A Strategic Choice Approach to Union Renewal: The Case of Union Participation to High-Involvement Management in France
Our research assesses whether and to what extent unions enact national-level strategic choices about their renewal into effective workplace-level outcomes, and if union ideology can explain these outcomes. Kochan et al. (1984:21–22) theorized that the actors of an employment relations (ER) system can make strategic choices when they enjoy discretion over their decisions and when they can ‘alter [their] role or [their] relationship with other actors’. This perspective also describes the interactions between actors from different ‘tiers’ of the ER system (Kochan et al., 1986:15–20). It is, therefore, a useful framework to understand how union national officials’ decisions at the national level can drive the interactions between union representatives and managers at the workplace level, as well as their outcomes.
Besides, unions are specific organizations, and distinguishing factors shape their strategic choices. Firstly, unions’ identities and ideologies influence their choices (Boxall, 2008; Hodder & Edwards, 2015; Hyman, 2004). Secondly, unions have a dual identity (Hyman, 2004). An administrative side reflects organizational properties, and a representative side reflects that unions define (at least some of) their objectives consistently with their members’. This duality can create internal conflicts between unions’ officials and union representatives, which can impact unions’ objectives and create discrepancies between unions’ official line and the behavior of their workplace representatives (Child et al., 1973:78). Thirdly, in a significant proportion of countries, unions are organizations in crisis. Among other paths to renewal, some suggested that participating to the use of specific organizational and human resource management (HRM) practices, called high-performance work practices (HPWP; Kochan & Osterman, 1994), could be benefitial to unions. HPWP seek to take advantage of workers’ under-utilized abilities, and to increase motivation through effective opportunities to participate in decision-making processes about the contents and goals of workers’ efforts. HPWP also provide workers direct means of communication with management (Appelbaum et al. 2000). Yet, this path to renewal is ambiguous because HPWP rely on individualized workers’ treatment, and can compete with unions’ communicational role by opposing individual voice mechanisms to unions’ collective voice (Freeman & Medoff, 1984). Because of this, unions’ identity and ideology can also impact strategic choices about their participation to management, with ‘radical’ unions often opposing their use, and ‘reformist’ unions often favoring union involvement (e.g. Hyman, 2004).
Therefore, unions’ strategic choices about participation to management (either to support or oppose the use of HPWP) are not ideologically neutral, and their efficiency means to obtain effective workplace results (HPWP will be used or not, and this should be due to union representatives). However, because of union duality, and because these outcomes are expected at the workplace level, union representatives’ possible deviation from national-level decisions should also be accounted for.
We studied the French case, which concentrates many of the challenges other countries also face (Connolly, 2012). A variety of competing union ideologies also characterizes the French ER system. Furthermore, unions benefit from institutional support thanks to regulations organizing their presence and their role in collective bargaining at the workplace level. Labor regulation also allows several unions to represent employees from a same workplace simultaneously (“union pluralism”). This creates an opportunity for the expression of diverse union voices, and has implications about local power and ideological arrangements (Jefferys, 2003). Lastly, studies have reported evidence of ‘grassroot resistance’ and representatives’ dissent with national unions’ positions about both individualized HRM practices (Biétry, 2006) and the adoption of a social partnership orientation (Taylor & Mathers, 2002).
Our data is the REPONSE database (Relations professionnelles et négociation sociale en entreprise), created from a nationally representative survey conducted in 2010–2011. It covers around 4,000 private sector workplaces with 10 or more employees, from all industries except agriculture. We ran bivariate probit regression models to investigate the influence of unions on the use of HPWP
We posit that unions’ support or opposition to the use of HPWP at the national level is a strategic choice. The literature shows that such choices often align with unions’ identity and ideology. Therefore, our independent variables depict the union affiliation of workplace union representatives, and this allows (1) to approximate the national union’s position about the use of HPWP, (2) deduce what the influence of a representative with sufficient relative power should be, and (3) observe if the use of HPWP and the presence of union representatives correlates, if at all, consistently or inconsistently with the representatives’ union national position. We used two sets of dependent variables, which draw on the strategic HRM literature, to measure the use of systems of HPWP in the workplace (Delery & Doty, 1996). The first set measures a system according to the number of practices in use (“additivity” index). The second identifies bundles of practices (“information”, “appraisal”, “variable compensation”, “participation to decision-making”, “flexibility”, and “empowerment” indices). Lastly, our models account for unobserved heterogeneity between dependent and independent variables, i.e. we alleviated regressions from possible reverse causality effects.
Our results show that the affiliation of workplace union representatives matters, which suggests that union ideology affects unions’ influence on the use of HPWP in France, although not always in an expected way. The presence of representatives from the most important reformist confederations—CFDT, FO, CFE-CGC—shows positive correlations with our additivity index, contrary to workplaces where CGT—a traditionally radical, albeit engaged in a difficult mutation toward moderation, union—dominates, which report no statistically significant estimates. However, results from “bundles” models suggest that workplace union representatives do not systematically influence the use of HPWP consistently with their unions’ national orientation, and that the competition between different union ideologies could translate into the specialization of representatives from specific unions on specific areas of HRM.
NB. References are available upon request from the authors.