Globalisation and Employee Participation

Iordanis Psimmenos

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138316737
• eBook ISBN: 9780429848896
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Negocios en general

First published in 1997, this is an important and wide-ranging book. It is rooted in a fascinating, research-based case study of employee participation in the state-owned Greek public power (electricity) corporation. Drawing on extensive familiarity with the relevant literatures, however, it also provides a full appreciation of the significance of this case by placing it within both the history and current framework of employee organisation and industrial relations in Greece, and the development of Greece as a peripheral capitalist society in a global economy.

By exploring the issue of employee participation in this way Dr Psimmenos not only makes a unique, original contribution to the study of industrial organisation and management-worker relations in Europe but also shows the impact which the institutions and processes of globalisation have upon a society and economy like Greece – part of the European Union and also subject to the constraints of international capitalism.

Globalisation and Employee Participation will be welcomed by academics and researchers in sociology, politics, industrial relations and political economy, as well as those concerned with the history and present state of Greece and other Mediterranean societies. It is a valuable, scholarly addition to the literature in these areas.

1 Global Restructuring and Forms of Industrial Organisation

To understand the nature and characteristics of industrial organisation, and how it affects the ideological and political context of employee participation, one has to embark on a journey exploring the dynamics and contours of emerging new global socio-economic arrangements. Indeed, as Harvey (1989) has asserted in ‘The Conditions of Postmodernity’, in order to decipher the political meanings that the present transitory framework of industrial activity has created, it is necessary to search within the present maelstrom of global political change; a maelstrom of change that breaks from major traditions of social organisation. It also makes the present as poignant and transitory, as if the industrial place has suddenly become borderless, opaque and temporary, and transmits new experiences which cut across the boundaries of geography, nationality and ideology (Berman 1989; Robertson 1992; Axford 1995). This chapter, therefore, will explicate the socio-economic conditions and processes that bring such a maelstrom of change in industrial relations and hence in employees’ roles and ability to shape and control industrial activity at their place of work.

The end of World War II has marked the beginning of a new era in the world economic and political order. This order constitutes, in a sense, the political and economic institutionalisation of international trade. It does also constitute the rise of new hegemonic regimes of world economic regulation, through the expansion of multinational corporations over financial and political activity, and through the growing changes in matters relating to the division of labour on a world scale. In essence, the period of global orientated networks of economic and political regulation of labour by capital had already begun.

New experiences, contradictions and antagonisms between capital and labour, were already a part of the cultural and social milieu of labour movements throughout the world. During the 1970’s a number of financial and political events forced the transformation of capital’s forms of social and industrial world organisation towards a new plane. The analysis makes no claim to exhaust the economic and political events which have pushed capital towards a new transformation, and its aim is not to pursue vigorously the political economy of capital’s internationalisation. Instead, it focuses upon the main trends of capital’s new transformation, that enable it to construct globally integrated and flexible forms of industrial regulation. In short, it exposes in a systematic way the essence of political and economic norms for global regulation that are being reflected in the presence of a new ideological/cultural framework for industrial organisation. The issue of a new ideological/cultural framework becomes more evident through the existence and the interpenetration of processes that, on the one hand, fuse together aspects and policies on economic capitalist activity. This takes place by integrating local and global industrial environments, through the establishment of global networks that determine all major aspects of industrial activity. On the other hand, the new framework for industrial regulation demands almost total deregulation, total defusion of existing national and local industrial practices and aims for industrial planning. This becomes possible, through the establishment of flexible forms of industrial regulation. Both seem to articulate a new environment for political and economic power control networks at industrial places.

Facets of the global village

Traditional modes of economic industrial organisation for the Industrial place, which were followed in the aftermath of World War II, were replaced or relativised by a mode of organisation which encompassed production relations and political systems for labour regulation on a global level (Robertson 1992). They have surpassed the hegemonic regimes of production-accumulation whose context was determined by the interaction between national economies and individual trade corporations, and have established a world of socio-economic integration (Jessop 1988)¹. The new context of ecomomic and thus political relations on a global level, had to overcome the separation of the world into individual regional blocks of power, (Franko 1983) through the economic and political transformation of the frameworks of industrial organisation and their replacement by new frameworks of industrial and political order (Modelski 1978; Spero 1989).

The social factors, which have dictated the transformation of the labour process and which are imposing a new economic and an ideological/cultural edifice on the relationship between capital and labour, are not determined by one set of political realities alone. The articulation of different sets of post-war realities have created domestic and global economic challenges (ie in the mode of industrial development). The impossibilities which Zygmunt Bauman (1990) refers to in his article ‘From Pillars to Post’, are the impossibilities of reconciling the continuing dependent development of peripheral capitalist nations on multinational corporations and the major post-war core capitalist nations. This condition resulted in the expropriation-appropriation of the political and economic assets which Third World countries had for their national development. In addition, it has rendered them incapable of sustaining a policy of national reconstruction and industrialisation, so as to become what Wallerstein (1974) has often referred to as competitors in the world market (Goldfrank 1979; Ranjit 1978; Thomas 1976). Then again, those countries, that were able to construct some form of industrialised sector, remained at the hands of financial and economic foreign speculation (Giannitsis 1982, 1985; Jalee 1968; Babanasis 1980).

The impossibilities which international trade between individual nations and multinational corporations created, resulted in stagnation and crisis, in terms of open trade conflict, amongst producer and consumer nations and amongst rival distribution corporations and organisations (Nore and Turner 1980). These impossibilities resulted not only in the financial crisis of the 1973-1980’s, but also in the political and military polarisation of international relations. In turn, there was the conglomeration of regional economic and political interests under the aegis of international institutions for the co-operation and regulation of domestic and international trade (Keohane and Nye 1977; Keohane 1984).

Zygmunt Bauman’s reference to post-war impossibilities has additionally a further meaning, in the sense that the present is the crisis of post-war suppositions on the cultural and ideological edifices of social organisation. The intervention of multinational corporations and of developed capitalist nations in the internal affairs of developing nations; the sustaining of repressive regimes for the operation of domestic and foreign ruling elites; the scarcity of natural resources and the complete destruction of natural and social environments, and the rise of popular nationalist orientated movements; have all synthesized a climate of ideological and cultural crisis. This crisis is related to issues of democratic economic and political activity, and the relationship between geographical regions, nations and corporations. From within this perspective, the analysis which follows will focus upon the processes and factors which have contributed to the rise of a global frame of economic activity, and upon the main processes which determine the new context of ideological/cultural regulation of industrial activity at international, national and corporate level. These are: the increase in international capital centralisation and the rise of new forms of hegemonic regimes of economic regulation of trade and investement; and the globalisation of the labour process and of its products (Kumar 1991)².

The international capital centralisation

The political difference between the early industrialisation, that was analysed and referred to by classical theorists and the era during and after World War II, is based on the characteristics of international trade amongst nations, and in the rapid rise of multinational corporations. Both became the most important features of capitalism’s internationalised operation (Werner and Schoelle 1982)³. These features of capitalist activity and of organisation (ie in the form of multinational corporations) became more apparent through the growing direct foreign investments, by developed nations and multinational corporations, and through the establishment of international political structures on a regional basis which perpetuated and expanded capital’s economic and social dominance over foreign markets⁴.

The development of telecommunications, transport and energy systems on a world scale, (ie the establishment of national and international networks of services) has made possible the further utilisation of global trade by developed capitalist nations and their corporations, which has resulted in the increase of foreign investments of capital from the developed towards the developing countries (Slenwagen 1988; Groce 1982). The forms and reasons for the transfer of investments by capital vary, but at least in the early 1950’s there was a need to expand, reconstruct and develop national economics so as to allow international trade to continue and also create safe networks from which multinational corporations would operate (Nayyar 1988; Seitz 1988; Ruggie 1982). This need for the construction of networks for international trade by the US for example, is summarised by Gill and Law (1989, p. 418) as follows:

…The first was the construction of a US-centred economic security, and political structure for the non-communist world, ensuring peaceful conditions at the capitalist core (in sharp contrast to the 1914-1945 years). The second element, closely related to the first, was the ability for the US to maintain the growth of global aggregate demand through its balance of payments deficits, partly generated by heavy overseas military expenditures. The third element, was the substantial congruence of ideas, institutions and policies among the leading capitalist nations, in a system of embedded liberalism. This involved the emergence and consolidation of ideology of the mixed economy, which along with the rise of the cold war, was important in the reconstitution (or creation) of the liberal-democratic form of rule in the West and in Japan. A fourth element was the cheap and plentiful supply of raw materials, especially oil…⁵

The increased interest of Western super-powers in the reconstruction of foreign economies through direct foreign investments, had, as well, according to Maxfield and Nolt (1990) a value in itself, as the co-ordinator of world trade, (eg price fixing, accumulation of goods). This co-ordination was essential if pre-war inter-imperialist rivalries were to be avoided and if co-ordination and co-operation amongst developed capitalist nations were to be established (Jenkins 1984). The essence of co-ordination and co-operation was especially important for the recostruction of national economies, if international trade was to become more flexible and less dependent upon the market fluctuations of for example the US ecomomy. In a sense international trade demanded a new organisation of industrial activity and an injection of new funds in developing nations, if the latter were to be able to trade with and boost the economies of developed nations. This was a situation, as Mandel (1975) has described, where the capitalist world recognised the need to utilize the consumer tastes of peripheral economies and to create the condition where there would be a market, far greater than the domestic ones. The recognition of the economic potential for developed countries which the revitalisation of trade with peripheral economies had, was also related to the US political motivation to develop a sustainable global order on trade for its interests.

…In the immediate aftermath of the war, attention focused first on European reconstruction. By the late 1940’s however, Third World development issues returned to the forefront as it became clear that chronic dollar shortages and consequent foreign exchange crises were plaguing many poorer countries: in the absence of capital exports or continuing gifts from the United States, such a contraction (in world trade) would appear inevitable, because US imports are unlikely to increase sufficiently to maintain present export levels (ECEEP DZI/49:2)… consequently several Truman administration...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Global Restructuring and Forms of Industrial Organisation Notes
• 2 Ideologies of Employee Participation in the Post-War World Notes
• 3 The Development of Employee Participation in Greece
• 4 Employees’ Participation: the Case of the Greek Public Power Corporation
• Concluding Remarks
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index