Workplace Partnership and Employee Voice in the UK: Comparative Case Studies of Union Strategy and Worker Experience

This article addresses the role of ‘employee voice’ in workplace partnership. Drawing on two organizational case studies from the UK’s aerospace sector, it analyses employee experiences of two key dimensions of worker participation in partnership environments: joint consultation and union representation. Specifically, it investigates what consultation and union representation actually mean for employees in the context of different union responses to employer-driven partnership agendas. The article finds predominantly negative patterns of employee experience and attributes this partly to management control strategies and the short-termist dynamic of British manufacturing capital.

[1]  K. Sisson.  Personnel management : a comprehensive guide to theory and practice in Britain , 1994 .

[2]  Edmund Heery,et al.  Partnership Versus Organising: Alternative Futures for British Trade Unionism , 2002 .

[3]  W. Brown.  Putting Partnership into Practice in Britain , 2000 .

[4]  Neil Conway,et al.  Human Resource Management and Corporate Performance in the UK , 2003 .

[5]  P. Boxall,et al.  Strategy and Human Resource Management , 2002 .

[6]  M. Cully,et al.  Britain At Work : As Depicted by the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey , 1999 .

[7]  G. Murray.  Work and employment relations in the high performance workplace , 2002 .

[8]  P. Haynes,et al.  Partnership as union strategy: a preliminary evaluation , 2001 .

[9]  Sandra E. Black,et al.  What's Driving the New Economy?: The Benefits of Workplace Innovation , 2000 .

[10]  Alex Bryson.  Have British workers lost their voice or have they gained a new one , 2000 .

[11]  Michael Terry.  Partnership and the Future of Trade Unions in the UK , 2003 .

[12]  Rick Delbridge,et al.  Manufacturing in Transition , 1998 .

[13]  Howard Gospel,et al.  Finance, Corporate Governance and the Management of Labour: A Conceptual and Comparative Analysis , 2003 .

[14]  A. Bryson.  Employee desire for unionisation in Britian and its implications for union organising , 2003 .

[15]  Paul Sparrow,et al.  Human Resource Management: the new agenda , 1998 .

[16]  C. Lloyd.  What Do Employee Councils Do? The Impact of Non-Union Forms of Representation on Trade Union Organisation , 2001 .

[17]  Sandra E. Black,et al.  What's Driving the New Economy?: The Benefits of Workplace Innovation , 2000 .

[18]  M. Stuart,et al.  Assessing partnership: the prospects for, and challenges of, modernisation , 2002 .

[19]  Jeff Hyman,et al.  Managing Employee Involvement and Participation , 1995 .

[20]  R. Peccei,et al.  Partnership at Work: Mutuality and the Balance of Advantage , 2001 .

[21]  J. Waddington.  What do Representatives Think of the Practices of European Works Councils? Views from Six Countries , 2003 .

[22]  Geoffrey A. Broad.  Japan in Britain: the dynamics of joint consultation , 1994 .

[23]  Mike Richardson,et al.  High Performance Work Systems and Workplace Partnership: A Case Study of Aerospace Workers , 2004 .

[24]  Yuan Cheng,et al.  Restructuring the Employment Relationship , 1998 .

[25]  Charles Koeber,et al.  Manufacturing Advantage: Why High-Performance Work Systems Pay off , 1999 .

[26]  Adrian John Wilkinson,et al.  NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN EMPLOYEE INVOLVEMENT , 1991 .