Introduction
What images come to mind when comparing Britain and France? A visitor to each country might think of the culinary delights and wine available in French bistros, comparing them with the fish, chips, and beer available in the British pub. A sportsman might compare the Lycra-clad cyclists of France with Britain’s white-padded cricketers. Employers and employees, however, are likely to alight upon different aspects of the two national systems. These might include France’s higher levels of employment protection and more compressed working week, or Britain’s lower levels of unemployment and comparative industrial peace.
All of these images capture a part of each country which is recognisable to us but, like so many snapshots of national life that are intended to capture the ‘essence’ of the particular country in question, they may inadvertently obfuscate, causing us to ignore the similarities between countries and the many nuances within them. After all, a Briton has recently won ‘Le Tour’, and France has a well-established national cricket team.1 Similarly, comparisons based around the economy and employment relations must accept that extensive bargaining coverage in France coexists with union membership density that is among the lowest in Europe and that, despite France having a lower skills base, its productivity is around 30% higher than in the lightly regulated British economy.
So where are the points of commonality and difference in employment relations between the two countries, and what are their determinants? In making comparisons, macroeceonomic data take us only so far. What is typically lacking is a comparison of the way in which the employment relationship is structured and managed within the workplace. This omission limits our ability to understand differences in economic and social outcomes in the two countries—for instance, their respective experiences of the recent economic crisis—because it abstracts away from the structures and processes of employment relations at the point of production.
This book sets out to compare employment relations and organisation of work from the perspective of the workplace. The novelty of our contribution rests on our use of linked employer–employee data which give us a unique and detailed insight into the operation of workplaces and the experiences of their employees. Our data are taken from the British Workplace Employment Relations Surveys (WERS 2004 and 2011) and the French Enquête Relations Professionnelles et Négociations d’Entreprises (REPONSE 2005 and 2011). These comprise national surveys of establishments and their employees, carried out at very similar times on the basis of very similar methodologies. They provide us with rich information on the two countries’ workplaces—their structural characteristics, ownership patterns, and management practices—alongside detailed information on the experiences and attitudes of their employees. The surveys have not been explicitly harmonised, but they have been developed loosely in parallel and contain many comparable data items. They have the advantage of providing larger samples for Britain and France than some of the most prominent harmonised cross-national surveys (such as the European Working Conditions Survey, the European Social Survey, and the European Company Survey), with the added advantage that the data from employees and their workplace managers can be linked.
Two broad hypotheses are scrutinised throughout the book. The first is that an understanding of what happens to economies and to workforces is incomplete without knowing what happens within and across workplaces. The underlying contention is that much of the variance in how employees experience work, how they are treated, and how their jobs are configured and rewarded depends on where they are employed, not just who they are and the occupations they have chosen. An appreciation of the role of the workplace in people’s working lives can greatly enhance our understanding of how firms and labour markets operate, in a way that is simply not possible if one relies solely on household surveys or aggregate data. Past studies have found this to be the case. What is often attributed to the demographic or human capital traits of individuals turns out to be driven, at least in part, by the places in which employees work. For example, Bryson and Freeman (2013) have shown that, in Britain, most of the variance in the problems that employees report at work is related to the workplace that employs them, rather than who they are or the job they are doing. Barth et al. (2014) and Song et al. (2015) show that most of the growth in wage variance in the USA since the 1970s is accounted for by where you work, not who you are. Whether these kinds of ‘workplace effects’ operate in the same way, and to the same degree, in Britain and France is an open question.
The second broad hypothesis is that ‘local’ conditions, including national institutions, play a key role in shaping how employees work and think, and how employers recruit, dismiss, and manage employment relations, but in a more nuanced way that is ordinarily portrayed in the literature. It seems likely, for instance, that strong adherence to EU social legislation in France and its own national legal context, in particular the 35-hour working week, will have a substantial effect on comparative working conditions in the two countries. Legally enforceable financial penalties for failure to train employees in France are likely to shape the pattern of training in France vis-à-vis Britain. The relatively low cost of union organisation in France—something which emanates directly from state legislation—is likely to mean that workplace-level union representation is far more widespread in France than it is in Britain. But expectations are not always fulfilled and practice is never homogenous. Accordingly, whilst one primary aim of the book is to investigate the extent to which workplace employment relations correspond with Britain’s ‘liberal pluralist’ approach and France’s more state-centred and polarised regime (see Visser 2009), another is to examine the heterogeneity within each country in order to establish areas of similarity, as well as the main points of difference.2
Our Contribution
The book is intended to complement two main strands of the existing literature. The first provides broad comparisons of employment relations in the two countries through a reliance on aggregate data or syntheses of existing research (see, e.g. Milner 2015), or provides country-specific syntheses that are undertaken within a comparative framework (e.g. Bamber et al. 2010; Barry and Wilkinson 2011; Frege and Kelly 2013). These existing contributions typically focus on the institutions, actors, and aggregate outcomes of employment relations, whereas our contribution will focus on microdata, revealing the foundations on which such higher-level comparisons are based. The second strand comprises studies of employment, management, and employment relations that are based on survey data for multiple countries (e.g. Eurofound 2012; Gallie 2007; Bloom and Van Reenen 2010; Bryson et al. 2012). Here the focus is typically on the enumeration of practice across a large number of countries and the identification of broad similarities or differences between nations or country groups. Our contribution adds to these by providing greater detail on the specific circumstances in Britain and France, and a greater degree of local contextualisation than is typically possible when considering large numbers of countries at the same time.
We are not the first to undertake a comparative analysis using the WERS and REPONSE data (see, e.g. Bryson et al. 2011; Conway et al. 2008; Coutrot 1998; Lorenz et al. 2004; Marsden and Belfield 2010; Marsden 2013). However, this book represents the first comprehensive comparative analysis using the two surveys. Through our investigation, we will speak to some of the major questions about employment relations in the two countries, as well as to important questions about the performance of their economies and labour markets in general. For instance, we anticipate that French readers will be interested to understand more about the true nature of the liberal market economy in Britain—is it really much less regulated than in France and what are the apparent implications for employers and employees? Among British readers, there may be strong support for a deregulated economy, but puzzlement at how the French system generates higher productivity and wage growth, and whether greater regulation in Britain might in fact provide a ‘beneficial constraint’ (Streeck 1997) which would help to address Britain’s low skill equilibrium. Among readers outside France and Britain, we anticipate interest in the differences between two countries that share the same supranational regulatory regime (the EU). ...