Innovation in Isolation: Labor-Management Partnerships in the United States

In the United States, as in other advanced industrial countries, worker participation in management has taken on increasing importance, placing pressures on employers and unions to change how they deal with employees/members, and with each other. This paper examines two of the most impressive cases in the U.S.: the partnerships between General Motors (G.M.) and the United Autoworkers union (U.A W.) at Saturn and between BellSouth and the Communication Workers union (C.W.A.). We outline the evolution and the basic features of these innovations, as well as highlighting certain ongoing problems. These problems, we argue, confront the parties to employment relations in the U.S. more generally, reflecting profound ambivalence about such experiments, and their continued isolation as ‘islands of excellence ’. As such, these cases both illustrate the vast potential for labor-management partnerships as well as the dampening effect of the employment relations context in the U.S

Perils of the High and Low Roads: Employment Relations in the United States and Germany

[Excerpt] The U.S. crisis is characterized by growing income inequality, a shrinking safety net, and the decline of worker representation. Like the German crisis, it is caused in part by intensified global competition. Unlike in Germany, problems in the United States have also been exacerbated by deregulation, short-term horizons (e.g., quarterly reports to shareholders), and the decline of the labor movement. Both Germany and the United States, however, have substantial political, economic, and social resources to use in solving their problems. The contemporary crises do not appear for either of these countries to foreshadow a major collapse like that of the Great Depression. We are confident that actors in Germany and the United States can and will pursue reforms, including policy innovations and negotiation. In so doing, we suggest that these societies—the two strongest western economies—have a great deal to learn from each other and from their common experience in the global economy. They do not need, and are unlikely to get, convergence. Yet, each could benefit significantly by adopting elements and aspects of the other\u27s institutions, practices, and policies. In this chapter, the focus is on employment relations, which we believe are central to the broader economic and social problems in each society. We consider the following two interrelated questions. First, exactly how do the internal and external pressures on employment relations emerge in each country? Second, in what tangible forms do these pressures appear on the ground, where labor and business (and, more indirectly, other political, social, and economic actors) interact to perpetuate, alter, or scrap certain modes of production, including service delivery, work organization, and negotiation

Labor, Business, and Change in Germany and the United States

The chapters explore the proposition that the benefits of either the German coordinating institutions or the United States\u27 more decentralized political economy each entail trade-offs that may be necessary but politically unpleasant. The authors also offer comparisons of sectoral and firm-level adjustment processes for change.https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1181/thumbnail.jp

Conclusion: Markets, Strategies, and Institutions in Comparative Perspective

[Excerpt If this had been another collection of country case studies, it would now be possible to map out the similarities and differences across the cases covered, possibly in a figure describing various IR-related issues by country. However, since this is a collection of different kinds of analyses with a variety of different focuses, the job of concluding this volume is not so simple. Nevertheless, in the very variety offered by the chapters in this volume, several themes emerge, most of which are at least implicitly, if not explicitly, clarified in the five substantive chapters. The chapters point up the need to analyze industrial relations developments in the context of a changing global economy—especially the context of the broader competitiveness pressures and debates that have taken center stage on national political and economic agendas. They illustrate the simultaneous pressures for decentralization and a realignment of the division of labor between central and local decision making and activities. They draw our attention to the continuing importance of existing institutions in shaping industrial relations outcomes and the increasingly important role also of actor strategies in shaping outcomes and influencing how institutions are used. Finally, the chapters underline the importance of including labor as a major negotiating partner if the benefits of economic growth and competitiveness are to be widely diffused across different socioeconomic groups and strata, as well as the continuing viability of a model of industrial competitiveness that excludes collective labor influence, whose benefits accrue to isolated segments of society and economy—not just in the developing world but in advanced industrial countries as well

Introduction: A Wide-Angle Lens for a Global Marketplace

[Excerpt] We hope in this volume to accomplish three things. First, we hope to meet the wide and growing demand in the IR community for a better understanding of industrial relations developments abroad. That is, we would like to help lift comparative IR out of its secondary status to a more prominent position within the field as well as reaffirm its centrality to other fields, such as comparative political economy and political sociology. Secondly, we aim to shed light on the specific comparison between other advanced industrial economies and industrializing countries, on the one hand, and the U.S., on the other. Since employee representation in the U.S. is experiencing a crisis more profound than in many, if not most, other countries, we believe that the effort to draw as many lessons as possible from other cases is well timed. Finally, we hope to move the field forward in its effort to specify a theory of industrial relations that can update the "New Deal Model." Recently industrial relations scholars have been reaching toward higher levels of analysis to balance the field's traditional shopfloor focus and explain events that the country-centered framework cannot capture (see, for example, Kochan and Osterman 1995). Likewise, after decades of focusing on macro-level variables, comparative political economists (such as ourselves) are increasingly interested in trying to understand shopfloor industrial relations (Thelen 1991; Turner 1991; Wever 1995). We hope this work will aid in these endeavors.Turner1072_Introduction_A_Wide_Angle_Lense_for_a_Global_Marketplace.pdf: 62 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020