Conference on Organized labour
Responses to the Conference Paper
Professor Colin Crouch
European University Institute, Domenico di Fiesole, Italy
28 August 1998
Thank you very much for including me in your circulation of details of the Network on Organized Labour in the 21st Century. Your preliminary review is an excellent summary of the current situation, though it possibly underestimates the constructive opportunities that are available to unions at the present time. However, in order to discuss these it is necessary to consider different types of labour and union separately; there are very few general prescriptions that can be offered.
1. Distinctions within labour
1.1. The most important distinction is between those countries where governments have some dependence on unions, either for general social stability or for more technical questions of economic management, and those where government can ignore unions without incurring any problems. In the former cases governments can be encouraged to introduce legislation assisting unions in the struggle for recognition from employers, and for the maintenance of a decent minimum of working conditions which can provide a floor for union action. (Both these have become more difficult in recent years to achieve through bargaining alone.)
1.2. The distinction between these two different types of political context is quite complex: it is not a matter of advanced countries in the first group and poorer ones in the second. In the first group come all cases where union co-operation is needed for some wider policy purpose: for example, countries forming the new European Single Currency zone, where union co-operation will probably be needed for stability pacts; or countries involved in welfare-state reform and where unions have a role in the management of pension schemes and other elements of social policy. Also included are countries where insecure political systems or problems of social order make unions important actual or potential pillars of social stability. Examples would be several countries in central and eastern Europe and also in south-east Asia. Among countries where unions find it far more difficult to demonstrate a general value to governance include (obviously) all cases where political regimes have successfully suppressed union rights, but also cases like the UK and USA where the structure of industrial relations makes it difficult for unions (or employers' associations) to play that kind of role.
2. Unions in dictatorships
2.1. In the dictatorship cases (which covers a high proportion of newly industrializing countries) it is very difficult to know what to advise unions to do apart from engage in difficult and dangerous social struggle. It is possible that eventual democratization and the growing dependence of economic systems on labour co-operation (that comes with gradually rising skills) will eventually lead to breakthroughs - as we have seen in recent years in Korea. One can of course advocate measures that could be taken by the advanced countries, such as the insertion of basic individual and collective rights clauses in the criteria for participating in global free trade. In theory the World Trade Organization could become a structure for enforcing certain minimal labour standards just as it enforces trading rules. However, given the prevailing orthodoxy among international organizations and the US government that labour rights should be reduced rather than advanced (in the interests of free trade), there is little prospect of these ideas becoming practicable in the foreseeable future.
3. Unions with a claim to power
3.1. Within economies where unions do have a serious claim to be taken seriously, especially by governments, they have serious possibilities for developing a role, though it is still necessary to differentiate according to different types of worker and labour market.
3.2. The revival of national concertation: To start with familiar territory, as already noted there has been, especially in the western European euro zone, some revival of national stability pacts involving quite sophisticated and effective exchanges of wage restraint and flexible labour market reform for advances in new kinds of labour rights. These have in no way been mere repetitions of the neo-corporatist arrangements of the 1960s and 1970s; they have had to come to terms with the new autonomy of the company level of industrial relations, and they have had to interpret labour rights in the context of flexibility, casualisation, temporary and part-time work, etc. described in the ILO review. The details of these new syntheses of old corporatism with new labour markets repay careful study, as they contain lessons that might be selectively imitated more generally. The leading examples would be the Danish and Dutch system reforms of the early 1990s; at a less detailed technical level Italian developments since 1993 provide interesting examples of how a largely rhetorical and political social pact can gradually grow in practical detail and importance.
3.3. Unions within the firm:
These national developments require both increased technical expertise by unions and an ability to produce compromises between industry- or national-level actions and autonomous approaches within larger firms. Unions' capacity to do this will be enhanced if they can also acquire the expertise to become valuable advisors to workers' representatives within the firms. Solving this problem would also help tackle another of the challenges listed in the ILO review: how to appeal to highly skilled, individualized employees involved in company HRM strategies? The beginning of the answer to this question is the observation of the extreme asymmetry in the position of managers and employees (even highly skilled ones) within HRM and other schemes. Management participate in these forums on the basis of massive advice and help from consultants, specialized training and a literature. Employees in contrast simply stand alone with just their individual resources. There should be a gain to the whole corporate process, but certainly to the employees, were workers to have access to similar advice and knowledge. How are problems tackled in best-practice companies? Are there ways of solving problems that are more convenient to employees? What kind of expertise can employees contribute to the improvement of working practices? Unions need to develop so that part of their role is that of being 'employee consultants' in the same way that management has management consultants.
3.3.1. The work would be a complex mix of technical skill advance, positive-sum ideas for the good of the company, and more conflictual protection of employees' interests. It is very difficult for unions to develop the resources to enable them to provide competent services of this kind, but if it can be achieved the prizes could be great in terms of increased attractiveness to highly skilled and committed employees, bridging the gap between the individual firm and the more general industry and national levels, and feedback to the unions that would improve their competence in national and industry forums. The idea is not far-fetched. Some German unions have provided this kind of service for works councils for many years, and organizations representing professional workers (teachers, medical practitioners, etc) have long done this.
3.4. Unions and women:
Different approaches are needed for the mass of routine workers who remain outside these advanced schemes, and for the insecure precarious workers. The best prospects for growth in the former category lie with women in private services: the big growth area of the economy and the sector where unions are weakest. It is highly unlikely that these women will be willing to engage in struggle for union rights. This is therefore an area where unions need governmental or legal help in establishing their respectability and in making it easy to secure recognition. Where unions' political contacts make this difficult to achieve there will be major limitations on growth possibilities. However, both in these cases and in those where legal recognition rights can be used, unions will only be able to recruit women if they address issues of importance to them, which are often different from the issues that interest men in unions' traditional recruitment areas or men and women in public services. This is obvious, and unions in several countries - especially Scandinavia and the UK - have learned what to do. Others need to do the same.
3.5. Precarious work: up-market forms:
More difficult than recruiting women is the role of unions among precarious workers of various kinds, as discussed in the ILO review - though the categories overlap as a disproportional number of precarious workers are often female. Perhaps a further distinction is useful among this group. Some of the people who accept temporary contracts are in fact confident, well skilled people whose occupational identity is based in their set of skills, which they take from firm to firm or sometimes operate in a self-employed capacity. These people seem remote from the normal modern trade-union member, but they are in fact very similar to the original trade unionists in the early 19th century: skilled workers moving from job to job, and needing their union as an aspect of occupational identity and source of employment opportunities as much as for negotiation with a specific employer. Attracting this kind of worker to membership in a union in today's circumstances will include something similar to that discussed above in connection with the 'employee consultant' model. The union function will have to be combined with help in maintaining skills and expertise, in addition with information on job openings and also identification of particular legal changes and employer policies that are required to make the working lives of this type of worker more comfortable. There is here a particularly subtle combination of individual services and forms of collective representation.
3.6.1. Precarious work: down-market forms: Most precarious workers of course do not have skills of this kind. There might be some chances of mobilization of these people through alliances between unions and other social movements (e.g. housing movements, or those among ethnic minorities as minority communities are strongly represented among the precarious). Beyond that this is an area where government co-operation will be important to unions in making it easier to secure union recognition and ensure minimum working standards. This will remain a difficult task, as governments often want the extreme flexibility and low labour costs that are core features of precarious work. Governments do however have an incentive to co-operate with unions in solving the problem of illegal work, as this involves governments in considerable loss of tax revenue. This issue therefore becomes one on which unions should work.
3.6.2. An approach to precarious, highly flexible work which contradicts mainly traditional union stances, but which may hold much promise in the future, concerns the role of temporary work agencies (such as Manpower Inc or Randstad). Unions have usually opposed those, since they confuse the employment relationship. Temporary agency staff working within a firm are unlikely to be interested in improving conditions within that firm as such, while the agency that employs them does not constitute a work place. However, if means can be found of regularizing the employment position of these agencies and establishing the unionization of their staff, and if unions can work out ways of representing agency employees as such, there will be a major improvement. On the one hand a very useful form of flexible working will be able to develop without union opposition, and with union involvement. Some progress has been made on issues of this kind in the Dutch labour-market reforms, while some individual agency firms have found ways of co-operating with unions.
4. Conclusion
The above is all pitched at a very general level, as an initial response to the ILO invitation to participate requires. The actual tasks described however all need detailed work. This is in fact one of the principal messages of the above proposals: unions need considerable detailed knowledge of issues going beyond their traditional competence if they are to advance in the coming years. Only a few unions - largely in Germany and Scandinavia - have the resources and expertise necessary to play such a role. This could be another point at which networks of academics could be useful. In addition to their professional knowledge in the area, many industrial relations academics have a sympathy for the cause of organized labour and would willingly give freely of some of their time to help unions acquire the new expertise that they need. In many countries this is a resource that is not well used, but where a little organization could lead to major improvements.
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