Do HRM practices influence the desire for unionization? Evidence across workers, workplaces, and co-workers for Great Britain

Is low unionisation in the British hospitality industry due to industry characteristics?

“…If there is a lack of association (Machin and Wood, 2005) this would counters the observations of others (Freeman and Rogers, 1999;Fiorito, 2001;Belfield and Heywood, 2004) or may simply reflect that there is no difference in the incidence of these practices between the HI and the rest of the PSS. The descriptive statistics demonstrate there are differences between the HI and the rest of the PSS on these factors.…”

“…The lack of contact, hence the lack of perception of the benefits of membership such as the union wage premium (Bryson et al, 2004), is also likely to contribute to a vicious circle of low membership. As most HI employees are ''never-members'' (76%) (Bryson and Gomez, 2005) or lapsed members (14%) (Lucas, 2004), conditions are such that it is not good to be a union member, because other workers are not unionised (Belfield and Heywood, 2004).…”

“…Mainly American studies have observed negative effects on unionisation where managers use HRM techniques as part of an overt union substitution strategy (Kochan, 1980) or to raise job satisfaction through improved working conditions (for example, Freeman and Rogers, 1999;Fiorito, 2001) or to promote employee engagement and involvement (Belfield and Heywood, 2004). Machin and Wood (2005) posit that the incidence of flexible pay, pay that is managerially determined without any collective dimension, employee involvement and individual and non-union voice mechanisms, such as team briefings, direct management and communications channels, individual disputes procedures and non-union committees plus the presence of an HR specialist may help explain low unionisation in British workplaces but find no correlation between voice and HRM adoption and observe that unionised workplaces differ little from non-unionised workplaces in terms of HRM.…”

“…Joining a union might damage the status quo, a situation that Freeman and Diamond (2000) refer to as the ''incumbency effect''. HI employees are also more likely to describe workplace employment relationships as ''good/very good'' (Lucas, 2004), which is a negative determinant of union support (Lowe and Schellenberg, 2001;Guest and Conway, 2002;Belfield and Heywood, 2004). There are markedly fewer HI workplaces employing 200+ than in PSS (Table 1) and over three-quarters of HI workplaces are multi-site and typically part of an organisation employing 1000+ employees (Lucas, 2004).…”

Union Certification: A Critical Analysis and Proposed Alternative

“…More recently, Riddell (2004, 509) has similarly credited 25 percent of the decline in certification success to management opposition. In addition, progressive human resource practices and employee involvement programs also partially account for the fall in union certification “wins” (Belfield and Heywood 2004; Freeman and Rogers, 2006).…”