Trade Unions and Workplace Training

Issues and International Perspectives

Richard Cooney, Mark Stuart, Richard Cooney, Mark Stuart

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138107601
• eBook ISBN: 9781136306129
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Trade Unions and Workplace Training examines the changing role of trade unions in the provision of vocational education, workplace training and skill development. It reflects upon: the role that unions have played in the reform of vocational education and training systems; the nature of union involvement in consultative mechanisms at a national and industry level; the nature of union involvement in skill formation at the workplace; and the development of mechanisms for the articulation of employee voice in the design, delivery and assessment of vocational training.

The book provides a collection of studies of Canada, Australia, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Norway by leading researchers in the field. Distinctive, accessible and original, all the chapters are written in a style that illustrates the relevance of academic debates and research data to practice and the book includes a number of the chapters written by trade union practitioners.

1 Introduction

Trade Unions and Vocational Education and Training in Theory and Practice

Richard Cooney and Mark Stuart

INTRODUCTION

This collection examines the role of unions in the process of vocational education and training (VET). It looks at the role unions play in the development of their members’ skills for work and employment. This is an emergent issue for unions as they seek to respond to two decades of change in work and employment, change that has drawn attention to the importance of education, training, and employability over an individual’s lifetime. Certainly, trade unions have had to confront a rapidly changing landscape in the past few decades, which has impacted upon and led to the restructuring of labour markets, employment relations, and the organisation of work. This has had corresponding implications for the ways in which employees are educated for work, trained whilst in employment, and retrained over the course of their working lives. Training, skill development, and the attainment and certification of skills have all become significant issues for unions as they seek to ensure that their members are fairly paid for skills acquired and that their members are prepared for more frequent changes in employment in more turbulent labour markets (Locke, Kochan, and Piore 1995; Olney 1994). As Olney notes (1994, 44), union interest in skills is explicitly linked to the future employability of their members:

To secure opportunities for workers in times of change, not only is enterprise specific training required, but also general training and retraining to enhance external labour market mobility; trade unions are uniquely placed to promote and facilitate such training.

Nonetheless, unions face a number of challenges in how they look to respond to such change and effectively press an agenda around employee skill development. Firstly, unions find themselves enmeshed in relationships with members, employers, and the state that extend well beyond the reach of bargaining over the outcomes of the employment relationship. The navigation of such relationships has become far more complex in recent times as the historic pluralist compromise has faded, the state has retreated, and employers have sought to assert their authority. Unions have a role to play as industrial and social actors, but they have sought to advance their interests in VET at a time of declining power. Indeed, to some extent, this has been a predicate of increased union interest in skills development, as it is seen to offer a new agenda for the enhancement of union legitimacy (Mathews 1994).

Secondly, the advancement of an agenda around VET comes up against a collective good problem. The interests of unions and employers, in particular, are not the same. If left to their own devices, it is rational for employers to under-invest in skill development, because trained workers are free to leave the firm and competitors who free-ride are able to poach such skills. To address this collective good dilemma, Regini (1995, 192) asserts that it is necessary ‘that the VET system should be highly institutionalised, with appropriate legislation and strong trade unions which oblige firms to pursue collective long-term interests’. Historically, and of relevance to the international sweep of this book, the degree of institutionalisation of VET has differentiated economies. In liberal market economies, covered in the book by the UK, U.S., Australia, and Canada, weak institutionalisation has meant a relatively limited role for unions and a concern about systematic under-investment in VET. In contrast, the more coordinated economies of Germany, Norway, and France have tended to have higher levels of institutionalisation and higher levels of skills investment.

The problem for unions with regard to such regulation is the changed definition of skill development itself, with less emphasis on initial systems of training, which are often easier to systematise, measure, and regulate, and more of an emphasis on learning and competence of an informal and non-formal kind (Martínez Lucio et al. 2007). This poses a direct challenge for systems of regulation, governance, and interest articulation, because as Crouch, Finegold, and Sako (1999, 221) explain, ‘although the changeability and flexibility of new skill concepts are shifting emphasis towards further rather than initial VET, it is difficult to organize neo-corporatist involvement in the former’.

The third challenge is the manner of union engagement. Whereas union interest in VET has increased, to some extent encouraged by policymakers, this has typically been advocated on the basis of a partnership-based approach. The basic premise for this is the potential for training to deliver mutual gains that are of benefit to all parties’ interests. Given this mutual gains underpinning, unions are advised to advance the training agenda through integrative rather than distributive bargaining (Mathews 1994). Whether such mutual gains are easily achieved or partnership-based relations easily established, is a point of debate. It has been noted that union interests over training often cross the integrative–distributive bargaining divide and, to the extent that union involvement in VET may challenge managerial prerogative, conflicts of interest are ever present (Stuart 2007). As Martínez et al. (2007) note, how unions ‘craft’ their way into new partnership relations and institutions of regulation around VET should not be seen as a given and represents a major strategic challenge.

This forms the platform for the chapters that follow, which, from a variety of perspectives, interrogate the way in which unions have sought to tackle such challenges and explore key developments and innovations in the union role in VET. In the remainder of this chapter we examine more systematically the changing context faced by unions, and how they have sought to respond through partnership-based innovations around VET, and consider the implications of such developments for the wider project of union renewal. Following this, we introduce the contributions of the individual chapters before drawing out some general conclusions.

THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK

The initial evidence of change in work was seen in the restructuring of occupational skill profiles in established industries, such as manufacturing. From the 1990s onwards, technological change, the introduction of new manufacturing practices (such as lean production), and ongoing organisational restructuring (such as the introduction of teamworking) saw significant changes in the skill profiles and work roles of manufacturing employees. Work roles have expanded as new responsibilities for production (such as those for quality or routine maintenance) have been delegated to frontline employees and skill profiles have been changing to encompass more ‘soft skills’, such as communication and problem solving (Grugulis 2006).

But change in the established industries is only part of the picture. The past few decades have also seen the emergence of new industries, such as information technology (IT) services, that have their own distinctive skill requirements. These new industries have created new occupations with a broad set of work responsibilities and requirements for the deployment of a range of soft skills. New product or service development work, temporary work in projects, direct customer service work, and the like all require different occupational skill profiles to those traditionally found in more established areas. Moreover, the pace of technological and organisational change in the newer industries is rapid, mandating continuous upgrading of skills and knowledge to maintain employment.

It would be misleading, however, to suggest that this occupational change has all been in one direction: towards skill upgrading and an emphasis on new skills. Change has, as ever, been uneven, with some occupations experiencing increasing skill requirements while others have remained unchanged or experienced some deskilling (Grugulis 2006). This uneven development of change, when combined with increasing segmentation in labour markets between those with low skills and those with intermediate and higher-level skills, creates problems of equity and access to education and training. Those with greater skill requirements at work tend to receive the bulk of continuing training, whereas those with no or minimal qualifications, employed in areas of low skill, receive little continuing training and so are most at risk of social exclusion. Those with minimal qualifications are most at risk of unemployment or of finding themselves in ongoing contingent employment. In this context, the development of skills becomes critical for overcoming social disadvantage in employment. As organisations with an abiding concern for social justice, unions have also had a concern for the public policy implications of addressing disadvantage in the labour market through skill upgrading.

So far as union members are concerned, the changes taking place in occupations have seen an increased emphasis upon skill development for work. Employee training has assumed a growing significance as part of the employment relationship, as employees seek to develop their employability in rapidly changing labour markets. Whether in labour markets internal to the firm or external in the broader economy, employees are now interested in the employment and career development opportunities opened up by VET to an extent not previously seen. Vocational training has assumed a greater significance for many groups of employees, and unions have paid greater attention to training as they represent this interest. One consequence of this change is that training has become a more highly contested matter in the workplace (Stuart 1996). As the workplace has emerged as an important site of learning, and as the consequences for individuals of engaging in learning at work have grown in importance, so the contest about the kind of training that is offered, the conditions of the off er, and the outcomes of training has intensified (Streeck 1989; Stuart 2007).

Training has become a more important industrial matter for unions, but this change has occurred in the context of labour market deregulation and changes to established social institutions involved in regulating training and occupations. Unions have, in many cases, confronted an expanded managerial prerogative in relation to training, either because new forms of continuing training have not been regulated or because existing forms have been deregulated (Cooney 2010b). This has driven unions to focus upon the development of enterprise partnerships and sectoral joint action with employers. The approach of unions to skill development issues is, however, very much a work in progress. Partnerships have proved problematic in some cases and sectoral action has not led to wider changes in the social institutions that regulate training. How union strategy evolves in relation to training and skill development is a subject for ongoing research and study, and, as the chapters in the book illustrate, takes different forms in different countries, depending on the wider institutional make-up.

The pace and extent of change at work has, then, created new challenges for unions, their modes of organising, and the issues around which they organise. Dealing with training throws up a new suite of issues that become the subject of employment bargaining and social dialogue and so training represents a potential new pole of activity around which unions can organise and attract new members. How unions fare in this endeavour remains to be seen. Will involvement with skill development at work give unions a new role in the workplace and a new role in public policy relating to skill, or will these emerging issues merely be assimilated to existing forms of union activity?

UNIONS AND CHANGING CONCEPTS OF ‘SKILL’

The emerging challenges for unions when dealing with skill development first became evident in the 1990s as changing skill requirements in existing occupations began to be observed. Training was pushed to the forefront of debate about the future of industrial work. The recomposition of industrial work practices highlighted the need for continuing employee skill development and governments across the developed world began to examine the implications for public policy and the design of education and training systems, of these changes (see, for example, Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce 1990; National Board of Employment, Education and Training 1992).

Two significant effects were noted, initially in manufacturing. Firstly, rising skill requirements for operators, tradesmen, and technicians in manufacturing were observed. Secondly, there was an ongoing recomposition of manufacturing jobs and employee work roles. Numerous studies asserted that manufacturing work was being recomposed around new skill sets (Barley 1996; Capelli 1993, 1996; Capelli and Rogovsky 1994; Osterman 1994, 1995). In an effort to capture and conceptualise the changes taking place—not only to existing occupations but also to new and emerging occupations especially in the service sector—new conceptual frameworks were developed for the classification of skills. These conceptual schema are, however, many and varied. Some scholars have focused upon identifying the cognitive and interpersonal dimensions of the changes to skill, while others have focused upon skill and the design of work roles.

Adler (1986) identifies three skill areas that have been affected by changing skill requirements at work. He identifies new ‘task responsibilities’ such as responsibility for the integrity of the manufacturing process, the ‘abstractness of tasks’ or mental elements of what were formerly seen as manual jobs, and the ‘systemic interdependence of tasks’ in manufacturing systems with enhanced product flow such as just-in-time systems. Looking at job skills, Rainbird (1990) distinguishes between craft skills and tacit skills, whereas Conti and Warner (1997) develop a four-level classification of skills revolving around the use of social, technical, diagnostic, coping and discretionary skills.

The changing composition of the work role has also been used as the basis for the analysis of skills. Changes to work roles have seen job demarcations redrawn, leading to a growing emphasis upon the use of ‘diagnostic skills’ and ‘analytical skills’ that require different configurations of the breadth and depth of skill and knowledge (Hendry 1990; Hirschorn 1990). Where specialisation had been the norm in skill development, changes to the work role mean that although some roles retain their focus on specialist skills, other roles now require a breadth of skill and knowledge without much depth (generalist skills). Campbell and Warner (1992, 31) refer to this as a process of skill hybridisation and, referring to manufacturing, observe that:

those involved in the assembly, testing and maintenance functions may require a more general understanding than before, and possibly the command of a wider (not necessarily ‘deeper’) range of skills which may in turn require regular updating.

There is much evidence for the changing nature of skill development at work, but this has been multifaceted, uneven, and open to different interpretations. There are difficulties in defining, classifying, measuring, and recognising skills. Concepts of skill and conceptualisations of the changing nature of skills are many and varied and, as Darrah (1994) points out, whereas the idea of skill may seem straightforward, in practice it is a difficult idea to apply to the workplace.

This situation creates a significant problem for unions. Skill is not easy to define, but unions need a definition of skills so that their members can be trained for skills, assessed for skills, and then put onto appropriate classification scales and pay rates. Unions seek to have the skills of their members recognised through payment systems, but the links between skill and pay take us into the realm of Industrial Relations (IR) systems. The ways in which these systems interface with education and training systems becomes critical to understanding union strategy in relation to skill. Unions have used both education and training systems and IR systems to address the questions of recognition of skills, payment for skills, the attainment of certifications, and the portability of qualifications. The emerging IR of skill thus become complex and contested matters that are not always resolved simply through industrial agreement (Cooney 2010a).

UNIONS, TRAINING, AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS

How skills are defined is important because the outcomes of this process have important consequences for employees. Unions need a framework to negotiate issues around training, but the immediate industrial issues for unions are those of job definition (the identification of job tasks and work role boundaries), skill recognition, pay for skills, and training arrangements (including access and payment). Unions also have an interest in less direct vocational workplace training such as Occupational Health and Safety (O. H.&S.) training, training for organisational change, and the wider developmental interests of members (Rainbird 1990).

The growing emphasis upon workplace training and skill development, however, raises a second issue of concern for unions and that is how to deal with established management prerogative in relation to workplace training. Unions have long been interested in the regulation of entry-level training—especially that for the skilled trades through apprenticeships—but have, in the past, been less interested in the regulation of continuing training in the workplace. Unions now, however, seek to negotiate training issues for bro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Acronyms
• List of Tables
• 1 Introduction Trade Unions and Vocational Education and Training in Theory and Practice
• Part I The Theory and Practice of Unions and Training
• Part II Unions, Training, and Social Institutions
• Part III Training and Union Renewal
• List of Contributors
• Index