Economic and Industrial Democracy

This article questions the widespread view that the Canadian and US labour movements are diverging with respect to their strategic orientations (militant vs cooperativist) towards labour-management relations. Focusing on the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), the leading example of militant, social unionism in Canada, the article analyses the CAW's movement away from a more militant, rejectionist orientation in the 1980s towards a more complex, cooperativist orientation to labour-management relations at the local level in the 1990s. The CAW's changing orientation may exemplify broader workplace-centred cooperativist trends in Canada that are similar to those in the US. Union strategies in both countries are strongly conditioned by growing job insecurity and other competitiveness constraints in the context of highly decentralized union structures. In the case of the CAW, such cooperation with management reflects a more defensive unionism that is distinguished from a competitive unionism embracing 'high trust' managerial and 'progressive competitive' social democratic agendas. However, both kinds of unionism are considered to be inadequate, disorganized, microeconomic responses to increasing macroeconomic coercion.

This article is based upon empirical research with 45 cooperative and collective workers, 30 women and 15 men, undertaken in the United Kingdom between 1989 and 1993. It addresses both the constraints and the opportunities that workers experience in such organizations, and how both of these are informed by the gender of workers and the gender composition of the organization. Two lines of argument around which to theorize workers' experiences are presented; first, it is suggested that workers in cooperative and collective organizations have failed to overcome some of the material and discursive constraints that locate women and men in different positions in workplace organizations and in the labour market generally. Second, it is argued that gender inequalities are resisted and challenged by workers in cooperative and collective organizations in ways which allow for a different reading of their experiences, albeit one that is still informed by gender. The article argues that these gender inequalities, and the strategies adopted by workers to overcome them, operate at both the material and the discursive level. It concludes that there is support for both of the two apparently contrasting lines of argument, and that rather than viewing sociostructural and agency- orientated approaches to gender and work in opposition, it is possible to elucidate the ways in which they can be seen as elaborations or developments of one another.

Case data from an ethnographic study of six experimental firms illustrate characteristic dilemmas and patterns of action in organizational groups espousing participatory democracy. The article explores what the author calls 'democratic hierarchies' through vignettes from each case that highlight a particular dilemma or pattern of behavior. Three problematic aspects of democratic hierarchies discussed include hierarchy and accountability; hierarchy and authority; and hierarchy and ownership. Three recurrent behaviors include holding democratic values and business decisions in tension; participating in multiple forums, including attention to group process; and developing democratic repertoires and rituals.

The roles of workers' councils and trade unions in Polish private and state-owned enterprises are reviewed. State-owned enterprises and producer cooperatives are hypothesized to have greater industrial democracy than privatized or new private sector firms, and industrial democracy is hypothesized to be associated positively with enterprise performance. General support was found for both of these hypotheses with a national sample (n = 361) of Polish enterprises. There was considerable variance in Polish trade union density by firm type and, when present, trade unions were often found to have difficulty in securing collective agreements at the enterprise level. This study found Polish workers' councils to be positively associated with short- and long-term profitability and market share projections. These findings suggest that the current Polish labour code, which phases out workers' councils in the private sector, should be re-examined in order to expand industrial democracy at the enterprise level. Western European industrial relations paradigms which permit codetermination and/or consultation should be considered for adoption in Poland as a means to improve industrial democracy and organizational performance.

The central aim of the 1994 European Works Councils directive is to establish institutions in transnational enterprises with the explicit purpose of improving the rights of the employees to information and consultation in general, and to information concerning 'transnational questions which significantly affect workers' interests' in particular. Historically, the directive is placed within the context of reform demands from the social democratic mainstream in international trade unionism dating back to the 1960s. Since Commission proposals for such a directive had been strongly opposed and successfully defeated by employer interests, especially UNICE, for a long time, the actual adoption of the directive in September 1994 came as a cold shower for these interests. The development of the tripartite power relationship between the Commission and the peak organizations of labour and capital at European level in the tug of war up to the final adoption of the directive seems to indicate the emergence of a peculiar Euro- corporatism.