Changing Contexts: Globalisation, Labour Forces and Organisations

1
Changing Contexts Globalisation, Labour Forces
and Organisations

• Issues for Employee Relations

2
Contexts and Employee Relations

• A preliminary framework
• Understanding contextual influences on employee
  relations
• Dunlop systems model
• Context-Actors-Processes-Outcomes
• Dynamic nature of employee relations

3
Dunlops Industrial Relations System
CONTEXTS ACTORS PROCESSES OUTCOMES Economic Emplo
yers Managerial Reg Pay and Social Managers Coll
ective Conditions Legal Trade Unions Bargaining I
nc Productivity Political Employees Legal
Reg. Conflict Techno Customers CP Less
Conflict Logical Shareholders Feedback
Shared Ideology
4
Changing Contexts?

• Globalisation?
• Post-industrialisation?
• Flexibilisation?
• Feminisation of work?
• Polarisation of work?
• Juridification of employment?
• De-regulation/re-regulation of employment in
  advanced economies
• New agendas EU, work/life balance, social
  inclusion, flexicurity

5
Changing Contexts?

• Issues for labour forces and for organisations
• Insecurity and declining employment protection
• New employment relationships
• De-bureaucratisation?
• De-layering/down-sizing?
• De-integration?
• Contracting out/outsourcing?

6
Globalisation

• Precise definitions remain elusive, for Held
  (1999) it is
• The widening, deepening and speeding up of
  worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of
  contemporary social life, from the cultural to
  the criminal, the financial to the spiritual
• Therefore is about
• Economic, political, social and cultural change
• Latest stage of capitalist economic development
• Extension of capitalism to entire planet

7
Globalisation Components

• The Globalisation of financial markets
• The growing economic importance of trans-national
  companies
• The growing international interconnectedness of
  economies
• Time-space distanciation
• The internationalisation of corporate strategies
• The industrialisation of the Third World
• The emergence of a global economic system
• The decline of the Nation State
• Lying behind many of these developments are huge
  leaps in technological capability

8
Globalisation in Numbers

• WTO 151 countries, 90 of world trade,
  philosophy of trade liberalization
• Expansion of international trade, capital flows,
  and FDI
• International ownership of industries
• 51 of worlds 100 largest economic entities are
  corporations McDonalds present in 119
  countries, Shell, Philips in over 100 each
• 500 of worlds largest corporations accounted for
  over half of world trade in mid 1990s

9
Globalisation in Practices

• Closer integration of spatially distinct places
• Development of global markets for commodities,
  education, finance, telecoms, people
• Development of vast trans-national corporations
  with global strategies for development
• UK significantly affected by these trends
  relatively open economy

10
Globalisation of Practices (2)

• Changing employee relations see role of
  MNC/TNCs
• WERS data foreign-owned companies major
  innovators in employee relations in UK
• Dominant company effects - Royle (2006) work on
  McDonalds in Italy suggests impact on practices
  of indigenous companies
• See also Singapore impact of US MNCs on
  established working practices in 1980s/90s

11
Globalisation and Employees

• Growth of international benchmarking costs,
  productivity, quality
• Race to the bottom wages, conditions of
  employment
• UK and others become branch plant economies
• UK employees more open to global developments
  currency movements, overseas economic crises
• Labour market and employment flexibility and
  uncertainty
• Range of managerial approaches now evident
  Japanese, US, European

12
Globalisation Approaches

• Globalisation imprecise concept very different
  perspectives
• Held distinguishes between the
• Hyperglobalisers (Ohmae and the global
  marketplace)
• Transformationalists (Giddens, Castells)
• World system theorists (Korzeniewicz 1994)
• Sceptics (Hirst and Thompson)

13
Globalisation and Employee Relations

• The weakening of companies as social
  institutions goes in tandem with the further
  commodification of work. Labour has become
  something that is sold in bits to corporations.
  Businesses have shed many of the responsibilities
  that rendered the world of work humanly tolerable
  in the past
• (Gray 2002)

14
Globalisation and Employee Relations

• Gray (1998) see as linked to Global free market
  capitalism
• US model eroding social settlements
• Undermining established labour codes and
  weakening existing models of labour regulation
• Implications not just for states and national
  systems of regulation also
• Trade unions and collective bargaining
• Raises issue of whether national systems of
  regulation can survive onset of globalisation
• What are issues for trade unions and labour
  relations?

15
Globalisation and Employee Relations

• See also the End of Work theorists (Beck 2000,
  Gorz, 1998)
• Beck The Risk Society argues that erosion of
  Post-War social settlements brought about by
  global market pressures has led employers to
  re-assign risk at work to employees and workers
• Cappelli (1999, 2001) talks of a new employment
  relationship based on shifted risk and
  flexibility
• Osterman (2000) concurs with this in terms of
  changes in US labour markets

16
Summary points

• Change and continuity in employee relations
• Major environmental change 1980s and 1990s
  product markets, labour markets, political-legal
  context
• Millward et al. (2001) major change of 1980-1997
  legislation
• Real change in contexts and in impact on actors
  behaviour but attitudinal change slower
• Increasing globalisation but term poorly
  defined and impact uneven
• Major change through globalisation may be
  ideological