Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 2004 9
BOOK REVIEWS
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
IN THE
PRIVATE SECTOR
Edited by Paul F. Clark, John T. Delaney and Ann C. Frost. Industrial Relations
Research Association, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, 2002, iv + 380 pp., US$29.95
(paperback)
One hallmark of industrial relations scholarship is grounding employment
research in the institutional reality of how labour markets and trade unions work
in practice. This edited volume, therefore, presents detailed descriptions of US
unionism and collective bargaining in eight industries—airlines, autos, health
care, hotels and casinos, newspapers, professional sports, telecommunications
and trucking—written by 13 academics who are specialists in each industry. It is
impossible for any single volume to cover all industries in detail and the editors
have done a nice job of collecting diverse industries that represent a variety of
private sector experiences. Most of these chapters focus on developments over
the past 20 years and this collection provides a high-quality snapshot of the
state of US industrial relations two decades after the start of the concession
bargaining era, and in the immediate shadow of the aftermath of the tragic
events of September 11, 2001, albeit limited to the private sector.
Nearly all of the chapters begin with a description of the particular industry—
its organisational structure, the nature of competition, major occupations, the
primary companies and unions and the significant environmental trends over the
last two decades or so. Unsurprisingly, a common theme is a significant increase
in the competitive environment in each of the eight industries. Another recurring
theme is de-unionisation, especially in trucking, newspapers and autos, though
this theme is not universal because unionisation rates in airlines and professional
sports are relatively stable. Many of the chapters also raise important issues about
the obsolescence of US labour law, such as the exclusion of nurses as supervisors
(chapter 3, by Paul F Clark) and of truck drivers as owner–operators (chapter 8,
by Michael Belzer) – and of the traditional election-based organising process.
Against this backdrop, the chapters review recent bargaining outcomes, changes
in bargaining structure, strikes and organising drives. Though uneven in places,
a strength of this volume is this common coverage across the eight chapters.
The volume effectively reveals the unique pressures, strategies, and outcomes
in each industry. In particular, the common theme of increased competitiveness
is frequently rooted in different reasons in different industries. These include
globalisation, technological change, deregulation, and other changes in public
policies. Harry Katz, John Paul MacDuffie, and Frits Pil effectively describe the
industrial relations ramifications of the expansion of competition in the auto
assembly industry as Japanese and European automakers continue to open
non-union plants in the US (chapter 2). Howard Stanger uniquely shows
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how collective bargaining in the newspaper industry has been dramatically affected
not only by technological developments, but also by changes in the ownership
structure of newspapers brought on by tax law changes (chapter 5). In contrast,
deregulation is a key theme in airlines (chapter 1, by Nancy Brown Johnson),
telecommunications (chapter 7, by Jeffrey Keefe and Rosemary Batt), and trucking
(chapter 8, by Michael Belzer).
The occupational contrasts within some industries are also very useful: nurses
compared to doctors in the health care industry (chapter 3), pilots, flight
attendants and mechanics in the airline industry (chapter 1), casino dealers
versus other hospitality workers in the chapter by C. Jeffrey Waddoups and
Vincent Eade (chapter 4), and athletes in baseball, football, basketball and
hockey in the professional sports chapter by James Dworkin and Richard
Posthuma (chapter 6). Johnson also provides a nice overview of the special issues
for collective bargaining under the Railway Labor Act (chapter 1) and Belzer
demonstrates the importance of internal union politics on industrial relations
outcomes (chapter 8). Airlines, and hotels and casinos, were among the private
sector industries hardest hit by the effects of September 11, 2001 and these
two chapters appropriately conclude with a discussion of the implications for
industrial relations.
Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector concludes with two chapters that
are both titled ‘Practitioner Commentary’. After the rich descriptions of contemporary events in the eight industries, these last two chapters are disappointing. While certainly thought-provoking in isolation, neither of these two chapters
directly comments upon the eight industry case studies. The volume would
have been strengthened by concluding commentaries that integrated the previous
chapters, perhaps from public sector and international perspectives. The alphabetical order of the chapters further works against comparisons or integration.
Collective bargaining in airlines and trucking has responded to deregulation in
very different ways, and these contrasts would be more accessible if the chapters
followed each other rather than being chapters one and eight, respectively.
Similarly, industrial relations in both newspapers and telecommunications is
being critically shaped by technological changes and industry consolidation,
but these two chapters are interrupted by the professional sports chapter in
which very different issues are central. Lastly, inter-industry comparisons would
have been facilitated if the profiles of the eight industries contained a common
statistical portrait of the current state of collective bargaining. For example, some
of the chapters use Current Population Survey data to report union density rates,
but the entire volume would benefit from using this data source to consistently
report the same information for the same time periods for each industry.
The strength of this volume, therefore, lies in the individual descriptions of
each of the industries, not in their integration. Each chapter clearly reveals that
labour is a derived demand and consequently, understanding industrial relations
is incomplete without understanding the competitive nature and structure of
individual industries. At the same time, the chapters also demonstrate the
importance of other institutional features such as labour laws, public policies
ranging from estate taxes to Medicare reimbursements, and the strategic choices
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of unions. Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector is consequently a valuable
resource for scholars, students, practitioners and policy-makers wanting to learn
about the contemporary state of US private sector industrial relations in the eight
industries described. This volume will also have enduring value for scholars
and practitioners in future years who can use it to look back and see what US
industrial relations was like at the start of the new millennium.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
JOHN BUDD
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: TRANSSUPRANATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS AND PROSPECTS
AND
Edited by Berndt Keller and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003, x + 182
pp., £45 (hardback)
The 1990s was the decade of the European Union (EU); a time when the
Community came of age, not just economically, but in terms of developing
the previously-neglected ‘social dimension’. The single European Market was
created, and ultimately gave birth to the common currency. The Maastricht and
Amsterdam Treaties strengthened competencies over the social and employment
field and provided for the involvement of trade unions and employer representatives in policy making. A number of important directives appeared regulating
employment and providing for the creation of European Works Councils
(EWCs). And the declaration at the Lisbon European Council of March 2000
of ‘a new strategic goal’ to ‘strengthen employment, economic reform and social
cohesion’ showed that the long-awaited European Employment Strategy
(EES) had finally arrived. It therefore comes as no surprise that there has been
an explosion of interest within both academic and practitioner circles concerning
the ‘Europeanisation’ of industrial relations. One consequence, not without irony,
has been the splintering of scholarship in the field, as research has proceeded in
increasingly specialised directions. This book brings together leading authorities
on cross-border and European-level industrial relations to review and assess the
major developments.
Each chapter of the book stands alone, but it is perhaps best read as a whole
to understand the unfolding and sometimes contradictory nature of the
Europeanisation phenomenon. Following a brief introduction, three chapters
follow on institutional developments. Chapters two and three examine the
international ‘social dialogue’; first at multisector level then at each sector level.
Chapter four focuses on developments at (multinational) company level in
the form of EWCs. The next three chapters look at major policy initiatives—
implications of the Euro, trade union co-ordination efforts and the arrival of
the EES—followed by a summary and conclusion by the editors. Each chapter
merits some comment, however briefly, in turn.
The path to progress or lack of progress, within the inter-sectoral social
dialogue is traced by Gerda Falkner. The involved and often tortured politics
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of arriving at some form of consensus between not just management and labour
but also within the respective international constituencies of the two sides is clearly
shown, as is the important role of the Commission (and lurking behind it, national
governments). Difficulties reflect fundamental disagreements over ‘deregulation
versus worker security’, and the ‘fading shadow of the law’, together with the
effects of EU enlargement, makes the future rather bleak. Falkner concludes
that institutional self-interest will perpetuate a ‘corporatist policy community’ at
this level, facilitating consultation of the social partners rather than co-decision
making. If this is saddening to some, Berndt Keller shows why prospects for the
social dialogue at sector level are even dimmer. Employers are not interested in
breathing life into international systems of regulation and, even if they were,
the practicalities of inadequate resources and securing mandates would
handicap the process. The Commission remains reluctant to intervene at
sectoral level, not least because of problems reconciling different interests
across its Directorate Generals. The result is little to show for the transfer of
power to the social partners and ‘regulatory minimalism’ by default. A more
likely conduit for the Europeanisation of industrial relations is the establishment
of EWCs. Torsten Müller and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer guide us through the
most relevant contributions of the burgeoning literature on the subject. As
well as setting out the historical development of the directive, they develop a
typology of EWCs based on their ‘capacity to act’. They argue that the way
the legislation was framed allowed it to successfully account for diversity
and thereby to promote a form of Europeanisation ‘from below’, an iterative
process with ‘horizontal’ (procedural) and ‘vertical’ (substantive) dynamics. The
EWC story is, therefore, not one of ‘neo-voluntarism’, as some commentators
have maintained, but should be regarded more accurately as ‘regulated selfregulation’.
The next chapter, by Franz Traxler, examines the impact of economic
and monetary union (EMU) on collective bargaining. Arguably, EMU is a
fundamentally neo-liberal project. Not only is monetarism institutionalised
by design, but also the very removal of the option of competitive currency
devaluations, with international labour mobility very weak, shifts the focus of
economic corrections onto labour markets and employment. The risk of
‘social dumping’ through national deregulation and defensive collective
bargaining is therefore high. Traxler analyses the institutional development
and performance outcomes of national collective bargaining systems under
EMU. He shows that the interaction between wage and monetary policy,
and its outcomes, depends on the governance of industrial relations systems,
or whether bargaining is coordinated or not. The overall picture has been
institutional continuity (and therefore diversity) as well as the common
adoption of a more competitive wage policy. The result is a convergence of
the rate of pay growth to decreasing levels, far behind the rate of growth of
productivity.
One response by trade unions to this threat has been the coordination of
collective bargaining between different countries and, in the following chapter,
Torsten Schulten details various initiatives to this end. These are beset by
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practical problems, not least of which is their voluntary nature. This means
there is no compliance mechanism in the face of the very real and subversive
pressures of competitive corporatism at a national level and the decentralisation
of collective bargaining within firms and sectors. Schulten suggests that one
way to rectify lack of progress is to adopt the approach of the EU’s so-called
‘open method of co-ordination’ (OMC), involving a virtuous circle of guidelines,
action plans, benchmarking, monitoring and evaluation. The OMC originated
with the EES in the 1990s, and the tensions, potential and limits of both
are analysed by Janine Goetschy in the penultimate chapter of the book.
Seen by many as coming a poor second to the traditional community
method, Goetschy emphasises the iterative and inclusive nature of the process,
which means it can avoid the logjam that has so often beset the road to ‘hard’
regulation. With the prospect of further EU expansion eastwards, this is no
mean selling point.
In their concluding chapter the editors discuss the main dimensions and trends
in the Europeanisation of industrial relations, summarising the key contributions
of the preceding chapters. Europeanisation is defined as ‘the development
of a coherent, horizontally and vertically connected—and to certain degrees
integrated—‘European’ system of industrial relations’ (page 172). Some may
take issue with this, seeing the process of Europeanisation more in terms of
the impact of European integration on industrial relations within particular
countries. However, in this case, the subtitle of the book is an essential guide
to its content, and the editors acknowledge that it should be read alongside
other texts. With that in mind, this book consistently provides valuable
empirical and analytical insights into the debate, as each chapter summarises
the key developments, engages the literature and draws out the theoretical
implications.
The book is a timely review of some of the major challenges facing industrial
relations in the EU as it enters a new epoch defined by enlargement and a
new constitution—if ‘too timely’ in the sense that for many aspects it is still
‘too early to say’. Nevertheless, the book’s constituency should extend beyond
the ‘Europhiles’ of industrial relations. For a discipline often rebuked for its
aridity of theory, the Europeanisation of industrial relations has invoked fruitful
theoretical debates over the nature of multilevel governance, interest representation and integration, notably by engaging political science scholarship. This is
made clear by this book. Drawing on theory as well as empirical evidence,
the chapters show both individually and collectively that the Europeanisation of
industrial relations does not necessarily involve harmonisation or convergence,
but takes different forms and may be based on different modes of regulation. It
is essentially a multilevel, multispeed process which, as the editors point out, is
less ambitious than some would like, but a lot more realistic. There are wider
lessons here for anyone interested in how industrial relations ‘systems’ are
constituted and evolve.
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
JIM ARROWSMITH
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INDUSTRIAL REDUNDANCIES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE
CHEMICAL AND CLOTHING INDUSTRIES IN THE UK AND ITALY
By Lidia Greco. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002, xii + 215 pp., £39.95 (hardback)
This dense and thoughtful book offers both more and less than its title suggests.
Less, because its focus is at regional scale, not national, as it examines Teesside
in England’s north-east and Brindisi in Italy’s heel; more, because it offers a
thorough critique of neo-liberal orthodoxies about restructuring while melding
economics, industrial relations and human geography. The book sets out to
examine particular industries and spaces against the backdrop of generalised
restructuring, relocation and reorganisation of work. That is, it is concerned
with the changes that have been central concerns for many communities and have
been central issues for policy-makers and academic researchers for a generation
or so in Europe and, of course, Australia.
The book opens with a succinct statement of purpose: the book is ‘about
industrial and employment change over space’ (page ix). It aims to adopt an
institutionalist perspective that challenges the orthodoxies of labour market
analysis while situating its argument geographically and moving beyond the all
too familiar terrain of debates about labour market rigidities and flexibility. It is
the dominance of the ‘wage rigidity’ argument with which Greco is particularly
concerned, arguing, as many Australian critics would feel, that a straight line can
be plotted from neo-classical economists to the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) and then to policy-making at the
national scale. Thereafter, the book has a detailed exposition of ways of
theorising restructuring and unemployment, from the neo-classicists, through
Keynes, Hobson, Marx, and the ‘insitutionalists’, with a nod to the diverse insights
of some sociology. Much of this will be familiar enough to readers of this
journal. Indeed they will find, as did this reviewer, that the conceptualisation
of labour markets through the lens of the institutionalists (notably Commons)
might have led into a fuller discussion of the key texts of industrial relations
themselves.
What will be—or in my view should be—of interest to such readers, however,
is the insistence, following writers like Doreen Massey, Jamie Peck and others
in human geography, is that ‘geography matters’ in the making and remaking
of regions, industries and employment relations. As Greco puts it, a shift from
market centred analysis points us away from accepting claims to ‘convergence’
within or between these spaces and to the complexity of process and outcome—
and to ‘geographical specificity’ (page 6). This is not to privilege the local. As
others have previously said, so here: that institutional forms are both locally
specific and embedded into wider (national and international) institutional
contexts.
In its empirical core, the book takes us through the specific forms of restructuring in each case, and the ‘management of redundancies’ and changes in employment relations in each industry in each region. The importance of traditional
and local social relations in modifying the path of change is instructive. For
example, on Teesside the story of the chemical industry is largely the story
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of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and of weak union structures, but it is also
the story of how paternalism, embedded at least as much in the community
as in the workplace, shaped management strategy. In this case, the company
eschewed compulsory redundancies and offered some more or less imaginative
business deals on Teesside. In Brindisi, the chemical industry’s restructuring has
been interconstitutive of new class relations in part tied to the remaking of Europe
through the European Union. Here union presence has been important—not as
defender of jobs but as a facilitator of change in a localised neo-corporatist
arrangement.
That restructuring is not economic alone but social and geographic as well is
fully argued here. Perhaps my chief concern is that more might have been made
of this argument and that still more might have been done to synthesise the
argument. Fully to point to the complexity of change, I would have liked more
on space—to speak to the unconverted admittedly—and more on the internal
dynamics of labour organisations, precisely the kind of work that industrial relations scholars and labour historians have done. As the author does say, making
the employment relationship central to the analysis of change and understanding
institutions afresh might lead to ‘a more collective and, therefore, more democratic . . . way of solving labour problems’ (page 179). Finally, and in part to achieve
this, I would have liked more on the gendered construction of work and societies
in these industries and regions, something demonstrably important in the work
of some of the authors on whom Greco has drawn. Nonetheless, this complex
and forceful argument has much to offer us.
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
BRADON ELLEM
LAYING
THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE: THE PRESIDENTS
OF THE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS COMMISSION OF NSW 1902–1998
Edited by Greg Patmore. Federation Press, Sydney, 2003, x + 309 pp., $49.50
(paperback)
For more than a century, Australia has made use of state sponsored institutions,
generically known as industrial tribunals, to regulate relationships between
employers and workers/unions. On 30 April 1902, the Court of Arbitration of
NSW was created. In 1926 it became the Industrial Commission of NSW. Laying
the Foundations of Industrial Justice aims ‘to mark the centenary’ of this institution.
The book comprises a general historical chapter on industrial relations in NSW,
and nine case studies of each of the tribunal’s Presidents, beginning with the
appointment of Henry Emanuel Cohen in 1902, culminating with the retirement
of William Kenneth Fisher in 1998.
While state sponsored industrial tribunals have historically constituted the most
distinctive feature of Australia’s industrial relations landscape, limited research
has been conducted into the persons who have been their members and theoretical
investigation into their modus operandi. With respect to the former there have
been four studies of members of the federal tribunal (d’Alpuget B [1977] Mediator:
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A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press;
Dabscheck B [1983] Arbitrator at Work: Sir William Raymond Kelly and the
Regulation of Australian Industrial Relations. Sydney: Allen and Unwin; Larmour
C [1985] Labor Judge: The Life and Times of Judge Alfred William Foster. Sydney:
Hale and Iremonger; and Rickard J [1984] H.B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge.
Sydney: Allen and Unwin), and one of Albert Bathurst Piddington of the NSW
tribunal (Graham M [1995] A.B. Piddington: The Last Radical Liberal. Sydney:
UNSW Press).
In 1954, Mark Perlman, a young American, on the initial steps of an
illustrious career, published Judges in Industry: A Study of Labour Arbitration in
Australia (1954, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). For what it is
worth, the reviewer regards it as the most insightful work into the operation
of Australian industrial relations. Perlman, in essence, was concerned with a
single question: ‘Why is it that the parties accept the intervention of “outsiders”,
state sponsored third parties in the conduct of their affairs?’ In tackling this
question he developed different analytical terms and categories, to capture
different types of tribunal behaviour, and provided various case studies in
testing/illustrating these theoretical insights. While his research wandered
over the broad range of Australian industrial relations experience, it was clearly
focused on deriving an understanding of the workings and operation of
industrial tribunals.
In 1980 the reviewer and Jane Romeyn, in separate contributions, extended
and elaborated upon Perlman’s analytical categories (Dabscheck B [1980] The
Australian System of Industrial Relations: An Analytical Model. Journal of
Industrial Relations June; and Romeyn J [1980] Towards a Motivational Theory
of Arbitration in Australia. Journal of Industrial Relations June). Romeyn’s work
has been ignored by the editor and contributors to this volume. In 1983 the
reviewer applied theories of regulation, a literature primarily developed in
North America, to the operation of the federal tribunal. Various theories,
ranging from regulators being subservient to, or ‘captured’ by special interest
groups, to tribunals being ‘independent’ and ‘activist’ were tested against
Australian experience. An activist model of tribunal regulation was developed:
‘Regulators are activist when they seek to impose their own solutions to regulation onto . . . special interest groups . . . . They will attempt to convince the
parties of the wisdom and necessity of following their solutions in responding
to the many and varied problems associated with regulation . . . industrial
tribunals . . . balance the expectations of the parties with their interpretation
of what the problems of the moment require’ (Dabscheck, Arbitrator at Work,
pp. 14–15).
In the introduction Patmore dismisses Perlman’s Judges in Industry because it
‘was a general study of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court [sic] rather than a
biographical study of the members of the court’ (page 2). In doing so this enables
him (and his collaborators) to ignore the method Perlman employed in seeking
to understand how various members of the federal tribunal approached their work
as judges in industry. Moreover, to the extent that Laying the Foundations of
Industrial Justice is a celebration of the NSW tribunals centenary, should not the
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case studies of the respective Presidents, focus on their work and approach as
industrial relations regulators?
Patmore also misquotes or misrepresents the notion of ‘activist regulation’
developed by the reviewer. He claims I said activist regulation is where ‘industrial
tribunals are involved in a “balancing act” where they have to balance the
competing claims and expectations of the parties’ (page 3). See above for how
the activist arbitration was actually defined. Patmore’s characterisation is in
fact the antithesis of activist regulation. It is a situation where regulators are
‘passive’, being unable to supplant the parties as the independent variable in
decision making processes.
The dismissal of Perlman’s pioneering scholarship, ignorance of the work of
Romeyn, and the misunderstanding of the notion of ‘activist regulation’ is symptomatic of an approach to scholarship that is simply not interested in theoretical
discourse and debate. The book, with its presentation of nine descriptive studies,
is concerned with biographical details of persons who were once Presidents
of the NSW tribunal, represents a regression, rather than a progression, into
scholarship concerning the operation of Australian industrial tribunals.
This only begins to scratch the surface of problems associated with this book.
It constitutes a general work on labour history rather than a history of the
operation and work of an industrial relations tribunal. Patmore has a lengthy
general chapter which provides an account of major industrial relations developments which have occurred since the latter part of the nineteenth century. The
material is descriptive, devoid of any theoretical or conceptual schema, often
falls—as do many of the case study chapters—between the stools of chronology
and theme, and makes for uninteresting reading. It is doubtful if anyone will feel
the need to read the opening chapter from go to whoa. The material presented
provides little more than a backdrop to the environment in which the NSW
tribunal has operated.
Patmore has provided little information on the operation of the tribunal as an
institution. Industrial tribunals, like all institutions, operate in a more or less
hostile environment. Perlman, in Judges in Industry, noted how the federal
tribunal had ‘been attacked on two flanks’ (page 33): the judicial and the
political. The NSW tribunal, and for that matter, those of other states experience
similar problems. However, the nature of the political constraint is different from
that of the federal body. State tribunals do not have the constitutional protection
afforded, or that was once afforded, to the federal tribunal by Section 51, placitum
xxxv. They are more susceptible and vulnerable to political interference by
governments than the federal tribunal. Moreover, state tribunals are always
subject to their jurisdiction being eaten away and subsumed by the federal
tribunal. Rather than provide a general background chapter, Patmore should
have provided an institutional history of the NSW tribunal, how it had changed
its structure and operation in responding to the different environmental
pressures which have constituted its milieu.
Patmore claims that the Industrial Arbitration (Amendment) Act 1918 (NSW)
‘was the first statutory recognition of a living or basic wage in Australia’ (page
17, also see page 270). It is difficult to believe that he can be in ignorance of the
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Excise Tariff Act 1906 (Cwlth) which enabled Henry Bournes Higgins to
determine the basic wage in the famous Harvester case of 1907 (2 CAR 1). In
addition, he is unaware of the Factories Act Amendment Act 1906 (SA), which
empowered the South Australian Court of Industrial Appeals ‘to secure a living
wage’ (section 51; see also the 1908 decision of Justice Gordon in the Brushmakers
case, 4 SAIR X1).
The bulk of this volume comprises nine cases studies of the Presidents of the
tribunal. They were presumably chosen because of the leadership functions they
performed responding to the external and internal problems associated with the
tribunal’s operation. With two major exceptions, the case studies are exercises
in, or excuses, for presenting material concerned with labour history, at these
respective times/periods rather than concerned with the operation of the tribunal.
Moreover, when information is provided concerning the tribunal, it is in the
nature of a quick summary of major cases and events which occurred, rather than
an examination of the general philosophical, jurisprudential approach, of the
respective Presidents. The chapters on George Stephenson Beeby and Albert
Bathurst Piddington provide barely more than a few pages on their respective
periods as President. We are told that Stanley Cassin Taylor was a most unpresidential President, in that for the last eight years of his stewardship [sic] he did
not attend weekly judges’ meetings (page 199). This begs the question of: ‘How
did the tribunal manage to function and who performed the functions of
leadership and co-ordination?’—information that is apparently of no interest.
The best chapters are on Charles Gilbert Heydon (by Andrew Frazer) and
William Kenneth Fisher (by John Shields). Both authors focus directly on the
careers of the two as industrial relations regulators and the respective approaches
they employed in discharging their functions and responding to the various
problems they encountered.
Patmore claims that the ‘advantage of a comparative bibliographical approach
[in examining nine Presidents] is that it overcomes the objection to individual
biographies that they deal with the exceptional and limit the possibilities for
generalisation’ (page 2). This may be correct. In the case of this volume,
however, this sentiment has a very hollow ring. The authors of the case study
chapters, with two possible exceptions, have not attempted to discuss the style
and jurisprudential approaches of the respective Presidents to industrial relations
regulation. All we know is that they all handed down ‘important’ decisions. Given
the lack of a theoretical orientation of the editor and his authors it is impossible
for comparisons to be conducted and/or generalisations to be made.
The volume lacks an institutional dynamic dimension. Presidents act, or
presumably should act, as the protectors or champions of the tribunal over
which they preside. It is their job to tend to the needs of the institution, to enable
it to perform its various and desired functions, to obtain resources and seek
to ‘manage’ the environment in which it operates. In a sense, each President
inherits and creates a form of capital—goodwill, status, autonomy and so
on—for the tribunal. Analyses, rather than accounts, of each Presidents’ reign
could have begun with an examination of the capital they inherited, the environmental pressures and internal problems they experienced, the strategies they
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developed in responding to such pressures, including an assessment of their
success or otherwise, and the capital they bequeathed to their successor. Such
an approach would have provided a richer, more insightful and interesting
understanding of the role of this industrial relations tribunal.
Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice is designed ‘to mark the centenary
of the Commission’. It mainly consists of cases studies of the first nine Presidents
of the NSW tribunal. The other men and women who have served on it should
have received recognition. Their names and brief biographical information, of
only a few lines, could have been included, if only in an appendix. They deserved
better.
Overall, this is a disappointing book. It constitutes a descriptive account
of persons from the upper end of town who have figured in the workings of
industrial relations in NSW. The editor and contributors (with two exceptions)
were uninterested or unprepared to squarely focus on problems confronting the
operation of an industrial tribunal. The book lacks a firm editorial hand and would
benefit from a heavy dose of copy editing. Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice
represents a lost opportunity.
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
BRAHAM DABSCHECK
CHILD LABOR: AN AMERICAN HISTORY
By Hugh D Hindman. M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York, 2002, xi + 431 pp., US$29.95
(paperback)
As this book reminds us, child labour is an enduring issue, not confined to the
past. The salience of child labour is one reason why Hindman’s book appeals.
The study offers, as sound history should, insights provided by analysis of the
past to improve understandings of the present.
However, it is more than just contemporary relevance that makes this study
so attractive. Child Labor offers many riches. Following a brief foreword, the book
divides into three parts. Part one addresses ‘The child labor problem’, setting
the scene for the next section. Part two forms the backbone of the book. It
captures and explains child labour in the US in the early decades of the 20th
century. This section of the book is properly the largest, drawing extensively
from original sources. Part three shifts consideration of child labour to the
present, considering the issue in contemporary US and succinctly relating
the book’s findings to what the author calls ‘global child labour’.
In the first part, ‘The child labor problem’, Hindman contextualises the scene
for the book. He argues that child labour was construed as a problem in several
ways as the US witnessed the post-civil war industrialisation boom. As industrialisation extended and intensified, child labour raised (for various groups) social,
economic and moral concerns. The chapter on ‘Child Labor Reform’ details many
attempts and setbacks around child labour and related limiting legislation. It concludes with the upholding of the first enduring child labour law in 1941 (the
Fair Labor Standards Act). This chapter outlines a sequence and causality not
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dissimilar to that of late colonial and early 20th century NSW. Both jurisdictions
accepted legislation circumscribing and preventing most child labour only
when the significant employment of children had well and truly waned. And both
jurisdictions allowed de facto and de jure exemptions, in keeping with common
practice and patterns.
The core of the book (Part two) presents child labour as the National Child
Labor Committee (NCLC) considered it, analysed through major industries and
occupational sectors. Hindman uses the NCLC’s vast material well, cognisant of
limitations and supplementing the research base wherever possible. His illuminative note on evidence, though perhaps better placed earlier in the book, enhances
this careful treatment by further informing the reader about use of the book’s
main sources. The NCLC’s investigation reports comprised over 400 documents.
A feature of the second part of this book is the extensive use of Lewis Hines’
photographs of child labour. Hines was an investigator with the NCLC, supplementing his written reports with photographs. For those unable to view the
collection housed in the Library of Congress, the selection of photographs reproduced in the book are of great interest. They are also extremely powerful. Several
decades later these images of young children (many of whom we would now view
as of ‘pre-school’ age) working are evocative, even wrenching. These photographs
illustrate child labour in the US in the first decades of the 20th century. Yet their
power is such that they also reinforce the need to reduce and circumscribe
contemporary child labour, giving greater affect to what could seem rather
dry statistics and tables.
In Part three, Hindman provides a view of contemporary patterns in the US
and notes dramatic changes since the early 20th century. He notes that most
‘employee style’ labour undertaken by children in the US today is in jobs,
such as babysitting and yardwork, that may well ‘have positive effects on future
endeavours whether at work or at school’. While corresponding material on
children’s work in Australia is not yet available, various reports utilising the
Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth suggest similar patterns with juvenile
labour. This labour is in most cases no longer a marker of poverty or other
discrimination. Rather, juvenile labour is mostly limited and serves to encourage further positive employment outcomes.
After surveying current US patterns, Hindman offers a vigorous discussion of
the most useful definitions of child labour. It is possible that this discussion may
have been better served (and better served the book) by earlier placement.
Nonetheless, it is still an interesting and thought provoking treatment. Hindman
rebuts the simple definition of child labour as ‘work performed by children’,
arguing ‘no one could seriously suggest that all work performed by children is a
problem’. Here we see the kernel of Hindman’s thesis, and that underlying his
complete text—child labour is to be considered as child labour only when it is a
problem. For Hindman, a satisfactory definition of child labour ‘must signal something in the nature of the work that is, at least presumptively, problematic’. In
this schema schoolwork, for example, carries, according to the author, ‘positive
connotations’. Despite noting the coercive and ‘hard’ nature of much schooling,
he does not view it as problematic. Hindman’s favoured definition, (which he
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leads the reader to, after testing and laying aside other definitions, including ‘work
detrimental to children’) is ‘industrial employment of children’.
However, preferring this definition and underpinning it with other considerations, including those noted above, precludes Hindman from analysing child
labour by use of a spectrum. Yet other studies of the ‘work’ aspect of child labour
reveal that very many children, including those who are not poor or otherwise
disadvantaged, do undertake labour, and much of it is not problematic.
Commonly it is the extent or degree of child labour that makes it problematic
rather than the very fact of performance by children. It is salutary to remember
that this is not so for all forms of child labour; any form of child sex work, for
example, should be seen as problematic and exploitative. Yet for more common
forms of children’s work, such as childminding or domestic chores, it is the extent,
rather than the nature of the work that problematises it. Hindman’s choice of
definition in effect precludes such analysis. This weakens and stymies his
overall argument.
Having dealt with definitions the author also considers the wider issue of global
child labour. This section of the book is perhaps the most compelling as, one by
one, the author works through and discounts various arguments that could be
interpreted as favouring child labour. While not all readers may agree with
Hindman’s perspectives, his thorough marshalling and discussion of the
arguments is impressive.
Despite Hindman’s attention to global child labour issues in the book’s third
section, some may feel that other parts are overly ‘North American-centric’. This
concern is most applicable to the introduction and early chapters. Some of these
could be enhanced by further reference to related history. While antipodean
historians are long accustomed to ignorance and neglect by northern hemisphere
counterparts, more exceptional is the author’s restraint with respect to recent
European studies. While it is not possible to address all histories, there are a
number of these widely regarded as seminal works and their omission is surprising
and disappointing. This is not just a question of professional courtesy or display.
The inclusion of the arguments of others may have finessed Hindman’s
analysis.
THE SMITH FAMILY
UNDERSTANDING WORK
IN TRANSITION
MAREE MURRAY
AND
EMPLOYMENT: INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
Edited by Peter Ackers and Adrian Wilkinson. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003,
xvi + 366 pp., $69.95 (paperback)
Industrial relations has long been dominated by empiricism and, correspondingly,
consideration of theoretical and epistemological underpinnings is overdue. The
admirable aim of this compendium of papers is to tackle the issue of theory and,
in doing so, it clearly demonstrates that industrial relations seeks ‘reality’. In
the foreword, Towers argues that the subject ‘is not afraid to predict—an
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increasingly important task in an uncertain world’. The book is divided into
three parts. The first section (the major part) deals with the disciplines
conventionally associated with industrial relations, in the form of sociology, economics, human resource management, history, psychology, labour law, politics
and geography. These chapters demonstrate that industrial relations is largely
positivist, concerned with identifying workplace issues and/or providing regulations or strategies to help the vulnerable in the labour market. The second
section deals with the influence of different disciplines in three geographical
areas (North America, Australia and continental Europe). In the final section,
the book makes a major effort to deal with ‘future issues and arguments’. These
include consumer capitalism, trade unions, women, Marxism, postmodernism,
and a discussion of future trends in employment systems. Among these issues,
the postmodern challenge to the fundamental epistemological basis of industrial
relations has important implications for the future of the subject as an academic
discipline. Consequently, John Eldridge’s critique of postmodernism titled
‘Post-Modernism and Industrial Relations’ is the primary focus of this review.
His chapter follows in the tradition of Kelly’s leftist analysis of postmodern
thinking (see Kelly J [1998] Rethinking Industrial Relations. London: Routledge).
Eldridge doesn’t just present the literature, he shapes it to propose a view of postmodernism and, in doing so, explains why it is fundamentally problematic for
industrial relations. It’s an intellectually exciting chapter, written with complete
mastery, clarity and some humour. On finishing it, I immediately re-read it. That
left me still wanting more.
For industrial relations, postmodernism is particularly difficult to comprehend
because its concern is for cultural forms with no reference to an underlying infrastructure. Jean-Francois Lyotard has previously argued that the influence of the
production process was superseded in the ‘post industrial age’ by the impact of
new technology (see The Postmodern Condition. Paris, 1979). Knowledge, in
the form of identities or meanings, is constructed from language material by
flexible networks of language games (ibid, p. 17) or their set of language rules.
These are always in constant flux. The games or narratives replace the broad units
of analysis so familiar in industrial relations, like class and skill, which are no
longer relevant in the ‘post-industrial’ age. Eldridge does an excellent job of
explaining Lyotard’s basic ideas about these language games. Lyotard rejected
(or became incredulous of) the liberal and Marxist games, which he termed
meta-narratives. He argued that, by the 1950s, a transformation had occurred
in science, literature, the arts, and so on, resulting in a splintering or ‘crisis of
narratives’. In each of the many discrete areas of social life there was an
associated language game in the form of a ‘mode of discourse, each with its
own generated rules that constitute learning’.
Thus, Lyotard was concerned with ‘atomisation of the social bond’, ‘fragmentation’ and ‘dis-connectedness’—all unrelated to the underlying modes of
production. The goal of the postmodernist is to create new social linkages, in an
on-going and ever-changing process. This is postmodern knowledge. The object
is tolerance, not consensus. Clearly (and there are shades of Foucault here) in a
computerised society, those in power might seek to easily prescribe and censor
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knowledge, so Lyotard’s solution was that the public be given free access to
memory and data banks. In this way, language games are non-zero-sum and
characterised by free information.
Having set out these themes, Eldridge briefly ponders on some fine points of
internal inconsistency in Lyotard’s arguments. But his main thrust is to produce
literature that critiques postmodernism from a leftist perspective, characterising
it as emerging from the forces of the right and unequivocally acting in their
interests. According to Eldridge, postmodernism has a clear relationship with
capital. It is not just located as the cultural form of what it describes as late
capitalism, ‘it accommodates all its tendencies’ while disparaging it. He presents
a range of arguments to support his proposition. For example, the postmodern
view of the fiction of all actions and the arbitrariness of language ‘means that
nothing can be done about anything’. In addition, ‘what occurs is that the
coercive and economic restraints in society are understated and the conceptual
ones overvalued’, while attempts to provide ‘documented and testable accounts
of anything’ are abandoned.
If Eldridge and those authors he draws on are correct in their allegations, then
postmodernism unequivocally functions in the interests of capital. From a leftist
perspective, postmodernism is a bourgeois ideology, a critique presented within
neo-liberalism for the purpose of preserving it, a new way of eliciting Gramsci’s
‘spontaneous consent’ in the hybrid of capitalist society that has emerged in the
last few decades. Correspondingly, however, Lyotard viewed the meta-narratives
that underpin industrial relations as being firmly ground in a previous age. His
language (post-industrial, late capitalism) firmly consigns the subject to the past,
along with its concerns and concepts. For postmodernists, industrial relations is
not part of the modern era. Even the subject’s inductive qualitative work involves
its same misguided search for reality.
However, the jury is still out regarding these competing claims, but in the
meantime, the danger is that postmodern management may be seen as a natural
descendant of industrial relations, associated with studies of subordinate discourse.
Nike, sweatshops, workplace sabotage, refugees, call centres—the ad hoc grist
of the postmodernists—are ‘hot topics’ that fuel the imagination far more than
collective bargaining issues and industrial tribunals. Moreover, postmodernism
consciously seeks to colonise. Lyotard viewed the players in the positivist game
as ‘terrorist’: ‘the dominant discourse that seeks to violently suppress . . . the
oppositional subordinate discourse’. He maintained that there must be a ‘no
holds barred attitude’ on the part of postmodernists. Industrial relations
scholars shift uneasily, derided as cloth cap intellectuals, with a subject matter
and epistemology ground in a lost age. Uncertain and confused, they conduct a
fumbling defence, grasping at half-understood terminology: boundaries and space,
local knowledge, indeterminacy.
This potential ousting
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
IN THE
PRIVATE SECTOR
Edited by Paul F. Clark, John T. Delaney and Ann C. Frost. Industrial Relations
Research Association, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, 2002, iv + 380 pp., US$29.95
(paperback)
One hallmark of industrial relations scholarship is grounding employment
research in the institutional reality of how labour markets and trade unions work
in practice. This edited volume, therefore, presents detailed descriptions of US
unionism and collective bargaining in eight industries—airlines, autos, health
care, hotels and casinos, newspapers, professional sports, telecommunications
and trucking—written by 13 academics who are specialists in each industry. It is
impossible for any single volume to cover all industries in detail and the editors
have done a nice job of collecting diverse industries that represent a variety of
private sector experiences. Most of these chapters focus on developments over
the past 20 years and this collection provides a high-quality snapshot of the
state of US industrial relations two decades after the start of the concession
bargaining era, and in the immediate shadow of the aftermath of the tragic
events of September 11, 2001, albeit limited to the private sector.
Nearly all of the chapters begin with a description of the particular industry—
its organisational structure, the nature of competition, major occupations, the
primary companies and unions and the significant environmental trends over the
last two decades or so. Unsurprisingly, a common theme is a significant increase
in the competitive environment in each of the eight industries. Another recurring
theme is de-unionisation, especially in trucking, newspapers and autos, though
this theme is not universal because unionisation rates in airlines and professional
sports are relatively stable. Many of the chapters also raise important issues about
the obsolescence of US labour law, such as the exclusion of nurses as supervisors
(chapter 3, by Paul F Clark) and of truck drivers as owner–operators (chapter 8,
by Michael Belzer) – and of the traditional election-based organising process.
Against this backdrop, the chapters review recent bargaining outcomes, changes
in bargaining structure, strikes and organising drives. Though uneven in places,
a strength of this volume is this common coverage across the eight chapters.
The volume effectively reveals the unique pressures, strategies, and outcomes
in each industry. In particular, the common theme of increased competitiveness
is frequently rooted in different reasons in different industries. These include
globalisation, technological change, deregulation, and other changes in public
policies. Harry Katz, John Paul MacDuffie, and Frits Pil effectively describe the
industrial relations ramifications of the expansion of competition in the auto
assembly industry as Japanese and European automakers continue to open
non-union plants in the US (chapter 2). Howard Stanger uniquely shows
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how collective bargaining in the newspaper industry has been dramatically affected
not only by technological developments, but also by changes in the ownership
structure of newspapers brought on by tax law changes (chapter 5). In contrast,
deregulation is a key theme in airlines (chapter 1, by Nancy Brown Johnson),
telecommunications (chapter 7, by Jeffrey Keefe and Rosemary Batt), and trucking
(chapter 8, by Michael Belzer).
The occupational contrasts within some industries are also very useful: nurses
compared to doctors in the health care industry (chapter 3), pilots, flight
attendants and mechanics in the airline industry (chapter 1), casino dealers
versus other hospitality workers in the chapter by C. Jeffrey Waddoups and
Vincent Eade (chapter 4), and athletes in baseball, football, basketball and
hockey in the professional sports chapter by James Dworkin and Richard
Posthuma (chapter 6). Johnson also provides a nice overview of the special issues
for collective bargaining under the Railway Labor Act (chapter 1) and Belzer
demonstrates the importance of internal union politics on industrial relations
outcomes (chapter 8). Airlines, and hotels and casinos, were among the private
sector industries hardest hit by the effects of September 11, 2001 and these
two chapters appropriately conclude with a discussion of the implications for
industrial relations.
Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector concludes with two chapters that
are both titled ‘Practitioner Commentary’. After the rich descriptions of contemporary events in the eight industries, these last two chapters are disappointing. While certainly thought-provoking in isolation, neither of these two chapters
directly comments upon the eight industry case studies. The volume would
have been strengthened by concluding commentaries that integrated the previous
chapters, perhaps from public sector and international perspectives. The alphabetical order of the chapters further works against comparisons or integration.
Collective bargaining in airlines and trucking has responded to deregulation in
very different ways, and these contrasts would be more accessible if the chapters
followed each other rather than being chapters one and eight, respectively.
Similarly, industrial relations in both newspapers and telecommunications is
being critically shaped by technological changes and industry consolidation,
but these two chapters are interrupted by the professional sports chapter in
which very different issues are central. Lastly, inter-industry comparisons would
have been facilitated if the profiles of the eight industries contained a common
statistical portrait of the current state of collective bargaining. For example, some
of the chapters use Current Population Survey data to report union density rates,
but the entire volume would benefit from using this data source to consistently
report the same information for the same time periods for each industry.
The strength of this volume, therefore, lies in the individual descriptions of
each of the industries, not in their integration. Each chapter clearly reveals that
labour is a derived demand and consequently, understanding industrial relations
is incomplete without understanding the competitive nature and structure of
individual industries. At the same time, the chapters also demonstrate the
importance of other institutional features such as labour laws, public policies
ranging from estate taxes to Medicare reimbursements, and the strategic choices
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of unions. Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector is consequently a valuable
resource for scholars, students, practitioners and policy-makers wanting to learn
about the contemporary state of US private sector industrial relations in the eight
industries described. This volume will also have enduring value for scholars
and practitioners in future years who can use it to look back and see what US
industrial relations was like at the start of the new millennium.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
JOHN BUDD
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: TRANSSUPRANATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS AND PROSPECTS
AND
Edited by Berndt Keller and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003, x + 182
pp., £45 (hardback)
The 1990s was the decade of the European Union (EU); a time when the
Community came of age, not just economically, but in terms of developing
the previously-neglected ‘social dimension’. The single European Market was
created, and ultimately gave birth to the common currency. The Maastricht and
Amsterdam Treaties strengthened competencies over the social and employment
field and provided for the involvement of trade unions and employer representatives in policy making. A number of important directives appeared regulating
employment and providing for the creation of European Works Councils
(EWCs). And the declaration at the Lisbon European Council of March 2000
of ‘a new strategic goal’ to ‘strengthen employment, economic reform and social
cohesion’ showed that the long-awaited European Employment Strategy
(EES) had finally arrived. It therefore comes as no surprise that there has been
an explosion of interest within both academic and practitioner circles concerning
the ‘Europeanisation’ of industrial relations. One consequence, not without irony,
has been the splintering of scholarship in the field, as research has proceeded in
increasingly specialised directions. This book brings together leading authorities
on cross-border and European-level industrial relations to review and assess the
major developments.
Each chapter of the book stands alone, but it is perhaps best read as a whole
to understand the unfolding and sometimes contradictory nature of the
Europeanisation phenomenon. Following a brief introduction, three chapters
follow on institutional developments. Chapters two and three examine the
international ‘social dialogue’; first at multisector level then at each sector level.
Chapter four focuses on developments at (multinational) company level in
the form of EWCs. The next three chapters look at major policy initiatives—
implications of the Euro, trade union co-ordination efforts and the arrival of
the EES—followed by a summary and conclusion by the editors. Each chapter
merits some comment, however briefly, in turn.
The path to progress or lack of progress, within the inter-sectoral social
dialogue is traced by Gerda Falkner. The involved and often tortured politics
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of arriving at some form of consensus between not just management and labour
but also within the respective international constituencies of the two sides is clearly
shown, as is the important role of the Commission (and lurking behind it, national
governments). Difficulties reflect fundamental disagreements over ‘deregulation
versus worker security’, and the ‘fading shadow of the law’, together with the
effects of EU enlargement, makes the future rather bleak. Falkner concludes
that institutional self-interest will perpetuate a ‘corporatist policy community’ at
this level, facilitating consultation of the social partners rather than co-decision
making. If this is saddening to some, Berndt Keller shows why prospects for the
social dialogue at sector level are even dimmer. Employers are not interested in
breathing life into international systems of regulation and, even if they were,
the practicalities of inadequate resources and securing mandates would
handicap the process. The Commission remains reluctant to intervene at
sectoral level, not least because of problems reconciling different interests
across its Directorate Generals. The result is little to show for the transfer of
power to the social partners and ‘regulatory minimalism’ by default. A more
likely conduit for the Europeanisation of industrial relations is the establishment
of EWCs. Torsten Müller and Hans-Wolfgang Platzer guide us through the
most relevant contributions of the burgeoning literature on the subject. As
well as setting out the historical development of the directive, they develop a
typology of EWCs based on their ‘capacity to act’. They argue that the way
the legislation was framed allowed it to successfully account for diversity
and thereby to promote a form of Europeanisation ‘from below’, an iterative
process with ‘horizontal’ (procedural) and ‘vertical’ (substantive) dynamics. The
EWC story is, therefore, not one of ‘neo-voluntarism’, as some commentators
have maintained, but should be regarded more accurately as ‘regulated selfregulation’.
The next chapter, by Franz Traxler, examines the impact of economic
and monetary union (EMU) on collective bargaining. Arguably, EMU is a
fundamentally neo-liberal project. Not only is monetarism institutionalised
by design, but also the very removal of the option of competitive currency
devaluations, with international labour mobility very weak, shifts the focus of
economic corrections onto labour markets and employment. The risk of
‘social dumping’ through national deregulation and defensive collective
bargaining is therefore high. Traxler analyses the institutional development
and performance outcomes of national collective bargaining systems under
EMU. He shows that the interaction between wage and monetary policy,
and its outcomes, depends on the governance of industrial relations systems,
or whether bargaining is coordinated or not. The overall picture has been
institutional continuity (and therefore diversity) as well as the common
adoption of a more competitive wage policy. The result is a convergence of
the rate of pay growth to decreasing levels, far behind the rate of growth of
productivity.
One response by trade unions to this threat has been the coordination of
collective bargaining between different countries and, in the following chapter,
Torsten Schulten details various initiatives to this end. These are beset by
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practical problems, not least of which is their voluntary nature. This means
there is no compliance mechanism in the face of the very real and subversive
pressures of competitive corporatism at a national level and the decentralisation
of collective bargaining within firms and sectors. Schulten suggests that one
way to rectify lack of progress is to adopt the approach of the EU’s so-called
‘open method of co-ordination’ (OMC), involving a virtuous circle of guidelines,
action plans, benchmarking, monitoring and evaluation. The OMC originated
with the EES in the 1990s, and the tensions, potential and limits of both
are analysed by Janine Goetschy in the penultimate chapter of the book.
Seen by many as coming a poor second to the traditional community
method, Goetschy emphasises the iterative and inclusive nature of the process,
which means it can avoid the logjam that has so often beset the road to ‘hard’
regulation. With the prospect of further EU expansion eastwards, this is no
mean selling point.
In their concluding chapter the editors discuss the main dimensions and trends
in the Europeanisation of industrial relations, summarising the key contributions
of the preceding chapters. Europeanisation is defined as ‘the development
of a coherent, horizontally and vertically connected—and to certain degrees
integrated—‘European’ system of industrial relations’ (page 172). Some may
take issue with this, seeing the process of Europeanisation more in terms of
the impact of European integration on industrial relations within particular
countries. However, in this case, the subtitle of the book is an essential guide
to its content, and the editors acknowledge that it should be read alongside
other texts. With that in mind, this book consistently provides valuable
empirical and analytical insights into the debate, as each chapter summarises
the key developments, engages the literature and draws out the theoretical
implications.
The book is a timely review of some of the major challenges facing industrial
relations in the EU as it enters a new epoch defined by enlargement and a
new constitution—if ‘too timely’ in the sense that for many aspects it is still
‘too early to say’. Nevertheless, the book’s constituency should extend beyond
the ‘Europhiles’ of industrial relations. For a discipline often rebuked for its
aridity of theory, the Europeanisation of industrial relations has invoked fruitful
theoretical debates over the nature of multilevel governance, interest representation and integration, notably by engaging political science scholarship. This is
made clear by this book. Drawing on theory as well as empirical evidence,
the chapters show both individually and collectively that the Europeanisation of
industrial relations does not necessarily involve harmonisation or convergence,
but takes different forms and may be based on different modes of regulation. It
is essentially a multilevel, multispeed process which, as the editors point out, is
less ambitious than some would like, but a lot more realistic. There are wider
lessons here for anyone interested in how industrial relations ‘systems’ are
constituted and evolve.
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
JIM ARROWSMITH
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INDUSTRIAL REDUNDANCIES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE
CHEMICAL AND CLOTHING INDUSTRIES IN THE UK AND ITALY
By Lidia Greco. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002, xii + 215 pp., £39.95 (hardback)
This dense and thoughtful book offers both more and less than its title suggests.
Less, because its focus is at regional scale, not national, as it examines Teesside
in England’s north-east and Brindisi in Italy’s heel; more, because it offers a
thorough critique of neo-liberal orthodoxies about restructuring while melding
economics, industrial relations and human geography. The book sets out to
examine particular industries and spaces against the backdrop of generalised
restructuring, relocation and reorganisation of work. That is, it is concerned
with the changes that have been central concerns for many communities and have
been central issues for policy-makers and academic researchers for a generation
or so in Europe and, of course, Australia.
The book opens with a succinct statement of purpose: the book is ‘about
industrial and employment change over space’ (page ix). It aims to adopt an
institutionalist perspective that challenges the orthodoxies of labour market
analysis while situating its argument geographically and moving beyond the all
too familiar terrain of debates about labour market rigidities and flexibility. It is
the dominance of the ‘wage rigidity’ argument with which Greco is particularly
concerned, arguing, as many Australian critics would feel, that a straight line can
be plotted from neo-classical economists to the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD) and then to policy-making at the
national scale. Thereafter, the book has a detailed exposition of ways of
theorising restructuring and unemployment, from the neo-classicists, through
Keynes, Hobson, Marx, and the ‘insitutionalists’, with a nod to the diverse insights
of some sociology. Much of this will be familiar enough to readers of this
journal. Indeed they will find, as did this reviewer, that the conceptualisation
of labour markets through the lens of the institutionalists (notably Commons)
might have led into a fuller discussion of the key texts of industrial relations
themselves.
What will be—or in my view should be—of interest to such readers, however,
is the insistence, following writers like Doreen Massey, Jamie Peck and others
in human geography, is that ‘geography matters’ in the making and remaking
of regions, industries and employment relations. As Greco puts it, a shift from
market centred analysis points us away from accepting claims to ‘convergence’
within or between these spaces and to the complexity of process and outcome—
and to ‘geographical specificity’ (page 6). This is not to privilege the local. As
others have previously said, so here: that institutional forms are both locally
specific and embedded into wider (national and international) institutional
contexts.
In its empirical core, the book takes us through the specific forms of restructuring in each case, and the ‘management of redundancies’ and changes in employment relations in each industry in each region. The importance of traditional
and local social relations in modifying the path of change is instructive. For
example, on Teesside the story of the chemical industry is largely the story
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of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and of weak union structures, but it is also
the story of how paternalism, embedded at least as much in the community
as in the workplace, shaped management strategy. In this case, the company
eschewed compulsory redundancies and offered some more or less imaginative
business deals on Teesside. In Brindisi, the chemical industry’s restructuring has
been interconstitutive of new class relations in part tied to the remaking of Europe
through the European Union. Here union presence has been important—not as
defender of jobs but as a facilitator of change in a localised neo-corporatist
arrangement.
That restructuring is not economic alone but social and geographic as well is
fully argued here. Perhaps my chief concern is that more might have been made
of this argument and that still more might have been done to synthesise the
argument. Fully to point to the complexity of change, I would have liked more
on space—to speak to the unconverted admittedly—and more on the internal
dynamics of labour organisations, precisely the kind of work that industrial relations scholars and labour historians have done. As the author does say, making
the employment relationship central to the analysis of change and understanding
institutions afresh might lead to ‘a more collective and, therefore, more democratic . . . way of solving labour problems’ (page 179). Finally, and in part to achieve
this, I would have liked more on the gendered construction of work and societies
in these industries and regions, something demonstrably important in the work
of some of the authors on whom Greco has drawn. Nonetheless, this complex
and forceful argument has much to offer us.
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
BRADON ELLEM
LAYING
THE FOUNDATIONS OF INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE: THE PRESIDENTS
OF THE INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS COMMISSION OF NSW 1902–1998
Edited by Greg Patmore. Federation Press, Sydney, 2003, x + 309 pp., $49.50
(paperback)
For more than a century, Australia has made use of state sponsored institutions,
generically known as industrial tribunals, to regulate relationships between
employers and workers/unions. On 30 April 1902, the Court of Arbitration of
NSW was created. In 1926 it became the Industrial Commission of NSW. Laying
the Foundations of Industrial Justice aims ‘to mark the centenary’ of this institution.
The book comprises a general historical chapter on industrial relations in NSW,
and nine case studies of each of the tribunal’s Presidents, beginning with the
appointment of Henry Emanuel Cohen in 1902, culminating with the retirement
of William Kenneth Fisher in 1998.
While state sponsored industrial tribunals have historically constituted the most
distinctive feature of Australia’s industrial relations landscape, limited research
has been conducted into the persons who have been their members and theoretical
investigation into their modus operandi. With respect to the former there have
been four studies of members of the federal tribunal (d’Alpuget B [1977] Mediator:
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A Biography of Sir Richard Kirby. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press;
Dabscheck B [1983] Arbitrator at Work: Sir William Raymond Kelly and the
Regulation of Australian Industrial Relations. Sydney: Allen and Unwin; Larmour
C [1985] Labor Judge: The Life and Times of Judge Alfred William Foster. Sydney:
Hale and Iremonger; and Rickard J [1984] H.B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge.
Sydney: Allen and Unwin), and one of Albert Bathurst Piddington of the NSW
tribunal (Graham M [1995] A.B. Piddington: The Last Radical Liberal. Sydney:
UNSW Press).
In 1954, Mark Perlman, a young American, on the initial steps of an
illustrious career, published Judges in Industry: A Study of Labour Arbitration in
Australia (1954, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press). For what it is
worth, the reviewer regards it as the most insightful work into the operation
of Australian industrial relations. Perlman, in essence, was concerned with a
single question: ‘Why is it that the parties accept the intervention of “outsiders”,
state sponsored third parties in the conduct of their affairs?’ In tackling this
question he developed different analytical terms and categories, to capture
different types of tribunal behaviour, and provided various case studies in
testing/illustrating these theoretical insights. While his research wandered
over the broad range of Australian industrial relations experience, it was clearly
focused on deriving an understanding of the workings and operation of
industrial tribunals.
In 1980 the reviewer and Jane Romeyn, in separate contributions, extended
and elaborated upon Perlman’s analytical categories (Dabscheck B [1980] The
Australian System of Industrial Relations: An Analytical Model. Journal of
Industrial Relations June; and Romeyn J [1980] Towards a Motivational Theory
of Arbitration in Australia. Journal of Industrial Relations June). Romeyn’s work
has been ignored by the editor and contributors to this volume. In 1983 the
reviewer applied theories of regulation, a literature primarily developed in
North America, to the operation of the federal tribunal. Various theories,
ranging from regulators being subservient to, or ‘captured’ by special interest
groups, to tribunals being ‘independent’ and ‘activist’ were tested against
Australian experience. An activist model of tribunal regulation was developed:
‘Regulators are activist when they seek to impose their own solutions to regulation onto . . . special interest groups . . . . They will attempt to convince the
parties of the wisdom and necessity of following their solutions in responding
to the many and varied problems associated with regulation . . . industrial
tribunals . . . balance the expectations of the parties with their interpretation
of what the problems of the moment require’ (Dabscheck, Arbitrator at Work,
pp. 14–15).
In the introduction Patmore dismisses Perlman’s Judges in Industry because it
‘was a general study of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court [sic] rather than a
biographical study of the members of the court’ (page 2). In doing so this enables
him (and his collaborators) to ignore the method Perlman employed in seeking
to understand how various members of the federal tribunal approached their work
as judges in industry. Moreover, to the extent that Laying the Foundations of
Industrial Justice is a celebration of the NSW tribunals centenary, should not the
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case studies of the respective Presidents, focus on their work and approach as
industrial relations regulators?
Patmore also misquotes or misrepresents the notion of ‘activist regulation’
developed by the reviewer. He claims I said activist regulation is where ‘industrial
tribunals are involved in a “balancing act” where they have to balance the
competing claims and expectations of the parties’ (page 3). See above for how
the activist arbitration was actually defined. Patmore’s characterisation is in
fact the antithesis of activist regulation. It is a situation where regulators are
‘passive’, being unable to supplant the parties as the independent variable in
decision making processes.
The dismissal of Perlman’s pioneering scholarship, ignorance of the work of
Romeyn, and the misunderstanding of the notion of ‘activist regulation’ is symptomatic of an approach to scholarship that is simply not interested in theoretical
discourse and debate. The book, with its presentation of nine descriptive studies,
is concerned with biographical details of persons who were once Presidents
of the NSW tribunal, represents a regression, rather than a progression, into
scholarship concerning the operation of Australian industrial tribunals.
This only begins to scratch the surface of problems associated with this book.
It constitutes a general work on labour history rather than a history of the
operation and work of an industrial relations tribunal. Patmore has a lengthy
general chapter which provides an account of major industrial relations developments which have occurred since the latter part of the nineteenth century. The
material is descriptive, devoid of any theoretical or conceptual schema, often
falls—as do many of the case study chapters—between the stools of chronology
and theme, and makes for uninteresting reading. It is doubtful if anyone will feel
the need to read the opening chapter from go to whoa. The material presented
provides little more than a backdrop to the environment in which the NSW
tribunal has operated.
Patmore has provided little information on the operation of the tribunal as an
institution. Industrial tribunals, like all institutions, operate in a more or less
hostile environment. Perlman, in Judges in Industry, noted how the federal
tribunal had ‘been attacked on two flanks’ (page 33): the judicial and the
political. The NSW tribunal, and for that matter, those of other states experience
similar problems. However, the nature of the political constraint is different from
that of the federal body. State tribunals do not have the constitutional protection
afforded, or that was once afforded, to the federal tribunal by Section 51, placitum
xxxv. They are more susceptible and vulnerable to political interference by
governments than the federal tribunal. Moreover, state tribunals are always
subject to their jurisdiction being eaten away and subsumed by the federal
tribunal. Rather than provide a general background chapter, Patmore should
have provided an institutional history of the NSW tribunal, how it had changed
its structure and operation in responding to the different environmental
pressures which have constituted its milieu.
Patmore claims that the Industrial Arbitration (Amendment) Act 1918 (NSW)
‘was the first statutory recognition of a living or basic wage in Australia’ (page
17, also see page 270). It is difficult to believe that he can be in ignorance of the
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Excise Tariff Act 1906 (Cwlth) which enabled Henry Bournes Higgins to
determine the basic wage in the famous Harvester case of 1907 (2 CAR 1). In
addition, he is unaware of the Factories Act Amendment Act 1906 (SA), which
empowered the South Australian Court of Industrial Appeals ‘to secure a living
wage’ (section 51; see also the 1908 decision of Justice Gordon in the Brushmakers
case, 4 SAIR X1).
The bulk of this volume comprises nine cases studies of the Presidents of the
tribunal. They were presumably chosen because of the leadership functions they
performed responding to the external and internal problems associated with the
tribunal’s operation. With two major exceptions, the case studies are exercises
in, or excuses, for presenting material concerned with labour history, at these
respective times/periods rather than concerned with the operation of the tribunal.
Moreover, when information is provided concerning the tribunal, it is in the
nature of a quick summary of major cases and events which occurred, rather than
an examination of the general philosophical, jurisprudential approach, of the
respective Presidents. The chapters on George Stephenson Beeby and Albert
Bathurst Piddington provide barely more than a few pages on their respective
periods as President. We are told that Stanley Cassin Taylor was a most unpresidential President, in that for the last eight years of his stewardship [sic] he did
not attend weekly judges’ meetings (page 199). This begs the question of: ‘How
did the tribunal manage to function and who performed the functions of
leadership and co-ordination?’—information that is apparently of no interest.
The best chapters are on Charles Gilbert Heydon (by Andrew Frazer) and
William Kenneth Fisher (by John Shields). Both authors focus directly on the
careers of the two as industrial relations regulators and the respective approaches
they employed in discharging their functions and responding to the various
problems they encountered.
Patmore claims that the ‘advantage of a comparative bibliographical approach
[in examining nine Presidents] is that it overcomes the objection to individual
biographies that they deal with the exceptional and limit the possibilities for
generalisation’ (page 2). This may be correct. In the case of this volume,
however, this sentiment has a very hollow ring. The authors of the case study
chapters, with two possible exceptions, have not attempted to discuss the style
and jurisprudential approaches of the respective Presidents to industrial relations
regulation. All we know is that they all handed down ‘important’ decisions. Given
the lack of a theoretical orientation of the editor and his authors it is impossible
for comparisons to be conducted and/or generalisations to be made.
The volume lacks an institutional dynamic dimension. Presidents act, or
presumably should act, as the protectors or champions of the tribunal over
which they preside. It is their job to tend to the needs of the institution, to enable
it to perform its various and desired functions, to obtain resources and seek
to ‘manage’ the environment in which it operates. In a sense, each President
inherits and creates a form of capital—goodwill, status, autonomy and so
on—for the tribunal. Analyses, rather than accounts, of each Presidents’ reign
could have begun with an examination of the capital they inherited, the environmental pressures and internal problems they experienced, the strategies they
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developed in responding to such pressures, including an assessment of their
success or otherwise, and the capital they bequeathed to their successor. Such
an approach would have provided a richer, more insightful and interesting
understanding of the role of this industrial relations tribunal.
Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice is designed ‘to mark the centenary
of the Commission’. It mainly consists of cases studies of the first nine Presidents
of the NSW tribunal. The other men and women who have served on it should
have received recognition. Their names and brief biographical information, of
only a few lines, could have been included, if only in an appendix. They deserved
better.
Overall, this is a disappointing book. It constitutes a descriptive account
of persons from the upper end of town who have figured in the workings of
industrial relations in NSW. The editor and contributors (with two exceptions)
were uninterested or unprepared to squarely focus on problems confronting the
operation of an industrial tribunal. The book lacks a firm editorial hand and would
benefit from a heavy dose of copy editing. Laying the Foundations of Industrial Justice
represents a lost opportunity.
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
BRAHAM DABSCHECK
CHILD LABOR: AN AMERICAN HISTORY
By Hugh D Hindman. M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, New York, 2002, xi + 431 pp., US$29.95
(paperback)
As this book reminds us, child labour is an enduring issue, not confined to the
past. The salience of child labour is one reason why Hindman’s book appeals.
The study offers, as sound history should, insights provided by analysis of the
past to improve understandings of the present.
However, it is more than just contemporary relevance that makes this study
so attractive. Child Labor offers many riches. Following a brief foreword, the book
divides into three parts. Part one addresses ‘The child labor problem’, setting
the scene for the next section. Part two forms the backbone of the book. It
captures and explains child labour in the US in the early decades of the 20th
century. This section of the book is properly the largest, drawing extensively
from original sources. Part three shifts consideration of child labour to the
present, considering the issue in contemporary US and succinctly relating
the book’s findings to what the author calls ‘global child labour’.
In the first part, ‘The child labor problem’, Hindman contextualises the scene
for the book. He argues that child labour was construed as a problem in several
ways as the US witnessed the post-civil war industrialisation boom. As industrialisation extended and intensified, child labour raised (for various groups) social,
economic and moral concerns. The chapter on ‘Child Labor Reform’ details many
attempts and setbacks around child labour and related limiting legislation. It concludes with the upholding of the first enduring child labour law in 1941 (the
Fair Labor Standards Act). This chapter outlines a sequence and causality not
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dissimilar to that of late colonial and early 20th century NSW. Both jurisdictions
accepted legislation circumscribing and preventing most child labour only
when the significant employment of children had well and truly waned. And both
jurisdictions allowed de facto and de jure exemptions, in keeping with common
practice and patterns.
The core of the book (Part two) presents child labour as the National Child
Labor Committee (NCLC) considered it, analysed through major industries and
occupational sectors. Hindman uses the NCLC’s vast material well, cognisant of
limitations and supplementing the research base wherever possible. His illuminative note on evidence, though perhaps better placed earlier in the book, enhances
this careful treatment by further informing the reader about use of the book’s
main sources. The NCLC’s investigation reports comprised over 400 documents.
A feature of the second part of this book is the extensive use of Lewis Hines’
photographs of child labour. Hines was an investigator with the NCLC, supplementing his written reports with photographs. For those unable to view the
collection housed in the Library of Congress, the selection of photographs reproduced in the book are of great interest. They are also extremely powerful. Several
decades later these images of young children (many of whom we would now view
as of ‘pre-school’ age) working are evocative, even wrenching. These photographs
illustrate child labour in the US in the first decades of the 20th century. Yet their
power is such that they also reinforce the need to reduce and circumscribe
contemporary child labour, giving greater affect to what could seem rather
dry statistics and tables.
In Part three, Hindman provides a view of contemporary patterns in the US
and notes dramatic changes since the early 20th century. He notes that most
‘employee style’ labour undertaken by children in the US today is in jobs,
such as babysitting and yardwork, that may well ‘have positive effects on future
endeavours whether at work or at school’. While corresponding material on
children’s work in Australia is not yet available, various reports utilising the
Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth suggest similar patterns with juvenile
labour. This labour is in most cases no longer a marker of poverty or other
discrimination. Rather, juvenile labour is mostly limited and serves to encourage further positive employment outcomes.
After surveying current US patterns, Hindman offers a vigorous discussion of
the most useful definitions of child labour. It is possible that this discussion may
have been better served (and better served the book) by earlier placement.
Nonetheless, it is still an interesting and thought provoking treatment. Hindman
rebuts the simple definition of child labour as ‘work performed by children’,
arguing ‘no one could seriously suggest that all work performed by children is a
problem’. Here we see the kernel of Hindman’s thesis, and that underlying his
complete text—child labour is to be considered as child labour only when it is a
problem. For Hindman, a satisfactory definition of child labour ‘must signal something in the nature of the work that is, at least presumptively, problematic’. In
this schema schoolwork, for example, carries, according to the author, ‘positive
connotations’. Despite noting the coercive and ‘hard’ nature of much schooling,
he does not view it as problematic. Hindman’s favoured definition, (which he
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leads the reader to, after testing and laying aside other definitions, including ‘work
detrimental to children’) is ‘industrial employment of children’.
However, preferring this definition and underpinning it with other considerations, including those noted above, precludes Hindman from analysing child
labour by use of a spectrum. Yet other studies of the ‘work’ aspect of child labour
reveal that very many children, including those who are not poor or otherwise
disadvantaged, do undertake labour, and much of it is not problematic.
Commonly it is the extent or degree of child labour that makes it problematic
rather than the very fact of performance by children. It is salutary to remember
that this is not so for all forms of child labour; any form of child sex work, for
example, should be seen as problematic and exploitative. Yet for more common
forms of children’s work, such as childminding or domestic chores, it is the extent,
rather than the nature of the work that problematises it. Hindman’s choice of
definition in effect precludes such analysis. This weakens and stymies his
overall argument.
Having dealt with definitions the author also considers the wider issue of global
child labour. This section of the book is perhaps the most compelling as, one by
one, the author works through and discounts various arguments that could be
interpreted as favouring child labour. While not all readers may agree with
Hindman’s perspectives, his thorough marshalling and discussion of the
arguments is impressive.
Despite Hindman’s attention to global child labour issues in the book’s third
section, some may feel that other parts are overly ‘North American-centric’. This
concern is most applicable to the introduction and early chapters. Some of these
could be enhanced by further reference to related history. While antipodean
historians are long accustomed to ignorance and neglect by northern hemisphere
counterparts, more exceptional is the author’s restraint with respect to recent
European studies. While it is not possible to address all histories, there are a
number of these widely regarded as seminal works and their omission is surprising
and disappointing. This is not just a question of professional courtesy or display.
The inclusion of the arguments of others may have finessed Hindman’s
analysis.
THE SMITH FAMILY
UNDERSTANDING WORK
IN TRANSITION
MAREE MURRAY
AND
EMPLOYMENT: INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
Edited by Peter Ackers and Adrian Wilkinson. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2003,
xvi + 366 pp., $69.95 (paperback)
Industrial relations has long been dominated by empiricism and, correspondingly,
consideration of theoretical and epistemological underpinnings is overdue. The
admirable aim of this compendium of papers is to tackle the issue of theory and,
in doing so, it clearly demonstrates that industrial relations seeks ‘reality’. In
the foreword, Towers argues that the subject ‘is not afraid to predict—an
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increasingly important task in an uncertain world’. The book is divided into
three parts. The first section (the major part) deals with the disciplines
conventionally associated with industrial relations, in the form of sociology, economics, human resource management, history, psychology, labour law, politics
and geography. These chapters demonstrate that industrial relations is largely
positivist, concerned with identifying workplace issues and/or providing regulations or strategies to help the vulnerable in the labour market. The second
section deals with the influence of different disciplines in three geographical
areas (North America, Australia and continental Europe). In the final section,
the book makes a major effort to deal with ‘future issues and arguments’. These
include consumer capitalism, trade unions, women, Marxism, postmodernism,
and a discussion of future trends in employment systems. Among these issues,
the postmodern challenge to the fundamental epistemological basis of industrial
relations has important implications for the future of the subject as an academic
discipline. Consequently, John Eldridge’s critique of postmodernism titled
‘Post-Modernism and Industrial Relations’ is the primary focus of this review.
His chapter follows in the tradition of Kelly’s leftist analysis of postmodern
thinking (see Kelly J [1998] Rethinking Industrial Relations. London: Routledge).
Eldridge doesn’t just present the literature, he shapes it to propose a view of postmodernism and, in doing so, explains why it is fundamentally problematic for
industrial relations. It’s an intellectually exciting chapter, written with complete
mastery, clarity and some humour. On finishing it, I immediately re-read it. That
left me still wanting more.
For industrial relations, postmodernism is particularly difficult to comprehend
because its concern is for cultural forms with no reference to an underlying infrastructure. Jean-Francois Lyotard has previously argued that the influence of the
production process was superseded in the ‘post industrial age’ by the impact of
new technology (see The Postmodern Condition. Paris, 1979). Knowledge, in
the form of identities or meanings, is constructed from language material by
flexible networks of language games (ibid, p. 17) or their set of language rules.
These are always in constant flux. The games or narratives replace the broad units
of analysis so familiar in industrial relations, like class and skill, which are no
longer relevant in the ‘post-industrial’ age. Eldridge does an excellent job of
explaining Lyotard’s basic ideas about these language games. Lyotard rejected
(or became incredulous of) the liberal and Marxist games, which he termed
meta-narratives. He argued that, by the 1950s, a transformation had occurred
in science, literature, the arts, and so on, resulting in a splintering or ‘crisis of
narratives’. In each of the many discrete areas of social life there was an
associated language game in the form of a ‘mode of discourse, each with its
own generated rules that constitute learning’.
Thus, Lyotard was concerned with ‘atomisation of the social bond’, ‘fragmentation’ and ‘dis-connectedness’—all unrelated to the underlying modes of
production. The goal of the postmodernist is to create new social linkages, in an
on-going and ever-changing process. This is postmodern knowledge. The object
is tolerance, not consensus. Clearly (and there are shades of Foucault here) in a
computerised society, those in power might seek to easily prescribe and censor
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knowledge, so Lyotard’s solution was that the public be given free access to
memory and data banks. In this way, language games are non-zero-sum and
characterised by free information.
Having set out these themes, Eldridge briefly ponders on some fine points of
internal inconsistency in Lyotard’s arguments. But his main thrust is to produce
literature that critiques postmodernism from a leftist perspective, characterising
it as emerging from the forces of the right and unequivocally acting in their
interests. According to Eldridge, postmodernism has a clear relationship with
capital. It is not just located as the cultural form of what it describes as late
capitalism, ‘it accommodates all its tendencies’ while disparaging it. He presents
a range of arguments to support his proposition. For example, the postmodern
view of the fiction of all actions and the arbitrariness of language ‘means that
nothing can be done about anything’. In addition, ‘what occurs is that the
coercive and economic restraints in society are understated and the conceptual
ones overvalued’, while attempts to provide ‘documented and testable accounts
of anything’ are abandoned.
If Eldridge and those authors he draws on are correct in their allegations, then
postmodernism unequivocally functions in the interests of capital. From a leftist
perspective, postmodernism is a bourgeois ideology, a critique presented within
neo-liberalism for the purpose of preserving it, a new way of eliciting Gramsci’s
‘spontaneous consent’ in the hybrid of capitalist society that has emerged in the
last few decades. Correspondingly, however, Lyotard viewed the meta-narratives
that underpin industrial relations as being firmly ground in a previous age. His
language (post-industrial, late capitalism) firmly consigns the subject to the past,
along with its concerns and concepts. For postmodernists, industrial relations is
not part of the modern era. Even the subject’s inductive qualitative work involves
its same misguided search for reality.
However, the jury is still out regarding these competing claims, but in the
meantime, the danger is that postmodern management may be seen as a natural
descendant of industrial relations, associated with studies of subordinate discourse.
Nike, sweatshops, workplace sabotage, refugees, call centres—the ad hoc grist
of the postmodernists—are ‘hot topics’ that fuel the imagination far more than
collective bargaining issues and industrial tribunals. Moreover, postmodernism
consciously seeks to colonise. Lyotard viewed the players in the positivist game
as ‘terrorist’: ‘the dominant discourse that seeks to violently suppress . . . the
oppositional subordinate discourse’. He maintained that there must be a ‘no
holds barred attitude’ on the part of postmodernists. Industrial relations
scholars shift uneasily, derided as cloth cap intellectuals, with a subject matter
and epistemology ground in a lost age. Uncertain and confused, they conduct a
fumbling defence, grasping at half-understood terminology: boundaries and space,
local knowledge, indeterminacy.
This potential ousting