The role of an Italian trade union in ‘organising disintermediation’
Ilaria Armaroli, University of Bergamo, ADAPT – Association for International and Comparative Studies in the Field of Labour Law and Industrial Relations
» Full paper: ilera-2019-paper-31-Armaroli.pdf
It has been argued that «worker voice used to mean trade unions» (Ackers 2015, 95) and that unions represented the almost universal public policy answer to the need of worker voice. Despite differences in trade union membership, power and role in the workplace and society, this condition did characterise the vast majority of European countries until the end of the Twentieth century.
However, with very few national exceptions, the reality today has changed on a global scale. Circumstances, such as the decline in trade union density and collective bargaining coverage, the reduced union political influence and the increasing marginality of union discourses in society are raised many times by literature (e.g. Addison et al. 2013; Carrieri, Feltrin 2016; Vanchon et al. 2016). The main reasons behind these developments are often ascribed to deindustrialisation, globalisation and international migration, government measures in response to economic crisis, technological and organisational developments, the shift in the forms of employment from full-time permanent to precarious and temporary status, the increasing diversification of the workforce and the apparently greater influence of individualism on society (e.g. Lee 2005; Blanchflower, Bryson 2009; Carrieri, Treu 2013; Murray et al. 2013; Marginson 2015; Rodrik 2015; Vanchon et al. 2016).
Interestingly though, while debating the presumed crisis of trade unionism, a new trend has simultaneously emerged and triggered the interest of researchers: the spread of new forms of employee voice. The reference is generally to teamwork, high commitment human resource management, high-performance work practices, etc., developed in traditional industries since the late 1970s. The rationale behind the adoption of these practices is usually linked to the business case argument (Johnstone, Ackers 2015, 8), deriving from the assumption that far from exclusively being the building block of industrial democracy (Webb, Webb 1897), employee voice is today an essential link in the quest for increased organisational performance.
As regards the relationship with unions, literature tends to consider these direct forms of employee voice as either a substitute for indirect employee voice, organised by trade unions (e.g. Leana et al. 1992; Reshef et al. 1999; Kaufman, Levine 2000), or a complementary agent of workers’ representatives in guaranteeing a balance between efficiency, equity and voice at workplaces (e.g. Gill 2009; Bryson et al. 2013; Pohler, Luchak 2014). Within the framework of this lively debate, however, no one seems to call into question the management-led nature of direct employee participation practices.
Against this background, this paper intends to investigate an almost neglected research topic: the role of trade unions as promoters, rather than victims or antagonists, of non-union and direct employee voice. This trade union behaviour is synthetised via the expression "organising disintermediation", whereby "disintermediation" hints at the more individualised (since not mediated by trade unions) labour-management relationships entailed by the direct forms of employee voice, and "organising" refers to the proactive role of unions in their promotion, regulation and implementation.
More specifically, by focusing on the experience of a local metalworkers’ organisation in Italy, namely FIM-CISL of Brescia, this paper wants to shed light on the reasons behind and the ways through which a local trade union in a mixed market economy (Molina, Rhodes 2006) comes to promote forms of work organisation that enhance direct employee participation in a traditional industry. To do so, it essentially relies on the method of participant observation developed from May 2016 to April 2018 and lying in the analysis of primary documents (e.g. company-level collective agreements, business and action plans, etc.), on-site visits, attendance at negotiation tables and union internal meetings, interviews with local union officials, union delegates in companies and an external expert involved in the experience.
Findings from the case study reveal the importance for trade unions, as characterised by a non-unitary and multi-dimensional nature (Hoxie 1914; Craft 1991; Frege, Kelly 2003; Drakopoulos, Katselidis 2014), to bridge between apparently opposite domains (i.e. environmental pressures and union specific identity) and logics (i.e. membership and influence (Schmitter, Streeck 1999)), in order to overcome their presumed “lagged behaviour” in response to external challenges (Craft 1991) and successfully take part in current organisational transformations without jeopardising their traditional functions. More precisely, it was only after interpreting the market-led trend towards direct employee participation not only as an enabler for greater firms’ competitiveness but also as a potential ally for the realisation of union subjective goals, that FIM-CISL of Brescia decided to embark on the road of "organised disintermediation". Secondly, the implementation of actions aimed at ensuring consensus and legitimacy from workers, along with actions intended to convince managers to cooperate, was necessary to allow the trade union to engage in a new path without contravening its traditional duties vis-à-vis the rank-and-file. With specific regard to the impact of this new path, the analysis shows that, by turning direct employee voice from a separate mechanism into an integrated part of worker representation, the approach of "organising disintermediation" invites to rethink the meaning of direct employee voice in unionised settings and the role it can play in triggering, rather than merely challenging, trade union action and renewal. Finally, far from exclusively inspiring reflections upon the interplay between direct and representative employee voice, the union’s commitment to "organise disintermediation" paves the way for the involvement of new players in the traditional action field (i.e. external consultants), the appearance of new instruments (i.e. joint action plans for organisational innovation processes) and the enlargement of the area of labour-management interactions beyond the collective bargaining domain; in so doing, it is likely to bring about change in industrial relations as a whole.