Acted upon and acted through : Unions,consent and contestation vis-a-vis High Performance Work Systems in the automobile industry

Abstract

Comparing Canadian, German and Swedish automotive unions, this article examines why since the 1990s unions have increasingly accepted High Performance Work Systems (HPWS). ‘External’ factors such as globalization, outsourcing and state neoliberal policies are important, but drawing upon Gramsci and Burawoy, the article adopts an ‘internal’ perspective emphasizing (a) how the mystification of the wage relation is a basis for capital’s workplace hegemony and (b) the role of union agency via ‘defend and restore’ and ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies. The article argues that by incorporating union resistance, HPWS has acted through unions as much as it has acted upon them.

Keywords

Automotive industry hegemony HPWS mystification unions

Over the last quarter century there has been a clear shift in trade union strategies across advanced capitalism towards High Performance Work Systems (HPWS).¹ In the early 1990s unions both resisted and posited alternatives to HPWS as part of a ‘battle of production paradigms’ (see Johansson and Abrahamsson, 2009; Turner and Auer, 1994). However, unions have since become more cooperative with HPWS (Johansson et al., 2013; Lippert et al., 2014). Globalization, outsourcing and state neoliberal policies have all been identified as factors shifting the balance of power in favour of capital and towards a workplace regime characterized by what Burawoy (1985) terms hegemonic despotism (see Huxley, 2015; Siemiatycki, 2012). However, explanations emphasizing ‘external’ forces are not sufficient and view unions as largely acted upon, rather than as critical agents in HPWS adoption. Even under hegemonic despotism capital still requires the consent of workers and unions (Burawoy, 1985). We thus focus our analysis on trade union actions to explain why they have become ‘agents of reorganization’ in HPWS (Bergene and Hansen, 2016: 15).

In this article, we argue that while embedded in a wider institutional and global economic environment, unions have the capacity – even if sometimes limited – to act upon such structures (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010; Wenten, 2017). In this, we engage with Burawoy’s (2012) argument concerning how the wage relation ‘mystifies’ surplus value extraction and facilitates capital’s workplace hegemony, via promoting a sense of common worker and firm interests. While persuasive, in our view Burawoy underplays Gramsci’s perspective that hegemony must be constantly re-won by capital (Williams, 1977). In so doing, capital incorporates worker and trade union agency to re-win consent to ‘managerial prerogative’ (Bergene, 2010; Storey, 1983).² We thus argue that in confronting HPWS, unions have adopted either ‘defend and restore’ or ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies (see Bieler and Lindberg, 2008), which have also informed how capital has won hegemony. Geographical scale is critical to our arguments, not only for understanding how labour’s struggles under the hegemonic regime helped shape national institutions, but also how capital’s increased spatial mobility under hegemonic despotism has allowed it remake such institutions to implement HPWS. Based on this we ask two questions: first, how and why has the winning of consent by capital impacted unions’ ability to posit alternatives to and negotiate HPWS in different countries? Second, how have union ‘defend and restore’ and/or ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies impacted capital’s winning of consent?

We explore these questions by examining the automobile industry, long a focal one for new forms of work organization in which unions have played a significant role (see Bergene, 2010; Lippert et al., 2014). More specifically, we examine union agency vis-a-vis HPWS in three national cases: Canada, Germany and Sweden, focusing especially on the post-1990 period. The automobile industry is a major sector for each national economy and, at the same time, these countries have differing institutional contexts, with the latter two generally considered Coordinated Market Economies (CME), while the former is a Liberal Market Economy (LME) (Thelen, 2009).

Based on this review we first argue that the roots of union acceptance of HPWS lie in the postwar hegemonic regime. While, unlike Canadian unions, Swedish and German workers won co-determination rights, in all three cases trade unions recognized management rights over work organization in ‘productivity coalitions’ with firms (Bergene, 2010; Burawoy, 1985). Second, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, capital’s hegemony was contested by rank-and-file workers who took advantage of capital’s relative spatial immobility to develop union ‘defend and restore’ and ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies towards HPWS. Third, in the post-1990 period of hegemonic despotism, by building on how mystification promotes common labour and capital interests, union–firm coalitions have allowed capital’s workplace hegemony to be ‘re-won’ and HPWS implemented. These coalitions have strong continuities with those under the hegemonic regime but are targeted on securing mobile capital and reflect how capital has used unions and works councils to reconstitute consent especially at the plant scale and ‘remake’ national institutions. We thus conclude that by incorporating worker and union resistance, HPWS has not just acted upon unions but also through them.

The rest of the article is structured as follows. In the next section we critically review how workplace hegemony is constructed especially by HPWS. We then analyse union agency vis-a-vis HPWS in the three countries, especially in the post-1990 period. Finally, we discuss the implications of our study for trade unions’ workplace agency.

Trade unions, consent and HPWS

For many scholars HPWS is the dominant form of production in the automobile industry (see Huxley, 2015; Lippert et al., 2014). Moreover, there is a consensus that unions have lost the early 1990s battle over production paradigms in which HPWS was pitted against union-influenced ‘human-centred’ production systems (Johansson et al., 2013; Lippert et al., 2014; Turner and Auer, 1994).

Why has there been a clear shift in trade union strategies towards HPWS? Scholars give a few different possible answers. They typically involve the conjuncture of three long-term trends: the first, a crisis of management thought and practice in manufacturing; the second, the increasing adoption of neoliberal policies by states rejecting Fordist forms of citizenship at work; and finally, the weakening of trade unions via a combination of increasing capital mobility and declining union density (Huxley, 2015; MacDonald, 2014).

These elements are critical factors why unions have increasingly accepted HPWS, but are often viewed as largely impinging on unions from the ‘outside’ (see Danford et al., 2008). However, accommodationist strategies by unions towards HPWS reflect a much deeper process than can be provided only by stressing ‘external factors’. Rather, trade union agency needs to be viewed as bound up in the capitalist wage-labour relationship and the securing of hegemony by capital (Burawoy, 1985, 2012). Drawing upon Gramsci’s maxim that ‘hegemony … is born in the factory’, Burawoy (2012: 192) argues that this is rooted in how the capital–labour relationship necessarily ‘mystifies’ (or ‘hides’) the appropriation of surplus value as a ‘necessary condition for a stable hegemony, that is, for the organization of consent to domination’ (Burawoy, 2012: 199).

We concur with Burawoy, but in our view he overstates his arguments regarding hegemony. Surplus value extraction may be obscured, but its effects are not. Restructuring, shifts in firms’ competitive positions and crises can disrupt workplace hegemony (Grimshaw and Rubery, 2005: 1030), and potentially ‘de-mystify’ surplus value production. As Gramsci (1971: 626) argued, workers can develop a ‘good sense’ to counter capital’s ‘common sense’ and thus engage in a ‘practical transformation of the real world’ (Denning, 2009: 78). Indeed, workers and trade unions have often been ambivalent towards and challenged workplace ‘managerial prerogative’ (Storey, 1983). Hegemony is thus never total but ‘is continually resisted, limited, altered, [and] challenged’ (Williams, 1977: 112). Management workplace hegemony, then, must be periodically re-won in ways that incorporate worker resistance.

Indeed, reflecting such incorporation, management’s workplace hegemony has changed in important ways. Thus what Burawoy (1985) terms a despotic regime at the beginning of industrialization, in which management relied on the ‘whip hand’ of the market to secure surplus value, shifted in the postwar period to a hegemonic regime, due to the rise of trade unions and the welfare state. In the latter, capital gained labour’s consent via incorporating union demands for collective bargaining, the creation of internal labour markets and the negotiated application of discipline. However, as globalization and neoliberalism developed after 1980, a new regime of hegemonic despotism developed. Like its predecessor, it is still based on the need for management to win worker and union consent, but given capital’s enhanced geographic mobility, it is also based on workers’ and unions’ fears, not just of individual job loss, but of an entire factory (Burawoy, 1985: 150).

Hegemonic despotism thus draws on both ‘external’ conditions and how under the postwar hegemonic regime unions were drawn into workplace partnerships with management in the pursuit of productivity and profit in the ‘interests of all’ (Burawoy, 1985: 10; MacDonald, 2014: 742). However, the hegemonic regime’s national-centred scaling also reflected capital’s constrained mobility which won workers more favourable policies and laws (Bergene, 2010; Fulcher, 1991). Yet the hegemonic regime also suppressed worker challenges from below while facilitating union promotion of the ‘national’ interests of capital (Upchurch et al., 2009: 2–3). As Bergene and Hansen’s (2016) study of Norwegian trade unions shows, national tripartite co-determination systems drew workers and their unions on both macro-national and micro-workplace scales into negotiating productivity increases such that unions became effectively ‘agents of reorganization’ (Bergene and Hansen, 2016: 15).

The implications of union integration under the hegemonic regime are evident in the adoption of HPWS in the automotive industry. As Huxley (2015: 147–148) argues, independent unions have never been shown to be ‘incompatible’ with HPWS because workers and firms have mutual interests in promoting worker safety and managers want contracts that maximize flexibility, while workers want rights to grieve management actions. However, HPWS also emphasizes increasing productivity, in part by channelling worker knowledge via teams and fissuring the collective spaces created by unions under the hegemonic regime (Burawoy, 1985: 151). HPWS thus further promotes mystification and the perception of shared capital–worker interests, because workers perceive HPWS’s increased work intensity as ‘less relevant in determining their work outcomes when they are actively involved in continuous improvement’ (Neirotti, 2018: 22). Finally, HPWS is being adopted in a neoliberal context in which unions trade off workplace concessions in return for security via short-term firm competitiveness (MacDonald, 2014: 743). At the plant scale, unions may make job gains and grant consent, because they perceive that they have ‘interests integral to “their” local units of capital’ (Wells, 1997: 191; see also Bergene, 2010).

Burawoy (2012) argues that workers’ experience of mystification is largely universal within advanced capitalism, whilst other scholars view firm ‘permanent restructuring’ strategies as leading to an increased narrowing and particularism in trade union responses (Baccaro and Howell, 2011; MacDonald, 2014; Siemiatycki, 2012). Yet while critical of trade unions, Gramsci also thought that they could achieve progressive change (Bergene, 2010: 95). Unions thus remain ‘the genuine organizations representing the interests of workers’ which can adopt different strategies towards HPWS (Brinkmann and Nachtwey, 2013: 13; Wenten, 2017). Varieties of Capitalism (V of C) scholars suggest that union responses will be shaped by national institutions (see Thelen, 2009). However, as Bieler and Lindberg (2008: 204–205) argue, even within nations like Sweden, unions can adopt ‘defend and restore’ or ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies, which can either reinforce or challenge firm hegemonic strategies. ‘Defend and restore’ is a strategy which in the face of neoliberal globalization attempts to preserve previous union gains, while ‘modernize and adapt’ largely accepts this context and seeks to maintain union influence by increasing workplace flexibility.

Yet this distinction also begs the question of ‘defend and restore’ and ‘modernize and adapt’ for whom and for what? Thus unions may use such strategies to secure their own members’ consent while sustaining coalitions with capital over HPWS. This can lead to scalar tensions both between union leaders and membership but also within unions at plant scale as some workers gain at the expense of others (Bergene, 2010; Gold, 2011). Capital’s increasing mobility can also lead to conflicts between workers in one nation and location against another (Bergene, 2010: 170–175). Thus different union strategies must be viewed as subject to both internal struggles, on the one hand, and between unions and capital, on the other. The remainder of this article will examine the case of Canadian, German and Swedish automobile unions and explores the following questions: First, how and why, over the last 30 years has winning consent by capital impacted the ability of unions to posit alternatives to and negotiate HPWS? Second, how have union ‘defend and restore’ and ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies impacted capital’s winning of consent? While partly for language issues we do not review all the available literature, this critical review is representative of existing research on this topic, thus allowing us to make an analytical contribution to the debate concerning unions, workplace hegemony and HPWS.

Union consent and contestation vis-a-vis HPWS in the Canadian, Swedish and German automobile industries

Canada

In the Canadian auto industry the main union representing auto workers is UNIFOR.³ In its initial organizing efforts before and during the Second World War UNIFOR had a highly decentralized structure in which shop floor struggles against managerial authority and production speed-up included walk outs and plant occupations (Gindin, 1995; Wells, 1994; Yates, 1993). The union had a great depth of shop floor representation, especially shop-stewards (Wells, 1994). However, during the war, UNIFOR participated in employer and state coalitions to maximize production and began prioritizing winning union recognition from companies rather than conflict. In the postwar period unions won recognition but ceded control of workplace decisions to management and committed to discipline rank-and-file members during the length of a contract (Wells, 1994: 195). Both US and Canadian auto unions had an initial postwar vision of a co-managed auto industry, but they moved away from both this and plant-focused challenges to management rights, ‘which would mean an all-out battle with very uncertain chances of success’ (Gindin, 1995: 120), towards a more centralized strategy linking wages to productivity and winning benefits such as pensions. While UNIFOR remained more decentralized and democratic than the US UAW and won more concessions over workplace rules, these trends, and an increasing reliance on lobbying government, effectively conceded formal workplace control to firms (Yates, 1993: 235–239).

Thus UNIFOR has had no real institutional provision for direct involvement in corporate governance (Chaykowsky and Verma, 1992). Union membership grew however, especially after the 1965 Auto Pact between Canada and the United States, and led by US (and later Japanese) assemblers there was a significant increase in investment and employment levels (Anastakis, 2005). This investment, plus a lower Canadian dollar, led, by 1999, to Canada being the fifth largest auto producer in the world (Sweeney and Mordue, 2017).

By 1990 UNIFOR represented over 80% of employees in automotive assembly and 50% in the auto-parts sector (Wells, 1997). This allowed it to reject wage concessions and to retain the postwar practice of pattern bargaining which took wages out of competition (Holmes and Rusonick, 1991). Moreover, UNIFOR possessed strong local leaders and active left-wing rank-and-file caucuses which in part emerged due to shop floor restiveness over increasing work intensity in the 1960s and 1970s. As firms began to adopt HPWS, the national union initially adopted a ‘defend and restore’ strategy of protecting postwar workplace gains. UNIFOR established a Work Organization Department (the only North American union to have such a department), which helped the union formulate strategies against HPWS and developed ‘a cadre of rank-and-filers who could lead local discussions and educationals’ (Gindin, 1995: 258).

Yet UNIFOR’s response to HPWS in the 1990s continued its recognition of managerial prerogative and more consistent with a ‘modernize and adapt’ strategy, the union ‘willingly experimented with grafting certain flexible features of workplace arrangements into Fordist style wage and collective bargaining practices’ (Yates, 1993: 246). Thus, despite rank-and-file criticism, UNIFOR allowed a plant-by-plant response to HPWS based on their respective competitive positions. For example, at the greenfield GM-Suzuki’s CAMI plant, a 1992 strike led to considerable modifications of HPWS, including the election of team leaders and an increase in ‘relief’ workers and other measures to reduce work strain (Rinehart et al., 1997). In Windsor Chrysler plants, UNIFOR prevented work groups from taking on managerial responsibilities (for example, disciplining workers), but pragmatically increased flexibility, while maintaining union control of the internal labour market allowing workers to move from ‘bad’ jobs to ‘good’ jobs (Holmes and Kumar, 1998). However, in Ford’s Oakville plant, which was very vulnerable to closure, the local union, with national union support, adopted a more cooperative approach over the introduction of HPWS, including team work (Wells, 1997).

After 2000 UNIFOR’s strategy towards HPWS became increasingly a ‘modernize and adapt’ one (Fowler, 2012). NAFTA was signed in 1994, the Auto Pact was ended by the WTO in 1999 and by 2010 Mexico surpassed Canada in automotive production (Sweeney and Mordue, 2017). Furthermore, after 2000, Canada’s labour cost advantage eroded as the US UAW made significant wage and benefit concessions (Holmes, 2015). These shifts adversely impacted UNIFOR. Between 2005 and 2014 union density in the assembly sector fell from almost 80 to 58%, in auto-parts it fell from 30 to 20%, while in both sectors, wages stagnated (Sweeney and Mordue, 2017). Moreover, within the union there has been a significant decline in its activist base and a weakening of its workplace representation (Rosenfeld, 2009).

Confronted with plant closures, UNIFOR also formed investment and productivity coalitions with management, making the attraction or renewal of product mandates its top priority (Rosenfeld, 2016a). The union no longer opposes HPWS and has increasingly traded off wage increases, in return for concessions at the local level resulting in increased work intensity and reduced break times (Siemiatycki, 2012: 462). One indication of UNIFOR’s increasing acceptance of HPWS was in 2007, when it signed ‘The Framework of Fairness’ agreement with the non-union Canadian parts supplier Magna. The latter uses sophisticated methods to garner the ‘active consent’ of workers including a combination of direct communication, ‘egalitarian informality’ and team organization to enhance both problem-solving and worker discipline (Lewchuck and Wells, 2007: 114–115). Under the agreement, UNIFOR and Magna abdicated the possibility of strikes and lock-outs, replacing these with final-offer arbitration (CAW, 2007: 17). The agreement further weakened unions by giving up union-only elections of shop-stewards by secret ballot (Fowler, 2012).

Yet while UNIFOR’s ‘modernize and adapt’ strategy towards HPWS reflects increasingly adverse conditions, it is also linked to how auto assemblers have sought to win union and worker consent. Thus, unionized assemblers have preserved seniority and disciplinary regulations for core workers won by unions under the hegemonic regime, while also introducing two-tier employment systems and increasing the use of temporary workers (Rosenfeld, 2016a). While those hired at lesser wages and benefits will match regular employees within 10 years, it has divided workers (Fowler, 2012: 510; Murnighan, 2016). As at Magna, HPWS introduction at unionized assemblers such as Ford was linked to increased internal communications of firms’ market and competitive conditions, the union taking over non-disciplinary supervisory functions, and enhancing training to reduce conflict via ‘empowered partnerships’ (Wells, 1997: 184). Ford even allowed shop floor workers to design and develop production processes building prototype products. While firm engineers typically overrode worker designs, collaboration on production design deepened employees’ sense of ‘ownership’. Furthermore, union and worker acceptance of such initiatives reflected not just the threat of plant closure, but ‘a more enthusiastic dimension that suggests that the new relations were something more than merely pragmatic’ (Wells, 1997: 186).

UNIFOR’s ‘modernize and adapt’ strategy also reflects the active agency of the union. UNIFOR has ergonomic and production standards representatives negotiating HPWS (CAW, 2012), but these are aimed primarily at reducing worker repetitive strain injuries (RSIs), thus facilitating worker consent to HPWS without reducing overall work intensity. The union has also used a ‘lead plant’ strategy to secure the production of specific models at Canadian factories, but a strike at CAMI in Fall 2017 to win this commitment from GM was unsuccessful. Such a strategy could be viewed as a challenge to firm control over investment (see Rosenfeld and Gindin, 2016). However, it focuses narrowly upon sustaining individual plant competitiveness and union lobbying of government for subsidies for ‘their companies’. This strategy thus de-emphasizes workplace struggles and has increasingly informed rank-and-file attitudes that there is no viable alternative to HPWS (Rosenfeld, 2017).

Germany

The principal union representing German auto workers is IG Metall. After the Second World War, IG Metall quickly emerged as the most left-wing of German unions, advocating limited nationalization of industry with full co-determination rights in non-nationalized industries and shop-steward controlled works councils (Markovits, 1986). This also informed a broader grassroots union movement (see McGaughey, 2015: 34), which culminated in the 1949 Munich Programme advocating the socialization of industry and full co-determination. However, while full co-determination was won in the coal and steel industries, IG Metall and other German unions were not prepared to fully contest capital’s right to manage (Markovits, 1986; Müller-Jentsch, 1995). Furthermore, the impact of Cold War anti-communism and the revival of German capital meant that the 1952 Co-determination Act gave workers only one-third representation on supervisory boards, made works councils subordinate to firm goals and unions largely secondary to the works councils (McGaughey, 2015; Markovits, 1986).

After the 1952 Co-Determination Act, the relative weakness of IG Metall’s workplace power lead to a strategy of winning higher wages and benefits by entering into productivity coalitions with firms (Brinkman and Nachtwey, 2013: 8; Markovits, 1986). Nonetheless, IG Metall was able to ensure that the great majority of works councillors were union members (Markovits, 1986). Furthermore, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, work intensification led to increasing ‘rank-and-file demands, to bring aboard new shop-floor leaders and to push for stronger unions and works council rights in the workplace’ (Turner, 2009: 296), including an independent shop-stewards network (Upchurch et al., 2009: 64). In the wake of such agitation, IG Metall also developed a ‘humanizing work’ strategy, including greater worker participation in firm decision-making (Markovits, 1986; Turner and Auer, 1994). Worker actions also contributed to amendments of co-determination (1972, 1976) which gave workers the right to elect up to half of the members of the supervisory boards in firms with more than 2000 employees and one-third in firms with 500–2000 employees. In 1989, works councils won greater rights to consultation and input into work procedures (Müller-Jentsch, 1995). German workers thus won important rights over workplace personnel issues, but the dual system of co-determination secured managerial prerogatives over business and investment decisions (McGaughey, 2015; Müller-Jentsch, 2008).

When IG Metall first encountered HPWS in the late 1980s, it was amongst the strongest unions in the world, representing 75% of workers in auto assembly and parts (OECD, 1994). Furthermore, collective bargaining covered 90% of West German auto workers, effectively pushing wages out of competition (Müller-Jentsch, 1995; OECD, 1994). Partly driven by the ‘constraints’ of strong unionization and labour rights, the West German auto industry adopted a strategy of diversified quality production (DQP) (Sorge and Streeck, 2016). By 1990, it produced over 4.5 million vehicles, combining both mass assemblers, such as Volkswagen, with more high-end vehicle producers such as Daimler-Benz and BMW (Jurgens, 2003).

In response to pressures to adopt HPWS, works councils bargained pilot projects based on IG Metall’s principles of broad task assignments, long cycle times and team autonomy in job rotation, quality and training (Katz and Darbishire, 2000). However, despite IG Metall’s efforts, the production system remained largely dominated by more Taylorist assembly lines especially outside of firms like Audi and Opel (Jurgens, 2003). Thus even during a period of relative strength, IG Metall adopted principally a ‘modernize and adapt’ strategy towards HPWS (Turner and Auer, 1994: 47–51).

Moreover, after the early 1990s, with the reunification of Germany, and especially the opening of Central and Eastern Europe and increasingly China, German employers outsourced production to nations with significantly weaker labour standards (Jurgens, 2003). Higher German unemployment and the neoliberal Hartz labour market reforms, combined with increasing bargaining decentralization and suppressed wages, as via ‘opening clauses’ automotive firms increasingly opted out of sectorally-negotiated collective agreements (Haipeter et al., 2012). These changes meant that wages were no longer excluded from competition (Doellgast and Greer, 2007; Müller-Jentsch, 1995). In this context IG Metall’s membership fell from over 3.6 million in 1991 to 2.2 million by 2011 and a lessening of internal union activism has also shifted IG Metall’s priorities away from work organization towards both recruiting new members and employment security (Eurofound, 2012; Turner, 2009).

Such external conditions have been favourable to auto firms to push HPWS further (Jurgens, 2003), but also reflect how managerial hegemony is being reconstructed in the workplace. Thus, with the threat of outsourcing, firms are increasingly using temporary workers (up to 30% of employees in some auto assembly plants) leading to the emergence of a core and periphery workforce (Haipeter et al., 2012; Holst, 2013). Temporary workers can vote in works councils’ elections, but their numbers are not included when determining the number of council seats (Brinkmann and Nachtwey, 2013: 12–13). Furthermore, increasing employment insecurity has made unions less resistant to HPWS (Holst, 2013; Sorge and Streeck, 2016: 12). Core employees are more accommodating to the increasing presence of temporary workers, engendering a deeper attachment to firms by the former, who view employers as ‘the only place offering them a sense of security and identity’ (Brinkmann and Nachtwey, 2013: 13).

Firms have also sought HPWS consent by incorporating earlier union-initiated experiments, including self-organized work groups combining technical expertise and problem-solving. These remain as ‘Facharbeit’ or the focusing of production around highly skilled workers (Krzywdzinski, 2017; Turner, 2009). Some firms have reduced the Facharbeit role (Haipeter et al., 2012), but in others, they remain central in self-organized teams which include training and job rotation (Krzywdzinski, 2017: 332). German unions have also been able to ensure that team leaders are an elected non-managerial position (Gold and Artus, 2015; Haipeter et al., 2012). More recent initiatives by IG Metall, such as its besser statt billiger (better not cheaper) campaign, are designed to combat outsourcing by using co-determination to negotiate work reorganization and enrich workers’ skills while raising quality and productivity (Turner, 2009). Schilling and Vanselow (2012: 78) argue that this campaign could challenge managerial prerogatives not only on the shop floor, but also in innovation and overall firm strategy. Yet given that co-determination ensures that unions and work councils remain subordinate in decision-making, it is unclear how far unions and works councils can use this strategy.

Thus IG Metall’s besser statt billiger campaign depends heavily on the works councils which also figure strongly in firm consent strategies. Since the 1980s via opening clauses, work council and union roles have blurred and firms have incorporated the former to introduce HPWS (Becke, 2004; Müller-Jentsch, 2008). IG Metall continues to play an important role in works councils in large automotive assembly plants but union representation on works councils is declining (Kryzwdzinski, 2017; Waddington, 2015). Since work councils must legally promote interest integration between employees and employers, intensifying competitive pressures mean that ‘many works councilors have become professional crisis managers, agents of change and drivers of modernization’ (Müller-Jentsch, 2008: 270). In response, IG Metall was forced to develop coordinating guidelines to help the works councils deal with managerial pressure over wages and work conditions. Nonetheless, works councils still confront major challenges in sustaining an independent worker interest. Thus, team identities and workers’ beliefs that the ‘customer is king’ can undermine works councils’ representational efforts (Becke, 2004: 33; Gold and Artus, 2015: 204). Indeed, such factors have contributed to a ‘new culture of mutual independence’ in which works councils ‘enthusiastically participate in a culture of self-exploitation’ (Herrigel, 2008: 125). Such incorporation means that if works councils are not able to exert strong co-determination rights over personnel allocation, then IG Metall’s recent winning of a 28-hour workweek could, like the gaining of the 35-hour workweek in the 1980s, lead to increasing work intensification (Dӧrre, in Balhorn, 2018).

Sweden

The principal union representing Swedish auto workers is Metall (now IF Metall after its 2006 merger with the Swedish industrial union). By the interwar period, Swedish unions had largely abandoned outright challenges to managerial rights and supported production rationalization in the export-dependent engineering and automotive industries (Fulcher, 1991). After the 1938 Basic Agreement with employers and under the postwar aegis of the Social Democratic Party, trade unions supported solidarity wage bargaining which put pressure on firms to increase productivity, while Swedish labour law ‘gave local union organization little chance to resist rationalization, technical and organizational change or redundancy’ (Fulcher, 1991: 203). Indeed, Swedish unions showed little interest in co-determination rights until after the late 1960s when increasing shop floor resistance to work intensification and Metall’s overly collaborative workplace stance led the Social Democrats to introduce such legislation in 1976 (Bruhn et al., 2013). Works councils are not present but union representatives have rights to both enterprise- and board-level co-determination in all firms with more than 25 employees (Lippert et al., 2014). Co-determination was initially viewed as a threat to managerial prerogative but, like the German system, unions were not given the final say over firm decisions. Indeed, Swedish co-determination has facilitated union and worker consent to workplace restructuring (Fulcher, 1991: 276–277).

Nonetheless, at the beginning of the 1990s, Swedish unions had a very high level of monopoly power, representing 83% of the workforce including nearly complete coverage in auto assembly and parts (OECD, 1994). Despite a non-adversarial industrial relations system, strikes were a very credible threat because unions had strong strike funds, extensive rights to take industrial action and could display impressive mobilization and solidarity (Bruhn et al., 2013). Moreover, Metall had a strong workplace presence via ‘union clubs’ (union locals) and from the late 1960s onwards there were significant bottom-up pressures by workers on central union organizations (Turner and Auer, 1994; Upchurch et al., 2009: 30).

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Swedish auto industry was dominated by two major domestic assemblers, Volvo and Saab, both of whom had significant export markets. Increasing labour costs, tight labour markets and high demand for autos contributed to the need to reorganize and ‘humanize’ automotive production (Johansson and Abrahamsson, 2009; Pontusson, 1990). In response to this, during the 1970s Volvo CEO Pehr Gyllenhammar took initiatives for adopting more Socio-Technical Systems (STS), emphasizing greater work group autonomy and skill development and included Metall in developing and managing these changes (Berggren, 1992; Boglind, 2013).

In this context, Metall developed policies for autonomous group work (Johansson and Abrahamsson, 2009). Metall endorsed the Swedish Trade Union Confederation’s (LO) ‘Good Work’ strategy proposed in 1985, which included developing a workplace based on co-determination, cooperative work, professional development, training and equality (Bruhn et al., 2013). Metall thus pushed firms like Volvo, such that ‘companies not only accepted [union] demands for group work, but also took up the initiative to develop them. Competence development was also introduced as a new element in discussions about a new work organization’ (Johansson and Abrahamsson, 2009: 776). Thus while representing a ‘modernize and adapt’ strategy, Metall’s ‘Good Work’ crafted an alternative vision that went beyond simply bargaining over details and involved a strong level of coordination between local union clubs and Metall (Huzzard, 2000). At the beginning of the 1990s the strongest application of these systems was in the Volvo Kalmar and Uddevalla automobile assembly plants (Berggren, 1992; Boglind, 2013). High skilled workers and autonomous group work, together with democratic participation in production planning, represented a radical break from assembly-line production (Movitz and Sandberg, 2013).

However, since the late 1990s Swedish union ability to bargain for alternatives to HPWS has declined (Bruhn et al., 2013; Johansson et al., 2013; Lippert et al., 2014). The economic crisis in the early 1990s and the need to meet stringent macro-conditions for the EU (Bruhn et al., 2013) resulted in higher unemployment and declining union membership. Sweden also became increasingly open to foreign capital in the auto industry (Lippert et al., 2014). Volvo closed the Kalmar and Uddevalla plants in the early 1990s, representing a critical turn away from the vision of STS work systems with high union involvement. Volvo was purchased by Ford in 1999 and later by the Chinese firm Gheely in 2010, both of which emphasized a more standardized and centralized form of HPWS (Boglind, 2013).

Nonetheless, Swedish auto firm consent strategies still reflect union influence. The use of fixed-term workers (about 10% of IF Metall members) is subject to union agreement, and two-tier workplaces are less possible than in Canada or Germany. Volvo’s workplace strategy is thus based more on engaging permanent employees, which includes longer cycle operations than firms like Toyota and putting more emphasis on ‘natural learning’ and the professionalization of the individual worker (Pil and Fuijimoto, 2006). Group work is still significant and by promoting participation and learning, it gives employees a sense of ‘empowerment’ (Brännmark and Holden, 2013). Yet while auto firms have incorporated union demands for group work with expanded tasks and broad skills, this has been accompanied by increased work intensity as firms raised production targets while lowering employment (see Bruhn et al., 2013). Swedish auto firms also adopted more HRM influenced direct voice, which has been increasingly prioritized over union voice (Johansson et al., 2013: 453; Lippert et al., 2014). As a result, unions have been treated less and less as stakeholders with their own legitimate goals (Movitz and Sandberg, 2013: 61). Through labour representation at the board-level, management is seeking more knowledge from workers, but they value union representatives mostly for conflict reduction and legitimation (Movitz and Levinson, 2013). Furthermore, union representatives are increasingly marginalized as firms increase their total board size to reduce the influence of the statutory two to three labour representatives (Thomsen et al., 2013). Labour members tend to focus narrowly on production organization issues; but as Movitz and Levison (2013: 482) warn, such a focus ‘might be a dangerous strategy … because the local organization of production is increasingly determined by market contacts between companies and investors [than] through employment contracts between employees and employers’.

In this context Metall’s ‘modernize and adapt’ strategy is increasingly deferential to managerial competitiveness prerogatives (Bieler and Lindberg, 2008; Upchurch et al., 2009: 49). Even during Metall’s early 1990s ‘Good Work’ strategy, it did not publicly support local union protests over the closure of the Kalmar and Uddevalla plants, and since then, it has become significantly less focused on work design (Bruhn et al., 2013). This is in part because Metall is having greater difficulty recruiting shop floor representatives (Howell and Kolins-Givan, 2011). Where ‘union clubs’ remain active they continue to exert a significant influence on work design, but as Bruhn et al. (2013: 146) argue, ‘they do so from a perspective in which improved competitiveness and increased efficiency are fundamental’. Moreover, while in domestically owned enterprises unions retain a strong voice, in those that are US multinationals and/or private equity firms, co-determination matters ‘only if employees are committed to supporting the investors’ goals. Therefore, they take place in very weak participation structures’ (Lippert et al., 2014: 225).

Given these trends, Swedish automotive workers are reporting increasing work intensity with some union locals refusing to cooperate with further HPWS adoption (Brännmark and Holden, 2013; Bruhn et al. 2013; Johansson et al., 2013). In response, in 2009 Metall launched the ‘Sustainable Work’ campaign to regain influence over work organization. Drawing upon earlier STS principles, ‘Sustainable Work’ aims to enhance job enlargement and rotation, combined with increased competencies and more risk analysis in new job design. However, as Johansson et al. (2013: 456) argue, ‘the concept of sustainable work is living in the shadow of lean production, whose main purpose is to reduce costs and where rational flows are an important concept’. Thus, a critical question is: will Sustainable Work simply reinscribe managerial hegemony, or will it regain union initiative towards HPWS?

Discussion

Our case studies of Canadian, German and Swedish trade unions in the automobile industry illustrate that shifts in union positions towards HPWS over the last 30 years reflect not only increasing capital mobility and neoliberal policies, but also on firms winning worker and union consent. Drawing upon Bieler and Lindberg’s distinction between union ‘defend and restore’ and ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies, we argue that HPWS has not just acted upon unions but often through them. Thus UNIFOR initially viewed HPWS as a threat to its workplace position and adopted the ‘defend and restore’ approach. In contrast, German and Swedish unions had formal co-determination rights and were thus more likely to adopt ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies. As V of C scholars might argue, these differences reflect national institutional factors (Thelen, 2009). Lacking co-determination rights, UNIFOR was largely excluded from formal input and could only exert its influence through contract and informal shop floor bargaining to resist HPWS.

Yet the role of formal institutions and the distinction between ‘defend and restore’ and ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies go only so far. Thus, German and Swedish co-determination and ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies did not eliminate shop floor challenges to HPWS. German and Swedish unions resisted managerially defined ‘teams’ in favour of more autonomous Facharbeit and ‘group’ work. IG Metall and IF Metall’s respective besser statt billinger and Sustainable Work campaigns have also been driven by worker unrest over work conditions. Despite UNIFOR’s official ‘defend and restore’ position in the early 1990s, it was always open to experimenting with HPWS and after 2000, the union moved quickly towards a fully ‘adapt and modernize’ strategy. Thus, ‘defend and restore’ and ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies should be viewed as less of a binary than as a continuum or repertoire of practices. Moreover, while driven by and contested from below, they could reinforce capital’s hegemony, by not only privileging union hierarchies, but different plants over others, such as Chrysler in Windsor, Ontario, versus Ford, Oakville, and different workers over others, such as German and Canadian core workers versus non-core workers.

However, irrespective of strategy, thus far IG Metall’s and IF Metall’s current campaigns work more with than against HPWS. Furthermore, in both Canada and Germany, local unions and works councils respectively have helped secure core worker acceptance of the growing use of peripheral workers, while in all three cases unions have traded off HPWS work intensification to attract and sustain investment (Gindin, 2016; Sorge and Streeck, 2016). Indeed, what is striking is that while national institutions account for some differences, union responses to HPWS have been markedly similar.

We thus argue that this relative similarity in union responses to HPWS is rooted in how the mystification of surplus value production obscures exploitation. Our sources reveal strong tendencies for workers and unions to view themselves as having common interests with capital. This underlies both the productivity coalitions of the hegemonic regime and why under hegemonic despotism unions and workers have been willing to adopt HPWS to enhance the competitiveness of ‘their’ firms. This is especially notable in Sweden where IF Metall has often proved susceptible to firm appeals to accept workplace rationalization. Furthermore, in all the analysed cases, union agency over work organization often relied heavily upon collaboration, or even alliances, with managers. Thus Metall’s alliance with Volvo CEO Pehr Gyllenhammar was critical for giving the union influence over STS influenced work organization (Johansson and Abrahamsson, 2009). In Germany, some companies such as Audi and Opel were more open to collaborate with IG Metall, while in UNIFOR’s case Chrysler’s overall firm strategy and the union’s ‘good working relationship’ with local managers were critical to ensuring the union’s influence over HPWS (Holmes and Kumar, 1998: 260). Yet, the limits of union agency were evident, for when Volvo’s fortunes worsened in the 1990s and managers like Gyllenhammar lost influence, Metall had notably less success with their ‘Good Work’ strategy. Thus, all three unions accepted managerial prerogative and as competitive pressures increased, unions increasingly supported HPWS adoption.

This, then, is suggestive of Burawoy’s (2012) argument that mystification plays a significant role in the sustained nature of capitalist hegemony. However, this hegemony was never stable and at various times automotive unions strongly challenged managerial shop floor prerogatives. Illustrating Gramsci’s insight that workers also possessed ‘good sense’, shop floor resistance to work intensification could lead unions to challenge capital’s workplace hegemony and develop alternative forms of work organization. In the Canadian and the German case this was especially true in the initial postwar period and then in the late 1960s and 1970s, while in Sweden this was more prevalent during the latter period.

Nonetheless, despite these challenges to hegemony, even in the initial postwar period, it was not likely that unions would have been able to achieve true co-management, much less overcome the workplace power of capital (see Fulcher, 1991; Gindin, 1995; McGaughey, 2015). Thus, postwar moves by trade unions away from direct workplace challenges to managerial prerogatives and the development of productivity coalitions cannot be viewed as simply co-optation. Indeed, Burawoy (1985) underestimates how capital’s workplace hegemony was in part won by firms incorporating some union demands, but often in ways that demobilized shop floor challenges and secured overall managerial prerogative. German and Swedish formal co-determination rights were not granted without struggle but labour representatives on firm supervisory boards, for example, have found that seeking greater influence with managers can risk alienating their own union members (Bergene, 2010; Gold, 2011). As Bergene and Hansen (2016: 7–8) argue, co-determination rights ‘produce an apparent balance of power [that was] mostly constraining of worker action, [and have] a major role in coordinating the interests of workers and management’.

The introduction of HPWS, then, took place as much within a continuity of postwar trade union ‘constrained agency’, as it was an attack upon it. Furthermore, firms have implemented HPWS not only via divide-and-conquer and two-tier employment strategies such as in Germany and Canada, but also by ‘drawing in’ workers and unions through the adoption of union group work initiatives or modifying team structures. There is also evidence that workers like aspects of HPWS and how team identity and problem-solving may offset significantly higher work intensities (Brännmark and Holden, 2013). Finally, due to declining shop floor union representation and rank-and-file militancy, German and Swedish firms have been able take advantage of the ‘unequal consensus’ nature of co-determination.

In making these points we do not underestimate the ‘external’ effects of heightened capital mobility and hostile neoliberal state policies on union accommodation of HPWS or how these blur ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’. Neoliberalism has not necessarily led to significant change of formal industrial relations institutions but it is reshaping their functioning, not only contributing to a distinct narrowing between different nations in work system bargaining outcomes (Baccaro and Howell, 2011), but also deepening differences within them (Katz and Darbishire, 2000). In these conditions, such institutions have been turned against employee and union interests (MacDonald, 2014). Thus, co-determination institutions and unions have not only been acted upon, but also acted through, becoming less of a ‘constraining’ influence on firms and more of an ‘enabling’ one promoting the latter’s competitive interests (Sorge and Streeck, 2016). Hegemonic despotism involves a rescaling towards the local plant level, but capital’s re-winning of consent also reflects how it has ‘made use’ of reconstituted national laws and enhanced spatial mobility to secure hegemony.

Yet unions remain subject to contestation in part driven by worker restiveness over HPWS. Such struggles could inform Bieler and Lindberg’s (2008: 212) third and possibly emergent union strategy of ‘defend, modernize and strike back’, featuring ‘a transformation of current power relations between workers and owners of capital [including] … a deepening of (economic) democracy’. Thus in opposition to two-tier employment systems, in 2016, Ford Oakville workers rejected UNIFOR’s negotiated contract (Rosenfeld, 2016b). In Sweden, workers remain strongly concerned about work organization issues (Bruhn et al., 2013) and in Germany, continuing shop floor discontent combined with a decline in lower wage-led outsourcing⁴ may give IG Metall greater leverage to challenge HPWS (Schilling and Vanselow, 2012). Furthermore, as Bergene’s (2010: 171–172) study of GM Europe shows, workers can ‘scale up’ to mount effective campaigns against attempts to ‘whipsaw’ plants in different nations over HPWS. Capital’s deeply inscribed workplace hegemony poses significant challenges but its contradictions may yet present unions with opportunities for more fundamental counter-hegemonic strategies. However, these will also require greater scalar coordination not only between local and national unions, but also through European Works Councils (EWCs) and Global Union Federations (GUFs).

Conclusions

In this article we have argued that while ‘external’ factors such as globalization, neoliberalism and the overall weakening of unions have made the latter more accommodating to the adoption of HPWS in the automobile industry, these are not sufficient to fully explain such a shift. We have stressed that union actions towards HPWS are also linked to ‘internal’ factors, especially how worker and union agency via ‘resist and restore’ and ‘modernize and adapt’ strategies are influenced by ‘mystification’ and inform how firms seek to gain their consent. We have thus highlighted the role of trade unions in this process, especially in productivity coalitions under the postwar hegemonic regime and investment and productivity coalitions in post-1990 hegemonic despotism.

In making these arguments, we are aware that our article has relied solely on secondary evidence. Future research can build on our analytical contribution, developing a longer-term comparative empirical analysis of unions and HPWS across several countries. Finally, we would stress that while changing macro-conditions and union agency itself have lessened the ability of unions to both challenge and negotiate HPWS, it is important not to simply project the past into an unproblematic future path. In all our cases, there have been indications of a recent push-back by workers against union accommodation of HPWS. Gramsci was always cognizant of the potential for workers to transcend, through their own organization, ‘even joyless, alienated work’ (Denning, 2009: 78). Could such restiveness lead to a renewed challenge to capital’s common sense by worker and union good sense? Perhaps, but Gramsci also tempered any ‘optimism of the will’, by a ‘pessimism of the intellect’. Thus our cases also suggest how difficult it may prove for unions to fundamentally challenge managerial hegemony and HPWS, not only because of mystification and managerial consent strategies, but also how these have acted through unions themselves

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of the reviewers and editor. We also would like to thank Carlo Sica of the Department of Geography at Syracuse University for his expert proof-reading of our article. Any errors remain the responsibility of the authors.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the funding and support of the Automotive Policy Research Centre, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Notes

Author biographies

Tod Rutherford is Professor in the Department of Geography in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. His research examines the North American auto industry, trade unions and labour market policy. He has published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, The Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society and Regional Studies.

Lorenzo Frangi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Organization and Human Resources, School of Management, University of Quebec in Montreal. He analyses public support for unions and the willingness to strike through a comparative employment relations perspective. His articles have appeared in Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, Canadian Review of Sociology, Transfer and Latin American Perspectives.

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