21st‐century models of employee representation: structures, processes and outcomes

• Date: 01 July 2007
• Author: Andy Charlwood,Mike Terry
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2338.2007.00451.x
• Published date: 01 July 2007

21st-century models of employee

representation: structures, processes

and outcomes

Andy Charlwood and Mike Terry

ABSTRACT

The 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey allows further exploration of the

fate or workplace-based forms of employee representation charted by earlier surveys.

We describe the occurrence and diversity of representational forms, union, non-union

and ‘hybrid’, and the structural characteristics of workplaces where they are found.

We go on to analyse a number of structural and processual differences and differences

in outcomes. In particular, we try to estimate the effects of different forms for

outcomes such as wage dispersion, procedural ‘fairness’ and productivity. The data

show that ‘hybrid’ systems of union and non-union representation are associated with

the best outcomes, therefore, notwithstanding the continuing decline in the diffusion

of the ‘traditional’ union-based model of workplace representation, union presence is

still a prerequisite for effective representation, while ‘pure’ non-union forms serve

neither employee nor employer interests.

INTRODUCTION

For over 40 years, the policy and theory of employee representation has been pro-

foundly influenced by a particular idealised model of representation. Essentially,

this was identified as a collective of union-based shop stewards, close to the mem-

bership and democratically accountable to them; working within but often indepen-

dent from, wider union structures and engaged in continuous negotiations with

local management in collective bargaining over terms and conditions of employ-

ment, wages in particular. The outcome, celebrated as the central achievement of

British trade unions, was characterised as joint regulation of a wide range of terms

and conditions of employment. Related outcomes were held to include both higher

wages and better working conditions than non-union employees, and also fairer

employment conditions (flatter wage structures, although too often issues of gender

and race equality were ignored) and procedural fairness in matters such as discipline

❒Andy Charlwood is Associate Professor of Industrial Relations, Warwick Business School; Mike Terry

is Deputy Dean of Warwick Business School and Professor of Industrial Relations and Organisational

Behaviour. Correspondence should be addressed to Dr Andy Charlwood, Warwick Business School,

University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK; e-mail: andy.charlwood@wbs.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal 38:4, 320–337

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2007 The Author(s)

Journal compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Rd, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and Main St., Malden,

MA 02148, USA.

and grievance handling. Joint regulation was the product of negotiation between

powerful parties, each with its own battery of sanctions to be called upon when

needed; a form of industrial ‘power-sharing’ (to paraphrase Flanders and the

Donovan Commission). These shop stewards were traditionally jealous of their

right to represent employees, refusing, in rhetoric if not always in practice, to

countenance non-union forms of representation (see e.g. Coates and Toopham,

1988: 161).

This analysis, probably only applicable to a small number of workplaces even at

the height of shopfloor trade union power, has nevertheless exerted a powerful

influence as a ‘benchmark’ against which shopfloor trade unionism is, often impli-

citly, judged. From such a perspective, the relentless decline of workplace represen-

tative structures charted in successive Workplace Industrial Relations Survey

(WIRS) and Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) since the mid-

1980s has been interpreted as evidence of possibly irreversible weakness as ever

more workplace union bodies failed to come anywhere close to this ideal. More

than this, it has been taken as evidence of the fracturing of the ‘system’ of industrial

relations that existed in Britain prior to 1979 (Millward et al., 2000).

Over the last 20 years, these surveys, supplemented by a rich array of case-study

research (see e.g. Gollan, 2002; Oxenbridge and Brown, 2002; Terry, 1999), have

started to chart alternative approaches to the analysis of employee representation, by

indicating how many of the features previously summarised have been modified or

discarded and how many new ones have been adopted. Analysis of workplaces

outside the manufacturing and public sector heartlands of 1970s unionism has indi-

cated the adoption of new models of representation. However, much of this has been

informed by a prevailing mood of pessimism. This is clearly seen in the dominant view

of ‘workplace partnerships’ as representing not an exciting opportunity to redefine the

nature and purpose of workplace unionism as argued by its (predominantly trade

union) advocates but rather a compromised, weakened, self-defeating strategy (see

Terry, 2003, for a summary of competing arguments).

WERS 2004 enables us to take a fuller and richer view of the state of workplace

employee representation early in the 21st century than any of its predecessors. We are

not just mapping the new terrain of employee representation, but sifting through the

pieces of Great Britain’s increasingly varied system of industrial relations to identify

and describe the diversity. We are able to do this because the latest WERS probes

more carefully than before the dimensions of representative structure, processes of

engagement with employers and outcomes, both for organisations and employees. It

includes—and this too is an indication of the changed environment—the most thor-

ough survey evaluation to date of the extent and nature of non-union representative

systems. It also allows examination of the interplay between union and non-union

representatives in workplaces where they coexist.

STRUCTURES

The survey enables us to examine the extent to which traditional collective shop

steward-based employee representation still exists and the sectors and workplaces in

which it survives. It allows us to contrast this with different, allegedly weaker forms

of union representation, where a single shop steward works alone, or where there

is no shop steward present at all. The evidence from Kersley et al. (2006: 126)

suggests that union representation is not being replaced by non-union forms of

32121st-century models of employee representation

© 2007 The Author(s)

Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007