TRADE UNION REPRESENTATION OF EMPLOYEE INTERESTS AT THE WORKPLACE LEVEL

The article discusses trade union representation of employee interests at the workplace level. The author analyzes the structure of the company trade union organization, the facilitations in its functioning and the most important rights, including the right to collective bargaining. The analysis is the basis for assessing the current regulation and formulating conclusions for the future.

Dialing for Change: Organizing Call Center Workers in the 1990s

This article contrasts two Communications Workers of America (CWA) strategic organizing campaigns at Sprint and Southwestern Bell wireless in the 1990s. In the first case, the NLRA failed to protect Sprint workers after their employer closed the call center to avoid a union election, despite a complaint filed by a Mexican union under labor provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the second case, the CWA's “bargain to organize” strategy neutralized Southwestern Bell's opposition, and 40,000 wireless workers chose CWA representation under a negotiated neutrality/card-check recognition process. This article demonstrates how neoliberal regulatory changes in the telecommunications sector in combination with weak labor laws fostered the decline in union representation in this vitally important and dynamic sector of the economy.

The potential of a union default to influence the preferences and choices of non-union workers in unionised workplaces

This article questions the perception of non-union workers as rather rigid and out-of-reach non-unionists by using research conducted in New Zealand. It explores whether, under new institutional architecture, non-unionists would continue to exhibit the same preferences and exercise the same choices as before. This was done by testing their responses to a union default scenario. The significance of this study concerns how this particular group of workers, contra non-union workers in non-union workplaces, would react to a union default where a union is already available to them. By contrast, non-union workers in non-union workplaces not only at present have effectively no choice for gaining union representation but are also bereft of any experience of it in their workplace. The results suggest 44% of these employees would join as a result of a union default with union density consequently rising in New Zealand from 17–18% to 26–27%.

Staff Representation Rights Related to The Creation Of Employee Capital Plans (PPK)

The article presents the role of the staff representation under the Act of 4 October 2018 on Employee Capital Plans. Employee Capital Plans (PPK) are the part of third pillar of polish pension system. By creating the PPK, the legislature placed the staff representation and the employer under an obligation to co-decide on the form of the created capital plan. The method of identifying the staff representation, as defined in the Act on Employee Capital Plans, is modelled on the regulation contained in the Act on Occupational Pension Schemes. The Act on Employee Capital Plans states, that an occupational trade union organisation operating within the premises of the company excludes the competence of representation of employees. The legitimacy of the primacy of the trade union over the non-union representation of the staff stems, first of all, from the possibility of guaranteeing the employees’ effective participation in the selection of the financial institution.

Not so exceptional? Prosocial influences on union support among US workers

US unions have often been characterized as ‘exceptional’ in their weakness and conservatism compared to their Western European counterparts. American organized labor is associated with a ‘business unionism’ philosophy that assumes American workers are only pragmatic and materialistic, seeing their unions as vehicles for improving the terms and conditions of employment at their workplaces. Such an analysis omits the potential power of a belief that unions work to improve society. Applying an experimental vignette design based on a survey of over 1000 employed persons, this article examines whether ‘workplace instrumentality’ is the only motivation for workers to support unions. The authors consider the likelihood of voting yes in a union representation election to test the efficacy of two less studied predictors – perceiving unions as positively influencing society and perceiving them as facilitating workers’ voice in union policies and practices. Logistic regression shows that the most influential beliefs associated with union support were that unions improve terms and conditions of employment for represented workers (‘union instrumentality’), that unions positively influence society (‘prosocial unionism’), and that unions offer workers substantial influence on union policies and practices (‘worker say’). Researchers and union organizing campaigns should consider devoting greater attention to the social benefits of unionism and to union democracy.

Collective labor relations and juridification: A marriage proposal

Contributing to debates over relations between the collective and juridified regulation of labor, this article analyzes a rich case study in the Israeli construction sector to claim that juridification can spur unions and employers’ associations to initiate strategic and inclusive change. By subsuming processes of juridification into traditional IR frameworks and embracing its logic and practices, the corporatist social partners broaden the relevance of collective labor relations to workers otherwise excluded from direct union representation. In this way, while not increasing union density or improving wages, these ‘traditional’ IR actors reassert their monopolistic control over worker and employer representation, as well as over the sectoral labor market.

Trade Union Representation in the Philippines

This chapter discusses the various characteristics of maritime trade unions in the Philippines within the wider context of the history of the country’s industrial relations and labour movement. The main historical focal points in the country’s labour environment and how these shaped industrial relations today is introduced in the first section. In the second section the development of seafarers’ representation in the country and the profile of their trade unions in the context of the country’s labour history is discussed. The final section concludes with a discussion of the trends and challenges faced by unions representing Filipino seafarers today.

New Labor Actors Under Corporatism: Complementarity and the Renewal of Class Representation for Precarious Workers

Labor scholars identify increased roles of “new labor actors,” such as civil society organizations, in workers’ representation. Previous work found their increasing tendency to cooperate with unions, opening these up to inclusion of precarious workers. Praising these cooperative relations, research has understated other interactions that might develop between labor actors and their contributions to workers. Focusing on the relations among new labor actors and unions in the context of Israeli corporatism, this article analyzes conflictual interactions among labor actors and their implications of these for union legitimacy as well as for workers’ representation. Comparing two cases—of noncitizen Palestinian construction workers, and of subcontracted cleaning and security workers—the article argues that “conflictual complementarity” persists in the relations between labor actors in corporatist contexts. Conflictual complementarity is identified as based on sectoral traditions, contributing to transformations in union representation of precarious workers.

Corporate Governance, Employee Voice and the Interests of Employees: The Broken Promise of a ‘World Leading Package of Corporate Reforms’

Following a series of corporate governance scandals which involved exploitative treatment of workers, reforms were introduced to the UK’s corporate governance system in 2018, presented both as an attempt to rebuild trust and to afford a stronger voice for workers in that system. This paper explores the new landscape from a workers’ voice and protection perspective. It highlights that, while corporate governance has a role in ensuring workers’ needs are met, there is a tension between the goals of any reforms in this territory: board-level employee representation could be seen as a way of democratising the economy and valuing the part played by labour in that process, but it could also be seen as a way of increasing corporate value, economic performance or employee motivation, and disregarding the implications for labour. It is argued in this paper that worker protection requires a more genuine workplace democracy with full involvement of trade union representation. This would also help to broaden the corporate governance framework’s horizon towards a more genuine stakeholder vision beyond the existing tokenistic legal and regulatory nods in that direction.

Did Right-To-Work Laws Impact Income Inequality? Evidence from U.S. States Using the Synthetic Control Method

In this paper, we use the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) to examine the impact of a state’s adoption of a Right-To-Work (RTW) law on income inequality. We explore possible pathways through which RTW laws may impact inequality, namely, unionization, investment, and wages. Our finding of a lack of impact of RTW laws on inequality is further supported by findings of a lack of impact of the law on these variables. Our results follow Farber (1984), who suggests that RTW laws may simply mirror pre-existing preferences against union representation. Hence RTW laws are not the primary driver of changes in inequality.