Contemporary Employers’ Organizations

Adaptation and Resilience

Leon Gooberman, Marco Hauptmeier, Leon Gooberman, Marco Hauptmeier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367611972
• eBook ISBN: 9781000579383
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book argues that employers' organizations are resilient organizations that adapt to changing circumstances by developing new practices. Adaptation has been prompted by changing economic and social contexts, including state interventions and union activities. Contexts vary over time, across countries and world regions. The purpose of the book is to explore these variations and their impacts on employer organization.

The book covers the following themes across four book sections: theoretical perspectives on employer collective action; employers' organizations in different types of capitalism; different types of employers' organizations; and international and comparative employer interest representation. Theoretical explorations examining employer power, political preferences, meta-organizing, and ideological foundations are complemented by studies of employers' organization in China, Denmark, Australia, Germany, Turkey, Canada, and the UK. Different types such as regional and international employers' organizations are also examined. The book is one of the few edited volumes to examine employer collective action within work and employment, and is the first since 1984 to consider western and non-western contexts.

The book will be of interest to employment relations and sociology of work researchers, scholars, advanced students, and practitioners as it brings new perspectives to an understudied actor in employment relations: employers' organizations.

1 The Adaptation and Resilience of Employers' Organizations

Leon Gooberman and Marco Hauptmeier

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104575-1

Introduction

The first book on Employers’ Organizations (EOs) with an international scope spanning several continents was Windmuller and Gladstone (1984).¹ The book considered the role and functions of EOs in Western countries and Japan in their historical context, focusing on the period since World War II. This context was characterized by significant economic growth and limited international competition as trade barriers constrained national markets. Meanwhile, EOs grew both in terms of their membership and functions. Collective bargaining coverage increased and EOs and unions set pay and working conditions for large parts of national workforces. EOs took part in tripartite concertation with the state and unions, where they participated in governing national training regimes, welfare state programmes and income policies although their involvement varied across countries. Overall, EOs were key actors within the political economies of Western countries during the post-war era.

The period since the 1980s saw impacts on EOs differ to those of previous decades. Many governments were influenced by the emerging neoliberal paradigm to deregulate and liberalize national economies. Liberalization combined with technological advances to enable the internationalization of trade and production that in turn prompted the development of global value chains and platform work (Newsome et al. 2015; Tilly 1995; Wood 2020). Union membership waned (Ebbinghaus and Visser 1999), collective bargaining coverage declined (Doellgast and Benassi 2020), and governments relied less on tripartite coordination (Culpepper and Regan 2014; Streeck 2003). These changes combined to increase the discretion of individual employers when managing the employment relationship (Baccaro and Howell 2017) although trends varied across liberal and coordinated market economies. Employer incentives to counter union power, and collectively coordinate activities with unions and the state reduced. Such activities were central to EOs, and as collective Employment Relations (ER) declined (Purcell 1995), a corresponding EO decline was often assumed but was rarely tested through research. Barry and Wilkinson (2011), for example, examined five major ER journals published between 2000 and 2011 and identified only three studies on EOs.

Our book contributes to a more recent literature that explores ‘the strange non-death of EOs’ (Brandl and Lehr 2019; Barry and Wilkinson 2011; Behrens and Helfen 2019; Benson et al. 2017; Boumans 2021; Gooberman et al. 2018, 2019a; 2020b; Ibsen and Navrbjerg 2019; Martin and Swank 2012; Sánchez-Mosquera 2021; Sezer 2019; Sheldon et al. 2016, 2019; You and Barry 2016; Zhu and Nyland 2017). Our book argues that EOs are resilient organizations that adapt to changing circumstances by developing new practices to ensure organizational survival. EOs are impacted by changing economic and social contexts, including state interventions and union activities. These contexts vary significantly over time, across countries and world regions. EOs interpret changing contexts and respond to new challenges by developing new strategies, activities, and organizational forms that assist EOs and employers in adapting to evolving environments. Adaptation can be observed across democratic and authoritarian political systems as well as in countries where economies and ER institutions have transformed, demonstrating EOs’ organizational resilience.

This broader argument builds on the more recent EO literature, including the chapters in this volume, within which five main trends can be identified. First, EO adaptation to changing socio-economic contexts has been studied in new country contexts including those in Asia (e.g., Benson et al. 2017) and in Eastern and Central Europe (e.g., Aguilera and Dabu 2005; Delteil and Kirov 2016). This volume contributes chapters by Zhu on China and by Sezer on Turkey.

Second, the literature identified distinct types of EOs beyond those that primarily conduct collective bargaining. Some target structures and regulation above and below national levels. This volume contains chapters by Farnsworth and Liu on international EOs, by Aranea et al. on European EOs, and by Larouche and Gooberman et al. on sub-national EOs in, respectively, Canada and the United Kingdom (UK).

Third, the role of EOs in regulating ER evolved as the decline of collective bargaining in recent decades was not total, and important pockets of bargaining remained. EOs’ continuing role in collective ER is a cross-cutting theme in this volume and is examined, for example in Germany by Behrens and in Denmark by Ibsen and Navrbjerg. EOs also engage in new forms of unilateral, private employment regulation through codes of conduct, benchmarking, and certification. Helfen's contribution to this volume uses a meta-organizing perspective to contrast such private regulation with traditional collective regulation.

Fourth, political representation of EOs has evolved. Pluralist lobbying by EOs targeting employment and labour laws has become more important where corporatist institutions declined or disappeared. But EOs operating elsewhere have retained involvement in social pacts, whether in Asia (Benson et al. 2017; Kuruvilla and Liu 2010) or Europe (Bender and Ebbinghaus 2021). In this volume, Morgan examines the political power of EOs in the UK while Paster develops a differentiated account of German EO preferences on social programmes.

Fifth, EOs’ service provision has evolved especially where collective regulation has declined most, prompting EOs to develop services to appeal to new or prospective members to maintain and grow subscription revenue, as explored in the chapter on Australia by Sheldon and Thornthwaite and the comparative chapter on higher education EOs by White and Hopkins.

The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. The next section focuses on the historic growth and decline of EOs in Western countries, until recently the focus of ER research on EOs. The subsequent section explores the adaptation and resilience of EOs based on the evidence presented in this book and other recent EO literature. The conclusion distils key points about contemporary EOs and identifies gaps for future research.

The Growth and Decline of EOs in Western countries

The post-World War II decades were a growth period for EOs in Western countries across memberships, number of organizations, and functions. This period saw significant economic growth while product and labour markets were protected by trade barriers. Policy making was informed by the Keynesian economic paradigm that stipulated a role for EOs and unions within economic governance (Hall 1989). Tripartite governance between EOs, unions, and the state assumed three primary forms. The first was income policies and coordination between economic policy and collective bargaining that aimed to ensure aggregate demand without generating excessive inflation (Scharpf 1991). The second was that EOs and unions were granted new or expanded roles in organizing training regimes that often covered the bulk of national workforces (Gospel and Edwards 2012). The third form was prompted by the expansion of welfare states, within which EOs and unions participated in the governance of social programmes.

These forms reflected how states sought to integrate interest groups in various policy areas, as set out by theories of corporatism (Lehmbruch and Schmitter 1982; Schmitter 1974; Schmitter and Lehmbruch 1979; Schmitter and Streeck 1999). Corporatism suggested that by involving associations with specialized knowledge, states reduced their role in governing complex or conflictual societal domains like ER. Nevertheless, EO involvement varied across countries ranging from the US which saw no corporatist involvement of EOs in policy domains, to more coordinated economies that saw their full involvement.

But EOs’ primary activity throughout this period remained collective bargaining (Clegg 1979; Plowman 1988; Sisson 1987) even as their other governance activities expanded. Collective bargaining coverage expanded, and union power grew. Locking unions into binding collective agreements had advantages for EOs. The first was that multi-employer bargaining moved a source of conflict, negotiations over wages, away from the workplace (Sisson 1987). The second was that bargaining prevented whipsawing where unions sought to play firms off against each other in the absence of multi-employer agreements to ratchet up wages and working conditions. Finally, bargaining reduced competition within industries as it took wages out of competition, reducing the ability of low-cost entrants to undercut wages while also preventing more profitable companies from poaching skilled staff (Swenson 1991). The benefits of bargaining were spread unevenly across EO memberships. For example, large employers in Germany benefited most as wage settlements were linked to average productivity increases by industry, making them more affordable to larger businesses with higher productivity growth while hampering the ability of EOs to reconcile the competing interests of larger and smaller members (Thelen 2000).

The literature also identified how forms of multi-employer bargaining varied across countries. A prominent typology used to explore these patterns is Varieties of Capitalism (Hall and Soskice 2001) with its identification of liberal market economies (LMEs) and coordinated market economies (CMEs), although later contributions identified further diversity in bargaining forms and EOs roles within both types. Within LMEs, Colvin and Darbishire (2013) set out three models. The first was the ‘Wagner Act’ model of the USA and Canada where ER revolved around private governance, with representation and collective bargaining centred on firms or enterprises although during post-war decades unions established pattern bargaining in many industries. The second was the ‘voluntarist’ model of the UK and, to some extent, Ireland. In the UK, bargaining outcomes were not legally enforceable. Implementation was underpinned by the relative actor power and a supportive but inobtrusive state (Howell 2005). A dual system emerged in key industries where informal and fragmented shop floor bargaining co-existed with more formal multi-employer bargaining (Flanders 1974). The final model was the ‘award system’ of Australia as analyzed by Sheldon and Thornthwaite in this volume, and New Zealand, where arbitration and award mechanisms were stimulated by state action, such as the 1906 Arbitration Act in Australia (Plowman 1989) that set out industry and occupational awards, followed by more recent iterations such as the Australian Fair Pay Commission, Fair Work Australia, and the Fair Work Commission.

CMEs also featured different patterns. A first was nationally centralized bargaining covering the entire economy. As examples, peak organizations in the Nordic states and Austria bargained to regulate the labour market, often encompassing welfare issues such as pensions (Swenson and Pontusson 2000; Traxler 2004). A second focused on sectoral collective bargaining with informal coordination between different sectors. One example was Germany where agreements in the metal sector provided a closely followed benchmark for other sectors (Traxler et al. 2008). A third was a multi-level combination of agreements. In Italy, Belgium, and France, national agreements determined broad issues such a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Authors
• 1 The Adaptation and Resilience of Employers' Organizations
• Part I: Theoretical Perspectives on Employer Collective Action
• Part II: Employers' Organizations in Different Types of Capitalism
• Part III: Different Types of Employers' Organizations
• Part IV: International and Comparative Employer Interest Representation
• Index