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Roy J. Adams, Ph.D.Author, Editor, Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations, McMaster andAriel F. Sallows
Chair of Human Rights for 2009/2010, University of
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Roy Adams (
Please click here for recent publications.
· North American Industrial Relations (B.Comm., MBA)
· Comparative Industrial Relations (B.Comm, MBA, BA, MIR, Ph.D.)
· Human Resources Management (MBA)
· Organizational Behaviour (BA)
· Collective Bargaining (MBA)
· Industrial Relations Theory (Ph.D.)
· Comparative Labour Movements (BA)
· Rights of Labour
(BA)
His travels have allowed Adams to dive in some of the
best spots in the world including Belize, Cozumel,
Mexico, the Great Barrier Reef, the Red Sea, Malaysia, South Africa and the
Galapagos and to climb to the highest points (none of them too high) in North
Africa, Eastern US, SE Asia, Japan and Australia. Because of his penchant for
visiting indigenous people living in (dangerous but not too dangerous) jungle
settings (
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The
- Adams, Roy J., Labour Left Out: Canada's Failure to Protect and Promote Collective Bargaining as a Human Right, (Ottawa, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2006)
- Labour Law Casebook Group (Roy Adams, Bernard Adell, Harry Arthurs, David Beatty, Richard Brown, Donald Carter, Geoffrey England, Brian Etherington, Gillian Hatfield, Brian Langille, Gillian Lester, Patrick Macklem, Dianne Pothier, Gilles Trudeau, Guylaine Vallee, Diane Veilleux) Labour and Employment Law: Cases, Materials and Commentary, Kingston, IRC Press, 1998.
- Adams, Roy J., Industrial
Relations Under Liberal Democracy,
- Adams, R.J., Skills
Development Leave For Working Canadians - Towards
a National Strategy, (
- Adams, R.J., Draper, P.M.
and Du Charme, C.,
Education and Working Canadians, Report of the Commission on Educational
Leave and Productivity, (
- Adams, R.J., White Collar
Union Growth in
CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
Adams, Roy J., “Labour’s Human Rights“ in David P.
Forsythe, Editor, Routledge Encyclopedia
of Human Rights, London, Routledge, forthcoming
- Adams, Roy J., “America’s ‘Union-Free’
Movement in light of international human rights standards,” in Justice
on the Job edited by Richard Block, Michelle Kaminski, Andy Levin and
Sheldon Friedman, W.E. Upjohn, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 2006.
- Adams, Roy J., "Voice for All: Why the right to refrain from collective bargaining is no right at all" in Worker Rights as Human Rights, edited by James Gross, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003.
- Adams, Roy J. "The Impact of the Movement Toward Hemispheric Free Trade on Industrial Relations," in Dan Cornfield, Karen Campbell and Holly McCammon, eds., Working in Restructured Workplaces, Sage Publications, 2001, pp.397-408. (This article was originally published in the journal Work and Occupations, 1997, 24: 364-380).
- Adams, Roy J., "Realizing the Right to Bargain Collectively in Canada and the Americas," in Richard Chaykowski, ed., Globalization of the Economy, Implications for Labour Markets, Society and the State, Kingston, Queen's University School of Policy Studies, 2001, pp. 139- 147.
- Adams, Roy J., "Public Employment Relations: Canadian Developments in Perspective," in Gene Swimmer, ed., Public Sector Labour Relations in an Era of Restraint and Restructuring, Don Mills, Ontario, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 212-227.
- Adams, Roy J., "Taking On Goliath: Industrial Relations and the Neo-Liberal Agenda," in Ton Wilthagen, ed. Advancing Theory in Labour Law an Industrial Relations in a Global Context, Amsterdam, North-Holland for the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1998, pp. 11-20.
- Adams, Roy J. and Parbudyal Singh, "Worker Rights Under NAFTA: Experiencewith the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation," in R. Chaykowski, P. Lapointe, G. Vallée and A. Verma, eds., Worker
Representation in the Era of Trade and Deregulation,
- Adams, Roy J. and Raymond
Markey, "How the State Affects Trade Union Growth: Re-evaluating
- Adams, R.J., "Canada," in L. Peters, S. Youngblood and C. Greer, eds.,Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Human Resource Management, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1997, pp. 32-33.
- Adams, Roy J., "Integrating Disparate Strands: An Elaborated Version of Systems Theory as a Framework for Organizing the Field of Industrial Relations," in Jack Barbash and Noah Meltz (eds.) Theorizing in Industrial Relations: Approaches and Applications, Sydney, Australia, Centre for Industrial Relations Research and Teaching of the University of Sydney, 1997, pp. 29-56.
- Adams, Roy J.,
"Trade Unions," in M. Poole and M. Warner, eds., The Handbook of Human Resource Management,
- Adams, Roy J., "Selig Perlman," in
Malcolm Warner, ed., The IEBM
Handbook of Management Thinking,
- Adams, Roy J.,
"Trade Union Representativeness in
- Adams, R.J., "Trade Unions," in Malcolm Warner, ed., International Encyclopedia of Business and Management, London, International Thomson Business Press, 6 volumes, 1996, pp. 4922-4931, volume 5.
- Adams, Roy J., "From Adversarialism to Social Partnership: Lessons from the Experience of Germany, Japan, Sweden and the United States," in Roy J. Adams, Gordon Betcherman and Beth Bilson, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, No Jobs, Tough Choices for Canadian Labour Policy (Toronto, C.D. Howe Institute, 1995) pp. 19-69.
- Adams, R.J., "Canadian Industrial Relations in Comparative Perspective," in M. Gunderson and A. Ponak, eds., Union-Management Relations in Canada, 3rd ed., (Don Mills, Addison-Wesley, 1995) pp. 495-526.
- Adams, R.J. and Lowell Turner, "The Social Dimension of Freer Trade," in Harry Katz and Maria Cook, eds., Regional Integration and Industrial Relations in North America, (Institute of Collective Bargaining, ILR School, Cornell University, 1994). pp. 82-104.
- Adams, Roy J., "Union Certification as an Instrument of Labor Policy, A Comparative Perspective," in Sheldon Friedman, Richard Hurd, Rudy Oswald, and Ronald L. Seeber, eds., Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, (Ithaca, New York, ILR Press, 1994) pp. 260-272.
- Adams, Roy J., "State Regulation of Unions and Collective Bargaining," in John Niland, Raymond Lansbury and Chrissie Verevis, eds., The Future of Industrial Relations in a Changing World, (Newbury Park, Calif., Sage, 1994) pp. 41-62.
- Adams, Roy J., "Understanding, Constructing and Teaching Industrial Relations Theory," in Adams and Meltz (eds.) Industrial Relations Theory, Its Nature, Scope and Pedagogy (Methuen, New Jersey, Scarecrow, 1993) pp. 1-16.
- Adams, Roy J.,
"Theory Construction and Assessment: A Checklist," in
- Adams, Roy J., "All Aspects of People at Work: Unity and Division in the Study of Labor and Labor Management," in Adams and Meltz (eds) In- dustrial Relations Theory, Its Nature Scope and Pedagogy (Methuen, New Jersey, Scarecrow, 1993) pp. 119-160.
- Adams, Roy J., "The Role of the State in Industrial Relations," in D. Lewin, O. Mitchell and P. Sherer (eds.) Research Frontiers in Industrial Relations (Madison, Wisconsin: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1992) p. 489-524.
- Adams, Roy J. and Bernard Adell, "Industrial Justice in Canada," in Hoyt Wheeler and Jacques Rojot (eds.) Workplace Justice: Employment Obligations in International Perspective (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1992) p. 99-135.
- Adams, Roy J., "An international survey of courses in comparative industrial relations," in Mark Bray (ed.) Teaching Comparative Industrial Relations, (Sydney, Australian Centre for Industrial Relations Teaching and Research: 1991) p. 43-51.
- Adams R.J., "The Role of Management in a Political Conception of the Employment Relationship," in G. Dlugos, W. Dorow and K. Weiermair (eds.) Management Under Differing Labour Market and Employment Systems (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988) pp. 177-191.
- Adams, R.J. and Hoyt N. Wheeler, "Dispute Resolution and the Quality of Labour-Management Decision Making," in W. Dorow (ed.) The Business Corporation in the Democratic Society (Berlin, de Gruyter, 1987) pp. 277-288.
- Adams, R.J., "An Overview of Training and Development in Canada," in Shimon Dolan and Randall S. Schuler (eds.) Canadian Readings in Personnel and Human Resources Management (Toronto, West Publishing Co., 1987) pp. 279-288.
- Adams, R.J., "Two Policy Approaches to Labour-Management Decision- Making at the Level of The Enterprise: A Comparison of the Wagner Model and Statutory Works Councils", in C. Riddell (ed.) Labour- Management Cooperation in Canada, (published by the University of Toronto Press for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, 1986) pp. 87-110.
- Adams, R.J., "Industrial Relations and the Economic Crisis: Canada Moves Toward Europe," in H. Juris, M. Thompson and W. Daniels (eds.) Industrial Relations in a Decade of Economic Change, (Madison, Wisconsin: Industrial Relations Research Association, 1985) pp. 115-150.
- Adams, R.J., "Industrial Relations Systems in Europe and North America," in Anderson, John and Gunderson, Morley (eds.) Union-Management Relations in Canada (Toronto: Addison-Wesley, l982), pp. 457-481.
- Adams, R.J., "A Theory of Employer Attitudes and Behaviour Towards Trade Unions in Europe and North America," in K. Weiermair and G. Dlugos (eds.) Management Under Differing Value Systems (Berlin: De Gruyter, l981).
PAPERS IN PROFESSIONAL JOURNALS
Adams, Roy J., “Prospects for Labour’s Right to Bargain Collectively
After BC Health Services,” UNB Law Journal, forthcoming, 2009.
Adams, Roy J., “Fraser v.
Adams, Roy J., “The Supreme Court,
Collective Bargaining and International Law: A Reply to Brian Langille,” Canadian Labour
and Employment Law Journal, Vol. 14, no. 1, 2008, pp. 111-121.
Adams, Roy J., “The Human Right of Police
to Organize and Bargain Collectively,” Police Practice and Research,
vol. 9, No. 2, May 2008, 161-168.
Adams, Roy J.,
“From Statutory Right to Human Right: The Evolution and Current Status of
Collective Bargaining,” Just Labour,
Volume 12, Spring 2008, pp. 48-67.
Adams, Roy J.,
“I-Mode, the New Language of Workers’ Rights, A Rejoinder to Larry
Savage,” Just Labour, Volume 12, Spring,
2008, pp. 76-86.
Adams, Roy J., "The Employee Free Choice
Act: A Skeptical View and Alternative," Labour
Studies Journal, vol. 31, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1-14.
- Adams, Roy J., "Organizing
Wal-Mart: The Canadian Campaign," Just Labour, vol. 6&7,
Autumn 2005, pp. 1-11
- Adams, Roy J.,
“Efficiency, Equity and Voice as Moral Imperatives,” Employee
Responsibilities and Rights Journal, vol 17, No
2, June 2005, pp. 111-117.
- Adams, Roy J., “Managing in Turbulent Times: The Corporate
Responsibility Imperative,” Journal of Comparative International
Management, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp 3-11, December 2004.
- Adams, Roy J., "
- Adams, Roy J., “Why American Workers are so Disorganized,” Human Resources and Employment Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, March, 2003, pp. 31-36
- Adams, Roy J., "The Wagner-Act Model: A Toxic System Beyond Repair," British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 40, No. 1, March, 2002, pp. 122-127.
- Adams, Roy J., "Implications of the International Human Rights Consensus for Canadian Labour and Management," Canadian Labour and Employment Policy Journal, vol 9, no. 1, 2002, pp. 119-140.
- Adams, Roy J., "The
State of the Unions: a review of recent literature,"
Employee Relations Review (
- Adams, Roy J., "Choice or Voice? Rethinking American labor policy in light of the international human rights consensus," Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, 2001, pp. 521-548.
- Adams, Roy J., "Employment Relations: Is Individualization Inevitable?" Employment Relations Record, vol. 1, no. 2, 2001, pp. 1-8.
- Adams, Roy J. and Parbudyal Singh, "Neither a Gem Nor a Scam: The Progress of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation," vol 28, no. 2, Summer 2001, pp. 1-17.
- Adams, Roy J., "On the convergence of labour rights and human rights: a review essay," in Relations Industrielles, vol. 56, No. 1, 2001, pp. 199-203.
- Adams, Roy J., "Implications of the International Human Rights in Employment Consensus for Management Teaching and Practice," in Journal of Comparative International Management, Vol. 4, Number 1, June 2001, pp. 22-32.
- Adams, Roy J.,
"Developments in Comparative Employment Relations, A
Review Article," Employee Relations Review (
- Adams, Roy J. "North
American Employment Relations in the Twenty First Century," Employee
Relations Review (
- Adams, Roy J., "Contemporary Industrial Relations in Industrialized Market Economies: A Review Article," New Zealand Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 24, no. 1, February 1999, pp. 83-91.
- Adams, Roy J., "Why statutory union recongition is bad labour policy: the North American Experience," Industrial Relations Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 96-101.
- Adams, Roy J., "Why statutory union recongition is bad labour policy: the North American Experience," Industrial Relations Journal, vol. 30, no. 2, June 1999, pp. 96-101.
- Adams, Roy J., "Using the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation to Achieve Industrial Relations Reform," Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 1999, pp.31-44.
- Adams, Roy J. and Raymond Markey, "How the State Influences Union Growth: A Comparative Analysis of Developments in Europe, North America and Australasia," International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations, vol. 13, #4, Winter 1997, pp. 285-303.
- Adams, Roy J.,
"NAALC Priorities: Past Experiences and Future Avenues,"
- Adams, Roy J., "Comparing Unions Cross Nationally: Towards a Research Agenda," International Journal of Employment Studies, Vol. 4, nol 1, 1996, pp. 127-143.
- Adams, Roy J., "A
Pernicious Euphoria: 50 Years of Wagnerism in
- Adams, Roy J. and Bernard Adell, "Unions Can Facilitate Real Change," Policy Options, vol. 16, no. 8, October, 1995, pp. 16-19.
- Adams, R.J., "Labour Policy, Cooperation and Competitiveness: Re- casting the Vital Links," Policy Options, vol. 15, No. 2. March, 1994, pp. 33-38.
- Adams, Roy J., "The North American Model of Employee Representational Participation: 'A Hollow Mockery'" Comparative Labor Law Journal, volume 15, no. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 201-211.
- Adell, Bernard and Roy J. Adams, "Theft As A Cause for Employment Discipline, Some Comparative Observations," International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations, 9, 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 93-114.
- Adams, Roy J., "Regulating Unions and Collective Bargaining: A global, historical analysis of determinants and consequences," Comparative Labor Law Journal, volume 14, no. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 272-301.
- Adams, Roy J., "The Right to Participate," Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, 1992, pp. 91-99.
- Adams, Roy J., "Efficiency is not enough," Labor Studies Journal, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 18-28.
- Adams, Roy J., "Collective Bargaining under Pressure. A Canada-US. Comparison," Employee Relations, vol. 12, #2, 1990, pp. 33-39.
- Adams, Roy J.,
"North American Industrial Relations: Divergent Trends in
- Adams, R.J., "Desperately Seeking Industrial Relations Theory," International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations, 4, #1, Spring, 1988, pp. 1-10.
- Adams, R.J., "The Old Industrial Relations and Corporate Competitiveness: A Canadian Case," Employee Relations, 10, #2, 1988, pp.3-7.
- Adams, R.J., "Should Works Councils be used as Industrial Relations Policy?" Monthly Labor Review, 108, #7, July, 1985, pp. 25-29.
- Adams, R.J., "The Federal Government and Tripartism," Relations Industrielles, 37, #3, l982, pp. 606-6l7.
- Adams, R.J., "Educational Innovation in an Age of Uncertainty," Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education, XII, #2, Winter, l98l, pp. 4l-44.
- Adams, R.J.,
"Towards a More Competent Labour Force: A
Training Levy Scheme for
- Adams, R.J., "Bain's Theory of White-Collar Union Growth: A Conceptual Critique," British Journal of Industrial Relations, XV, #3, November, l977, pp. 3l7-32l.
- Adams, R.J., "The Work of the Trade Union Field Officer," Relations Industrielles, 32, #4, l977, pp. 5l2-53l.
- Adams, R.J. and Rummel, C.H., "Workers' Participation in
Management in
- Adams, R.J., "Canada-U.S. Labour Link Under Stress," Industrial Relations, l976, l5, #3, pp. 295-3l2.
- Murray, V., Jain, H.C.
and Adams, R.J., "A Framework for the Comparative Analysis of
Personnel Administration,"
- Adams, R.J., "Wage Determination: Reconciling Theory and Practice," American Journal of Economics and Sociology, l975, 34, pp. 353-364.
- Adams, R.J., "The Recognition of White-Collar Worker Unions," British Journal of Industrial Relations, l975, l3, #l, pp. l02-l06.
- Adams, R.J.,
"Solidarity, Self-Interest and the Unionization Differential Between
- Adams, R.J.,
"White-Collar Union Growth: The Case of
ARTICLES INTENDED FOR A NON-PROFESSIONAL AUDIENCE
Adams, Roy J., “Back-to-work legislation violates international
law,” Straight Goods,
Adams, Roy J., “Still Charting the Charter,” Straight
Goods,
Adams, Roy J., “Workplace Representation
for all is a right, Rabble News,
Adams, Roy J., “Imagine there’s no
labour board,” Our Times, Vol. 26, no. 2, April/May 2007, pp.
31-33.
Adams, Roy J., “Court Puts Collective
Bargaining into the Constitution,”
Straight Goods,
Adams, Roy J., “Mulling the Right to Bargain,” Straight
Goods,
Adams, Roy J., “The Supreme Onus is on
Workers,” Our Times, vol. 26, no. 4, 2007.
Adams, Roy J., “Court Decision could bar new anti-strike
law,” Straight Goods,
Adams, Roy J., “Workplace Representation
for all,” International Union Rights, vol. 14, no. 1, 2007.
Adams, Roy J., “Getting Back on the Road
to Industrial Democracy,” CCPA Monitor, vol. 13, no. 8, February,
2007, pp. 42-43.
Adams, Roy J., “Collective Bargaining: The
Human Right Denied to Most Canadians,” CCPA Monitor. Volume 13,
No. 1, May 2006, pp. 36-38. Reprinted in Mayday Magazine, issue 16, July
2006.
Adams, Roy J., A Canada, @ in The Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Management, Human Resource Management, 2 nd
edition
Adams, Roy J., “Wal-Mart’s Anti-Unionism and Human Rights, Recent Canadian Developments,” International Union Rights, Vol. 12, Issue 1, 2005, p 13.
Adams, Roy J., “Tolerating Wal-Mart’s anti-unionism betrays our ILO obligations,” CCPA Monitor, Vol. 12, No. 1, May 2005, p 26
Adams, Roy J., “Collective bargaining: The Way It’s Supposed to be but sadly isn’t,” CCPA Monitor, Vol. 12, No. 1, May 2005, p 3
Adams, Roy J., “Labour Rights as Human Rights, Thinking Outside the Box,” Our Times, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2005, pp 31-34.
Adams, Roy J., "Trade Unions." in
Malcolm Warner, ed., International Encyclopedia
of Business and Management,
Adams, Roy J. and Margaret Hallock, "The Anti-sweatshop movement and corporate codes of conduct," in Perspectives at Work, 2001 (a publication of the Industrial Relations Research Assn), Vol. 5, No. 1, 2001, pp. 15-18.
Adams, Roy J., "Realizing International Standards," International Union Rights, Volume 8, No. 2, 2001.
Adams, Roy J., "Canadian Industrial
Relations at the dawn of the twenty- first
century: prospects for reform," Workplace Gazette, (An
Industrial Relations Quarterly published by Human Resources
Development
Adams, Roy J., "The
Prevention of Unionism
Adams, Roy J., "Labour Rights as Human Rights" WorkingUSA, July/August 1999, pp. 72-77.
Adams, Roy J., "The
Prevention of Unionism
Adams, Roy J., "Buiding International Labor Rights into the Labor Education Curriculum," Labor Studies Forum, 12, 1, Spring 1999, pp. 1-3.
Adams, Roy J. and Sheldon Friedman, "Industrial Relations Implications of the New International Consensus on Human Rights in Employment," Perspectives on Work, vol. 2, no. 2, 1998, pp. 24-27.
Adams, Roy J., "
Adams, Roy, "The Right to Unionization," Education Forum, Volume 24, Issue 3, Fall 1998, pp. 8-9.
Adams,
Adams, Roy J., "Some Industrial Disputes Rock the World," Perspectives on Work, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1998, p. 23.
Adams, Roy J., "What's at stake in the
battle over
Adams, Roy J., "Tory bill violates basic
human rights"
- Adams, Roy J., "Why
Harris's Labour Policy is Bad for
- Adams, R.J., "The Functionally Illiterate Worker & Public Policy," TESL Talk, Quarterly For Teachers of English as a Second Language, l3, #4, Fall, l982, pp. 9-l6.
- Adams, R.J., "Educational Leave: North American Developments and Design Elements," Work Times, 1, #2, l982, pp. l-5.
- Adams, R.J., "Why Business Should Support a Training Levy Scheme," Worklife, Autumn, l980, pp. 24-25.
- Adams, R.J., "The Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Educational Leave and Productivity: Key Issues and Recommendations," Canadian Personnel and Industrial Relations Journal, 27, #4, September, l980, pp. 34-39.
- Adams, R.J., "Day Release for Literacy Education," Literacy, 5, #l, l980, pp. 3-6.
- Adams, R.J., "A Case
for the Establishment of a Central Employer's Organization in
- Adams, R.J., "Conflict and the Nature of the Industrial Relations System," Labour Gazette, April, l975, pp. 220-224. (Reprinted in G.S. Lowe and H.J. Krahn (eds.) Working Canadians: Readings in the Sociology of Work and Industry, (Toronto: Methuen, 1984); pp. 353- 361).
Adams, Roy J., “Fraser v.
Adams,
Roy J., “Prospects for Labour’s Right to Bargain Collectively After
BC Health Services,” UNB Law Journal, Vol. 59, pp. 85-94, 2009.
Adams,
Roy J. “Labor’s Human Rights,” in
David P. Forsythe, editor, Encyclopedia of
Human Rights, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Adams, Roy J., “The Supreme Court, Collective Bargaining and
International Law: A Reply to Brian Langille,” Canadian
Labour and Employment Law Journal, Vol. 14, no.
1, 2008, pp. 111-121.
Adams, Roy J., “From Statutory Right to Human Right: The Evolution and Current Status of Collective Bargaining,” Just Labour, Volume 12, Spring 2008, pp. 48-67.
Adams, Roy J., “I-Mode, the New Language of Workers’ Rights, A Rejoinder to Larry Savage,” Just Labour, Volume 12, Spring, 2008, pp. 76-86.
Both available at http://www.justlabour.yorku.ca/index.php?page=toc&volume=12
Roy
J. Adams, “Workplace Representation for All is a Right,” Rabble
News, February 19, 2007. Available on line at: http://www.rabble.ca/politics.shtml?x=57398
Roy
J. Adams, “Labor’s
Human Rights: A Review of the Nature and Status of
Core
Labor Rights as Human Rights,” Working Paper No. 36, Human Rights and Human Welfare Working Paper Series, October 2006
Adams, Roy J., "Organizing
Wal-Mart: The Canadian Campaign," Just Labour, vol. 6&7, Autumn 2005, pp. 1-11
Adams, Roy J., "The
Employee Free Choice Act: A Skeptical View and
Alternative," Labor Studies Journal, Volume
32, #1, Spring, 2007.
.
xxxxx
WORKING DRAFT Please do not quote without permission).
IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS CONSENSUS FOR CANADIAN LABOUR AND MANAGEMENT
by
Roy J. Adams
(Notes for an address to the Canadian Policy Research Conference, Ottawa, December 1 2000.
WORKING DRAFT Please do not quote without permission)
INTRODUCTION: THE EMERGENCE OF AN INTERNATIONAL WORKERS' HUMAN RIGHTS CONSENSUS
During the 1990s a very strong international consensus emerged around the proposition that a set of core labour rights ought to be regarded as fundamental human rights (Adams and Friedman 1998; ILO 2000). The set includes freedom of association, the right to bargain collectively, the elimination of forced labour, the abolition of child labour and the elimination of discrimination in employment and occupation. Organizations joining the consensus cover a wide range of the political spectrum. In addition to the International Labour Organization and various trade union and civil society associations, those affirming support for the international consensus include the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United Nations has recently developed a Global Compact with labour, business and non-governmental organizations containing a commitment to core labour standards as human rights. Among the business organizations agreeing to adhere to the Compact and thus to promote core labour rights as human rights are the International Organization of Employers, the International Chamber of Commerce and 50 major multinational corporations.
Canada actively supported the development of the consensus and signed onto several international documents pledging to abide by international standards with respect to those rights (see e.g., DFAIT 1998; DFAIT 2000). Canadian policy recognizes that "The promotion and protection of human rights is. . . not purely a question of values but a mutual obligation of all members of the international community." It also recognizes that "Canada does not expect other governments to respect standards which it does not apply to itself." (DFAIT 2000)
Canada's official position with respect to compliance with international labour norms is that "legislation [at the federal and provincial levels] generally promotes free collective bargaining and recognizes the right to strike or lockout." (ILO 2000b, p. 17). There are two ILO conventions which embody generally recognized international principles regarding freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively and to strike. They are number 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize and number 98 on the right to organize and collective bargaining. As their titles would suggest they overlap but each contributes to a comprehensive body of principles.
Canada has ratified number 87 but not number 98. Nevertheless, according to a recent article by two Labour Canada officials "there is a high conformity to the major principles of Convention 98." (Poisson and Torobin 1999). In this article I will endeavor to show that the variance of Canadian policy and practice from international norms is wider than the official position of the federal government suggests. I shall also argue that Canada's deviance is ethically wrong, politically dangerous and economically wrongheaded. Complying fully with its international obligations is not only the right thing to do, it is the wise thing to do both politically and economically.
CANADIAN POLICY AND PRACTICE IN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
The International Labour Organization is the major institution with responsibility to establish and interpret international labour standards. It traces its history to the World War I period and the League of Nations. Today it is part of the UN system. It is a tripartite institution with representation from labour, management and governments around the globe. Its annual labour conference acts as a sort of global parliament for the legislation of minimum standards for working people. In 1998 that conference passed unanimously a Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (ILO 2000), making it clear that all member countries are required (as a condition of membership) to "respect, to promote and to realize in good faith" as set of core labour standards that include "freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining." Although the obligations made explicit in the Fundamental Declaration have existed for some time the global debate regarding the social dimension of international trade convinced the ILO and its members that it was appropriate to reaffirm and strengthen their commitment to them (Valticos 1998).
Prior to the 1990s the labour and human rights communities had pursued their objectives separately (Leary 1996). Although the human rights community has recognized freedom of association for some time as being a fundamental human right generally it has left the promotion and defense of that right to the labour movement. For its part the labour movement has commonly pursued its ends in national political and economic arenas and has generally not embraced the language and culture of human rights. During the 1990s, however, opposition to negative aspects of economic globalization brought the human rights and labour communities together. One result was the re-affirmation of core labour rights as fundamental human rights.
A keystone principle of the international human rights consensus is that fundamental human rights are the birthright of all human beings. As such they cannot be granted or withheld by governments. Another basic principle is that all human rights are "universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated." Each of them, according to the Vienna Declaration of the World Summit on Human Rights, which was endorsed by nearly all of the world's nations, must be treated "on the same footing, and with the same emphasis." (UN High Commission for Human Rights, 1993).
The human rights character of freedom of association has a long history. It was initially affirmed as a global labour right in the consitution of the International Labour Organization in 1919. It was affirmed as a fundamenal human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In that same year the ILO elaborated its principles on the issue in its Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize Convention (No. 87). Another explication of the principles underlying freedom of association took place in 1949 when the ILO adopted its Convention on the Right to Organize and Collective Bargaining (No. 98). The UN further developed the notion in both its Convenant on Civil and Political Rights and its Convenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in the 1960s. (Valticos 1998). The meaning of the term was further developed as a result of the working of the ILO's enforcement procedures. Over the years its Freedom of Association Committee has considered over 1800 cases of alleged infringements to ILO requirements and in that context has formulated a detailed jurisprudence regarding the issue (Gernigon, et al., 2000). International exercises such as the World Summit on Human Rights, the World Summit on Social Development and the UN's Global Compact has made it clear that, within the UN family, the ILO has been designated the prime interpreter of the practical meaning of Freedom of Association.
The doctrines laid down in these various documents and in the jurisprudence of the ILO are considered to be aspects of international law. At least some parts of international law are considered to be "customary" and thus binding on all nations whether or not they have officially agreed to be bound by them. Because of its age and prominence in so many international instruments, Freedom of Association is considered, at least by some, to be a part of customary international labour law whose dictates are universally binding (e.g., Leary 1996).
Canada has been a strong supporter of both the United Nations and the International Labour Organization. It was a signer of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and has ratified both of the relevant covenants. As noted above it has also ratified ILO convention No. 87 but not 98. Nevertheless, by its support of the ILO's Fundamental Declaration of 1998 it has promised to "respect, to promote and to realize in good faith" the relevant principles underlying both core labour rights conventions.
ILO jurisprudence makes it clear that Freedom of Association implies the right to bargain collectively and the right to strike. Both of these rights have been found by the ILO's Freedom of Association Committee to be inherent aspects of Freedom of Association. Moreover, in the Fundamental Declaration of 1998 instead of being treated as a right derivative from Freedom of Association, the Right to Bargain Collectively was explicitly mentioned.
Canadian policy and practice, however, is out of line with these principles.
Freedom of association is embedded in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but contrary to international standards, the Supreme Court has interpreted the concept to exclude the right to bargain collectively and the right to strike (see e.g., Christian 1989). In the well-known Alberta Reference case, Justice Dickson argued that Canada ought to follow international standards but, without reasons, the majority of the court did not accept his judgement. Instead it decided the case on the basis of judicial deference to parliament in labour matters. The tradition of judicial deference, which has existed in Canada for some time, has considerable support from elements of the Canadian industrial relations community. Nevertheless, it is at loggerheads with the international human rights consensus because it makes collective bargaining and the strike right into partisan issues thereby denying their human rights character.
As noted above, according to the consensus, strongly supported by Canada, human rights are, "universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated." (UN High Commission for Human Rights 1993). The consensus declares fundamental human rights to be the birthright of all human beings and, as such, beyond the capacity of legislatures to deny. From a human rights perspective to treat the right to bargain collectively and the right to strike as ordinary polical issues is tantamount to legitimizing slavery, child labour and overt employment discrimination as issues that may be legalized or not according to the whims of the party in power.
Despite the consensus and Canada's part in constructing it, Canadian legislators commonly take action contrary to international standards. Among the most egregious violators of international human rights norms is Ontario's Harris government. Shortly after coming to power in 1994 that government not only excluded agricultural workers from the protection of that province's labour rights act but also terminated the bargaining rights of existing bargaining agents and nullified existing collective agreements. After considering this case the ILO's Freedom of Association Committee "adopted decisive recommendations: the Government was requested to take the necessary measures to guarantee the excluded groups access to machinery and procedures that facilitate collectivie bargaining, to recertify the organizations representing those workers, and to revalidate any collective agreements that they had entered into." (Olney 1999) The Ontario government, however, ignored these recommendations and the Federal government made no effort to intervene.
Another example occurred in 1998 when the Harris Government passed a "Prevention of Unionism" act which was designed to dissuade workfare recipients from organizing in their own interests. In response Canadian non-governmental organizations filed complaints with the United Nations' Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which at that time was reviewing Canada's compliance with the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Not only the federal government but also all provinces specifically agreed to respect that Covenant. The Committee found, however, that Ontario's Act was a clear violation of freedom of association and thus of Canada's international commitments and asked the Ontario government to repeal it. The Harris government, however, gruffy refused. Since the UN, like the ILO, has no power to compel compliance with its directives, it was powerless to proceed further. (see, relevant information at the web site of the Society for the Promotion of Human Rights in Employment). Despite its international obligations, the Canadian federal government again made no effort to intervene.
Despite Canada's official position that it is largely in compliance with international standards, no Canadian government actively promotes collective bargaining with a view towards its "realization in good faith." All Canadian jurisdictions make "access to bargaining" available to most employees but no Canadian government actively encourages employees to exercise their right to bargain collectively. Nor does any Canadian government actively encourage employers voluntarily to recognize representatives of their employees for collective bargaining purposes.
Indeed instead of focusing on the rights of workers to influence their conditions of work - the central objective of collective bargaining as a human right - most Canadian labour policy seems to be focused instead on achieving a balance between business interests and the institutional interests of established trade unions. Reflecting this position, the title of a recent government commission report into federal labour law was "Seeking a Balance." (Sims, Blouin and Knopf 1995).
According to the logic of "balance" the appropriate policy of government, as discussed in the Sims report, is to provide working people with "access to bargaining" but not to promote it as required by the ILO's Fundamental Declaration. Implicitly, the assumption underlying Canadian policy is that capital has a natural and legitimate aversion to collective bargaining that the state as neutral must respect. As a result most Canadian employers in the private sector follow a policy of "union substitution." They seek to avoid collective bargaining by managing in a manner that "makes unions unnecessary." (See e.g., Kaufman and Taras 2000; Thompson 1995). By their acceptance of that behaviour as legitimate Canadian governments implicitly deny the human rights character of collective bargaining. From a human rights perspective, governmental tolerance of opposition to collective bargaining is analogous to turning a blind eye to child prostitution or overt racial and sexual discrimination.
Canadian employers in all jurisdictions are forbidden to threaten or intimidate employees or promise them benefit for forgoing collective bargaining but Canadian society benignly tolerates corporate policy publicly and explicitly designed to avoid unionization providing that illegal tactics are not used to achieve that end. This toleration is based on the proposition that employers have a free speech right to express their preferences regarding collective bargaining.
In a society in which collective bargaining is deemed to be an ordinary political issue, this position is perfectly appropriate. But if collective bargaining is held to be a fundamental human right then this approach to the issue is, at the minimum, problematic. If all human rights are equal then opposition to collective bargaining is equivalent to opposition to equal employment opportunity for women, aboriginals and people of colour.
Implicitly the stance of Canadian governments is that those who have failed to make use of the available procedures to establish collective bargaining must prefer their individualistic employment relationship. Survey evidence indicates, however, that although some workers are wary of participating in the adversarial environment of conventional collective bargaining, the large majority of currently unrepresented workers would like to have representation in the making of their conditions of employment by some means (Freeman and Rogers 1999). The problem is that employers generally make it known that they prefer to manage without collective employee input and, not wanting to rock the boat, Canadian workers defer to that preference.
Nor is it possible for workers individually to participate in making the rules with respect to the full range of issues of relevance. Many critical issues in organizations of any size are collective in nature and thus not amenable to individual negotiations. For example, it is possible for an individual to negotiate a wage increase but not the overall approach of the enterprise to remuneration. For employees to be involved in decisions of that sort it is necessary for them to have collective representation.
Although there is strong support for the idea that freedom of association implies the right not to associate, it is not at all clear that the right to bargain collectively implies a right not to bargain. To reject collective bargaining of any sort is to grant to the employer license to establish employment conditions critical to employee welfare without employee advice and consent. It is doubtful that any rational person would agree to exclusion from such decisions if the cost of inclusion was nil.
Democratic nations generally withhold from their citizens the right to engage in activities repugnant to basic notions of democracy. For example, in the modern world there is no right of citizens to sell themselves into slavery; there is no right of nations to pursue a policy of apartheid and there is no right of children voluntarily to engage in exploitative activities. Arguably, employers should have no right to wield arbitrary authority over their employees and employees should have no right to defer to such authority (Adams 2000a).
Along with the United States, Canada is one of the few nations in the world that, for most purposes, makes the enjoyment of the right to bargain collectively, contingent on the exercise of freedom of association. Commonly, advanced democratic nations have separate and distinct policies with respect to freedom of association and the right to bargain. In Germany, for example, in deference to the principles of freedom of association no citizen may be compelled to join an association against his or her will. On the other hand in order to realize the right to bargain collectively the German government by fostering a combination of conventional collective bargaining, statutory works councils and participation in corporate policy via representation on corporate directing boards ensures that nearly all workers enjoy representation in the establishment of their conditions of work. (Mitchnick 1993; ILO 1997). Like Germany, most European nations pursue independent policies with respect to the two issues (Adams 2000a). Commonly although union membership density varies widely, in continental Europe the large majority of the workforce has representation institions in place (ILO 1997).
The best evidence of Canada's failure to promote collective bargaining with a view towards realizing it in good faith is the fact that in the typical European country the representation rate is 80% or more whereas in the Canadian private sector it is about 20%. The European experience suggests that policy tools are available to achieve universal or near-universal employee representation. With that in mind, the low Canadian rate must be considered to be the result of wilful behaviour on the part of governments contrary to their international obligations.
Canada also infringes international standards when governments override collective bargaining and impose conditions of employment during non-crisis periods. Although all Canadian jurisdictions permit government workers to bargain collectively, quite often those governments overrule collective bargaining by imposing terms compatible with economic policy objectives. ILO principles allow governments to annul bargaining during crisis conditions but Canadian governments commonly resort to imposition in conditions that the ILO does not regard to be crisis. As a result, the ILO's Freedom of Association Committee has frequently deemed Canadian governments to be out of line. Those governments have, however, only infrequently accepted the ILO's recommendations (Adams 2000; Olney 1999).
In addition to its failure to provide employees universally with a voice at work, the respect by Canadian government for the right to strike is also problematic. According to international labour standards all workers should enjoy that right and, although states are entitled to regulate the use of the strike, those regulations must be reasonable. The meaning of reasonable in many circumstances is to be found in the international jurisprudence. Thus, while ILO principles permit governments to withhold the right from certain "essential" employees those employees must be provided with a viable dispute resolution alternative such as arbitration (Valticos and von Potobsky 1995).
One of the most discreditable aspects of Canadian policy with respect to the right to strike has to do with the propensity of governments to pass ad hoc legislation ordering workers legally on strike back to work or forbidding workers on an ad hoc basis to undertake a strike. This policy is widespread in Canada and it seems to be casually accepted by the Canadian public. Nevertheless, it offends international law and international human rights standards. Several of these incidents have been sent to the ILO and repeatedly it has found Canada to be in violation of its international obligations. In nearly all cases, Canadian governments involved have ignored the ILO findings and have repeated their contrary behaviour (Panitch and Swartz 1993; Adams 2001).
Another compliance issue that is not quite as clear as the one's noted above has to do with the propensity of Canadian governments to exclude certain workers from the coverage of labour relations legislation. Among those excluded in one or more Canadian jurisdictions are domestic workers, agricultural and horticultural workers, architects, land surveyors, lawyers and doctors. The existence of these exclusions is the primary reason why Canada has not ratified ILO Convention No. 98 (Olney 1999). It is the policy of the Federal government not to ratify international instruments unless there is a consensus of all 13 jurisdictions and the policy of several jurisdictions to maintain some or all of these exclusions has led them to withhold their consent to ratify.
This issue is not so clear as the others because, although Ontario is an exception, most provinces and the federal government do not forbid excluded workers from organizing in their own interests. Thus Canada's official position, as stated in its report to the ILO under the Follow-up to the Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work is that excluded workers "are nevertheless entitled to negotiate with their employers on a voluntary basis" and that "such voluntary negotiations routinely take place in Canada, for example, by the Alberta and Ontario Medical Associations which negotiate physician fees." (P.21).
COMPLYING WITH THE INTERNATIONAL CONSENSUS
In its report under the Follow-up the the Fundamental Declaration, the ILO lists as a priority objective: "closing the representation gap for workers and employers." The size of the representation gap is indicated by the percentage of employees whose conditions of employment are not determined through negotiations between employers and representatives independently chosen by employees. In the Canadian private sector the gap is about 80%.
In order to comply with its international commitments with regard to collective bargaining Canada ought to embrace the ILO's objective of closing the "representation gap." Instead of providing "access to bargaining" it ought to put in place institutions which allow all Canadian workers to co-determine their conditions of employment. Although such a step might seem to be extreme within the narrow North American context it does have recent international precdent. In the early 1980s, for example, France explicitly adopted a policy of closing its representation gap with considerable success. Its policies towards that end have resulted in a collective bargaining coverage rate of about 90% (ILO 1997).
The ILO's definition of collective bargaining is broader than the common perception of that institution in North America. In Canada and the United States collective bargaining is commonly throught of as the nexus of behaviour associated with negotiations under the Wagner-Act labour policy model. It consists of periodic negotiations leading to collective agreements containing managment's rights clauses and formal grievance procedures ending in binding arbitration. Commonly union-management relationships under this model are adversarial and often antagonistic.
Although the ILO's conception of bargaining includes this nexus of relationships what is simply referred to as collective bargaining in North America is only one variant of bargaining. Collective bargaining is defined by the ILO as "all negotiations which take place between an employer, a group of employers or one or more employers' organizations on the one hand and one of more workers' organizations on the other for determining working conditions and terms of employment, for regulating relations between employers and workers and for regulating relations between employers and their organizations and a workers' organization or workers' organizations." Although this definition certainly includes negotiations between trade unions and employers the ILO also includes within its definition of collective bargaining, situations where, in the absence of a union, workers are represented by delegates "duly elected and authorised by them in accordance with national laws and regulations." (Gernigon, Odero and Guido 2000)
That definition would seem to include employee representation agencies established by statute. Works councils are a common feature of European industrial relations and the logic underlying them has been embraced by Canada with respect to statutory health and safety committees and with the implementation of work sharing supported by Employment Insurance funds. In the federal jurisdiction, the establishment in all enterprises, whether unionized or not, of committees to negotiate the effects of plant shutdowns. Several Canadian commissions and task forces have recommended the use of statutory employee representation schemes with respect other employment issues such as profit sharing, and the implementation of employment standards legislation and human rights legislation.
The point to be made here is that Canadian governments have available the means to "realize in good faith" the human right of workers to a voice at work. According to the ILO collective bargaining includes not only the adversarial brand of labour-management negotiations so common in Canada but also any negotiations between representatives freely chosen by the employees and employer representatives over employment issues with a view towards reaching mutually acceptable agreement on those issues. Putting in place by statute the joint committees recommended by the procession of Canadian investigatory bodies would go some way towards fulfilling Canada's international obligations. To date, however, most Canadian governments have ignored the recommendations. (Adams 1986).
In Europe there is extensive experience with the use of statutory councils for a broader variety of issues (Rogers and Streeck 1995). Recently the European Union adopted legislation requiring all European companies to establish councils for consultative purposes (Blanpain and Hanami 1995). In short, there is a lot of experience with statutory representation and Canada could, if it had the will to do so, move a long way towards closing the representation gap by more extensively making use of this approach. Most experience with this sort of representation has been positive. From an early stance of skepticism, most European unions have come to support statutory works councils.
Canadian governments also need to give up the practice of overriding collective bargaining by unilaterally imposing conditions of employment. Recent research on the experience of Canadian provinces during the 1990s with addressing deficits found that those provinces who negotiated cut-backs with their employees were as successful as those who imposed retrenchment. In short, it was not necessary for governments to offend international human rights standards in order to achieve their economic objectives.
Canadian governments also need to forgo their penchant to order workers legally on strike back to work. ILO principles allow governments a lot of lattitude in developing policies designed to minimize the incidence and impact of industrial conflict. But they do not permit the arbitrary suppression by ad hoc legislation of that right. Giving up that illicit policy tool may be expected to put pressure on Canadian governments to reconsider relevant labour policy with a view towards designing a system that is less prone to conflict. The tendency of Canadian governments to constantly intervene in the industrial relations system to suppress conflict has been disastrous. The present system is one of the world's most conflict prone but that record has not prompted governments to search seriously for alternatives.
In addition to action taken by elected Canadian governments, the Supreme Court ought to consider reversing its Alberta Reference decision excluding the right to bargain collectively and the right to strike from its definition of Freedom of Association. First of all, the entire Canadian tradition of failing to respect international treaty obligations until they are enacted by the legislature might fruitfully be reconsidered. That standard, imported from England, was developed in the distant past when the executive (the Queen) was a distinctively different branch of government from parliament. Its intent was to ensure parliamentary sovereigntly over international policy. However, in Canada today the distinction between the executive and the legislature has become ambiguous. Because of the dynamics of party discipline the executive and parliament work very closely together on policy and legislation. In a majority government, at least, there is no excuse for an executive failing to follow through with legislation.
But without changing the treaty policy, there is good reason for the Supreme Court to reverse its Alberta Reference doctrine. That decision was taken before the wave of globalization engulfed the world in the 1990s giving rise to the strengthening of the human rights consensus and workers' human rights as part of that consensus. The elected Canadian federal government has repeatedly during the past decade pledged to be bound by ILO jurisprudence with respect to freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively. In the recent case of Baker vs. Canada the Supreme Court said that adminstrative agencies in making discretionary decisions under the law must make decisions that are consistent with Canadian values. With that in mind it might be argued that Canadians value integrity; they reject the cynicism under which a government makes a promise that it has no intention of keeping. It that is true, then Canadians, through their representatives, have committed themselves to respect and abide by international labour rights principles. If that is also true, then the deviation of the Supreme Court's definition of freedom of association from that of the international community needs to be rectified. It is contrary to Canadian values.
In addition to obligations accepted as part of specific treaties, Canada is
also bound by customary international law and, in the opinion of at least some
experts (e.g. Virginia Leary 1996) freedom of association has risen to that
level. For its deviance from international norms with respect to freedom of
association Canada could be embarassed before the
World Court. But, like treaties, World Court decisions are not self-executing
in the Canadian legal system. Nevertheless, the seriousness of offending
customary international law may be illustrated by pointing to other practices
that it forbids. They include slavery, political murder, torture, etc. In
reconsidering this issue the Supreme Court needs to take into consideration the
position that it will be putting Canada in by permitting Canadian governments
to engage in practices the conceptual equivalent of those egregious human
rights violations.
THE ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITY OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT
Legally, the Federal government has jurisdiction over only about 10-15% of the Canadian labour force with respect to labour law. As a result, although it is the level of government that has the authority to make international commitments on Canada's behalf, it cannot legally compel the provinces to abide by those international commitments. On the issue of freedom of association and collective bargaining, however, the provinces have bound themselves by their agreement to comply with the terms of the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights both of which make reference to freedom of association. Within the UN system, the ILO has been designated as the appropriate agency to define and elaborate those commitments. Moreover, even though it does not have the authority to legislate on issues under provincial jurisdiction, nevertheless, the Federal government does have a moral obligation to pursue provincial compliance with international obligations. Its lack of jurisdiction did not stop it from recently negotiating an agreement with the provinces to provide consistent levels of health care across Canada.
CONSEQUENCES OF CONTINUED DEVIANCE
In tandem with the international human rights consensus there has emerged in the past decade a push for freer trade and along with it a movement for a social dimension to economic globalization. In 1995 efforts to liberalize international trade reached a climax with the establishment of the World Trade Organization. The WTO establishes a set of rules for the global trade regime backed not only by sanctions but also the strong committment of the global community to respect the rules. Thus both rich and less wealthy nations have changed policies pursuant to WTO findings. This development has produced a movement to have included within those rules an equally binding set of standards with respect to human rights and environmental issues. To date that demand has been sucessfully resisted by the global establishment. However, a number of events have forced those in power to take the coalition of labour, human rights, and environment groups that have come to be referred to as Civil Society seriously (UNDP 1993). In 1998, action taken by that coalition contributed strongly to the defeat of the proposed Multinational Agreement on Investment (Drohan 1998). In 1999 those in support of a strong social and environment agenda were able to wreck the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Subsequently large demonstrations were organized in Washington, DC and in Prague, Czech Republic. This spring more demonstrations are being planned for the meeting in Quebec City of nations working to create a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas.
Although Civil Society's attention has, to date, been focused primarily on international organizations and proposed international treaties, it is not unlikely that in future elements of that coalition will begin to target individual countries who are out of sync with international social and labour law. In short, Canada cannot expect to continue indefinitely with its hypocritical behavior without consequences. Indeed, because of its good record in other respects it is probably more prone to be singled out for attention because non-governmental organizations have begun to develop a strategy of focusing on organizations most likely to react favourably to pressure. An example is the huge amount of criticism that has fallen on the NIKE corporation for alleged human rights abuses despite the many initiatives that it has taken to bring its production standards up to international norms. In short, Canada may well be an outstanding candidate to become the national equivalent of NIKE.
CONSEQUENCES OF COMPLIANCE
Canada is unusual in its propensity to impose collective agreements and order workers on legal strike back to work. Evidence gathered during the 1990s on the provincial experience with reducing deficits suggests that bargaining and imposition were equally effective means for provinces to achieve their governmental employee wage budgets (Adams 2000).
Moreover, continually ordering workers back to work sets in motion dynamics that are dysfunctional. Unions are motivated to make unrealistic demands and government negotiators are prone to defer to arbitrators rather than take responsibility for tough decisions. Although back to work legislation may solve an immediate problem, in the long run Canada would be better off if it were exorcised from the policy option tool kit.
Although the effects of collective bargaining on economic performance
continues to be an issue that attracts controversy, the weight of the evidence
suggests that appropriately designed industrial relations systems may have
positive economic effects despite some popular beliefs to the contrary (Adams
1995). Recent reviews of research on the economic impact of freedom of
association and collective bargaining conclude strongly that, although some
forms of collective bargaining may be problematic, the widely held casual view
that bargaining is bad for economic performance has no empirical basis (Brown
2000, ILO 2000c).
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
To summarize, Canada has obligated itself to "respect, to promote
and to realize in good faith" a core set of labour
rights affirmed by the international community to be fundamental human rights.
Several aspects of Canadian policy and practice are out of sync with
international standards at both the federal and provincial levels, Canadian
governments are doing much less than they reasonably could in order to fulfil their international obligations. During the past few
decades Canada has cultivated an international reputation as a champion of
human rights. In order to maintain that reputation it needs to take action to
bring internal policy and practice in line with the international consensus.
Doing so is likely to have beneficial social and economic results.
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Adams, Roy J. and Sheldon Friedman, "Industrial Relations Implicationsof the New International Consensus on Human Rights in Employment," Perspectives on Work, vol. 2, no. 2, 1998, pp. 24-27.
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Drohan, Madelaine, "How the Net killed the MAI,", Globe and Mail, Toronto, 29 April, 1998.
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Freeman, Richard B. and Joel Rogers, What Workers Want, Ithaca, ILR Press, 1999.
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Howard, Rhoda and Jack Donnelly, "Introduction," in Howard and Donnelly, eds., International Handbook of Human Rights, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1987.
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ILO, Your Voice at Work, Geneva, International Labour Office, 2000a
ILO, Review of Annual Reports Under the Follow-up to the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, Geneva, International Labour Office, 2000b.
ILO, Organization, bargaining and dialogue for development in a globalizing world, Working Paper of the Working Party on the Social Dimensions of Globalization (GB.279/wp/sdg/2), Geneva, November 2000c.
Howse, Robert and Makau Mutua, "Protecting Human Rights in a Global Economy, Challenges for the World Trade Organization," Montreal, International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2000.
Kaufman, Bruce and Daphne Gottlieb Taras, Nonunion employee representation, Armonk, NY, ME Sharpe, 2000.
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Current editorial board memberships:
1. Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal
2. Journal of Comparative International Management
3. International Union Rights (U.K.)
Visiting and Honorary Appointments
- Distinguished Visitor, Department of Organizational and Labour Studies, University of Western Australia, Feb-March, 1996.
- Visiting Professor, SINNEA Summer School in Comparative Industrial Relations, University of Bologna, Italy (an intensive two week program for a wide range of participants from government, business and labour officials to university students). 1994.
- Adjunct Professor of Labor Studies, Antioch University, Wash- ington, D.C. Campus, (Taught the Comparative Labour Movements course in the George Meany Center-Antioch University Degree Completion Program for mid-career trade unionists). 1994-
- Visiting Fellow, Industrial Relations Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 1992.
- Visiting Scholar, International Labour Office, Geneva, Switzerland, 1991.
- Visiting Professor, Institute for Labour Research, Budapest Hungary, 1991.
- Canadian Pacific Distinguished Visiting Professor, Centre for Industrial Relations, University of Toronto, 1990.
- Visiting Professor, University of Science and Technology - Beijing, China, 1989.
- Visiting Scholar, International Institute of Labour Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, 1988.
- Visiting Professor, European Institute of Business Adminis tration (INSEAD), Fontainebleau, France, 1987.
- Visiting Professor, Beijing University of Iron and Steel Technology, China, 1985.
- Visiting Professor, Institute for International Studies and Training, Fujinomiya, Japan, 1985.
- Visiting Professor, Labor Education Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1980.
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International Employee Relations Network
an interdisciplinary discussion group concerned with all aspects of people at work and particularly with international and comparative aspects of employment relations. IERN-L is the electronic network for the International Industrial Relations Association, an organization with more than 1500 members in over 80 countries. The list is open, however, to all interested individuals. To subscribe send the following one sentence message (no subject):
sub IERN-L firstname lastname (e.g., sub IERN-L allan flanders)
to
listserv@business.unisa.edu.au
The Comparative Industrial Relations Research and Teaching Society
is an international organization whose mission is to foster
communication about cross national research on all aspects of working life and
about the teaching of international and comparative labour
subjects. CIRRTS is a study group of the International Industrial Relations
Association and generally meets in conjunction with the regional and global
meetings of the IIRA. For several years CIRRTS has also conducted meetings in
conjunction with the annual conference of the American-based Industrial
Relations Research Association. Co-Chairs of CIRRTS are Roy Adams adamsr@mcmaster.ca and John Logan of the
London School of Economics J.Logan@lse.ac.uk.
JOINT MEETING OF THE INTERNATIONAL SECTION OF THE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION AND THE COMPARATIVE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH AND TEACHING SOCIETY
Friday, January 3, 1997 Fairmont Hotel, New Orleans, LA Bayou 1, 1:00 p.m.
Convenors: Roy J. Adams, president and Janice Bellace, president-elect in conjunction with the executive committee of the International Section of the Industrial Relations Research Association: Mark Wardell, Secretary/Treasurer, Stephen Havlovic, Russ Smith, Trevor Bain, John Lawler, Sarosh Kuruvilla and Chris Albertyn.
1:00-1:30 Roundtable on Industrial Relations Developments in South Africa
Discussion leaders: Frank Horwitz, University of Capetown, and Chris Albertyn, Ontario Labour Relations Board and formerly counsel to various labour organizations in South Africa.
1:30-2:00 Roundtable on labour and industrial relations developments in Eastern and Central Europe.
Panelists: Stephen Havlovic, Simon Fraser University, Marc Weinstein, University of Oregon, Lowell Turner, Cornell University and Elena Iankova, Cornell University.
2:00-2:15 Coffee Break
2:15-2:45 Roundtable on industrial relations developments in Australia and New Zealand
Discussion leaders: Clive Gilson, University of Waikato and Ian McAndrew, University of Otago.
2:45-3:15 Roundtable on labour developments in Latin America and the impact of the NAFTA accord
Discussion leaders: Russ Smith, Washburn University, Enrique de la Garza, Autonomous Metropolitan University-Mexico City
3:15-3:30 Refreshment Break
3:30-4:00 Project Reports
Paul Craven was to report on the state of the major international project focused on the evolution of Master and Servant law and practice. He is, however, unable to make the meeting. Anyone desiring information on this project should contact Paul directly at pcraven@yorku.ca
Lance Compa will discuss the research programme of the Secretariat of the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (the NAFTA labor side accord).
4:00-5:00 Annual Business Meeting of the International Section of the IRRA.
Click here for statutes of the ISIRRA
STATUTES OF THE INTERNATIONAL SECTION OF THE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS RESEARCH ASSOCIATION
1. The IS-IRRA was established in 1995 as a constituent organization of the
Industrial Relations Research Association.
2. The object of the IS-IRRA is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas
about international and comparative aspects of industrial relations. Its
activities include: a. organizing sessions at the meetings of the IRRA. b.
organizing other meetings, workshops and colloquia. c. encouraging professional
interaction and collaboration among teachers of comparative labor subjects,
researchers in any aspect of the field of labor and practitioners. d. any other
relevant activities.
3. Membership is open to all members of the IRRA who comply with any additional
requirements established by the Board of the International Section.
4. Membership fees will be determined by the Business Meeting of the
International Section held at each IRRA Annual Meeting.
5. IS-IRRA policy, consistent with the statutes, will be determined by a simple
majority of members in good standing at each Business Meeting. It is open to
the meeting to submit any question to a postal ballot of members, and this
procedure must be followed in the absence of a Quorum of 10 members.
6. In the period between Annual Meetings of the IRRA, the IS-IRRA shall be
governed by a Board comprising President, Past-President, Vice-President,
Secretary-Treasurer and between 4 and 10 ordinary members. The duties of the
Past-President shall normally include acting as chair of the nominations
committee; the President shall normally chair the annual Business Meeting; the
Vice-President (who shall also be the President-Elect) shall normally organize
the annual activities of the Section with the advice and consent of the Board;
the Secretary-Treasurer shall normally prepare minutes of the Business Meeting
and other meetings of the Board, maintain the financial records of the Section
and assume other duties as determined by the Board.
7. Officers and members of the Board shall be elected at the Business Meeting
and shall hold office until successors are elected. The maximum term of office
of a member of the Board shall be five consecutive years; years served as
officers are excluded from the maximum.
8. A Nominations Committee, composed of the Past-President and two other
members of the Board shall be responsible for presenting a slate of candidates
for election as officers and members of the Board to the annual Business
Meeting. Additional nominations supported by at least 5 members may be
submitted in advance of the Business Meeting to the Secretary-Treasurer.
9. An Awards Committee, composed of the officers of the Section, shall nominate
a list of candidates for election to the Council of Fellows. Nominees should be
individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of
international and comparative industrial relations sustained over a long period
of time. To be elected to the Council nominees must attract a two-thirds vote
of members in a postal ballot.
10. These statutes may be amended by a two-thirds vote of those present and
voting at the annual Business Meeting provided that the amendments are received
at least two weeks in advance by the Secretary-Treasurer. They may also be
amended by a simple majority of those voting in a mail ballot of the members.
On
seeing this picture, taken on the Thai-Burmese border in 1985, Roy's daughter
Jenny exclaimed, "Hey, it's Indiana Dad!" The fellow in the
background is a Karenni soldier. The Karen people had
been fighting a civil war with the Burmese authorities since the end of World
War II.
McMaster University Theme School on International Justice and Human Rights
January, 1997
The Rights of Labour
TSIJHR 3H03
Roy J. Adams MGD 424 tel 23965 email adamsr
What we will do in this class is negotiable.
The issues in the default course plan below are ones that I know enough about to act as a guide, consultant, coach, teacher or whatever to the class. It is much like the plan that we used in this course when I last taught it in January 1995.
Each class was led by a student group. During the first part of the typical class there was a review of the relevant factual material and in the second part there was a discussion about related issues. A number of groups, however, used innovative techniques such as role playing and debates. I generally played the role of resource person. After the first few classes, a pattern developed in which I would be alloted the last 10-15 minutes to do "Roy's soapbox" to give my take on the issues under discussion. I also made notes on participation looking for not only activity but activity which indicated serious preparation. For each class, every student was required to bring in one well thought out question elicited by reading the relevant material. The questions were to be ones that were likely to provoke discussion. The questions had to be delivered to the team responsible for organizing the class for that week at least two days prior to the class so that they might make use of them in their planning. The written questions were also turned in to me and formed a part of the participation grade. I provided feedback on each question. After the first 6 weeks I assigned participation marks so that everyone had some idea of their progress.
Each student was also required to write a term paper on a relevant issue. An outline and bibliography had to be turned in to me before the spring break and the paper was due on the last day of class. It had to be no more than 15 double-spaced pages or 4500 words whichever was shorter although appendices were permissable. It had to meet high standards of grammar and organization.
Sixty percent of the course grade was based on participation (attendance, effectiveness in organizing the class sessions, thoughtfulness of the written questions and effectiveness of participation in class discussions) and 40% on the research paper. The students apparently judged that the format worked well since they evaluated the course highly.
For this class, I think it might be a good idea to set up an internet discussion group for the class. Activity in that forum would count toward the participation grade. Also, it is inevitable that some students will have to miss some classes. That should be rare and only for a good reason but if it is necessary I would like the student to turn in a set of notes based on the course readings for the week.
Course Plan:
Jan 8. Course overview and discussion of industrial relations in North America
Thompson, "Industrial Relations in Canada," Wheeler, "Industrial Relations in the United States of America," both in Bamber and Lansbury, International and Comparative Industrial Relations, 2nd ed., Allen and Unwin, 1993.
(It won't be possible to read this material in advance but it constitutes an important base for the rest of the material in the course. So, I would like every student to turn in a set of notes on it).
Jan 15. Development of Labour Movements in Europe and North America
Discussion topic: the relative merits of business and social unionism
Roy J. Adams, Industrial Relations Under Liberal Democracy, chapters 1-3.
Jan. 22. The International Labour Organization and International Labour Standards
Discussion: Is labour a commodity?
N. Valticos and K. Samson, "International Labour Law" in Blanpain and Engels, eds., Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations in Industrialized Market Economies, Deventer-Boston, Kluwer, 5th and revised ed., 1993.
Canadian Labour law casebook 29-47.
The homepage of the ILO is at http://www.ilo.org. Have a look for info on ILO activities along with the text of the most basic conventions
Jan 29 Freedom of Association
Discussion: What is it? Does it imply a right not to associate? Is it legitimate to compel people to be union members?
Creighton, B., 1993, "Freedom of Association," in Blanpain and Engels eds., Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations in Industrialised Market Economies, Deventer, the Netherlands, Kluwer.
Mitchnick, Morton G., "Recent Developments in compulsory unionism," International Labour Review, 132, 4, 1993, 453-468.
February 5 . A Right to Bargain Collectively?
Discussion: Does the Wagner Act Model genuinely establish a right to bargain collectively? Are employer "free speech" rights justified in the context of union organizing?
ILO Convention 154 concerning the Promotion of Collective Bargaining.
Adams, Roy J., "The North American Model of Employee Representational Participation: 'A Hollow Mockery'" Comparative Labor Law Journal, volume 15, no. 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 201-211.
Ferdinand von Prondzynski, Freedom of Association and Industrial Relations, A comparative study, London, Mansell, 1987, pp. 89-103.
Labour Law Casebook, 301-315
Feb. 12. (No Class. Attend talk by Michael Marrus on "The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial: After Fifty Years", on Thursday, February 13, 1997 at 7:30 and turn in a 1-2 page write-up of talk).
February 19. A Right to Strike? Part 1
discussion: Should the right to strike be considered a fundamental human right?
Hodges-Aberhard, Jane and Alberto Odero De Dios, "Principles of the Committee on Freedom of Assn concerning strikes," International Labour Review, 126, 5, Sept-Oct 1987, pp. 543-563.
Labour Law Casebook, pp. 509-526.
FEB 26: SPRING BREAK
5 March. A Right to Strike? Part 2
discussion: Is arbitration an acceptable substitute to the right to strike? Under what conditions is it acceptable to restrict the right to strike? (e.g., essential services? if so what is essential?) Should strikebreakers be outlawed?
Paul Weiler, Reconcilable Differences Chapter 7, pp. 209-248.
A. Sims, et al., Seeking a Balance, Report of the Task Force to Review the Canada Labour Code, Part I, Ottawa, Human Resource Development Canada, 1996, pp. 122-130.
12 March Industrial Democracy, part 1: Labour Representation on boards of directors
discussion: Should workers have representation on boards of directors? Does mandatory labour participation on boards of directors infringe property rights? If so, is that reasonable in a democratic society?
Michael Levin, The Spectre of Democracy, Washington Square, New York, New York University Press, 1992 chpts 2 and 9.
West Germany, Workers on the Board, 3 Basic Systems, 2 pp.
Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, London, HMSO (Cmnd 6706), 1977. pp. 41-58.
Dahl, Robert, 1984, "Democracy in the Workplace: Is it a Right or a Privilege?" Dissent, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 54-60.
19 March. Industrial Democracy, part 2: Statutory Works Councils
discussion: Should general purpose statutory works councils be required universally in Canada?
Adams, Roy J., "Union Certification as an Instrument of Labor Policy, A Comparative Perspective," in Sheldon Friedman, Richard Hurd, Rudy Oswald, and Ronald L. Seeber, eds., Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, (Ithaca, New York, ILR Press, 1994) pp. 260-272.
Adams, R.J., "Two Policy Approaches to Labour-Management Decision-Making at the Level of The Enterprise: A Comparison of the Wagner Model and Statutory Works Councils", in C. Riddell (ed.) Labour-Management Cooperation in Canada, (published by the University of Toronto Press for the Royal Commission on the Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada, 1986) pp. 87-110.
Weiler, Paul, Governing the Workplace, Harvard University Press, 1990, pp 186-224; 282-295.
26 March. Labour Rights in the Context of Freer Trade
discussion: Should labour standards be linked to freer trade? Is the link a way of discriminating against poorer countries?
Bob Hepple, "European Labour Law: The European Community," in Blanpain and Engels, eds., Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations in Industrialized Market Economies, Deventer, Kluwer, 1993.
Hector G. Bartholomei de la Cruz, "International Labour Law: Renewal or Decline?" in International Journal of Comparative Labour Law and industrial Relations, 10, 3, Autumn, 1994, pp. 201-222.
Benn Steil, "Social Correctness is the new protectionism," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, no. 1, Jan/Feb. 1994.
Roy J. Adams and Parbudyal Singh, "Worker Rights Under NAFTA: Experience with the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation," Working Paper #417, DeGroote School of Business, October, 1996.
2 April. Workplace Justice. Should there be a general right to just cause for discharge?
Glasbeek, Harry, J., "The Contract of Employment at Common Law," in Anderson and Gunderson, Union-Management Relations in Canada, 1982.
Adams, R.J., B. Adell and H. Wheeler, "Discipline and Discharge in Canada and the U.S.", Labor Law Journal, August, 1990, pp. 596-601.
Theodore J. St. Antoine, "A Seed Germinates: Unjust Discharge Reform Heads Toward Full Flower," Nebraska Law Review, 67, 1988, pp. 56-81.
Stuart Henry, "1992 State-By-State Update Survey of Development in Legislative Proposals on 'Just Cause' Employment Termination Law For Private Nonunionized Employees," Journal of Individual Employment Rights, 2, 3, 263-267, 1993-94.
April 9. Wrap up
Comparative Industrial Relations
(LS 4DO3; Commerce 4BH3)
Winter 2000
Roy J. Adams
23965
adamsr
424 MGD
Office Hours:
Tuesday 11-12
Thursday 4-5
Texts and other reading material:
Bamber and Lansbury, eds., International and Comparative Employment
Relations, 3rd ed, 1998
Roy J. Adams, Industrial Relations Under Liberal Democracy, 1995.
Course Pack, available from Copies Plus.
Course Overview:
In the first section of the course we will review the development of modern industrial relations, place Canadian and American developments in comparative perspective and then consider why North American industrial relations are considered to be "exceptional." In the second section we will consider the issue of globalization and its effects on labour issues with particular reference to the development of corporate codes of conduct and so-called social clauses. After reading week we'll review the practice of industrial relations in several advanced democratic nations at about the same level of development as Canada in order to compare their approaches to industrial relations with Canada's. The object is to place Canada in perspective so as better to understand what we do and to learn things of value about options to our policies and practices. The final week we will draw some lessons about the relationship between industrial relations and socio-economic performance.
Evaluation:
1. Individual Involvement. You are expected to become familiar with the subject matter in the assigned readings for the week and in other materials assigned from time to time and come to each class prepared to discuss the topic of the week knowledgeably.
2. Project. Five groups will be formed and each one will be responsible for researching of industrial relations in one of Britain, Sweden, Germany, France or Japan. Three information sessions will be held in the second half of the course. Each session will cover selected aspects of industrial relations (see schedule). Each group will have 15 minutes in each session to share the information on its country. Comparison with the Canadian situation will be expected.
Each group member must take a turn during the information sessions (but not every one). Use of overheads and other visuals are strongly recommended. The sessions will be assesed in terms of content and in terms of how effectively and creatively the information was communicated. The presenters should adopt the role of researchers making a presentation to a group of officials about to embark on a study visit to the countries under consideration.
Each task force is required to provide a written brief. Two copies must be handed in by April 4. The report should be no longer than 25 pages (excluding appendices), typed, double spaced, 12 pt. type, with one inch margins all around. There should be a title page, executive summary, table of contents and bibliography which should include not only books and articles but also relevant web site addresses. It is expected that each group will make good use of the web as well as the lectures, readings, information sessions and discussions. Some comparisons with other countries will be expected in the report.
There will also be a final exam of three hours in length. On the last day of class a set of about 10 questions will be distributed. The final exam will consist of two or three of these questions as well as some identifications. Since the essay questions will be distributed in advance a high standard of performance will be expected.
ACADEMIC ETHICS: Students are reminded that they
must adhere to the standards of academic ethics of the University. Academic
ethics and honesty standards are described in the booklet of Senate Policy
Statements under the title of "Statement on Academic Ethics" and
"the Senate Resolutions on Academic Dishonesty." They should have
been distributed at registration and are also available in the Senate Office,
Gilmour Hall, Room 104.
Task Force Presentation 20%
Written Report 30%
Final Exam 40%
Individual involvement 10%
Jan 10
week 1 Introduction and overview of north american
industrial relations in comparative perspective Bamber
and Lansbury chapters on US and Canada
PART 1: NORTH AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: In many ways North American (Canadian
and US) industrial relations are very different from employment relations in
other economically advanced democracies. They are more decentralized and more
adversarial and the labour movement is less well
accepted as a social partner. Over the next few weeks we will explore how and
why we got to be so different. We'll also have a look at more recent
international developments and their effects on employment relations.
Jan 17
week2 Emergence and development of modern IR systems: the Euro Mainstream Adams
chapters 1 and 2
discussion topic: the pros and cons of business and social unionism
Jan 24
week3 American exceptionalism/
Canadian exceptionalism Adams chapter 3
discussion topic: why the American labour movement isn't socialist and how the Canadian movement fits in.
Jan 31
week4 Contemporary Employment Relations B&L chapter 12
Adams chapters 4 and 5
discussion topic: the Great Recession and its impact on employment relations
PART 2: EMPLOYMENT ISSUES IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBALIZATION: For the past decade everyone has been talking about globalization. Although there is not unanimous agreement on what the term means there is agreement that markets have been becoming more international in scope. That development has produced a hot debate on the impact of expanding markets on employment relations as well as a number of initiatives designed to ameliorate obvious or feared negative consequences. In this section of the course we will have a look at the debate around labour and globalization and some of the initiatives that have been taken as a result of that debate.
Feb 7
week5 Labour and Globalization I: focus on corporate
codes of conduct
Anthony Giles, "Globalization and Industrial Relations," in Giles, Smith and Trudeau, eds., The Globalization of the Economy and the Worker, Selected papers from the XXXII Annual CIRA Conference, 1996.
Janelle Diller, "A social conscience in the global marketplace? Labour dimensions of codes of conduct, social labelling and investor initiatives," International Labour Review, 138,2,1999.
Pamela Varley, ed., The Sweatshop Quandry,1998, pp. 3-26
Visitor: Michelle McSorley
from NIKE.
(Have a look at Nike homepage: http://www.nikebiz.com and for one of the
many sites with info critical of Nike check out the site of the Campaign for
Labor Rights: http://www.summersault.com/~agj/clr/)
feb 14 Labour and Globalization II: the Social Dimension of Freer Trade
OECD, Trade, Employment and Labour Standards, A Study of Core Workers' Rights and International Trade, 1996, pp. 9-19.
Anne Trebilcock, "What future for social clauses? Differing institutional approaches," paper presented at the International Industrial Relations Association's World Congress, Bologna, Italy, September 1998.
Roy J. Adams, "Collective Bargaining: the Rodney Dangerfield of Human Rights," SPHRE working paper, December 1998.
Jagdish Bhagwati, "Trade Liberalization and ‘fair trade' demands: Adressing the environmental and labour standards issues," World Economy, 18,6, 1995.
Discussion Topic: Should labour standards be incorporated into the rules of the World Trade Organization?
(For some background on the WTO visit its website
at
http://www.wto.org/wto/about/about.htm and for an opposing view:
http://www.citizen.org/pctrade/gattwto/gatthome.html)
feb 22 Reading Week
feb 28 Labour and Globalization III: Focus on the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation
Lance Compa, "NAFTA's Labour Side Agreement Five Years On: Progress and Prospects for the NAALC"
Roy J. Adams, "Using the North American Agreement on Labour Cooperation to Achieve Industrial Relations Reform"
(Both in Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, 7,1, 1999)
Discussion topic: Is the NAALC a scam?
PART 3. INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS IN ECONOMICALLY ADVANCED LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES: Over the next 4 weeks we will consider industrial relations in a set of countries at about the same level of economic development as Canada. In a role-playing exercise research teams will brief officials about to undertake a study visit abroad. The object of the study visit is to learn about what is done overseas with a view towards better understanding what we do but also with a view towards improving our institutions. The chapters from Bamber and Lansbury on the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Sweden and Japan should be read in their entirety in advance and reviewed for the specific relevant content each week just before the session. Additional material relevant to the specific topic of the week is noted below and is included in the course pack available at Copies Plus.
Mar 6 Briefing Session I: Introduction and Role of the State
Review CIA World Factbook
for each country at:
http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/factbook/country.html
Roy J. Adams, "State Regulation of Unions and Collective Bargaining: An international assessment of determinants and consequences," in Niland, Lansbury and Verevis, eds., The Future of Industrial Relations, Sage, 1994.
Mar 13 Briefing Session II: Organization and strategies of labour and management for industrial relations
J. Windmuller and S. Pursey, "The International Trade Union Movement,"
J.J. Oechslin, "International Employers'
Organizations,"
G. Cella and T. Treu,
"National Trade Union Movements," all in
R. Blanpain and C. Engels,
eds., Comparative Labour Law and Industrial Relations
in Industrialized Market Economies
Mar 20 Briefing Session III:
Interaction between labour, management and the state review Adams chapters 4 and 5
Franz Traxler, "Collective Bargaining in the OECD: Developments, Preconditions, Effects," European Journal of Industrial Relations, 4,2,July 1998.
Mar 27 review and comparative discussion
April 3 Industrial Relations and Socioeconomic Performance:
In this summary section we will look at the impact
of IR on the well-being of employees, of firms and of nations as a whole. We'll
also consider what Canada might do in order to improve its IR institutions.
Adams 6, 7, 8
PRESENTATION FRAMEWORK NOTES
INTRODUCTION
Population
main industries and distribution of labour force
between agri/manu/service
standard of living (literacy levels, life expectancy, prices, etc.)
outstanding cultural characteristics
State and political system
form of government
political parties
main economic indicators
other genl aspects of interest
ROLE OF THE STATE IN EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS
size and nature of welfare state;
labour and employment policies of government - their
development and current status
(e.g., suppression, toleration or encouragement of collective bargaining;
amount and nature of govt regulation of structure and
process of labor-mgt interaction;
recent key interventions and developments
EMPLOYERS AND UNIONS AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS OF LABOUR REPRESENTATION
Ideology
historical development
organization, structure and government
statistics (membership density, etc)
relative strength
how do they view each other?
(Checklist should be used to look at both employer organization and labour organization)
INTERACTION
structure and process of employer-union
interaction:
collective bargaining?
works councils?
corporate board participation?
Relationship between govt, employers and unions
Tripartism? participation of labour, mgt in policy making and administration
labour courts?
Strikes and other bases of power of labour and
management
Other actors, involvements in system besides govt,
unions and employers (e.g. NGOs)
Size of the representation gap and the status of those outside the collective
representation system
impact of multinational institutions (e.g. EU, NAFTA, UN, ILO)
key changes in employment relations in recent times
key employment issues currently facing the three main parties
Impact of globalization
HUMAN RIGHTS IN EMPLOYMENT: IMPLICATIONS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONSENSUS FOR MANAGEMENT TEACHING AND PRACTICE
by
Roy J. Adams
Professor Emeritus, McMaster University, Hamilton,
Canada, L8S 4C7
Distinguished Speaker Address. Prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the Eastern Academy of Management, Danvers, MA, 11 May 2000
In North America the term human rights in employment is used almost entirely to refer to the rights of minorities to be treated fairly and with justice. Internationally, however, the term encompasses a broader range of issues. There is in fact a very strong international consensus that, in addition to protection against discrimination in employment, young children should not be permitted to work and employees everywhere should enjoy freedom from forced labour, freedom of association, and the right to bargain collectively. Action designed to thwart the enjoyment of these standards are human rights violations.
What I will try to do today is to convince you that the well established American employment practice of union avoidance sabotages the right to bargain collectively and thus is morally wrong. It should not be practised by business and it should not be taught in business schools. From a human rights perspective the North American practice of union avoidance is the moral equivalent of forced labour, child labour and overt discrimination.
If you are sceptical, I can understand. When this notion first occurred to me my reaction was to reject it. Over the years, however, I became a convert to the extent that in 1997 I helped found an organization dedicated to promoting awareness and compliance with core labour rights as human rights. Let me review with you the tortuous road that I travelled to get to this point.
My first job out of Penn State university was with Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City. I had signed on as a lending officer trainee but after a few weeks I realized that finance was not my thing and so wound up in the ambiguously named Personnel Planning Department. One of its main functions was to advise the bank on how to maintain its non-union status; another was to prepare bank officers being sent overseas to deal with unions in such diverse parts of the world as the Caribbean, Asia and Europe.
One of the projects to which I was assigned was the making of a training film for supervisors entitled Labor Unions in America. Although it was distributed by the American Association of Industrial Management, it was bankrolled by Chase. Its basic theme was that historically unions played an important role in winning workers acceptable conditions. Today, however, most firms had become enlightened and it was no longer necessary for workers to unionize in order to compel their firms to pay them fairly and treat them with dignity. By and large modern employers provided good conditions thereby making unions unnecessary.
The film also discussed many ways that unions - as institutions in their own right - were likely to make the job of management more difficult by, for example, negotiating rigid conditions, forcing management to waste time dealing with frivolous grievances and by going on strike. Unions today, the film concluded, were disruptive and costly and were primarily interested in maximizing their own power and income rather than ensuring the best interests of working people.
Another project that I was involved with was the writing of a formal bank policy on unionization. In essence it said that the bank believed in treating its employees well and, consequentially, it believed that employees had no need to turn to "outside organizations" in order to protect their interests.
At the time, the logic underlying these two projects was just being worked out in American industry. In the 1930s and 1940s there had been a huge increase in unionization and collective bargaining in the US and after World War II it appeared that a new set of labour-management understandings had fallen into place. That "compromise" seemed to suggest that American business was willing to accept trade unions as legitimate institutions and collective bargaining as the preferred way to establish conditions of work.
By the 1960s, however, as my experience in the field at Chase suggests, the Post War Compromise was already crumbling. Companies that had withstood the labour onslaught of the 30s and 40s were in the process of developing substantive and conceptual resources designed to protect their autonomy - their freedom to develop and institute programs without "outside interference."
Academe was a bit slow in picking up on this change. When I arrived in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin in 1969 the understood convention, as stated in textbooks and in classroom lectures, was that collective bargaining was still the preferred method for establishing conditions of employment. The organization of the public sector in the 1960s and early 1970s comforted academics in their belief that this notion was widely accepted in the real world.
By the 1980s, however, there was a good deal of confusion in academe caused by lots of seemingly contrary and contradictory signals. Tom Kochan, Bob McKersie and Harry Katz cleared it up when they published The Transformation of American Industrial Relations - one of the most widely read books on American IR in the past half-century. They told us that even though lots of IR types in industry still honoured the post war understandings, corporate heads didn't. Even in industries where union-management negotiations had become the norm companies were setting up new plants on greenfield sites where they engaged in policies similar to those that had been worked out earlier at Chase and other companies - policies designed to keep unions out of new plants even though they had been accepted as bargaining partners at other plants.
Clearly, Kochan, McKersie and Katz taught us, there was no longer a mutual understanding that collective bargaining was the preferred means to establish conditions of employment. Instead, the theme of the Chase supervisory film had become the general business norm: Unions and collective bargaining are disruptive and a nuisance and if companies do right willingly there is no need for employees to turn to them.
Today that norm has been widely accepted not only in industry but also in academe. Although developed in the United States it has been widely embraced in Canada as well. Based on this theory and the values associated with it, contemporary Human Resource Management text writers commonly provide sections summarizing the best thinking on how to maintain non-union status.
For example, in their widely used text, Canadian Human Resource Management - A Strategic Approach Schwind, Das and Wagar say
"In nonunion facilities, an implicit objective of management is often to remain nonunion. Employers frequently adopt either a union suppression or union substitution approach in order to avoid unionization."
Employers using union suppression "may try to intimidate workers, threaten closing or moving the plant or facility, or discriminate against union supporters."
Union substitution on the other hand "examines what unions bring to the employment relationship and then tries to introduce such features into the nonunion workplace."
To use this approach effectively the authors tell us "human resource managers need to actively apply the ideas discussed in earlier chapters of this book. Failure to implement sound human resource policies and practices provides the motivation for workers to form unions." (pp.661-662).
I believe that Schwind, Das and Wagar accurately capture the dominant norm in business schools across North America. Corporations are thought of as clients for professional human resource advice. Descriptively a corporate objective is to avoid bargaining with employee representatives. Prescriptively, a function of the human resources academic is to help them achieve that end. There are, of course, academics who reject this role but they are the exception that illustrates the rule.
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To this point my purpose has been to be informative. I wanted to review with you some developments about which most of you are no doubt familiar.
From this point I will be changing gears to be persuasive. As noted in my opening statement, I will try to persuade you that the dominant norms described above in both business and academe need to be fundamentally rethought because they are morally wrong. When companies like my old employer Chase publicize their union-free preference they engage in a form of harassment no less illicit than sexual harassment. The objective of remaining "union-free' and thus, in the American context, "collective bargaining- free" is as wrong as seeking to remain Black free or Woman free, or Old free. The pursuit of freedom from unions and collective bargaining, although perfectly legal in the United States and Canada, is as much of a human rights violation as producing goods and services with slave labour or with young children.
At this point I expect that many of you are saying: No way! How can the US - the global champion of democracy - be a hot bed of daily human rights violations on a plane with slavery in Sudan and forced child prostitution in Thailand? How can so common a pattern of behaviour be so wrong?
Please bear with me. As I said above, I too began as a sceptic but the more that I looked into this issue the more difficult it became to deny the conclusion stated above. Let me tell you, in brief outline, the story that my inquiries uncovered.
During the 1930s and 1940s behaviour that today we would all agree was grossly evil was commonplace. Among the worst atrocities were those committed in the context of the holocaust. At that time the world community of nations had no way of dealing with terrible acts committed inside national borders. As a result of the 17th century Treaty of Westphalia (see, for example, Mastanduno and Lyons), the understanding was that countries could do whatever they saw fit within their own borders as long as they did not invade their nation-state neighbours.
After WWII, however, the world community got together and established a global moral code - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It laid out the norms against which the behaviour of any nation-state could be assessed. Because the spirit of Westphalia was still strong, the Declaration was self-executing. The only normal sanction that could be assessed against a trespasser was moral indignation. Occasionally, however, the community of nations did act in concert to impose real substantive sanctions as it did against South Africa's policy of apartheid.
Included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was the concept of Freedom of Association which, the document asserted, was a fundamental human right no less worthy of respect than the right to vote or the right to trial by jury. The international agency designated to promote respect for this concept was the International Labour Organization - a tripartite (labour, management, government) body tracing its roots to the period after World War I. The ILO is most well known for its establishment of international labour standards. Each year there is a meeting in Geneva of labour, management and government representatives from around the world who debate labour issues and establish standards which, if ratified, become law in member states.
The ILO's policy and approach to Freedom of Association is, however, distinct from its standards work and is less well known. Regardless of labour standard ratification, each member nation of the ILO accepts a responsibility - simply as a function of its membership status - to promote within its national boundaries behaviour consistent with Freedom of Association. To oversee the implementation of this policy the ILO has a committee of international notables (representing all three interests) who review complaints of non-compliance against nation-states. Since its establishment in the 1940s this committee has decided over 1800 cases and in its decisions has formulated a practical definition of Freedom of Association. It has also developed a jurisprudence establishing conduct consistent with respect for this universal human right. Among the subsidiary rights that the committee has found to be inherent in the notion of Freedom of Association are the right to strike and the right to bargain collectively (see Bartolomei de la Cruz, von Potobsky and Swepston 1996).
When the committee hears a complaint and finds it to have validity, it issues a recommendation to the delinquent government outlining what it ought to do to bring itself into compliance. Because of Westphalia, however, it has no power to impose sanctions beyond public embarrassment.
Until about 10 years ago, this ILO function had a low profile. Certainly the Labour Office did some good in convincing poor and weak nations to conform to international norms but powerful nations generally ignored it when they saw fit to do so.
In the 1990s, however, globalization began to take off. Trade was liberalized and capital began to flow around the world in greater amounts seeking inexpensive venues to produce items such as soccer balls, sport shoes and computer chips. In response labour and human rights groups began to insist that, as the price of admission to the liberal trade club, all nations and all multinational corporations should be required to respect a set of core labour rights as human rights. The labour rights which nearly everyone agreed should be regarded as human rights are, in the words of the ILO's 1998 Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work:
Freedom of Association
The effective recognition of the right to bargain collectively
The elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour
The effective abolition of child labour
The elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation.
Contrary to what you might think there was no opposition to the declaration from business representatives. In fact, the ILO declaration was affirmed unanimously (but with some abstentions) by business, labour and government representatives from 157 countries. Not only was that declaration overwhelmingly supported by employer representatives but indeed it was initiated by them (see Trebilcock 1998).
Since the early 1990s, these standards have been affirmed by a growing list of organizations representing opinions from across the political spectrum. In addition to the ILO these core rights have been affirmed to be human rights by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (see OECD 1996), several international congresses sponsored by the United Nations and by the World Trade Organization. In January 1999 UN Secretary General Kofi Annan proposed a Global Compact between the UN, business and civil society groups. The International Chamber of Commerce was one of the first international organizations to accept the terms of the pact which commits it to promote compliance with international environmental and human rights standards including the core rights noted above (See, e.g., Trebilcock 1998 and the web sites of the ILO and that of the UN's Global Compact).
Both the U.S. government and the employer organization that represents US employer interests at the ILO have been keen supporters of this consensus. Although employer organizations have generally been opposed to incorporating the core standards into the rules of the World Trade Organization, the Clinton Administration has supported that proposal. Making access to trade contingent upon respect of core labour rights as human rights was the goal of many of those who took to the streets in Seattle in 1999 in order to disrupt a meeting of the World Trade Organization.
So what does all of this have to do with my assertion that human rights are daily violated in the US? "American workers," you might be thinking, "have the legal right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining if they want to. Haven't they just decided that they don't want to do that and why shouldn't we respect their choice? When employers like Chase make it known publicly that they want to stay union free aren't they doing no more than exercising their constitutional right of free speech? And why shouldn't workers have all of the facts before setting off on a course that may be against their best interests?"
Given contemporary North American conventions these questions and their implied answers are entirely reasonable. But those conventions stem from a fundamental confusion - a collective mindset that obfuscates two distinct notions. In the collective American mind, freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively are conflated. You can't have one without the other. As Clyde Summers recently put it "A vote for 'No Union' is, in practice, a vote for no collective bargaining."(Summers 1999, p.54).
Why is this a problem? Because, while the notion of freedom of association certainly implies freedom not to associate; the right to bargain collectively does not imply a right not to bargain collectively. Indeed the notion that the right not to bargain collectively would have any value to a sane adult who was thinking clearly is preposterous.
Recently a story appeared in the Canadian press about the defeat of a union organizing attempt at a Wal-Mart store in Windsor Ontario. It was accompanied by a photo of three smiling women - leaders of an ad-hoc group opposing unionization - and their lawyer. That photo reminded me of one that appeared in the 1970s of kidnapee Patty Hearst. She had come to embrace the ideas of her captors to such an extent that she was willingly participating with them in a bank robbery. In both cases, it seems to me, the principals involved were befuddled.
Consider what the women in the Wal-Mart case had accomplished. They had worked diligently to deny themselves any say in the making of the rules of work. They had voted to return to the employer sole authority to determine their wages, working conditions, hours of work and job security. They had laboured to ensure that should a dispute arise, the employer would have complete authority to decide its outcome.
Quite reasonably, the people involved might not have wanted to be represented by the Canadian Autoworkers Union which had given up the struggle. They might not have liked CAW president Buzz Hargrove's brashness. They might have feared that, because of its history, that union might pressure them to do things about which they did not feel comfortable such as threatening or actually undertaking a strike.
Quite reasonably the principals in this drama might not have wanted to have their relationship with the employer controlled by the rigid and adversarial framework imposed by the Ontario Labour Relations Act.
But if they were thinking straight they would not have been so overjoyed at denying themselves any say in employment decision-making. Since essentially all firms of any size today have rationalized policies that apply equally to all employees, individual bargaining is not an option. Either there is some form of collective codetermination or, with respect to issues such as general wage movements, overall employment levels, hours of work and many more, there is unilateral imposition.
What options exist other than representation by a conventional union and bargaining under the rules of the labour relations act and the antagonistic conventions it has fostered? The situation of the Faculty Association at McMaster University provides an example of the possibilities.
Although the Association is not a certified union it has been recognized voluntarily by the university as the representative of the faculty's employment interests. The relationship is very flexible and constantly in flux. As new issues arise joint committees are established to address them. The Association has developed a procedure with the administration under which it negotiates wage movements on an annual basis. If there is an impasse it is settled by reference to an arbitrator who must choose the last offer of one side or the other. Both sides work hard to avoid falling into an "us and them" rut. Like employees everywhere, faculty members are concerned with their conditions of work but that does not stop them from being keenly committed to the prosperity of the university as a whole.
With the goodwill of employers, situations similar to that at McMaster could flourish across North America.
Instead we have permitted conventions to become deeply rooted under which it is considered legitimate for employers to deny to employees any say in making the rules unless they have gone through an arduous certification procedure leading to a rigid and adversarial process. Not only are these conventions bad for workers and contrary to international human rights norms, but also they are a cancer in our body politic. By inducing working people passively to accept or, as in the Wal-Mart case, actively to work for denial of voice at work our conventions foster in employees attitudes of deference to authority inimical to a healthy democracy.
Could public policy actively encourage or even require collective bargaining while at the same time respecting freedom of association? Yes it could. To see how consider the situation in Germany.
Contrary to North American norms unionization and collective bargaining are treated as entirely separate issues requiring entirely different policy approaches. Because of the high regard in which freedom of association is held, mandatory union membership is illegal in Germany. Indeed the unions are forbidden even to negotiate terms that apply exclusively to union members. Nevertheless, nearly all German workers have their employment interests represented through a set of overlapping and intertwining institutions. Multi-employer collective agreements negotiated between unions and employer associations cover most German workers. Because of a law under which such agreements may be extended to unassociated companies and their employees it is all but impossible for a corporation even to attempt to pursue the bargaining free policy so common in North America. In addition, German law requires the establishment of statutory works councils elected by all employees whether unionized or not in all enterprises with five or more employees. These entities have a legal right to codetermine a list of employment issues specified in law. German policy also provides for worker representation on the directing boards of German corporations.
These institutions are much more consistent with international human rights norms and they have proven to be practical and workable in a modern economy. Indeed, there is research which suggests that they add value to corporations rather than detracting from it.
Many social problems are difficult to solve - the persistence of discrimination for instance. But the representation shortfall is not in that category. If employers and governments had the will to do so, the gap could be erased in a short time. Techniques used by the Germans have been emulated in several other advanced countries and, with appropriate modifications, could certainly be applied in North America if our governments and employers had the mind to do so.
Please don't get me wrong. I am not trying to convince you that managers who behave according the dominant current convention in North America or politicians who benignly allow it to persist or professors who teach it are bad people. To be a bad person you must understand that what you are doing is wrong. Many of the people that I grew up with were racial and ethnic bigots but they were not bad people. At that time and place that sort of bigotry was accepted as ok. I know better and so do my kids. If we did or said the sorts of things that our parents generation did we would indeed be bad people.
With respect to the right to bargain collectively; the right to codecide conditions of employment; the responsibility of employers to involve employees in making the rules and the responsibility of government to ensure that no working person is subject to regulation without representation we North Americans are participating in a huge contradiction. Externally we preach compliance with the global consensus regarding core labour rights as human rights but internally we fully accept the daily violation of one of those rights. I don't think that contradiction can continue indefinitely. The more North Americans hear about the global human rights consensus and its implications the less they will be able to continue to think of themselves as good people. When enough of them become uncomfortable things will change.
I hope that I have convinced you to at least look further into this issue. If you do, I am confident that those of you who have accepted the union avoidance convention and its rhetorical supports, will be convinced to reject it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, R.J., "The North American Model of Employee Representation: A Hollow Mockery," Comparative Labor Law Journal, 15, 1, Fall, 1993, pp. 201-211.
Adams, Roy J. Industrial Relations Under Liberal Democracy: North America in Comparative Perspective, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1995.
Adams, R.J., "A Pernicious Euphoria: 50 years of Wagnerism in Canada," Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, 3, 3-4, 1995, pp. 321-355.
Bartolomei de la Cruz, Hector, Geraldo von Potobsky and Lee Swepston, The International Labor Organization, The International Standards System and Basic Human Rights, Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1996.
Furstenberg, Friedrich, "Employment relations in Germany," in Greg J. Bamber and Russell D. Lansbury, eds., International and Comparative Employment Relations, 1998.
ILO Web Site: www.ilo.org
Kochan, Thomas, Harry Katz and Robert McKersie, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, New York, Basic Books, 1986.
Mastanduno, Michael and Gene M. Lyons, Beyond Westphalia? State Sovereignty and International Intervention, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
OECD, Trade Employment and Labour Standards, A Study of Core Workers' Rights and International Trade, Paris, 1996.
Schwind, Herman F., Hari Das and Terry H. Wagar, Canadian Human Resource Management: A Strategic Approach, 5th edition, Toronto, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1999.
Summers, Clyde W., "Exclusive Representatuion: A Comparative Inquiry into a "Unique" American Principle," Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, Volume 20, Number 1, Fall 1998.
SPHRE web site: www.mericleinc.com/Sphre/
Trebilcock, Anne, "What future for social clauses? Differing institutional approaches," paper presented at the International Industrial Relations Association's World Congress, Bologna, Italy, 1998.
UN Global Compact web site:
http://www.unhchr.ch/global.htm
Why are American workers so disorganized?
by
Roy J. Adams
(Keynote address presented at "Emerging Issues 2000" 19th annual meeting of the Industrial and Labor Relations Department of the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 7 April 2000)
Since I was a graduate student one question has dominated my academic life more than any other: "Why are American workers so disorganized?" That was the question that launched the work reported in my Ph.D. dissertation. In one way or the other it has suffused most of my research over the years.
To the naive observer, one who believes in rationality at any rate, the disorganization of American workers ought to be puzzling. As a long line of economic research indicates, organized workers in the United States are better paid than are their disorganized counterparts. They also have much greater security against arbitrary dismissal. The grievance procedure leading to binding arbitration and the institution of reinstatement of workers found to have been unfairly dismissed is one of the great achievements of American industrial relations (Adams, Adell and Wheeler 1990). It has produced an industrial jurisprudence which has reined in managers tempted to act rashly in contentious circumstances and it has provided a body of rules on which workers may rely. In unorganized enterprises, on the other hand, workers may be dismissed at any time for almost any reason without warning. Unionization also provides workers with a voice in the establishment and administration of a wide range of enterprise policies critical to their well-being. The disorganized, on the other hand, have no means of influencing many corporate policies critical to their welfare.
Given the advantages of unionization one would think that workers would flock to join or form unions but they don't. In continental Europe the conditions of work of about 80% of the labor force are negotiated. The corresponding U.S. figure is about 15% (ILO 1997)..
Among the most commonly heard explanations for this differential are those that attribute it to unique aspects of American culture. According to one theory, American culture has produced a class of employers who are especially resistant to unionization and collective bargaining. Another theory attributes the difference to American individualism. Unlike their foreign counterparts, according to this theory, American workers prefer to establish their conditions of work individually.
My international research has convinced me that both of these theories are wrong. American employers today do go further in opposing unionization and collective bargaining than do their European confreres. But that behaviour is not due to some fundamental attitudinal difference. Employers everywhere prefer to operate with a minimum of constraint not only from unions but also from government or any other agency (Adams 1981). Being responsible for the bottom line, they naturally feel that they need maximum control in order to deliver. In addition, power is rewarding in its own right and it is rare to find anyone willing to give it up easily or willingly.
The contemporary Europe-North America difference in employer behaviour is due, not to attitudinal differences but rather it is due primarily to institutional differences. North American institutions permit employers to act on their instincts; European institutions don't. It is considered to be socially unacceptable for European employers today to engage in union avoidance or bargaining avoidance. But it was not always that way. If we go back to the 19th century we find that most European employers behaved no differently than do their American counterparts today. Their behaviour changed because of a whole set of institutions that were put in place between about 1880 and 1950 with the most dramatic changes occurring by 1920 (Adams 1995).
The fragility of those institutions and the
fundamental nature of employer propensity to shirk off constraint when it is
socially acceptable to do so is indicated by the recent experience in the U.K.
From early in the 20th century until 1979 when Margaret Thatcher rose to power,
a succession of British governments of both the left and right supported the
notion that employers had a social responsibility to recognize and bargain with
trade unions. The result by 1979 was that about 75% of all British workers had
their conditions negotiated. Thatcher, however, withdrew governmental support
for collective bargaining, passed a number of laws designed to fetter trade
unions, and encouraged employers to ignore unions as best they could in order
to establish whatever conditions they felt were warranted. The result was that
bargaining coverage fell precipitously. Today in the private sector it is
probably under 40% (Goodman, et al. 1998).
We also know that employer behaviour towards unions is changeable rather than immutable because when American employers go to Europe generally they attempt to conform to European norms. Along with their European counterparts recently they opposed the initiation of European works councils but they were not successful. Once the European Union required the establishment of councils, American employers conformed with the law even more quickly than did the Europeans (Hall 1997).
Likewise, when European companies establish American branches they do not, as a rule, voluntarily recognize and bargain with employee representatives despite the prevalence of that process in Europe and their acceptance of it. Instead they generally follow the American practice of operating "union-free" unless compelled by an NLRB bargaining order to do otherwise.
In short, despite the instinct to avoid constraint, employer behaviour is malleable. Employers tend to conform to the dominant standards in effect wherever they operate. The conclusion is that American employer behaviour is due to changeable convention rather than to something more fundamental.
Employer behaviour in the U.S. today towards unions and collective bargaining is similar to what it once was towards diversity. In the 1950s discrimination on the basis of race, sex and age was rife. Fifty years later, after the upsurge of the equal opportunity movement, workplace diversity is all the rage. Not only is it accepted but articles on its positive contribution to enterprise performance are common (Jackson and Alvarez 1992). The principle seems to be: if forced to change find the silver lining. That is exactly what European employers did when faced with the reality of universal employee representation and, I have little doubt that American employers would react similarly if faced with the same reality.
I also have problems with individualism as an explanation for the disorganized character of the American working class. Implicitly those who put it forth expect their audience to accept without reflection that there is an inconsistency between individualism and collective bargaining. Is there? I don't think so. Occupations that have attracted the most individualistic people such as acting, music and writing are highly organized.
I've always considered myself to be an individualist and most academics that I know went into the profession in large part because of the flexibility it afforded them to pursue their own interests and (within reasonable bounds) to establish their own work routine. My experience and that of others in these occupations suggests that collective bargaining is capable of establishing standards that may protect individualism rather than override it. I wouldn't want my academic administrators to have the unilateral authority to change the tenure document, for example. At my university there is a tradition that no major changes in policy affecting the faculty will be made without first consulting faculty representatives with a view towards reaching consensus on the issues involved. My individualism does not stop me from loudly applauding that custom.
Those who argue the individualism thesis also would like us to believe that individual bargaining is the logical alternative to collective bargaining. But it isn't. Although the individual may, in theory, negotiate some conditions of employment such as the starting salary, in organizations of any size human resource systems are rationalized. The rules apply to everyone. Those rules may allow for some internal variation but if employees want to have some say about the parameters of the system they may only do so through collective representation. With respect to a large class of rationalized human resources practices individual bargaining is impossible. The only options are codetermination or unilateral imposition and rational straight-thinking adults would not, if given a cost-free choice, defer to unilateral management determination of these issues.
To see why this is so, consider a thought experiment. The owner of a private sector firm dies and leaves the company to his daughter who knows nothing at all of labor relations. When the issue arises she consults the National Labor Relations Act and reads that it is the policy of the U.S. government to "encourage the policy and procedure of collective bargaining." She also has a look at the International Labour Organization's Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work, a document supported not only by the U.S. government but also by representatives of American labor and business. It says that collective bargaining is a fundamental human right equivalent to protection against slavery, child labour and discrimination in employment. It says that all ILO members have an obligation to "respect, promote and realize in good faith...the right to collective bargaining." Wanting to be a good corporate citizen she issues a public statement to her employees. It says,
"Please select representatives of your own choosing to meet with me so that we might discuss, with a view toward reaching consensus, any issues of mutual concern."
Now try to imagine the employees saying "no thanks, we would prefer that you unilaterally decide all of our conditions of work: our wages, hours, benefits, work load, access to training, the health and safety environment, and the system of dispute resolution. If things get tough we would like you to decide without our input to reduce employment, shutdown plants, and individually fire or retain whoever you see fit." That any group of rational and sane adults, who believed the boss's offer to be genuine, would provide such an answer is preposterous.
The employees involved might not want to join the established trade union in the industry. Those who speak against collective bargaining often point to the shortfalls of some union or another as reason why employees should not unionize. But problems with existing unions is not a good reason to accept unilateral managerial authority. If available unions are seen to have problems, employees have the option of forming their own independent organizations.
Those opposed to unionization also often argue that when an enterprise becomes unionized, the employment relationship deteriorates into one characterized by animosity, conflict and distrust. Unorganized employees might naturally want to avoid that outcome. But to a large extent the character of any labor-management relationship is determined by management. If the employer is open and respectful of the union and is willing to include it in the making of key decisions, usually the union is quite willing to work constructively with the employer.
Both the company and the employees might not want to be constrained by the requirements of the National Labor Relations Act. If not, they can work out any sort of mutually acceptable relationship. At McMaster University, where I teach, the Faculty Association is not certified under the Ontario Labour Relations Act (which in broad outline is very similar to the U.S. National Labor Relations Act). Instead faculty and administration have worked out a set of procedures tailor-made for our specific situation through which the faculty participates in the making of rules regulating nearly all aspects of its situation in the university. Wages are negotiated annually and, by mutual agreement, disputes are settled by reference to binding final-offer selection. The executive of the association is elected annually and there has never been a hint of administration tampering with that process even though, over the years, some individuals have served as both officers of the association and officers of the university - although never at the same time.
If, like McMaster's administration, all North American employers offered to meet with representative freely chosen by their employees with a view toward reaching agreement on issues of mutual concern, the take up rate would very likely be close to one hundred percent. Anything less would be cause for worry about the viability of America as a democratic nation. Democracy requires that its citizens be willing to participate in the making of the rules that regulate their lives. If they are prepared to defer to unaccountable leaders to make the rules for them then, as the Germans found out in the 1930s, democracy is dead.
Lots of research suggests that American workers are so disorganized because of intensive employer resistance to unionization. Workers are unwilling to exercise their right to codecide their conditions of employment because they are afraid of the consequences of doing so. That is one answer to the question that I posed at the outset. But that answer elicits another question. Why do American workers put up with employer resistance? If they considered it to be entirely wrong (as, for example, they consider forced labor, slavery and discrimination in employment to be fundamentally wrong) wouldn't they be in the streets protesting against it? Wouldn't they also be putting pressure on their elected officials to do something effective to bring that behaviour to a halt? Apparently, however, employer behaviour with regard to unionization and collective bargaining is accepted as legitimate. Again, the question arises: why?
After several decades, in which the answer to this question stared me in the face, it finally became clear. American workers and their representatives accept employer opposition as legitimate because of confusion about the nature of two fundamental concepts. In the United States freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively are conflated or "fused" in the collective mind. They are "combined into a composite whole" which requires that they each be achieved together or entirely denied. To get collective bargaining, American workers must "unionize." That is they must exercise their freedom of association. If they don't do that they are denied entirely any means of influencing that large class of collective employment issues present in any enterprise.
Because the two notions are fused together, champions of democracy in America do not seek democratic universality in industry. Because freedom of association logically implies freedom not to associate, the goal of American industrial democrats is "real free choice." They decry employer interference with "union organizing" but they do not insist that the government put in place procedures which compel codetermination. Instead, even the most aggressive union leaders commonly accept as legitimate the idea that it is appropriate to respect worker choice not to associate. Because the two concepts are fused they also accept, without protest, the preposterous notion that millions of American workers might prefer to have their conditions of employment unilaterally determined.
The response of management-side spokespersons to the "demand" for "real free choice" is that workers, in making their choice, should have the advantage of all of the facts, including the fact that having to enter into a collective bargaining relationship is displeasing to their employer. The vicious circle is closed when workers, in possession of these facts, "willingly!" form committees to oppose unionization efforts - committees whose purpose is to ensure that the employer retain the power to deny them any say in the establishment of their conditions of employment. Surely, this phenomenon is a close cousin to the one in which the kidnapped come to identify with their oppressors.
Generally, the American public and those active in the political system have accepted the terms of this debate. Many labour supporters feel that employers currently are permitted to go too far and in so doing overstep the bounds of acceptable free speech into the realm of illegal intimidation. But within the public discourse there is no questioning of the fundamental assumption underlying the debate - the notion that choice is the appropriate standard to be applied not only to association rights but also to collective bargaining.
Europe provides evidence of what happens when freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively are treated as separate and stand alone issues. Throughout Europe there is a strong convention in place which holds that Freedom of Association assumes the negative right not to associate. As a result, several European countries forbid unions to negotiate mandatory union membership clauses. Indeed, some countries forbid unions to negotiate any conditions that favour union members over non-members (Adams 1995).
On the other hand, public policy in most European nations strongly favours universal codetermination of conditions of employment. Universality is achieved via a variety of means.
First, most collective bargaining in Europe involves one or more unions and an association of employers. The resulting agreement applies to all relevant employees of all of the associated employers regardless of their union membership. To achieve universality, several European countries also make use of the legislative techniques of extension of agreements. According to this procedure, multi-employer agreements are extended to all relevant employers regardless of their association status. In part because of extension, participation in employer associations is usually very high (Traxler 1998).
Whereas general wage movements and other issues amenable to multi-employer bargaining such as overall hours of work are subject to union-employer collective bargaining, many of the issues commonly subject to union-management negotiations in North America are handled by statutory works councils in Europe. In Germany, for example, works councils have the legal right to co-decide a wide range of issues such as training, health and safety, layoffs and the specific implementation of the industry-level wage and hour agreements with management (Muller-Jentsch 1995).
The councils are required in all enterprises with five or more employees and councillors are elected by all relevant employees regardless of union membership. As a result of this approach, many of the issues that in North America remain within the realm of managerial discretion, are universally codecided in Europe.
Many European countries also have made legal provision for worker representation on corporate boards of directors. In the most balanced scheme workers and shareholders of firms in the German coal and steel industry elect an equal number of representatives to policy making supervisory boards. For the most part, however, employees elect representatives to only a minority of corporate board seats.
European countries also commonly invite labour and management representatives to sit on boards regulating areas of mutual concern such as training, worker's compensation, and labour market policy (Slomp 1996). When key issues come up for national debate labour and employer organizations are commonly invited to negotiate a mutually acceptable approach that is also acceptable to the public. The rules of the European community require that labour and employer organizations be given such an opportunity before new social requirements are instituted.
The result of unravelling freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively in Europe is that, contrary to the United States, there is very little relationship between the degree of unionization and the collective bargaining participation rate (ILO 1997). In France, for example, close to 90% of workers are covered by collective agreements even though the rate of unionization is only about 10%. In Germany nearly all employees have their conditions of work codecided but only about 35% are union members. In Sweden where union organizing is very aggressive and efficient, both union membership density and collective bargaining coverage are around 90% even though mandatory union membership is all but non-existent..
Conclusion
In a remarkable speech delivered at the annual meeting of the Industrial Relations Research Association, Joseph Stiglitz, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank argued that "development" the main formal object of the bank, meant more than the accumulation of material goods (Stiglitz 2000). Development implies a more general betterment in the quality of life. To say that a nation has arrived at a high level of developnment is to say that it is not only highly developed economically but also that it has an advanced level of political and social development. No nation, Stiglitz argues, may consider itself to be highly developed socially and politically unless it practices "economic democracy" because "economic democracy is an essential part of a democratic society."
Highly developed nations encourage "open dialogue and broadly active civic engagement." In advanced societies "individuals have a voice in the decisions that affect them, including economic decisions."
Stiglitz's comments are consistent with a rapidly expanding international consensus which holds that core labour rights including freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively are fundamental human rights to which all people are entitled as a birthright (Adams and Friedman). In the United States the right to bargain collectively is wrongly withheld from millions of workers by making its enjoyment contingent upon the exercise of freedom of association.
Why, then are American workers so disorganized? Because American labour policy makes the enjoyment of codetermination improperly contingent on the exercise of freedom of association and in so doing requires workers to challenge their employer's authority in order to establish collective bargaining. Whether under direct threat of sanction or not, to challenge the boss's authority is to go down a potentially hazardous path. Requiring workers to place their employment prospects in jeopardy in order to achieve it, is no way to "promote" collective bargaining.
Why don't American workers protest these conditions and put pressure on their elected representatives to live up to the standards required by the international consensus on labour rights as human rights? Because in America's collective mind freedom of association is fused with the right to bargain collectively. Rightly Americans insist that everyone ought to have the right not to associate; wrongly they accept that those who choose not to associate must prefer to have their conditions of work unilaterally determined by their employers. The European experience demonstrates clearly that there is nothing fundamental about this unfortunate confuscation.
If you agree with Stiglitz,
as I do, then it follows that the European level of development is much higher
than that of the U.S. Despite its economic might the U.S. is socially backward.
Because its policies and conventions result in the suppression rather than the
encouragement of collective bargaining, it is also a major violator of
international human rights standards.
References
Adams, Roy J., "A Theory of Employer Attitudes and Behaviour Towards Trade Unions in Europe and North America," in K. Weiermair and G. Dlugos, eds., Management Under Differing Value Systems, Berlin, DeGruyter, 1981.
Adams, Roy J., Bernard Adell and Hoyt Wheeler, "Discipline and Discharge in Canada and the U.S." Labor Law Journal, August, 1990, pp. 596-601.
Adams, Roy J., Industrial Relations Under Liberal Democracy, Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1995.
Goodman, John, Mick Marchington, John Berridge, Ed Snape and Greg J. Bamber, "Employment Relations in Britain," in Greg J. Bamber and Russell D. Lansbury, eds., International and Comparative Employment Relations, London, Sage, 1998.
Hall, M., "Opting into the EWC's Directive," European Works Council Bulletin 9, IRS/IRRU, London, May/Jun 1997.
International Labour Office, Industrial Relations, Democracy and Social Stability, World Labour Report 1997-98, Geneva, ILO, 1997.
Jackson, Susan and Eden B. Alvarez. "Working
through diversity as a strategic imperative"
in S. Jackson and Associates, Diversity in the Workplace, NY, The Guilford
Press, 1992.
Muller-Jentsch, W., "Germany: From Collective Voice to Co-management," in J. Rogers and W. Streeck, eds., Works Councils, Consultation, Representation, and Cooperation in Industrial Relations, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Slomp, Hans, Between Bargaining and Politics, London, Praeger, 1996.
Strauss, Marina, "CAW abandons fight for union at Ontario Wal-Mart," Globe and Mail, Toronto, April 20, 2000.
Stiglitz, Joseph, "Democratic Development as the Fruits of Labor," Keynote Address, Industrial Relations Research Association, Boston, January 2000. To be published in the proceedings.
Traxler, Franz,
"Collective Bargaining in the OECD: Developments, Preconditions and
Effects," European Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 4, Number 2, pp.
207-226.
Choice or Voice? Rethinking American labor policy in light of the international human rights consensus
by
Roy J. Adams
McMaster University
Hamilton, Canada, L8S 4C7
INTRODUCTION: THE ARGUMENT IN BRIEF
In the United States the right to bargain collectively is considered to be an inherent aspect of freedom of association. In the thinking of the American labor relations community and the American public the two concepts are inextricably linked. The idea of one without the other rarely enters the policy dialogue.
The central argument in this paper is that, although originally developed as an aspect of freedom of association, in recent years the right to bargain collectively has emerged as a stand alone human right - a result that has dramatic implications for American labor policy.
In section one I review the development of the international workers' rights consensus including the emergence of collective bargaining as a human right.
In the second section I consider two theories of the standard against which collective bargaining policy may be evaluated in light of the international consensus: choice versus voice. Choice theory holds that a nation is in compliance if its working people are permitted to engage in collective bargaining. Voice theory sets a higher standard. It insists that, in order to comply with international obligations, states must ensure that all employees have in place an independent collective voice through which their employment interests may be represented.
In section three, I argue that policies based on choice theory are deficient. States that adopt that theory fail to abide by their international obligations. In particular, by obfuscating freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively rather than treating them as distinct and equal rights, US policy denies a collective voice at work to a majority of the American workforce. Contrary to numerous international human rights agreements that the US has voluntarily entered into, American labor policy perpetuates arbitrary authority in industry. According to the logic of the international human rights consensus, US policy is the moral equivalent of apartheid and slavery.
In section four, we consider some of the steps that
the US government might take in order to bring its domestic policies in line
with the international consensus it was instrumental in creating.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL WORKERS' HUMAN RIGHTS CONSENSUS
During the 1990s a strong international consensus emerged which affirms as fundamental human rights a set of core labor rights. This consensus is supported by parties from all parts of the political spectrum. Among the international organizations affirming support for the human rights character of core labor standards are the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, The World Trade Organization, the International Labour Organization and most recently the United Nations in the form of a Global Compact forged with labor, business and non-government organizations. Notable employer organizations signing on are the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Organization of Employers, some 50 major multinational corporations and the US Council for International Business, the primary representative of American business interests abroad. (see, e.g., IOE 1996; Adams and Friedman 1998; Trebilcock 1998; ILO 1999; UN Global Compact).
The major consensus document is the International Labour Organization's 1998 Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (ILO 2000). Founded in 1919 the ILO is the UN agency focused on labor issues. It has a tripartite character with representation from organized labor, business and states. The primary function of the ILO is to establish global standards with respect to labor issues by adopting conventions which, when ratified by member states, usually (but not always) become law in those states. But, in addition to putting into practice the conventions which they have adopted, all ILO members have certain constitutional duties. The Declaration of Fundamental Principles reaffirms the commitment of ILO members to comply with their constitutional responsibilities. It obliges all ILO members to "respect, to promote and to realize in good faith" five core rights which are deemed to be fundamental human rights. They are:
1. Freedom of association
2. Effective Recognition of the right to collective bargaining
3. The elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labour
4. The effective abolition of child labour
5. The elimination of discrimination in respect of employment or occupation
The ILO considers that the 1998 Declaration has the effect of "committing the Organization's 174 member States to respect the principles inherent in seven core labor standards and promoting their universal application." (ILO 1998). With respect to labor relations policy the key conventions are number 87 concerning freedom of association and protection of the right to organize and number 98 which establishes principles with respect to the right to organize and bargain collectively. The US is one of the few countries in the world that has ratified neither convention. Nevertheless, by signing the Declaration it has, according to the ILO's interpretation of that document, agreed to bring its policy in line with the principles contained in conventions 87 and 98 (ILO 1998).
In the employment context freedom of association, as defined by the ILO, means that "workers and employers, without distinction whatsoever, shall have the right to establish and, subject only to the rules of the organization concerned, to join organizations of their own choosing without previous authorization." ILO principles further hold that such organizations have the right to draw up their own constitutions and rules, elect their own representatives, organize their administration and activities and formulate their own programs. These organizations should not be liable to be dissolved or suspended by outside authority. (Valticos and Von Potobsky, 1995).
Collective bargaining is defined by the ILO as "all negotiations which take place between an employer, a group of employers or one or more employers' organizations on the one hand and one of more workers' organizations on the other for determining working conditions and terms of employment, for regulating relations between employers and workers and for regulating relations between employers and their organizations and a workers' organization or workers' organizations." Although collective bargaining is commonly understood to include negotiations between trade unions and employers the ILO definition extends to cases where, in the absence of a union, workers are represented by delegates "duly elected and authorised by them in accordance with national laws and regulations." (Gernigon, Odero and Guido 2000)
Generically, then, the right to collective bargaining means that working people have a fundamental human right to co-determine their conditions of work and to select representatives of their own choosing in order to negotiate those terms on their behalf.
In designating these rights to be human rights, the Fundamental Declaration brings them under the umbrella of the broader international human rights consensus. Among the basic standards of that consensus is the principle that "human rights and fundamental freedoms are the birthright of all human beings; their protection and promotion is the first responsibility of Governments." That consensus also holds that "all human rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent and interrelated." Each of them, according to the Vienna Declaration of the World Summit on Human Rights, which was endorsed by nearly all of the world's nations, must be treated "on the same footing, and with the same emphasis." (UN High Commission for Human Rights, 1993).
STANDARDS FOR ASSESSING THE EXTENT OF COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL OBLIGATIONS REGARDING WORKERS' HUMAN RIGHTS
Although these stipulations seem to make the issue clear, in practice there are two starkly different theories of the steps necessary to comply with the international consensus.
The first theory, on which US labor policy is based, holds that the obligation is to ensure that employees have a choice. According to the terms of the U.S. National Labor Relations Act covered workers may choose to establish a collective bargaining relationship but they are explicitly granted the right to refrain from doing so. Section 7 of the Act states that "employees shall have the right to self-organization, to form, join or assist labor organizations, to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and to engage in other mutual aid or protection." It also says that employees have "the right to refrain from any or all of such activities..." American workers have freedom to associate and the freedom not to associate. They also have the right to bargain collectively and the right not to bargain collectively.
This concept of the government's responsibility - to provide workers with a choice - seems to be accepted by all parties to the employment relationship in the U.S. including most trade unionists and other advocates for collective bargaining. Policy debates center on how to make choice effective (Dunlop Commission 1994; Block, Beck and Kruger 1996). There is essentially no debate about whether choice is the appropriate standard with respect to these rights.
The almost total acceptance of a right not to associate in the United States is consistent with the stipulation in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that although "everyone has the right to freedom of ...association" no one "may be compelled to belong to an association." As Sheldon Leader points out, a law requiring everyone to belong to a state-designated labor organization is as much a violation of freedom of association as a law forbidding unionization (Leader 1992, p. 28).
Although, the International Labour Organization has refused to take a position on union security provisions in collective agreements, many nations, having embraced what might be referred to as a strong version of freedom of association, have passed laws forbidding trade unions to negotiate mandatory union membership clauses (Mitchnick 1993). US policy on this particular issue is equivocal. Although mandatory dues payment may be required of all workers in designated bargaining units under the National Labor Relations Act, the courts have forbidden the union to discipline covered workers who refuse to comply with all of the requirements of membership. In essence, although mandatory union membership clauses are theoretically permitted, American workers may refuse to fulfill membership obligations (Mitchnick 1993). De Facto, these regulations ensure freedom to associate and freedom not to associate.
Internationally, however, a different logic is commonly applied to collective bargaining. Indeed the most popular theory would seem to be that all working people have a fundamental human right to participate in the making of their conditions of work. They have a right to be consulted by their employer about employment decisions that are critical to them. As Colin Crouch (1998) puts it, among the "fundamental citizenship rights" of all contemporary workers are "collective rights to representation by autonomous organizations in relations between employees and their employers." The government responsibility under this theory is not to put employees in a position where they must choose between representation and deferral to authority unaccountable to the governed. It is, instead, to ensure that all employees have a voice at work.
Thus, among the aims the European Community adopted in 1974 were "progressively to involve workers or their representatives in the life of undertakings in the Community" and "to develop the involvement of management and labour in the economic and social decisions of the Community." (quoted in Knudsen 1995, p. 115).Towards fulfilling that commitment, via the process known as social dialogue, trade unions and employer organizations have the legal right to consider and make recommendations about social legislation before it is adopted by the community as a whole. Also, consistent with that commitment, in 1994 the European Union adopted a European Works Council directive which requires European corporations to provide information to and consult with elected employee representatives before going ahead with decisions of importance to employees (Blanpain and Hanami 1995).
At the national level most continental European countries, while fostering the freedom of workers to join or not to join trade unions, have put in place mechanisms, ranging from conventional collective bargaining, through statutory works councils to worker representatives on corporate boards of directors which provide nearly all working people with a voice at work. As a result, although union membership density varies significantly from country to country, collective agreements in most continental European countries cover between 70-90% of the labor force. In the United States, however, where employee representation is contingent upon the exercise of freedom of association not only by individuals but rather by a majority of employees in bargaining units designated by the National Labor Relations Board, the large majority of working people are excluded from enterprise decision making (See table 1).
(Please place table 1 about here).
TABLE 1
UNION DENSITY AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING COVERAGE
ESTIMATES,
EARLY 1990s
COUNTRY UNION MEMBERSHIP DENSITY (% UNIONIZED)
PROPORTION OF EMPLOYEES COVERED BY COLLECTIVE AGREEMENTS (%)
FRANCE 8-12 70-80
GERMANY 39-45 90
NETHERLANDS 35-40 75-80
AUSTRIA 45-50 90+
SWITZERLAND 28-35 65
SWEDEN 80-95 90+
UNITED STATES 15-17 18-22
Source: Adams, 1995, table 4.1
In short, in Europe the hypothetical right to desist from participating in enterprise decision making is not considered to be legitimate. The objective is to ensure that there are institutions in place that allow all working people to influence their conditions of work.
In the United States, however, freedom of association and the right to collective bargaining have been, without much reflection, treated as a unitary phenomenon and, as much as anything, that mental laziness has been responsible for the denial of representation to most American working people. In order to establish a bargaining relationship American workers must exercise their freedom of association (Summers 1999). To engage in collective bargaining they must first join or form a trade union. However, American society strongly supports both a right not to associate as well as freedom of speech (Gross 1999). Despite arguments made against it by trade unionists and academics sympathetic to labor, the American public broadly accepts the proposition that the employer is justified in making use of freedom of speech in order to convince employees not to become union members. By making representation contingent upon the union joining decision, US policy allows employers to oppose collective representation free from principled opposition. That situation, according to many studies, has resulted in the denial of the right to bargain in practice despite its existence on paper. Thus according to Block, Beck and Kruger (1996)
"Although the employer may act legally, the result of pyramiding legal activities one on top of another is an outcome that was surely not intended by the Act. The NLRA was enacted to provide employees with a free and uncoerced choice regarding whether to be represented by a union and to provide the employees in a unit in which a union was chosen the right to bargain collectively. The law can be used, however, to achieve precisely the opposite result." (P. 91-92).
"Ironically, then, a system that was designed to provide a choice of representation to employees seems only to provide employers with a choice -- a choice as to the type of employee relations system they will create." (p. 100).
The evidence suggests that most unorganized workers in the US fear reprisals for getting involved in an organizing campaign and evidence on the actual practice of victimization indicates that their fears are fully warranted. In their sample of American workers Freeman and Rogers (1999) found that, of those who had been involved in a unionization campaign "two thirds said that management had opposed the organizing campaign in ways that ranged from information campaigns to threats against or harassment of union supporters." (page 62). Human Rights Watch (1999) found a "growing incidence of workers' rights violations." (page 9). Although US policies formally:
"comport with international human rights norms," the "reality of NLRA enforcement falls far short of its goals. Many workers who try to form and join trade unions to bargain with their employers are spied on, harassed, pressured, threatened, suspended, fired, deported or otherwise victimized in reprisal for their exercise of the right to freedom of association." (p. 9).
Freeman and Rogers also interviewed a sample of managers who reported that "if the employees they managed formed a union" it would "hurt their career a great deal." (p. 62). They note that under U.S. law "a manager who refuses to oppose a union can be summarily dismissed." (p.62).
Although collective bargaining is commonly thought of in North America as an adversarial process of negotiation between employers and state certified unions leading to written agreements containing management's rights clauses, formal grievance procedures and many other specific attributes, that nexus is only one variant of collective bargaining. As indicated by the ILO definition above, the term collective bargaining refers to a wide range of practises which include but are not limited to the specifics of typical American practice.
Generically, the term includes any set of discussions between employers and representatives independently selected by employees to discuss employment issues with a view towards reaching mutual agreement on those issues. This broad definition includes, for example, negotiations which take place between worker representatives and employers within the context of works councils established statutorily in many countries. These institutions cover practically the entire work force in several European nations (Rogers and Strake 1995). The ILO's conception of collective bargaining also includes the negotiations taking place within the statutorily established wages councils which were a basic part of British industrial relations for most of the twentieth century (Edwards 1992). It includes the discussions which take place within legally required joint health and safety committees in Canada (Bernard 1995). It includes cases where employers and autonomous employee representatives develop their own relationship outside of the confines of the Wagner Act legal framework in Canada and the United States.
Despite evidence that they are intensely anti-union in the context of the Wagner-Act legal framework, a substantial percentage of American managers recognize the appropriateness and value to the firm of employee representation. Although employer-dominated company unions are not legal in the United States and do not meet the ILO test of autonomous employee representation, in a recent study Lipset and Meltz (2000) found that about 20% of American workers are covered by employee representation plans unilaterally established by their employers. In their sample, Freeman and Rogers (1999) found that "much of management favours a more substantial employee voice in joint committees." Moreover, "nearly one-half of managers said that they favoured employees electing their own representatives to such committees." (p. 7).
A major stumbling block in moving this area of agreement into conformity with international standards is the reluctance of American top executives to relinquish their hold on power. If those employers identified in the Meltz and Lipset study as having representation schemes were to allow participating employees to select their own leaders and develop their own agendas, these relationships would probably qualify under both US and international law as legitimate collective bargaining arrangements and thus would add significantly to the collective bargaining participation rate in the United States (see, e.g., Summers 1993). Unfortunately, as Rogers and Freeman found, American managers generally "oppose programs that would keep them from making the final decisions about workplace governance." (p.7).
WHY CHOICE IS AN INAPPROPRIATE STANDARD FOR COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL OBLIGATIONS
On considering the evidence reviewed briefly above, most trade unionists and intellectuals supportive of collective bargaining in the United States argue that if employees had real free choice the collective bargaining rate in the US would be much higher. Most are critical of the government for failing to end the rampant illegality aimed at repressing the desire to organize and bargain collectively. Their object is a policy in which employee choice would be truly unfettered.
The argument made here is entirely different.
I suggest that choice is the wrong standard altogether. Employees should not be compelled to choose between bargaining and no representation. The obligation of government, consistent with the theory embraced by the European Union, is to ensure that all workers have in place representative institutions through which they are able to influence their conditions of work. When examined closely the case for choice as the standard for compliance with the human right to bargain is without foundation.
Since only about 10% of the private sector workforce in the US is covered by collective agreements, American choice theory would have us believe that most American workers prefer not to bargain collectively which is to say that they have no desire to influence the many collective aspects of work critical to their well being. They prefer not to be consulted about the company's wage budget, about the nature of the wage payment system, about the work organization system, about the amount and nature of training provided by the firm, about the framework in place for ensuring a safe and healthy workplace, about the implementation of equal employment opportunity. They prefer to have management unilaterally establish policies on these issues without their advice and consent.
On its face, this notion is preposterous. Employees may prefer to forgo the confrontational version of collective bargaining available to them under the NLRA but that is quite different from rejecting collective representation altogether. To say that employees prefer to forego collective bargaining is to affirm that they choose to accept, without discussion, whatever the employer might put in place.
A thought experiment is useful to illustrate the absurdity of that proposition. Imagine a liberal employer graciously offering in good humour to meet with representatives selected by the employees with a view towards discussing and reaching agreement on any collective issues of mutual concern. Rejection by employees of such an offer would raise concerns about the civic-mindedness of those involved. No democracy could survive a citizenry so willing to reject participation in preference to deferral to unaccountable authority.
Nor is such an attitude characteristic of American workers. In their recent survey, Freeman and Rogers (1999) found that, although many workers weren't keen on the adversarial brand of bargaining available under the NLRA, nearly all of those responding wanted some form of voice at work. Some 88% of those surveyed indicated that they wanted to be represented in the making of the rules of work.
Despite the survey evidence that American workers want a representative voice the argument is frequently made that the American people are individualistic and, although they may want to have a say about their employment conditions, they prefer to negotiate individual contracts. However that may be, those who prefer to participate in the full range of organizational governance via individual negotiations are seeking the impossible. Some employment issues are individually negotiable and a case might be made that (contrary to the requirements of the NLRA which grants exclusive bargaining status to the bargaining agent) employees should be provided with the opportunity to bargain individually over them. For many years industrial relations experts have argued that individual negotiations favour the employer whose bargaining power obviously exceeds that of most individual employees. Nevertheless, it is not unreasonable to maintain that, if employees choose to do so, the state should not forbid them to bargain individually over issues that are amenable to individual bargaining despite the apparent imbalance of power.
But many critical conditions of work are collective in nature and cannot be negotiated by each employee separately. With respect to issues such as the overall wage budget, the wage structure, the training system, the health and safety system, the promotion scheme, the implementation of human rights and employment standards legislation to name only a few relevant issues, the only choices are collective decision making or imposition. How the firm handles these issues, the amount of resources it devotes to them, and decisions to make major changes to them are all inherently of concern to employees. In firms of any size, however, individual bargaining over them is infeasible.
A third category of issues may be individually negotiated or be treated collectively. For example, a firm might individually negotiate an amount of money with each employee that would be placed in a pension plan of the employees choice. Most firms with pensions plans, however, have a single plan with common rules that apply to all employees within particular occupational groupings. Where such plans exist, the only way that employees can influence their rules is through some form of representation. Each individual employee cannot separately negotiate the rules of the scheme.
Another argument commonly made in the United States against aggressive promotion of collective bargaining by government is that it would be economically damaging to companies now operating under unconstrained managerial discretion. Such arguments helped, for example, to defeat labor law reform in the 1970s (Raskin 1979). To anyone involved in labor relations it is, of course, a commonplace observation that in certain situations employee organizations are capable of causing corporate officers headaches. However, a considerable amount of research has attempted to test the hypothesis that collective bargaining is systematically bad for business with ambiguous results. Among economists a debate on the issue continues to rage without a definitive winner. Indeed, a considerable amount of evidence points to positive economic benefits of collective bargaining in a range of situations.
In a recent review of the literature prepared for the ILO's Working Party on the Social Dimensions of Globalization the authors concluded that "The respect and realization of the principles of freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining and the institutions built thereon (representative organizations, collective bargaining and social dialogue) are not a barrier to economic performance." (ILO 2000c). That conclusion echoes similar results reached by researchers at the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (Aidt and Tzannatos 2000; D. Brown 2000).
Whatever the outcome of the economic debate, from a human rights perspective, these arguments are irrelevant because according to the international consensus fundamental human rights "trump" other considerations. Some economists have argued theoretically that economies would be more efficient if workers were permitted to sell themselves into slavery. Whatever the potential economic benefits, slavery is repugnant to democratic values and thus beyond the realm of consideration (see, e.g., Stiglitz 2000; Langille 1998). If fundamental human rights are indivisible and if collective bargaining is a human right, as the international consensus affirms it to be, then the persistence of arbitrary authority in industry should arouse indignation no less intense than the continued existence of forced labor in countries such as Burma and child prostitution is countries such as Thailand.
The evidence suggests that, despite the human rights character of collective bargaining, about 90% of American private sector workers are excluded from collective employment decision making. Some of them would like to be represented under NLRA rules but are precluded from doing so because of deficiencies in US law and its administration. Many others want, but are denied, representation in a format different from that available under the NLRA because employers are unwilling to enter willingly into such relationships and the state has not provided employees with statutory options. Despite this sorry state of affairs, defenders of the status quo insist that choice must remain the standard for establishing a bargaining relationship because to deny choice would be offensive to democratic principles.
Superficially, that argument might be appealing but closer examination reveals it to be seriously flawed. In the modern democratic state there are some choices that result in conditions so morally repugnant that they cannot be allowed. Of the five core labor rights standards endorsed unanimously by government, business and labor delegates to the ILO's annual conference as fundamental human rights, theoretical negative rights are clearly not permitted with respect to three of them. We do not, for example, permit people to sell themselves into slavery. We do not allow states to choose apartheid and we do not allow children to choose to prostitute themselves or enter into other forms of exploitative employment relations. From a human rights perspective the alternative to voice for employees - deferral to authority unaccountable to the governed - is as obnoxious as any of these possibilities and its continued existence is shameful. Not only should it not be available to be chosen, but like slavery, child labor and discrimination the elimination of arbitrary authority in industry should be the urgent objective.
One way of looking at the situation is that the choice with respect to this issue was made long ago. Collective bargaining is commonly characterized as the preferred method to introduce democratic principles into industry. Once a nation opts for democracy it need not, and should not have to, continually remake that decision with respect to its practice in its various institutions. Placing before the American people an option for the establishment of a hereditary Count of Westchester, Duke of New York or King of America is absurd. The issue to be decided is not whether their ought to be democracy but rather what form democratic participation ought to take. Debate about the relative merits of Wagner-Act style negotiations, statutory works councils and independent extra-legal relations voluntarily established by employers and representatives freely chosen by their employees is legitimate and appropriate. In a democratic nation, however, no representation as a option should be accorded no legitimacy.
IMPLICATIONS FOR LABOR POLICY
With respect to the proper interpretation of the international consensus, theory has dramatic practical implications for labor policy. If the negative right not to bargain were rejected then a number of steps would logically follow. For example, closing what the ILO (2000a) calls "the representation gap," would become the central objective of American policy. Adopting such a policy would mean a sharp break with policy approaches that have been deeply ingrained for decades. Among the most sacred of principles is that of "balance" which holds that the government has a responsibility to treat the interests of business and the trade union movement equally. To favour one over the other is considered to be inappropriate (Gross 1985). The problem with the theory is that it focuses on the interests of business and existing trade unions. In doing so, it neglects the interests of employees in a voice at work. As the recent Human Rights Watch report insists, workers deserve to be considered "autonomous actors" to whom unions and collective bargaining are "tools" for the "exercise of basic rights." They should not be conceived of as "objects of unions' or employers' institutional interests." (Human Rights Watch 2000).
Although a policy of aggressively and purposively attacking the representation gap may seem extreme given current American practice, such a policy has recent precedent. Unapologetically closing the gap was precisely the policy objective adopted in France in the early 1980s (Goetschy and Rozenblatt 1992). The initiatives that the French took led to a significant expansion of collective bargaining coverage. Today about 90% of French workers are covered by collective agreements (ILO 1997).
On accepting the same objective an American administration might immediately urge employers voluntarily to agree to meet with representatives freely and independently chosen by the employees in order to discuss any issues of mutual concern. Even in its current state, American labor policy does not forbid the voluntary establishment of flexible bargaining relationships tailor-made to the preferences of the parties (see, e.g., Summers 1992; Hyde, et al., 1993). The research by Meltz and Lipset (2000) and by Freeman and Rogers (1999) indicates that many American employers see the value in such arrangements even though they are apparently reluctant to surrender control of them. A strong moral stance by the administration in favour of collective bargaining could be based not only on international human rights law but also on the United States constitution (see, e.g., Wheeler 2000; Labor Party of America 2000).
A formal and well publicized initiative by the American government would, even in the absence of new legislation, make it difficult for employers to continue publicly and openly to pursue union avoidance strategies. From early in the 20th century until the late 1970s when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, a series of British governments of both the left and right consistently pursued a policy of encouraging employers voluntarily to recognize and bargain with representatives freely chosen by their employees. By the mid-1970s that policy had resulted in a collective bargaining coverage rate of approximately 75%. When Thatcher dropped that policy and attacked collective bargaining the coverage rate fell steeply (see Adams 1994).
With sufficient political support the administration might also send legislation to Congress requiring the establishment of employee representative councils (Summers 1998a). Typically, delegates to these bodies are elected by all relevant employees whether union members or not. The councils commonly have responsibility for co-determining a range of issues identified in law. In Germany, for example, representative councils established by statute are responsible for a wide range of issues including training policy, safety and health policy, the implementation of employment legislation and the implementation of collective agreements negotiated on a multi-employer basis by trade unions. Companies may not lay off workers without council consent subject to an arbitration procedure in which the employer must demonstrate necessity. Individual dismissals may also be vetoed by the council subject again to arbitration (Muller-Jentsch 1995).
Trade unions in Germany may and generally do run candidates for council election. As a result, the large majority of councillors are active trade unionists. Although German unions were initially opposed to these institutions they have learned to live with them and now consider them to be the union's institution within the workplace.
I realize that the labor movement in America is wary of these institutions and fears that they might develop into weak, employer dominated substitutes for genuine independent representation. These fears are not unreasonable and they need to be effectively addressed. But there has been a lot of international experience with representative councils and unions abroad have found ways to co-exist compatibly with them. Where they exist labor movements today generally approve of them (Rogers and Streeck 1995). With the good will of all parties to the employment relationship and with the international experience as a resource, developing an acceptable American model should not be an insurmountable problem.
It would be appropriate, for example, for trade unions to set up local union branches in enterprises in which they do not have majority support. The object of these local organizations would be to represent members interests as best they could without the support provided by the Wagner-Act model to certified unions. With respect to the representative councils, they could run candidates. Indeed, in line with the international experience, the law might make it easier for unions to nominate candidates than for candidates to get on the ballot independently. If able to capture the council, the local union would be able to use its statutory powers to advance member interests.
For this scenario to occur, it would be necessary to have effective protection of workers from victimization for involvement in union activity. If councils were established by statute, employer opposition to union membership would be expected to diminish at any rate. Indeed, the success of the American labor movement in imposing its agenda at the workplace in those enterprises in which it is well established is often noted as a prime reason for the comparatively intense anti-union behaviour of American employers. In Europe, once the issue of recognition for bargaining purposes was settled, employer opposition to unionism per se subsided substantially (see Adams 1981). Having to deal with an employee representation agency with statutory powers, there was less to be gained by dissuading employees from taking out union membership. Much the same reaction may be expected in the US.
Even without new legislation, were an American administration to forcefully condemn bargaining avoidance as a violation of human rights it would be difficult for employers to engage in practices now accepted as the norm. A combined effort by human rights and labor organizations to protest the immorality of these actions in cases where employers attempted to persist with them (much as the Civil Rights, Women's Rights and Gay Rights movements have done) would make such practices costly.
THE PRACTICALITY OF A LABOR POLICY CONSISTENT WITH INTERNATIONAL NORMS
At this point the objection is frequently raised that my proposals are impractical and thus of no more than esoteric interest. Clearly, the realists say, they are beyond the realm of the possible. Most of these realists accept the current normative milieu as a given and do not consider the option of changing it. But as the civil rights, women's rights and gay rights movement's have demonstrated during the past half century, social values and behaviour can be changed.
Winning wide support for rejection of the illegitimate "right" of employers to deny voice to their employees should not be unattainable if pursued with vigour by labor and human rights groups. The persistence of a system of workplace governance in which the governed have no representation is morally insupportable and the evidence clearly indicates that American workers do not approve of the current situation in which their conditions are imposed upon them without their advice and consent. The evidence also suggests that many American employers, in fact, see value in incorporating employee voice into employment decision making.
A campaign which insists that freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively are separate but equal rights subject to careful consideration on their own, that collective bargaining consists of a range of activities that include but are not limited to conventional adversarial bargaining and that all workers have a human right to a voice at work rather than a false right to submit to unaccountable authority ought to have a good chance of winning widespread support. Such a campaign should have good prospects of uniting the American labor and human rights communities.
On the other hand experience over the past several decades in the US indicates that labor law reform is unlikely to succeed under current political and social assumptions. Attempts at reform since the mid-1970s have repeatedly been defeated. Most recently an attempt to outlaw the technique of hiring permanent strike breakers, behaviour that is contrary to international labor standards, was defeated in the US Senate by a filibuster (ILO 2000b).
Moreover, if one looks at American labor policy from an international perspective, it seems obvious that the proposals on the table for tinkering with the Wagner Act Model such as those put forth by the Dunlop Commission (1994) or those more recently suggested by Human Rights Watch (2000), even if they were attainable, would not materialize the human right of all workers to a voice at work. Canada imported the American labor policy model in the 1940s. Over the years it was revised to include most of the reform options proposed for the US. At least some Canadian jurisdictions have introduced policies such as speedy certification votes, card check certification, first contract arbitration, and stiff and rapid sanctions against law breaking employers. No Canadian jurisdiction permits permanent strike replacements and a few forbid the employer to hire strike replacements at all.
The results of this more labor-friendly version of the Wagner-Act Model have been less than impressive (Adams 1993). Instead of 9 in 10 private sector workers having no voice at work, 8 of 10 equivalent workers are excluded in Canada (Adams 1995). From the institutional perspective of unions who might consider themselves to be purveyors of a service to prospective employee clients, a doubling of market penetration would be a significant achievement. If the human right to voice for all employees is the object, however, there is no reason to expect that adoption of the Canadian version of the Wagner-Act Model will achieve that end in the United States.
In the Canadian public sector the collective bargaining participation rate is at European levels - well over 70%. The reason for the public-private differential is obvious. In the public sector, the employer (federal and provincial governments) voluntarily extended recognition to associations of their employees in the 1960s and 1970s. Prior to World War II there was little public sector collective bargaining in Canada. Provided with the opportunity to bargain without fear of reprisal or of acting contrary to the wishes of the employer, however, the large majority of public sector workers did what the Freeman and Rogers survey suggests American workers would do under similar circumstances. They accepted the offer.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, The US has promised on the world
stage to honour international workers' human rights
standards but it is not fulfilling its obligations. In order to deliver on its
promise the US needs to alter its labor policy fundamentally. Without a major
change in course the large majority of American workers are likely to continue
to be denied, against their will, what most of the world has affirmed to be a
birthright of all human beings - the right to collective bargaining; the right
to a voice at work.
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Unpublished Conference
Presentations and Seminar Papers
Invited papers include those read at meetings
sponsored by Centre for Industrial Relations, University of Toronto; Labour Education Centre, Rutgers University; University of
Aston (UK); Human Resources Institute, Thammassat
University (Thailand); Beijing University of Iron and Steel Technology;
Industrial Relations Research Institute, University of Wisconsin; United
Steelworkers of America; Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (US);
Ontario Economic Council; Labour Canada; National
Institute for Work and Learning (US); Personnel Association of Toronto;
American Federation of Teachers; Canadian Association for Co-operative
Education; Conference Board of Canada; Institute for Research on Public Policy;
Canada Council on Working Life; Employment and Immigration Canada; Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development; National Institute of
Employment and Vocational Research (Japan); Canadian Business Council on
National Issues; German Marshall Fund of the U.S.; Royal Commission
on The Economic Union and Development Prospects for Canada; International
Institute of Management (Berlin, Germany); Queen's University Industrial
Relations Centre (Canada); University of Manitoba; Public Personnel
Management Association of Canada; University of Calgary; International Labour Law and Social Security Association; Warwick
University (UK); Industrial Relations Research Association (Paris Chapter);
International Industrial Relations Association; University of Paderborn (Germany); Institute for Social Research
(Germany); Cardiff Business School (UK); International Institute for Labour Studies (Geneva, Switzerland); Academy of
Management; Case-Western Reserve University (US); City Polytechnic of
Hong Kong; University of Queensland (Australia); University of New South
Wales (Australia); Brisbane College of Advanced Education (Australia);
University of Wollongong (Australia); York University (Canada); Indiana
University of Pennsylvania; University of Alabama; University of South
Carolina; University of Saskatchewan; Mohawk College of Applied Arts and
Technology (Canada); Canadian Centre for Management Development;
Laval University (Canada); University of Groningen (Netherlands);
University of Trier (Germany); Bell Canada;
University of California at Berkeley; University of the South Pacific
(Fiji); Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand); University of
Auckland (New Zealand); Western Australia Department of Labour; Monash University
(Australia); The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Cornell
University (US); American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial
Organizations; Canadian Union of Public Employees; United Way; North
American Economics and Finance Association; University of Buffalo (US);
Michigan State University (US); Council of Canadian Industrial Relations
Executives, Turkish Industrial Relations Association; Canadian
Institute, The Canadian Labour Law
Casebook Group; University of Witwatersrand; Industrial Relations
Association of South Africa; University of South Africa; University of
Natal; Pennsylvania State University; University of Texas at Austin; U.S.
Labor Law Group; University of Otago (New
Zealand); Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and
New Zealand; University of Western Australia; University of Western Sydney;
Griffith University; Industrial Relations Society of Australia; Royal
Netherlands, Academy of Arts and Sciences; Jamaica Employer's Federation;
Canadian Association for Studies in Development, Washington College of
Law at American University, The University and College Labor
Education Association, the Ontario Institute for Studies in
Education, the Hamilton Home and School Association, Hamilton Area
Separate Schools Parents Council, Parents Council for the Halton Region Secondary Schools; Hamilton Against
Poverty; State University of New York at Buffalo Law School;
Ontario Secondary School Teacher's Federation; University of Windsor Law
School; Oxford University; Trinity College, Dublin; the University of
Limerick; Levi Strauss and UNITE; National Chung Cheng University-Taiwan;
National Sun Yat-sen University-Taiwan; Indiana University
of Pennsylvania; University of Lethbridge;
International Employment Relations Association; American Society for
Legal History; Critical Management Studies Workshop- Academy of Management;
Eastern Academy of Management; Human Rights Centre Essex University (UK);
London School of Economics and Political Science; Tribhuvan
University (Kathmandu, Nepal). Eugene (Oregon) Human
Rights Commission; Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics, University of
Oregon; Canadian Workplace Research Network; University of Wisconsin-La Crosse;
A.E. Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change,
Madison, Wisconsin; The Advanced Design and Manufacturing Institute of Canada;
Business and Management Research Centre, McGill University; Administrative
Sciences Association of Canada; International Business Research Centre of the
Ontario Certified General Accountant’s Association, Communications
Workers of America, Hamilton West Federal New Democratic Party Association,
National Union of Public and General Workers, UFCW-Canada, Canadian Autoworkers
Union, Ontario Public Intererst Research Group.
11/05
Receiving CIRA's G. Dion Award in 1996.
From left: Mark Thompson (Univ of British Columbia),
Roy, Anil Verma (University of Toronto) and
Tony Smith (University of New Brunswick)
The HCC is an informal group of about 50 civic leaders chaired by Peter George, President of McMaster University and Don Pether, President of Dofasco. The group includes the CEO’s or equivalent of most of Hamilton’s major public and private sector institutions including the banks, steel companies, post-secondary institutions and hospitals. Top officials from social, arts and labour organizations are also included.
The HCC first came together following the provincial election held in the fall of 2003. Its initial purpose was to lend its support for a civic reform agenda originally developed by the Toronto City Summit Alliance. Since its inception, significant progress has been made on several of those issues including reinvestment in education, more support for public transportation, and getting city issues on the public agenda.
With respect to Hamilton specifically, the HCC strongly lobbied for provincial money to fill the gap left by Hamilton’s exclusion from the Toronto area social services pooling arrangement and has been given partial credit for the grants given by the province to the city in 2004 and 2005. The HCC currently has active projects in affordable housing, downtown renewal, technology transfer, and economic development. The group supports Hamilton’s Vision 2020 development framework and the triple bottom line approach to project initiatives.