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Employee Expression and Representation at Work: Voice or Exit?

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Comparative Workplace Employment Relations

Abstract

This chapter investigates the extent, nature, and implications of three broad types of arrangement for employee voice within the workplace: trade union representation; non-union employee representation; and management-led arrangements for direct voice, such as face-to-face meetings and attitude surveys. We find that voice regimes in the two countries are very different, in keeping with the contrast between a system which is more voluntarist (as in Britain) and one which is legally framed (as in France). Despite the stark differences in ‘voice’ regimes, many of the workplace characteristics and social outcomes associated with these regimes are similar in the two countries.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Trade unions in Britain do, of course, have a close relationship with the Labour Party, but the latter has sought to increase the distance between the two in recent decades.

  2. 2.

    See, for example, the permissive nature of the UK’s Information and Consultation of Employees Regulations, which allow for employers to consult employees over organisational changes via union representatives, non-union representatives, or through direct one-to-one or team meetings.

  3. 3.

    It is not possible in the REPONSE data to separate those workplaces with no union members from those with a density of 1–4%. This is possible in WERS; some 79% of workplaces have zero density and 3% have a density of 1–4%.

  4. 4.

    In a majority of them (23% of all workplaces), there are both elected union representatives (in CE, DP, or DUP) and appointed DS or RSS representatives.

  5. 5.

    See the Decree from the Ministry of Labour dated 30 May 2013 (‘Arrêté fixant la liste des organisations syndicales reconnues représentatives au niveau national et interprofessionnel’, accessible at http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr).

  6. 6.

    Other parts of the literature have taken a broader frame of reference for direct voice, including in their analysis of practices such as problem-solving groups (Millward et al. 2000; Willman et al. 2009) or appraisal meetings (Wood and Fenton-O’Creevy 2005). However, we focus on practices where the primary objective is consultation or communication about general workplace affairs. The use of problem-solving groups and appraisal meetings is considered in Chap. 5.

  7. 7.

    Such criticisms had been made early on—but to a smaller extent—concerning the USA (Foulkes 1980) and Britain (Purcell 1995).

  8. 8.

    Here, and at subsequent points in the chapter, we make use of a standard set of workplace and workforce characteristics comprising: workplace size; workplace age; industry; single-establishment organisation; part of a listed organisation; family ownership; foreign ownership; location in capital city; market location, market share; percentage of employees that are female, aged under 25 years, aged 50 or more; percentage in high-skilled/medium-skilled/low-skilled jobs; use of fixed-term contracts; and agency workers.

  9. 9.

    The association with workplace age can probably be attributed to the promotion of elected bodies by the left-wing social reformers from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. The presence of non-union representatives notably increased between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s (Jacod 2006).

  10. 10.

    The share of the variance in the presence of direct voice that is explained by a regression analysis which controls for workplace age, size, industry, governance, product market characteristics, and workforce composition (the R-squared) is 0.25 in Britain and 0.09 in France.

  11. 11.

    See note 8 for the list of control variables.

  12. 12.

    The principles are discussed in a comparative perspective by Marsden (2013) but his empirical focus is on the impact of different types of voice on employee self-determination in the two countries.

  13. 13.

    Although these ‘no voice’ workplaces are less common in France, it is notable that their profile is rather similar on either side of the Channel. They are typically small, independent workplaces (also often family-owned in France), often in retail or construction industries, with above-average shares of younger and older employees in France, and with relatively small market shares in Britain.

  14. 14.

    In the case of union representation, this propensity score approach serves to exclude many of the smallest and the largest workplaces, which have either a very low or a very high probability to have union representatives on-site and for which there are few viable comparators.

  15. 15.

    The association with union representation remains after adding the internal labour market (ILM) indicator from Chap. 4 as a control.

  16. 16.

    Our measure of the use of appraisal meetings is that the workplace manager reports that appraisal meetings are held with all non-managerial employees in the workplace, and that the meetings have a direct link to employees’ pay. Chapter 5 presents further analysis of the use of appraisals.

  17. 17.

    In the individual wage regressions, additional controls for employee and job characteristics comprise sex, age, educational attainment, occupation, and job tenure.

  18. 18.

    The union coefficients are also not significantly different from zero when we focus on workplaces with recognised unions or those engaged in active bargaining.

  19. 19.

    As in Table 3.5, the ‘net’ differences are estimated through regressions. Those for managers’ attitudes contain our standard set of workplace and workforce controls (see note 8). Those for employees’ opinions also control for employee and job characteristics (see note 17).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi, Paris, France

    Thomas Amossé

  2. National Institute of Economic and Social Research, London, UK

    John Forth

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  1. Thomas Amossé
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre d’Etudes de l’Emploi, NOISY-LE-GRAND CEDEX, France

    Thomas Amossé

  2. UCL Institute of Education, London, United Kingdom

    Alex Bryson

  3. National Institute of Economic and Socia, London, United Kingdom

    John Forth

  4. CLERSE, Université Lille 1, Lille, Franc, Paris, France

    Héloïse Petit

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Amossé, T., Forth, J. (2016). Employee Expression and Representation at Work: Voice or Exit?. In: Amossé, T., Bryson, A., Forth, J., Petit, H. (eds) Comparative Workplace Employment Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57419-0_3

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