Most people in the world spend the greater part of their life at their workplace. Globalization brings employees and workers from all over the world closer together—through direct value chains or indirect competition. Considering the very different regions of the world of labor, there are great varieties of labor regulation and labor conditions. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to develop an overview of the extent and mechanisms of workers’ participation at plant level. It is crucial to understand and analyze the conditions under which people around the world are able to participate in the day-to-day working process and strategic decision making of the companies that employ them. This is still a neglected topic in the area of industrial and labor relations that requires further research, especially from a global perspective. We therefore decided to organize the publication of an original handbook with new material that reflects the global dimension of different modes of workers’ participation at plant level.
The scope and organization of this handbook accounts for the international dimension of this topic in developing interdisciplinary perspectives. It is particularly concerned with the analysis of the mechanisms and practice of workers’ participation in the definition, control and enforcement of their working and employment conditions as well as their participation in work-related and company-strategic decisions. It aims at documenting and comparing different formal regulations and practices of workers’ participation at the workplace level in a carefully chosen selection of country case studies from all over the world.
A comprehensive handbook on this theme is important because the empirical findings and conceptual approaches concerning workers’ participation at plant level have varied tremendously over time and space. Some researchers have argued that workers’ participation has hindered management flexibility and introduced rigidity in times of increasing needs of companies to cope with more volatile and changing economic environments. For others, however, workers’ participation has been not only an indispensable precondition for democracy in society but also a way of facilitating workers’ integration, motivation and participation in production. Similarly, some scholars have viewed legally regulated workers’ participation as standing in stark opposition to any direct, individual and practical participation in work processes. For others, by contrast, new ‘Innovative Human Resource Management Strategies’ in search of greater involvement of employees should not be seen as contradictory to formal ways of workers’ participation and collective representation at plant level. Some also hold that workers’ participation and collective representation by unions is contradictory to direct democracy and participation of individuals at the workplace, whereas others argue the opposite: collective representation by unions and alternative mechanisms of direct and indirect participation at the workplace, plant and company levels are not mutually exclusive but reinforcing.
The development of workers’ participation at plant level has been greatly dependent on the specific cultural context and institutional tradition of the country concerned. Whereas in Western Europe and in Latin America there exists a long tradition of formalized collective workers’ participation at plant level, in many English-speaking countries individual and informal forms of participation at the workplace have prevailed. In Asia, Eastern Europe and in Africa a mix of bureaucratic and formalized collective participation could be found in some sectors, while research on other sectors has shown the complete absence of actual workers’ participation at plant level. In a global comparative view, the specific forms and patterns of workers’ participation at plant level vary significantly: from workers’ direct participation and decision making at the team level in many countries all over the world up to the model of cooperatives like Mondragón in Spain, from the German system of co-determination up to the formalized Staff and Workers Representative Councils in China . There is also a broad scope of the dominant functions of workers’ participation at plant level. It could channel inter- and intra-group conflicts in the working area; give work a voice and especially protect weaker groups in a given plant; stabilize the development of establishments and companies, triggering long-term perspectives (e.g. innovation, sustainability); increase motivation and commitment of workers at the workplace level; harmonize the conditions of competition by controlling the compliance of legal, legitimate, collective bargaining and tacit norms; control and delimit economic power; and combine economic efficiency with democracy in economic life.
Although many studies on workers’ participation in the member states of the European Union have been produced, other important regions of the world have hardly been dealt with at all. This volume comprises the study, documentation and comparison of workers’ participation around the world and thereby meets the challenge of offering a global perspective on this research area. Value chains and economic life in general, but also inter-cultural exchange and knowledge as well as the mobility of persons and ideas, increasingly transcend the horizons of nation-states and regions. In the era of knowledge societies, the active participation of workers in organizations is of crucial importance for sustainable and long-term innovation and growth. This volume offers a unique opportunity to learn from the global experiences in workers’ participation at plant level.
With regard to Europe, it would have been possible to include many more chapters, but the editors consciously restricted the number of chapters to make space for more non-European case studies, as these comprise countries and areas about which our knowledge is quite restricted—at least in comparison to Europe. Of course, our selection here also depended on who was available to write such a chapter and for which countries there exists enough information to produce a survey article. Hence the case studies selected here should not be seen as a definitive selection but rather as indicative of global trends. They fill in some dots on the global map which still need to be connected in future through more studies on more countries providing more comparative and transnational perspectives.
The volume is organized in four parts. In the first one, the editors offer a more extensive introduction to the volume’s topic. First, Stefan Berger opens with a historical view on workers’ participation at plant level in a comparative perspective. Berger explores the ‘Varieties of Capitalism (VOC)’ approach (Hall and Soskice 2001) as an explanatory tool to understand varieties of workers’ representation. He argues that a multi-factor explanation is necessary to understand the relative success or failure of models of social partnership. These factors include characteristics of the state but also the political culture and the influence of ideas, values and norms. This he illustrates by reconstructing historical trajectories from the first half of the twentieth century via the era of the Cold War towards the 1980s. He distinguishes between the authoritarian traditions of, for example, formerly fascist Germany, Italy and Spain and the liberal traditions of the US, the UK and Australia as well as the Nordic models. While the idea of a ‘social partnership’ came to fruition in Western Europe after the Second World War, the varying political cultures, state systems and established norms and values in European societies contributed to different developments of the participation of workers. Before 1945 the traditions of social liberalism and social Catholicism played a greater role than in the second half of the century. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ideas of promoting ‘capitalism with a human face’ and ‘social partnership’ were more popular in Western Europe than they have been since the 1990s. Interesting ideas of participation and teamwork at plant level have also been developed outside of Europe, for example, in cooperatives , which shall also be discussed in this volume.
In following Berger’s historical analysis, Ludger Pries provides a novel analytical framework for comparing different forms of contemporary worker participation at plant level. Even though the twentieth century witnessed a significant growth of social rights, he argues that we are still facing great challenges regarding the implementation and extension of participative democracy at the workplace, especially since the end of the Cold War. Pries demonstrates how globalizing economies have contributed to the need to reconceptualize labor relations and for new institutions beyond the national levels. He also shows how different modes of workers’ participation have developed across the world, for example, on the basis of a more direct involvement through teamwork and indirect involvement through councils. This chapter introduces a number of crucial issues, including arenas of collective bargaining, dominant actor groups, labor regulation, sources of power, shared ideology, cognitive maps and different types of conflict resolutions. In comparing the paradigmatic examples of China and Germany, Pries refers to the structural tensions among the key actors in labor relations. Moreover, he compares in some detail a number of European Union member states. In his conclusion, he summarizes the opportunities as well as challenges of workers’ participation. In terms of opportunities, workers’ participation could help, for instance, to channel inter- and intra-group conflicts in the working area, stabilize the development of companies or increase motivation and commitment of workers. On the downside, workers’ participation will challenge unions and other external collective actors by raising an intra-labor conflict on the question of who controls what or could stabilize unbalanced distributions of resources. Pries proposes that new dynamics and social mechanisms might help to counterbalance such challenges. For instance, new social movements or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) could function as external monitors.
Manfred Wannöffel subsequently emphasizes the particular role of social movement processes concerning the institutionalization of workers’ participation at plant level. He pays particular attention to the role of social conflicts and the social practice of conflict solution as a driver for the process of institutionalization within three different cases includin...