Changing Regimes of Workplace Governance, Shifting Axes of Social Mobilization, and the Challenge to Industrial Relations Theory

Abstract

This article challenges prevailing views about the collapse of the New Deal industrial relations system and the role of the market. It argues that the old system has been replaced not by the market but by an employment rights regime, in which the rules of the workplace are imposed by law, judicial opinions, and administrative rulings, supplemented by mechanisms at the enterprise level that are responsive to the law but also are susceptible to employee pressures, both individual and collective. The emergence of this regime is the product of a shift in the axes of social and political mobilization from mobilization around economic identities rooted in class, industry, occupation, and enterprise to identities rooted in the society outside the workplace: sex, race, ethnicity, age, disability, and sexual orientation. The shift in the axes of mobilization in turn reflects the collapse of the underlying model of social and economic organization upon which the collective bargaining regime was built and more fundamentally a shift in our understanding of the nature of industrial society and its direction of evolution in history. This interpretation poses a challenge to the conceptual tools used in industrial relations to understand the issues of work and to frame the public policy debate. We conclude with some suggestions as to the direction in which we might move to provide an alternative conceptual framework.I             -  the world of industrial relations and workplace governance has been fundamentally, probably irrevocably, altered. The system of collective bargaining that grew out of the New Deal reforms has collapsed. That collapse has been produced * The authors' affiliations are, respectively, Department of Economics, MIT; Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago. E-mail: mpiore@MIT.EDU. We have accumulated debts to a number of people, too great to be acknowledged here. But we were particularly influenced by conversations with the students and faculty of the IWER group at MIT, and with

Ideas at work

“…Here there is a preoccupation with the subjective experience of work and labour relations, coupled with a focus on questions of identity (Leidner 2006). Indeed, the latter concept has become pivotal to much recent scholarship on work and workers, with new or newly articulated identities, grounded in sexuality, age, faith, caring and the like, seen as providing a fresh impetus to resistance and collective action and new imperatives for management (Piore and Safford 2006). Much of the analysis in these traditions is confined to the immediate and the subjective and deals largely with the influence of ideas within the workplace.…”

Le cadre réglementaire en matière d’emploi

“…Aux États-Unis, le taux de présence syndicale, et donc, à peu de chose près, le taux de salariés assujettis à une convention collective, est en chute libre depuis 50 ans, ne représentant plus aujourd'hui que 13,7 % de la main-d'oeuvre américaine (Labrosse, 2006 : 2). Suivant la thèse avancée par Piore et Safford (2006), la perte d'influence du régime de négociation collective associé au New Deal ne signifie pas pour autant un retour au libre marché mais correspond plutôt au développement en parallèle d'un régime de régulation alternatif, un régime fondé sur les droits associés à l'emploi (employment rights regime). Des lois d'application générales adoptées dans les années 1990 par certains États et instances locales, d'importantes décisions de la Cour suprême, telles celles favorisant l'arbitrage privé des litiges dans l'entreprise, ainsi que les pratiques des entreprises contribuent selon ces auteurs à une transformation structurelle des rapports d'emploi aux États-Unis.…”

“…d'un autre modèle s'appuie selon eux sur un déplacement dans l'axe de la mobilisation sociale, alors que l'affirmation identitaire de groupes sociaux minoritaires, à travers des revendications soutenues par des mouvements sociaux dont l'origine remonte notamment au mouvement des droits civils des années 1960, se manifeste aussi dans les entreprises et les rapports d'emploi et de travail, prenant dans une certaine mesure, dans ce pays, le relais du mouvement syndical dans la mobilisation des forces progressistes (Piore et Safford, 2006).…”

Osmotic Mobilization and Union Support during the Long Protest Wave, 1960–1995

“…This point comes directly from theories of mobilization around and within organizations, which presume that social movements alter the acceptable limits on group formation (Zald & Berger 1978). Thus for example the spread of legal protection against ascriptive discrimination in the workplace increased the opportunities for organizing around affinity groups (Lichtenstein 2002, Piore & Safford 2006. It follows that the likelihood of groups' emerging in the wake of social mobilization should be greater in environments where the new groups face less potential opposition.…”