Fissured Employment and Network Bargaining: Emerging Employment Relations Dynamics in a Contingent World of Work

Abstract

For decades, direct employment relationships have been increasingly displaced by indirect employment relationships through networks of firms and layers of managerial control. The firm strategies driving these changes are organizational, geographic, and technological in nature and are facilitated by state policies. The resulting weakening of traditional forms of collective bargaining and worker power have led workers to counter by organizing broader alliances and complementing structural and associational power with symbolic power and state-oriented strategies through what the authors term “network bargaining.” These dynamics point to the limitations of dominant theories and frameworks for understanding employment relations and suggest a new approach that focuses on a range of direct and indirect work relationships, evolving forms of worker power, and networked patterns of worker–employer interactions.

New Directions in Employment Relations Theory: Understanding Fragmentation, Identity, and Legitimacy

“…The importance of legitimacy as a resource is evident in many of the contributions to this issue. Anner et al (2021) note that symbolic power plays a central role in network bargaining, as groups of activists seek to undermine the legitimacy of particular employment practices in order to pressure direct and indirect employers in firm networks. Similarly, Riordan and Kowalski (2021) emphasize the importance of symbolic goals and value in conflict.…”

“…A third, and related, response to the growing complexity of employers is to shift our unit of analysis from the individual employer to the entire value chain. This is the approach that Mark Anner, Matthew Fischer-Daly, and Michael Maffie (2021) adopt in their contribution to this issue. They suggest that we should consider the distinctive advantages to labor of bargaining at a network level, as workers face off against increasingly networked firms.…”

Human Dignity and Power: Worker Struggles against Precarity in U.S. Agribusiness

“…The industry began avoiding the constraints established in the union contracts by restructuring into networks, such that even the largest farms were independent of and price-takers from increasingly larger input suppliers and buyers. Industry restructuring meant the union would have to pressure multiple companies linked in the network (Anner, Fischer-Daly, and Maffie 2021).…”

Commentary on New Theories in Employment Relations

“…We might go back to the 1920s in the United States that witnessed the institutionalization of labor relations, to the post-1945 period of stable full employment in developed economies, or to the post-colonial era in emerging economies. Two articles in this special issue, Anner, Fischer-Daly, and Maffie (2021) on network bargaining and Benassi and Kornelakis (2021) on institutional toying, entertain an implicit benchmark of the post–World War II heyday in the United States and Europe. Both articles highlight the inadequacy of existing employment relations theories to explain labor responses to the rise of the so-called fissured workplace (Weil 2014).…”

“…Anner et al argue convincingly that in contrast to our understanding of firm strategy for externalization with organizational (outsourcing), geographic (global dispersion), and technological (“algorithmic management”) dimensions, the labor counterpart to firm strategies—“how workers may be able to also leverage this organizational form to achieve their demands” (Anner et al 2021: 690)—remains under-theorized. Hence the need to develop a new theory around network bargaining.…”