What Workers Say About Their Representation and Participation: Lessons from a Linked Set

What workers say about their representation and participation: lessons from a linked set of employee voice surveys in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand

Professor Peter Boxall

Department of Management and Employment Relations

University of Auckland

Abstract

This seminar reports the overall findings of a representative set of surveys of employee attitudes to workplace voice in six countries in the Anglo-American world: the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. In a project led by Richard Freeman, Peter Boxall and Peter Haynes, teams of researchers extended the work of Freeman and Rogers (1999) on the US and Diamond and Freeman (2002) on the UK to other parts of the Anglo-American world. The aim was to compare the voice workers have in their workplaces with the voice they want to have and to facilitate interesting forms of within-country and cross-country analysis. This seminar will report the overall findings as interpreted by the project leaders. It will address four sets of questions about the representation and participation of Anglo-American workers at their workplace:

1. Union representation gaps: To what extent, if at all, do workers want greater union representation than they have at their workplaces? Are some groups of workers more frustrated in their inability to gain union representation than others? Are some workplaces or sectors more prone to frustrated union demand?

2. Worker attitudes to representation generally: In the broadest possible terms, how do workers feel about the different ways their interests are represented in their firm? What can unions, in particular, learn from worker desires for representation and assessment of the effectiveness of institutions to meet those desires?

3. Worker attitudes to participation and styles of voice: How do workers feel about employer-driven forms of influence? Are these forms more effective when complementary with unionism? How well do they work independent of unionism? What styles of engagement with employers do workers seek?

4. Employee voice and public policy reform: Are there “institutional rigidities” that render public policy on employee voice ineffective in some Anglo-American countries? What institutional models are more successful in giving workers the voice they seek at workplaces?