Worker Voice in America: Is There a Gap between What Workers Expect and What They Experience?

Abstract

This article is the fifth in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. The series features articles that analyze the state of research and future directions for important themes this journal has featured over many years of publication. The decline in unionization experienced in the United States over the past 40 years raises a question of fundamental importance to workers, society, and the field of industrial relations: Have workers lost interest in having a voice at work, or is there a gap between workers’ expectations for a voice and what they actually experience? And if a “voice gap” exists, what options are available to workers to close that gap? The authors draw on a nationally representative survey of workers that both updates previous surveys conducted in 1977 and 1995 and goes beyond the scope of these previous efforts to consider a wider array of workplace issues and voice options. Results indicate that workers believe they should have a voice on a broad set of workplace issues, but substantial gaps exist between their expected and their actual level of voice at work. Nearly 50% of non-union workers say they would vote for a union, compared to approximately one-third in the two prior national surveys, which points to continued interest in unions as a voice mechanism. Additionally, the authors find significant variation in the rates of use of different voice options and workers’ satisfaction with those options. The results suggest that a sizable voice gap exists in American workplaces today, but at the same time, no one voice option fits all workers or all issues.

Speaking Up at Work: The Role of Perceived Organizational Support in Explaining the Relationship Between Perceptions of Organizational Politics and Voice Behavior

“…While we also consider this a strength of our study, it may be that having a sample from one organization would have provided more insight on POS as a mediator of the negative effects of perceptions of organizational politics. Although we did not find any differences in voice across the three industries in our sample, this is something to be explored more in future work to see if our findings would hold true across various industries and other types of work contexts, such as those identified by Kochan et al (2019; e.g., education, type of employment, and salary). Second, several researchers have noted the important, but often unexplored, impact of context (Johns, 2006).…”

What Do Americans Want From (Private) Government? Experimental Evidence Demonstrates that Americans Want Workplace Democracy

“…Broadly, our project extends existing work in economics and management that focus on preferences for types of work along economic dimensions such as compensation, flexibility, and benefits (Kostiuk 1990;Frymer 2005;Freeman and Rogers 2006;Eriksson and Kristensen 2014;Flory, Leibbrandt, and List 2015;Mas and Pallais 2017;Beglo and Gorges 2018;Wiswall and Zafar 2018). Building on work by Freeman and Rogers (2006) and Kochan et al (2019), we argue that workers not only have preferences over the economic fundamentals of labor arrangements, but also the political fundamentals over the supply of labor (Dahl 1986;Gourevitch 2014;Anderson 2017;Eidlin and Uetricht 2018). This implies that studies of labor supply and job search overlook an important dimension of work.…”

The consequences of trade union power erosion

“…An updated and wider ranging survey for 2017 gives comparable estimates of the two shortfalls of 21.4% and 46.9%, respectively, while indicating that rather more non-union workers than before-now 49%-would vote for a union [13]. However, in examining worker satisfaction with independent and internal voice options-where the former include unions, occupational associations, and joining strike action, and the latter encompass conversations with a supervisor, filing a grievance at the workplace, and joining an employee-manager committee-the new survey also reveals that no "one-sized shoe" fits all workers.…”

“…The author also thanks Barry Hirsch, Stanley Siebert, and Foteini Tzachrista. Version 2 of the article revises the discussion on inequality and employee voice, updates the figures, and adds new "Key references" [4], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15].…”