Abstract
This chapter analyzes the nature of employee participation in the United States making use of the framework provided in Katz and Darbishire (Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems. ILR/Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2000), which describes various patterns of industrial relations in union and nonunion workplaces as well as recent pressures that have increased the variation in work practices within the various work practice patterns. Historically, there has been very few cases of national-level tripartism in the United States due to the prevalence of decentralized collective bargaining, a relatively small union sector, and strong market-oriented and voluntarist traditions. This goes along with the fact that employer organizations are relatively unimportant in the United States. Since the early 1980s, some meaningful efforts of union and employee engagement in work restructuring have emerged at the shop-floor level, but these local labor-management partnerships have not broadened.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This sophisticated human resource management pattern developed in a few non-union firms in the 1950s and had roots in earlier corporate policies of the 1920s (often labeled welfare capitalism).
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Delta Airlines is not a pure case of this non-union pattern because its pilots are unionized.
- 4.
For a history of the personnel policies followed by Sears, see Sanford M. Jacoby (1997) Modern Manors.
- 5.
For evidence on the role of the founding executives, see Fred Foulkes (1980) Personnel Policies in Large Nonunion Companies.
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This discussion relies heavily on Katz and Kochan (2000, pp. 392–394).
- 7.
Fact Finding Report (1994, p. xi).
- 8.
- 9.
The labor side agreements create National Administrative Offices authorized to investigate public charges that one of the NAFTA countries is not enforcing its own labor laws. See Compa (2001b, pp. 454–457) for a description of a number of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) complaints.
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Katz, H.C., Wheaton, A. (2019). Workers’ and Union Participation at US Workplaces. In: Berger, S., Pries, L., Wannöffel, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Workers’ Participation at Plant Level. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48192-4_30
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