganisation, productivity, and ‘resistance’ is ambiguous. Trade unions have neverbeen ‘against’ productivity or the introduction of new technology as such (see Daniel,1987; Clark, 1993). Restrictive practices have usually been up for sale, except whereemployers are determined to end rather than negotiate relationships. Current dis-cussions of social partnership are, from this point of view, only pacific restatementsof Cannon’s dictum that ‘. . . out of the hardest struggles have come the best agree-ments and the best working practices’ (Elliot, 1978: 76). Indeed, union approaches toproductivity gains and social partnership usually reflect quite closely the existingbalance of class power. For example, Citrine maintained, in the aftermath of thegeneral strike, that unions could only defend their members’ interests through takingresponsibility for productivity alongside the employers (Milne-Bailey, 1929).
By contrast, contemporary advocates of management-led reform argue that changeleads to workers being more committed to employers’ objectives (see Hanson andMather, 1988; Peters and Waterman, 1982). Lean production was welcomed by Auto-motive News in America as creating ‘. . . an industrial world in which workers sharethe challenges and satisfactions of the business’ (Babson, 1995: 2). The assumptionis that management attitudes have changed, enabling them to work more co-operat-ively with workers (Cave, 1994: 127; Bacon and Storey, 1996a). In the USA suchpractices were seen mainly as a feature of non-unionised workplaces (Foulkes, 1980;Kochan et al., 1986), although Babson et al. (1995) chart the extension of all forms of‘lean’ production and HRM policies into the unionised sector. In the UK change issupposedly concentrated in unionised workplaces (Sisson, 1993; Millward, 1994: 129).It was this latter argument that contributed to the formulation of TUC policy onHRM and social partnership (TUC, 1994).
While some argue that a union presence promotes commitment, participation, andinvolvement (Leighton, 1992), others maintain that in many cases management havebeen unable to dispense with unions in the short run, (Hyman, 1989: 32; Storey,1992: 242–262). Nevertheless, while piecemeal introduction of workplace change mayqualify its effects, it is often intended to exclude or weaken the position of unions(Smith and Morton, 1993). In either case job controls are seen as crucial. Terry arguesthat steward organisation in the 1970s suffered from hidden weaknesses of ‘econom-ism’, and a refusal by management to concede formalisation of bargaining overmanagerial relations. Thus, while he concludes that UK unions cannot do withoutlocal organisation in a period of decentralisation (1995, 225) the experience in recentyears has been a move from bargaining autonomy to workplace isolation for manyworkers, or from centrally bargained job controls to decentralised weakness(Waddington and Whitston, 1994: 811).
Whitston and Waddington conducted the first survey reported here at the Univer-sity of Warwick between 1991 and 1993. They argued that the results showed thatchange had been piecemeal, rather than the result of a coherent employer strategy.Instead, work intensification, rather than empowerment, had been the substantialoutcome for most workers (Waddington and Whitston, 1995). The relevant resultsare reviewed in the next section.
In this context the findings of the second survey are particularly instructive.Research for the Communications Workers Union (CWU), conducted in 1996 by theauthors of this article, investigated member perceptions of the role of management,and the national and local union, in representing their interests on a series of collec-tive bargaining and job control issues in the telecommunications and postal indus-tries. The results form the third section of this article.
Responses in the CWU survey showed clear differences among members in theirperceptions of the role of the union in managerial as opposed to economic relations.In particular, management was cited by a significant number of members as bestrepresenting their interests on a range of job control issues, and this presents a prob-lem for effective unionism irrespective of any HRM initiatives.
The two surveys were conducted at different times, and for different purposes,and this makes their integration a problem. In particular, the evidence on worker
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grievances in the Warwick survey could not be reproduced for CWU members. How-ever, the sectoral specificity of the CWU survey complements the general picturedrawn by the Warwick survey, and both highlight points of interest for futureresearch into unions and job controls. Social partnership is the express grounds onwhich New Labour seeks to reconstruct industrial relations. These data represent animportant source of empirical evidence in terms of workers’ attitudes and experi-ences. The results cannot, of themselves, settle the questions arising from currentdebates, but they can inform that debate.
The Warwick survey: an activist perspective on managerialchange
The experience of change in the UK is mixed. Amongst other sources a series ofWorkplace Industrial Relations Surveys (WIRS) identified some of the key elements ofworkplace change since 1980 (Daniel and Millward, 1983; Millward and Stevens,1986; Millward et al., 1992; Millward, 1994). WIRS argued that two features are cen-tral to developments in the UK. First, workplace change is rarely implemented as asingle coherent package. Second, workplace changes are more likely to be found inunionised rather than non-unionised workplaces, and to operate in conjunction withexisting procedures rather than as their replacement. For the most part the empiricalevidence on both the extent and the impact of change has relied on managerialinputs. The results here reflect, by contrast, the perceptions of union activists. Inother words, if there is evidence of a fundamental shift in workplace relations andmanagement attitudes, it is most likely to be found at the workplaces from whichthis sample is drawn.
The data used are from the Trade Unions Into The 1990s Project conducted at theIndustrial Relations Research Unit, University of Warwick by Colin Whitston and JeremyWaddington, and the results have been comprehensively reported in Waddingtonand Whitston (1995, 1996), parts of which are replicated here. This project involvedtwelve major trade unions whose membership covers the entire industrial and occu-pational spectrum of employment in the UK. This article uses the responses of morethan 6,000 activists. The active members held at least one of the following six laypositions; shop steward, senior shop steward, convenor, branch secretary, branchpresident or branch officer.
Work organisation and labour management
Activists were asked about selected management practices affecting significant num-bers of the members they represented. For each practice two measures are provided;the first shows coverage three years prior to the survey, while the second shows itat the time of the survey. The difference between the two illustrates the perceivedgrowth of each practice. Only two groups of practices are discussed here. The firstcomprises features of work organisation and labour management, including meas-ures aimed at increasing worker commitment to management goals. The second com-prises measures to increase time and staff flexibility. Additionally, Waddington andWhitston (1995) found that a more extensive use of individualised payment systemswhich incorporate closer monitoring of performance and which involve direct link-ages between output and pay have extended managerial authority.
Changes in work organisation and labour management were widespread. How-ever, it is clear that task flexibility, multiskilling and teamworking were more com-mon, and were growing more rapidly than single status arrangements. Task flexi-bility was reported by 31 per cent of respondents and had grown by over 25percentage points, while the figures for multiskilling were 31 per cent and 24 percent-age points respectively. Similarly, teamworking covered more than 27 per cent ofworkplaces and had increased in coverage by more than 21 percentage points. Altog-ether, these figures suggest considerable gains by employers in the field of labour
Figure 1: Per cent of active members reporting workplace changes as affecting significantnumbers of the members, at the time of the survey and 3 years before (N = 6,432)
utilisation across a range of occupations. It remains an open question whether thesegains in labour utilisation have been ‘sold’ to management by workers or have beenextracted from workers by management, although Ingram (1991) suggests the formerrather than the latter.
Single status arrangements were found at fewer than 5 per cent of workplaces.These results duplicate those recorded from surveys of managers (Millward, 1994;104–113), but predate the 1998 agreement that introduced single status in localgovernment. Oliver and Wilkinson (1989) argued that such arrangements have notbeen confined to Japanese-owned manufacturing sites, and others that they form akey element in encouraging flexibility and commitment (IRS, 1993). Given the claimsmade, it is significant that the coverage of the measure is so limited, suggesting thatworkplace relations remain hierarchically demarcated.
Among other measures aimed at developing employee commitment team briefingscovered the largest number of workplaces, and were the fastest growing. They werereported in no less than 54 per cent of workplaces and had grown in coverage bymore than 39 percentage points in the three years preceding the survey. Teambriefings entail only a one-way channel of communication and are a dubious formof direct participation or ‘worker empowerment’ by any definition. Quality circles,for which more claims are made (Collard and Dale, 1989), were reported at a rela-tively low 25 per cent of workplaces, and had been growing at half the rate of teambriefings. The relative emphasis on team briefings suggests that management is opt-ing for those elements of workplace change that have the least effect on workplacepower relations.
Marginalisation may be counterposed to empowerment where flexibility is intro-duced primarily on management terms, producing insecurity or casualisation ofemployment. Respondents were asked about the numerical and working time flexi-bility measures shown in Figure 2. For each they were asked whether there had beenno change, a growth, or a decrease. Figure 2 presents the data in the form of a chartcalculated by subtracting the proportion of respondents answering ‘less’ from thoseanswering ‘more’
The chart shows that use of five of the measures intended to increase flexibilityhad been increased in the three years prior to the survey. Only overtime had declinedin coverage. This probably reflected the effects of the recession that coincided withthe distribution of the survey in the manufacturing sector, but it may also reflect thesuccess of other forms of numerical and time flexibility (Waddington and Whitston,1995: 429–430). Contracting work out and the use of sub-contract labour increasedat more than 40 per cent of workplaces. These results are slightly higher than the 30per cent recorded in WIRS for 1990 (Millward et al., 1992: 340). WIRS included bothunionised and non-unionised workplaces. The results in this survey are of unionisedworkplaces only, suggesting that unions have not been able to resist moves towardscontracting out and the use of sub-contract labour.
Job regulation and trade unions 485 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999.
Figure 2: The proportion of active members reporting workplace changes to promote timeand staff flexibility affecting significant numbers of the members they represent (N = 5,984)
Increases in the employment of part-time and casual labour have long character-ised adaptations to changing product market conditions (Lewis, 1987; Sproull, 1987;Dale and Bamford, 1988). Active union members report further growth in the cover-age of these measures: part-time work, 131 percentage points, casual labour, 122percentage points. Furthermore, there was an overall increase of 14 percentage pointsin the use of shift working. In summary, these data point to wide-ranging increasesin the flexibility of working time.
The evidence points to a very mixed experience at the workplace, with traditionalsystems of control and reward existing alongside or blended with practices whichextend the autonomy of managerial authority. Similarly, there is evidence of manage-ment successes in improving labour utilisation through increases in flexibility. Suchchanges are consistent with evidence from the USA on ‘management by stress’(Babson, 1995).
However, there is also some evidence in this survey to suggest that these changeshave been accompanied by the introduction of practices that are claimed to improvecommitment, if mostly of the weaker kind. If claims for the motivating capacity ofthese measures are to be substantiated, the pattern of workplace grievances shouldindicate changes in the attitudes of managers towards workers and vice-versa. Incontrast, if these claims are without substance the pattern of workplace grievancesshould indicate the effects of closer managerial control at the workplace and workintensification.
Membership grievances
Active members were asked to specify the three grievances that they pursued mostcommonly in the formal grievance procedure on behalf of their members. The data,therefore, do not cover all grievances, but only those most frequently handled. Also,it was impractical to request data covering the three-year period used in the case ofwork organisation and labour management. This means that the data on grievancesare a single-frame snapshot. To keep the data manageable here only those grievancestaken by more than 10 per cent of active members are dealt with.1 Data from the5,924 active members that responded are shown in Figure 3.
Attempts to increase labour flexibility are reflected in 16 per cent of active membersreporting flexibility issues as the source of one of their three most common griev-ances. Furthermore, pay is reported as one of the three most frequently handled
1 Other grievances and the frequency that they were reported by active members include: equalityissues, 1.1 per cent; holiday issues, 8.2 per cent; welfare issues, 5.7 per cent victimisation, 5.1 per cent;hours, 6.8 per cent; race/sex discrimination, 1.0 per cent; pensions issues, 2.7 per cent; productioncontrol/speed, 5.3 per cent; redundancy, 8.0 per cent; assaults, 0.7 per cent; and other, 7.4 per cent.
Figure 3: The distribution of workplace grievances as reported by active members—N = 5924(per cent of activists reporting grievances)
grievances by almost a quarter of active members. If flexibility is being sold for higherrates of pay, grievances over the settlement of these rates are central to workplacerelations.
Staffing levels and workload are reported among the three most commonly pur-sued grievances by over 17 per cent and 21 per cent of activists respectively. Theeffort bargain and work organisation evidently remain at the heart of the employ-ment relationship. The emphasis placed on staffing levels and workload points towork intensification underpinning the pattern of workplace grievances. Furthermore,the citing of discipline as a source of grievances by over 23 per cent of activists isalso evidence of tight workplace controls enforced by line management. In addition,20 per cent of activists mention the interpretation of agreements, and a further 18per cent grading issues, among the top three individual grievances. These resultsindicate a continued attachment to collective controls over labour organisation andeffort.
Similarly, the working environment remains central. No fewer than 37 per cent ofactive members reported health and safety as being one of their three most commonsources of grievances. As work intensification endangers physical and psychologicalhealth, this result is consistent with the argument that work intensification is at thecore of workplace relations. A contributory factor to the high incidence of health andsafety grievances may be the ‘redefinition’ of grievances as health and safety issuesthereby enabling recourse to a legal procedure that is familiar to active members(Nichols, 1991).
Given the claims for the new labour management practices, it is significant that43 per cent of activists placed management attitudes or behaviour among the topthree individual grievances. This result belies a fundamental change in workplacerelations in the direction of worker empowerment. Management attitudes were themost significant source of grievances reported by active members. It appears thatthere is a critical mismatch between policy formation, and the daily experience ofwork. This mismatch may be explained in terms of the prevalence of commitmentmeasures reported in the previous section that are soft on power. Put starkly, anyincreases in worker commitment accruing from team briefings or quality circlesappear insufficient to overcome differences in the workplace between managers andworkers when the intensification of work is underway. The design of such policiesby senior managers is relatively easy, but their application is more difficult for linemanagers.
The picture of the world of work as experienced by a broad spectrum of trade
Job regulation and trade unions 487 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999.
union active members underlines the need for caution when estimating the pace anddirection of change. Whatever innovative features may be found within particularworkplaces, other developments ensure that change is more uneven, more muddled,and less radical than many would lead us to believe. A more cautious assessment isrequired of workers’ experience of commitment, participation and involvement. Inparticular, the effects of measures intended to enhance employee commitment areundermined by those arising from measures to increase competitiveness throughwork intensification. The centrality of management attitudes as the principal sourceof grievances also suggests that there has not been a fundamental shift in manage-ment behaviour. The reluctance to move away from the elements of change that aresoft on power, and the widespread adoption of pay systems which incorporate themonitoring of individual effort, suggests that tightening control remains the over-arching objective of management practice at the workplace.
The CWU survey at Keele: evidence from the communicationsindustry
While the broad evidence from Waddington and Whitston provides an importantbenchmark for discussion, evidence from specific sectors is needed to trace the devel-opment of managerial practice, and its reflection in the employment relationship.Our second survey, conducted among members of the CWU in 1996, allows a closerexamination of how activists and members experience and evaluate change.
The survey consisted of a postal questionnaire of a representative sample of 3065members with a 53 per cent response rate. It sought information on, inter alia, per-sonal profiles of members, union communications, perceptions of the merged unionas well as issues regarding workplace relations and union bargaining agendasreported on here. In addition a number of group interviews were conducted withlay members who held no representative office, from each of the various sections.Responses from these are used to supplement the questionnaire data.
CWU membership covers all grades of labour except managers in British Telecom(BT) and the postal service. BT has, since privatisation, experienced substantial joblosses and work reorganisation, while Royal Mail remains in the public sector andhas not faced any substantial labour shedding, but did experience substantial indus-trial action following the employers’ attempt to introduce teamworking in 1996
Industrial relations within Royal Mail have received a deal of attention since anACAS report in the early 1990s suggesting that management, unions and employeesoperated as three separate units. Bacon and Storey suggest that, after initial temp-tations to marginalise the union were frustrated by membership loyalty, managementsought to change the culture of the organisation by adopting a new industrialrelations framework agreement, as well as by introducing measures to promote ‘qual-ity’ and employee commitment (Bacon and Storey, 1996b: 238–240).
The background to these developments was the commercialisation of the service,as well as the threat of privatisation. In the mid-1980s Ferner and Terry argued thatcommercialisation and political pressure had undermined the ‘traditional’ public sec-tor ethos of labour management and industrial relations (1985: 16–17). Martinez Luciocharts the evolution of industrial relations within Royal Mail from a form ofenterprise unionism based on ‘partnership principles’, through to management’sbelief that ‘direct communication and a new industrial relations strategy would haveto parallel traditional links with the unions’ (1995: 238). This work paints a far bleakerpicture than that drawn by Bacon and Storey. Similarly, Darlington argues that man-agement strategy from 1992 can be explained in terms of attacks on ‘strong workplaceunion controls and autonomy’ (1993: 3). While Darlington’s findings referred to alimited number of city sorting offices, his account emphasised how the employersought both flexibility and union marginalisation through TQM and HRM strategies.Our survey was not concerned directly with the Royal Mail dispute, but was com-missioned as part of an assessment of the impact of the merger that created the CWU.
Nevertheless, the dispute necessarily impacted on the survey results, and this mayexplain some, at least, of the results.
The following sections deal with representational issues and bargaining demands.Members were asked two questions. The first establishes who, in their opinion, bestrepresented their interests on a number of issues. The second analyses the relativeimportance of a number of issues.
Representation on issues
Members were asked to nominate who best represented their interests on a numberof work issues. Table 1 gives the result for the whole sample.
Out of 11 issues the majority felt that ‘the union’ best represents their interests onfour: ‘pay’, ‘job security’, ‘health and safety’, and ‘pensions’, of which the ‘localunion’ received a higher response than ‘national union’ only on ‘health and safety’.At least a third of respondents felt ‘the union’ best represented them on three issues:overtime, staffing levels, and part-time and temporary work. ‘New technology’ wasviewed as a stronger issue for the ‘national union’ than for the ‘local union’.
Importantly, management were cited as best representing their interests by betweena third and a half of respondents on six issues: staffing levels, overtime, volume ofwork, new technology, duties allocation, and training. These comprise a substantialrange of issues relating to managerial relations and job controls.
With the exception of health and safety and issues connecting part-time and tem-porary workers, the union is only seen as best representing their interests by mostrespondents in respect of market relations. The exception of health and safety is, how-ever, highly significant since it indicates that members can require the union to inter-vene in areas which affect work organisation and the management of labour(Whitston and Waddington, 1994).
It is not easy to categorise those responses saying that individuals best representedtheir own interests. For some this may indicate a lack of confidence in the union, forothers it may indicate confidence in their own abilities to argue a case, a viewreflected in a member’s comment:
Some of are stronger than others and will, you know, stand up for ourselves. Mm, unfortunately,I’m one of those, so I don’t tend to involve the Union much. (Laughs)
Job regulation and trade unions 489 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999.
Table 2: Five issues viewed as largely managerial matters
Respondents saying that nobody represented their interests clearly feel powerless.Below we analyse in depth the five issues shown in Table 2 where a majority ofrespondents felt that either management or nobody best represented their interests.
The respondents can be divided into three groups according to how they view theunion on these ‘managerial relations’ issues:
I A High Union group (234 respondents, 14 per cent) who said that either thenational or the local union best represented their interests on all the above fiveissues.
I A Low Union group (597 respondents, 37 per cent) who said that either themanagement or nobody best represented their interests on all the five issues.
I A Mid Union group (798 respondents, 49 per cent) who varied their responsesor non-responses across the five issues.
Table 3 shows how these High, Low and Mid Union groups are distributed by sexand by union constituency compared with the division of the whole sample (all):
These findings identify a significant core of about one in ten members who consist-ently view the union’s role as important on managerial control issues as well as onmarket relations. Such a core of members may play a significant leadership andmobilising role, especially in moments of conflict, viz a viz the half of the membershipthat does not hold consistent ‘managerial’ views.
The distribution of High, Low, and Mid Union attitudes differs between men andwomen, and between union constituencies. However, and significantly, the differ-ences are so small as to fall within a 65 per cent margin of error. This indicates thatsex and occupational characteristics need not be reflected in attitudes towards theunion. Additionally, Table 4 analyses the age and length of service distribution ofboth the High and Low Union attitude groups.
Those with Low Union attitudes are significantly younger than the High Uniongroup and also have slightly more respondents in the shorter years’ service group.The Low Union group also has a slightly higher proportion of Conservative voters,
Table 3: Frequency and proportion of High, Low, and Mid Union respondents
High Low MidFreq. per cent Freq. per cent Freq. per cent
and a much lower proportion of Labour voters than the High Union group. Respon-dents in the Low Union group were also nearly twice as likely not to have voted in1992 than those in the High Union attitude group (11 per cent to 6 per cent).
The Low Union group was slightly less concerned with job insecurity than werethe High Union respondents. They were less likely to report that their jobs had beenunder threat than were respondents in the High Union group (51 per cent to 55 percent), and were more likely to report that their jobs had never been under threat (40per cent and 34 per cent).
As would be expected there were some significant differences between the Lowand High Union attitude groups when respondents were asked another questionabout how much importance they gave to different union policies. Figure 4 belowcompares High and Low Union attitudes to the importance of the union securingincreased influence over the employer:
Figure 4: The importance assigned to more union influence with management by High andLow Union attitude groups
Job regulation and trade unions 491 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999.
Figure 4 shows that respondents in the Low Union group are less likely to say itis crucial for the union to raise the issue of more influence with management. Never-theless, 79 per cent of this group does report that more union influence is either acrucial or a very important issue for the union. This is important because it indicatesthat this group is not necessarily hostile to more union influence with management ingeneral. Evidence from discussion groups adds to our understanding of these issues,addressing both the difficult circumstances faced by the union, and the balancebetween fatalism and a willingness to resist. The balance of opinion in the discussiongroups on the national Union was that the CWU was less strong than formerly, asshown by the comments below:
I don’t know if their powers are dwindling, but that’s the impression that I get occasionally.
Weaker. Because of the government laws that is . . .
BT are so much stricter though, aren’t they though?
More BT employees than those in the Post Office shared this view. Members recog-nised, however, that the political conditions under which the Union is operating arestacked against it:
Unions have taken a right bashing in recent years, haven’t they? The Tories and that . . . AndI think now, at the time when generally they have been weaker, I think the CWU are doingvery well.
BT management is viewed as having a particularly strong hand, making it moredifficult for the Union to achieve advances for members:
I think we do try and put up a stand, but I think it’s very very hard. You know they’re tryingto bring in six o’clock working for us, and they sort of stopped that a little while. But you knowit’ll come eventually, cos BT’s so much stronger, or they seem to be so much stronger than theUnion.
In most departments BT management prevents union reps having the same closecontact that they used to have with their members:
The Union used to come round on the floors, and they used to be able to walk round and talkto us and things like that. Management won’t allow them in now . . . They have their meetingswith Management, and they go into the office, see them come out and they very rarely come andsee us, because they’re not allowed to. They have to have permission. And they’re not given per-mission.
Elsewhere BT managers even feel confident enough to disrupt Union communi-cations:
We’ve got a lot of the Management against it (the Union) as well. It’s like (the Union rep)’ll comeround and he’ll put letters on everyone’s desk, and then the chap’ll come and move them all offthe desks.
Fatalism about the ability of the Union to resist was particularly strong among BTclerical workers. Nevertheless, among engineering interviewees there appeared to besome confidence in the potential of a collective response to management:
There’s lots of people you can get to talk to at times who say, ‘The Union can’t do anything’.And you have to try and tell them: ‘You know, if we all stick together we can do something!’.You know, if we all just knuckle under like that, we are lost.
The clerical and postal section discussion groups appeared less concerned to dis-tinguish the role of the local union from that of the national union than did theengineers, where there was much more open criticism of their Executive:
I don’t think the Executive live in the real world . . . We’ve had them down at the union meetings,and they seem surprised at what’s going on, what management do! So whether they speak to adifferent kind of Management at the top than there is first line management, I don’t know.
Table 5 reports on the different attitudes taken by the Low and High Union attitudegroups to the importance of the union raising health and safety, training andimproved job security with management:
Table 5 shows that while there are significant differences between the two groupsthere is not a gulf between their attitudes. On health and safety there is no differencewhen the categories Crucial and Very Important are taken together, but it is clearthat the High Union group was more likely to rate this issue as crucial. The sameapplies to job security.
Health and safety and job security were issues where the majority of respondentssaid that either the local or the national union represented their interests best. Theissue of training is interesting here, because it was one that defined the differencebetween the two groups; that is, the Low Union group saw their interests on trainingbest represented by either management or nobody, while the High Union group sawthe union as the best representative. Yet, when asked how important it is for theunion to raise with management the issue of more training opportunities, there isno discernible difference between the groups.
These findings suggests that the differences between the attitudes of the twogroups may centre not so much on what they think the union ought to be doing,but on how effective they perceive union action to be. This view is reinforced whenreference is made to group discussions on training:
Interviewer: What about things like training?
Don’t get any, any more really (Laughter)
Well the thing is, it’s very sparse.
You may find that 50 per cent of the people get the training, and the rest they’ll say ‘You willget it’, and you’ll just get a piece of paper shoved at you, and saying ‘That’s it’.
A common theme in all the group interviews we conducted was the reduction intraining given to new and existing employees. Where it was still given it was criti-cised as being done hurriedly, often at some time away from the moment it wouldbe used, and over too short a period to allow the employee to gain any real benefits:
Over the years they’ve stopped training . . . When I first started, 10 years ago, before I was even,you know, allowed to touch a letter on the floor, I was given three or four weeks of inductiontraining.
The thing is, Royal Mail preach this. They preach it all the time. In papers like The Courier, don’tthey? And say ‘We are all for training!’ But they don’t say where. Where is it?
In many cases physical training and familiarisation courses appear to have beenreplaced by more passive learning approaches (over which, perhaps, union influenceis not seen as being so relevant) using documents, videos and PC packages:
But now it’s all in-house. Every new piece of equipment we get we’ll say, ‘Where’s the training?’And they go: ‘There’s a package on that PC, go through it when you’ve got a spare moment’.
Table 5: The importance assigned by High and Low Union attitude groups towards issuesfor the union to raise with management
Importance 1 = crucial; 1 1 2 = either crucial or very important
Job regulation and trade unions 493 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999.
Bargaining issues to raise with management
However unionised workers may see the respective roles of management and unionsin terms of interest representation, the ground for that representation remains in thesphere of collective bargaining. This section discusses a range of bargaining issues,and, in contrast to the division of respondents into High, Medium, and Low Uniongroups, explores the attitudes of office holders, and active (defined as meeting-attending) and passive (non-meeting-attending) members allowing a closer examin-ation of the role of leadership at the workplace. Respondents were asked to rank aseries of bargaining issues from crucial to unimportant. The full results are in Table 6.
There was little difference between the sectors on the top four bargaining issues.Nearly all thought that ‘job security’, ‘security of pay and pensions’, ‘pay’, and ‘betterpensions/pensionable pay rights’ were either ‘crucial’ or ‘very important’.
Some differences emerged between union sections when respondents chose whichof these issues were ‘crucial’. For example, better pay was chosen as ‘crucial’ by 64per cent of postal members but by only 37 per cent of clerical, and 44 per cent ofengineering members. Improved pensions/pensionable pay rights were identified as‘crucial’ by 52 per cent of postal and by 49 per cent of engineering members, but byjust 42 per cent of clerical members.
There were differences in response between union post holders, the larger groupof ‘active’ members, and the ‘passive’ members. Table 7 compares the proportionsof these groups identifying the various bargaining issues as ‘crucial’.
Lay union post holders are often expected to have different attitudes to the restof the membership, arising from their greater level of union activity, and from theirindustrial relations experience. The wider group of more ‘active’ members may alsogenerally be expected to express a ‘greater militancy’ than the more ‘passive’ mem-bers, if only because of greater exposure to union information. Yet these expectationsdo not always hold good, as is shown in Table 7 overleaf.
On the issues of security of pay and pensions, health and safety, job security, moreunion influence, and rights for part-time workers the spread of views is as expected,
Table 6: The importance of bargaining issues: per cent responding
with more post holders than active members, and more active members than passivemembers seeing them as crucial. These issues are ones that may, perhaps, be expectedto have greater importance for those involved in long-term bargaining relations withthe employer at local level.
On pay, holidays, and shorter hours, issues where local post-holders play little orno direct role, the nomination of ‘crucial’ by post holders is closer to passive membersthan to the active (meeting attending) members. This may be the result of post hold-ers more closely identifying with the national union’s moderating position, or it maybe as a result of the post holders’ greater exposure to information and argumentsfrom the employer leading them to ratchet down their expectations.
As a whole these results indicate that there is a considerable degree of consensusamong members, and that both post holders and active members more generally,while playing a leading role in defining the bargaining agenda, are in good touchwith the broader membership.
ConclusionsThe data presented here demonstrates that there is little evidence for a new orderin the workplace in which the structured antagonisms of the past have been replacedby homogenous interests, or even qualitatively improved co-operation. Certainly,the Warwick survey showed that companies were adopting some measures usuallypromoted as aids to securing worker commitment. These were dominated, however,by measures often described as soft on power, and did not, in any event, generallycome as a coherent package. In this we concur with other research findings, includingprincipally those of Millward et al. (1992). Instead we found evidence of work intensi-fication and the closer managerial control of labour.
Indeed, both surveys showed a real attachment to rather traditional views of collec-tive interest representation, and to collective bargaining. Among CWU members eventhe ‘low union group’ showed a high level of support for the proposition that theunion should have more influence on management decisions. Interview evidencefurthermore showed that this union attachment remained in the face of perceivedincreased management hostility to joint regulation on a collective basis.
The limiting factor here, and the factor that makes all social partnership policiesproblematic, is the dynamic of accumulation that transforms all gains in labour pro-ductivity into an extended platform for exploitation. In very short order capitalist
Job regulation and trade unions 495 Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999.
competition renders all labour saving measures as labour intensification. The publicsector status of the bulk of the CWU’s membership is no protection against thisdynamic, as successive management measures have acted as a transmission belt forcommercial and political pressures for work intensification. It is this contradictionwhich can, in exceptional circumstances, raise disputes over the distribution of pro-ductivity gains into broader social struggles to transform the basis of production asa whole. Such a possibility requires, however, a far broader challenge to classrelations than that contained by the boundaries of the ‘frontier of control’, and ofthe job controls—formal and informal—that constitute it.
This fact is itself rooted in the nature of capitalist employment relationships. WhatPalloix called the ‘porosity of the working day’ (1978) ensures that there is a constantdrive towards intensification. The empirical evidence in this article, especially fromWaddington and Whitston, confirms this, but it also points to other important factors,which mediate this experience for workers. Two points need to be made here. Firstly,outwith dramatic changes in production techniques (and, indeed, alongside them),labour intensification is often experienced as an incremental affair which can disguisethe process quite effectively both for individuals and for generations of workers. Fora discussion of this effect on worker perceptions see Edwards and Whitston (1991).The pattern of worker grievances discussed here, especially with regard to flexibilityand other gains in labour utilisation by management, are entirely consistent withthis. Secondly, both practically and ideologically, productivity gains often presentthemselves to workers not as the subordination of labour to capital, but as reified,natural, phenomena (see, for example, Schmiede’s 1978 discussion of the logic of‘Fordist’ production).
In short the subjective side of the equation needs proper consideration if currentdevelopments are to be understood, and this leads to a third point. Fox (1974) triedto explain the limits of pluralism in UK industrial relations in terms of trust, or itsabsence. He referred, essentially, to institutional trust, or the relations between unionrepresentatives and managers, but it must also be seen in terms of worker percep-tions. Here matters tend to elude the orthodox treatment of industrial relations. Cur-rently, with attention focussed on supposed ‘commitment strategies’, the degree towhich workers maintain a ‘them and us’ attitude (or to which managers do, cometo that, as Kelly and Kelly 1991 have argued) is an important factor in the restructur-ing of work. Evidence of a mismatch between policy and practice, with roots incompetitive pressures, has been noted in a number of case studies (Edwards andWhitston 1993). In other words, while managers claim that recent workplace changeis associated with greater workforce commitment to management objectives, the cen-trality to the pattern of grievances of management attitudes suggests that this com-mitment is, at best, qualified. Further, the evidence suggests that this mismatch isoften ‘invisible’ to the institutional actors to the degree that unions may becomeassociated in the minds of some workers as part of the system of workplace controls.
Nevertheless, evidence from CWU members does suggest that, employers canmake inroads into workers’ trust in certain circumstances, especially among thosewith a low union consciousness. Bain and Price (1993) argued that the ‘credit effect’of union bargaining gains was an important factor in union growth. The evidencehere also suggests that unions can forgo this effect in the workplace. This willdepend, among other things, on the degree that managers have real rather than for-mal control over labour management, irrespective of bargained relations, or thatunion job controls are seen simply as part of the local scenery, with little sense ofownership by workers. Nevertheless, even where workers identify managers as bestrepresenting their interests on some matters, there is little evidence that this is dis-placing unionism, nor that it reflects new areas of workplace co-operation that couldstand independently of union organisation.
These competing perceptions are likely to be present at all workplaces. What isimportant is the relationship between these perceptions, local and national unionleadership, and the new managerial agenda. Neither the absence nor the presenceof teamworking, or any other element of an ‘HRM strategy’, is sufficient to explain
the status or evolution of job controls. What is important is the union response, andhow far members can be mobilised around the proposition that it is both necessaryand legitimate to intervene in managerial as well as economic relations. In this sensethe foundations of New Labour’s version of social partnership is a misrepresentationof the reality of the employment relationship growing from an uncritical acceptanceof the rhetoric surrounding HRM in general, as well as TQM and other nostrums,including the now less fashionable idea of ‘Japanisation’.
Some of the confusions surrounding the debate can be illustrated by Grint’s (1993)suggestion that pre-1939 labour management practices in the post office prefiguredthe so-called Japanisation effect in the UK, and showed that such practices were notnecessarily alien to UK industrial relations traditions. He refers to life-long employ-ment, seniority, and a form of enterprise unionism as evidence. Despite the referenceto the 1930s the argument is essentially ahistorical, since it cannot address the reasonsfor current pressures for change. These, as Burchill argues, represent the periodicsearch for managerial touchstones aimed at producing ‘. . . not just a more flexibleworkforce, but a weaker and more malleable one’. Burchill goes on to characteriseJapanisation (and his strictures apply to a number of HRM variants) as ‘ . . . not post-Taylorism, but a Taylorism supplemented by information technology and a pervasiverhetoric concocted by the newly established business schools’ (1997, 193).
In these circumstances the ‘battle for hearts and minds’ at the workplace is anessential part of labour management, and an attempt at subordinating and undermin-ing independent collective representation, and, crucially, collective definitions ofworker interests. A consequent problem for unions is that a partnership approachmay leave them both ideologically bereft of meaning for workers, and rob them ofaccess to job control mechanisms which not only express workers’ independent inter-ests, but are an important element of their construction.
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