Whither Work?

Say What? Work-Force Science a New Field...Not! And Data Aren't the Problem

2013-04-30T18:42:36Z

A recent New York Times article described a so-called "emerging field called work-force science:

It adds a large dose of data analysis, aka Big Data, to the field of human resource management, which has traditionally relied heavily on gut feel and established practice to guide hiring, promotion and career planning.

While the practice of human resource management could certainly use stronger foundations in rigorous scholarship, this article is insulting to generations of researchers who have used data to carefully answer critical questions in the field for decades. In 1949, the first director of the precursor to today's Center for Human Resources and Labor Studies at the University of Minnesota, Professor Dale Yoder, launched a series of pioneering benchmarking studies of personnel ratios, salaries, and budgets. In the 1950s, Professor Yoder's colleagues developed of a number of measurement instruments that continue to be used today around the world, including the Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire. And so on and so forth right up to today, such as a recent project by some of my current colleagues who worked with data from seven organizations to better understand turnover. In fact, while we can always keep learning from new data sources (especially those using company records, or, even better, field experiments), from my perspective the field sometimes has too much data and not enough conceptual clarity.

]]> Indeed, my books seek to add this conceptual clarity and many of my entries in this blog are ultimately more conceptual than empirical in nature. As another example, earlier this month I had a stimulating time at the Asian Congress of the International Labor and Employment Relations Association in Melbourne, Australia, where I listened to numerous presentations on diverse topics related to human resources and employment relations in the Asia-Pacific region. But if there was a shortcoming, it wasn't that data were lacking, it was a lack of conceptual clarity.

From my perspective, the key idea of unitarism is particularly misapplied. Unitarism is a belief that the employment relationship is largely characterized by a unity of shared interests among employers and employees. Unitarism is thus a key assumption--often not articulated--of the scholarship and practice of human resource management that seeks to improve individual and organizational performance by recognizing the human factor inherent in employees and by aligning employee-employer interests (see chapter 6 in my book The Thought of Work).

But contrary to how I see it frequently (mis)used, unitarism does not reflect all methods of managing employees. Unitarism is not simply unilateralism. Admittedly, unitarism can have an element of unilateralism because human resource management is often determined with little employee input. But unitarist human resources practices are designed with the objective of benefitting employees and their organization through win-win interest alignment. A low-road employer that unilaterally slashes wages or benefits simply because it can is exercising a very different kind of unilateralism. So yes, human resource management can be criticized for its unilateral aspects, but unitarism is not simply unilateralism.

Similarly, unitarism is not neoliberalism. Neoliberalism embraces laissez-faire economic policies and the operation of so-called free markets. So forms of human resource management that emphasize adherence to markets, such as imposing wage cuts when unemployment is high, are consistent with neoliberalism. But they are not rooted in unitarism. In contrast, human resources policies that seek engagement, commitment, alignment, and the like are rooted in unitarism, not neoliberalism. Neoliberalism also sees work as a commodity while unitarism sees work very differently as a source of personal fulfillment.

Admittedly there is overlap between neoliberalism and unitarism in that both perspectives embrace the freedom of corporations and managers to make unfettered decisions, and thus both perspectives do not embrace unions or interventionist public policies--but for different reasons. In neoliberalism it is because the market is king, in unitarism it is because unions and laws interfere with employer-employee alignment.

In closing, I should make clear that I am a critic rather than supporter of unitarism. I believe that the employment relationship is better characterized by pluralism (that is, the employment relationship involves a multiplicity of legitimate stakeholder interests that include conflicts of interest that cannot be aligned--see my book Employment with a Human Face), and thus we should not rely on managers (or markets) to look out for workers' interests in all cases. But these debates are better served by clear understandings of these key conceptual ideas. And new data sources are always good, too, even if so-called work-force science has been around for decades in the form of industrial relations, I-O psychology, and other fields.

Disposing of Workers, Flexible Work Practices, or Outdated Views on Work?

2013-03-05T21:46:35Z

With many people still buzzing about Yahoo's termination of its telecommuting program, Best Buy has just announced the end of its Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) in which only job performance for corporate employees mattered, not time worked or time spent in the office. Like Yahoo last week, Best Buy attributes its decision to a need for greater collaboration among employees. According to a Best Buy spokesperson, "Bottom line, it's 'all hands on deck' at Best Buy and that means having employees in the office as much as possible to collaborate and connect on ways to improve our business" (Star Tribune, March 5, 2013). But there might be something deeper and more troubling at work (no pun intended).

]]> According to a Star Tribune article, last November Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly indicated that he aimed to restore accountability and said "You need to feel disposable as opposed to indispensable." This is a very frank and revealing statement. The implication is that self-directed employees, as those working under Best Buy's ROWE program or Yahoo's telecommuting policy, have it too easy. Workers need to feel the threat of being replaced in order to be motivated to perform at a high level.

This is certainly not a new attitude towards workers. Indeed, this was arguably the dominant approach to supervision in the steel mills, factories, and other industries 100 years ago. Workers were motivated by threats, verbal abuse, sometimes physical abuse, and a constant reminder that there were other workers massed at the factory gate poised to take their jobs. This has been called the drive system, and served as a rallying point for labor union leaders, reformers, progressive corporate leaders, and others to humanize the employment relationship (or in more radical circles, to replace capitalism with a system that treated workers with greater dignity).

One of the intellectual foundations of this perspective is the view that work is a lousy activity that we only endure to earn income. Without strong economic incentives or close supervision and monitoring, workers are believed to slack off and not work very hard. This perspective discounts intrinsic rewards, feelings of service, desires for a healthy identity, and other non-economic motivations for working hard. This perspective frequently goes hand-in-hand with an elitist view in which those higher in the organization are assumed to better know how work really should be done.

So to return to the termination of the flexible, self-directed employment practices at Yahoo and Best Buy, maybe the corporate leaders backing these decisions are sincere in their belief that the workers need to be physically present in the office to improve collaboration. But statements by these same leaders saying that workers "need to feel disposable as opposed to indispensable" suggest a more enduring motivation for the changes--that is, a perceived need to closely supervise workers, impose management's "one best way" of working, and drive them to work harder--that are rooted in longstanding views that degrade work and workers. Unfortunately, these views all too often seem indispensable, but they should be disposable.

UPDATE

In a March 17 Star Tribune commentary piece, Mr. Joly indicated that his remarks were misconstrued: "I was not talking about our employees; I was talking about myself being dispensable....Leaders need to remind themselves that they and their identities are distinct from their position and that they will leave someday, with the organization going on without them. That is why it is so critical that good leaders focus not on preserving their job but serving the organization and preparing the next generation to assume their role."

In that same commentary, he also explains the termination of the ROWE program: "This program was based on the premise that the right leadership style is always delegation....Well, anyone who has led a team knows that delegation is not always the most effective leadership style....Depending on the skill and will of the individual, the right leadership style may be coaching, motivating or directing rather than delegating. A leader has to pick the right style of leadership for each employee, and it is not one-size-fits-all, as the ROWE program would have suggested."

An online comment posted in response to this is quite insightful: "As a 15-year employee of Best Buy, and one that helped launch ROWE within the corporate campus, Mr. Joly's comments show that he truly does not understand what the Results Only Work Environment program is. He refers to it as a "one-size-fit-all" approach and seems to believe that it is only about "delegation". Neither one of these are even remotely true....He does correctly state that there is a failure of leadership execution. That is the real challenge of ROWE. You have to have strong leadership that fully understands the work that their team is responsible to produce. Too many Best Buy leaders don't understand what their teams do, nor could they step in and do it themselves. That gap makes managing and leading a team effectively, impossible."

To the extent that this leadership failure is rooted in elitist views in which those higher in the organization are assumed to (a) being doing more important work and (b) better know how work really should be done, then we are right back to longstanding views that degrade work and workers, irrespective of whether Mr. Joly's specific words were misconstrued.

Invisible Labor: The Eye Does Not See What the Mind Does Not Know

2013-02-17T15:04:28Z

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of participating in a very stimulating conference on invisible labor hosted by Washington University's Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Work and Social Capital. My contribution was reflected in an old adage that states that the eye does not see what the mind does not know. We only see and value work when it conforms to our mental models of what work is. In the public imagination, why is work less visible than other key aspects of human life? Because dominant ways of thinking about work reduce it to a curse or to a commodified, instrumental activity that supports consumption. So we do not think of work as having deeper value, and therefore we overlook work in favor of other human activities. Similarly, why are certain forms of work invisible? Because when we think of work in certain ways, especially as a commodified, instrumental activity, then forms of work that are thought of as different from or only weakly fulfilling these dominant conceptualizations of work are devalued and rendered invisible.

]]> In these ways, then, how we think about and conceptualize work have real consequences for what is seen and valued as work. Unfortunately, conceptualizations of work are frequently narrowly-conceived and typically unstated. To better understand issues of invisible work and questions of what forms of work are valued and why, it is important to explicitly consider the diverse ways in which work can be conceptualized.

I have written about these conceptualizations in my book The Thought of Work, and in earlier blog posts (e.g., What is Work, and Why Does It Matter?), so I will summarize my ideas in the following table:

Work as...	Definition	Implications for Invisible Labor
1. A Curse	An unquestioned burden necessary for human survival or maintenance of the social order.	All work is devalued; other human activities are more important and receive more attention.
2. Freedom	A way to achieve independence from nature or other humans, and to express human creativity.	Work that fails to achieve economic independence or lacks creativity is less likely to be valued and visible.
3. A Commodity	An abstract quantity of productive effort that has tradable economic value.	Visible work is exchanged in primary labor markets; high pay required to indicate economic value.
4. Occupational Citizenship	An activity pursued by human members of a community entitled to certain rights.	All forms of work should be valued more highly with rights provided to all types of workers.
5. Disutility	A lousy activity tolerated to obtain goods and services that provide pleasure.	Work that does not support high levels of consumption is less likely to be valued and visible.
6. Personal Fulfillment	Physical and psychological functioning that (ideally) satisfies individual needs.	Work that does not provide intrinsic rewards is less likely to be valued and visible.
7. A Social Relation	Human interaction embedded in social norms, institutions, and power structures.	Invisibility of work reflects socially-created institutions and power structures.
8. Caring for Others	The physical, cognitive, and emotional effort required to attend to and maintain others.	Though frequently invisible, caring work should be valued as real work.
9. Identity	A method for understanding who you are and where you stand in the social structure.	All forms of work should be valued more highly and more visible.
10. Service	The devotion of effort to others, such as God, household, community, or country.	Though frequently invisible, service towards others should be valued as real work.

By making these conceptualizations explicit, we have a better foundation for thinking more clearly about how we define work and for gaining a deeper understanding of why all work or some forms work are invisible. By broadening our thinking on work, this framework can further provide a foundation for crafting inclusive definitions of work that recognize not only the deep importance of work for individuals and society, but also the value of diverse forms of human activity that should be fully embraced as work rather than overlooked or marginalized. In short, in order for the eye to recognize wider forms of work, we need to train the mind to think more broadly and deeply about work.

The Roots of Words for Work

2013-01-15T18:57:38Z

An article in yesterday's Guardian correctly revealed the negative associations in language that have long been associated with words for work:

Words indicating labour in most European languages originate in an imagery of compulsion, torment, affliction and persecution. The French word travail (and Spanish trabajo), like its English equivalent, are derived from the Latin trepaliare - to torture, to inflict suffering or agony. The word peine, meaning penalty or punishment, also is used to signify arduous labour, something accomplished with great effort. The German Arbeit suggests effort, hardship and suffering; it is cognate with the Slavonic rabota (from which English derives "robot"), a word meaning corvee, forced or serf labour.

Unfortunately, experiencing work in arduous ways and seeing it as something that we have to do rather than as something we choose to do is all too frequent, not only in today's society, but in many societies stretching back to ancient Greece and presumably before. But this shouldn't be the entire story.

]]> While travail is rooted in torture, another French word for work, œuvre, comes from the Latin opus relating to accomplishment and creativity. The word work itself is rooted in the ancient Indo-European word werg meaning, simply, "to do." Etymologically, therefore, work is related to energy ("in or at work"), lethargy ("without work"), allergy ("oppositional work"), synergy ("working together"), liturgy ("public work") and organ ("a tool" as in "working with something").

Words for work and related to work, then, need not only have negative connotations and, in the words of the Guardian article, "tortured roots." Work can also be taken as a neutral term, or in positive ways, as in a work of art.

More importantly, this should be more than an esoteric, intellectual exercise. Rather, the linguistic features of work reflect the realities of human work--it is embedded in many elements of the human experience and occurring in many ways. Yes, it can be negative and it is something that often needs to be done when we'd prefer to be doing something else. But it need not always be so negative. As a society, we need to re-connect with the deep meanings of work not only for individuals but also for democracy, develop new norms that value work that is not rewarded by the labor market, and create institutions for improving how work is experienced.

Why So Many Lockouts? Means, Motive, and Opportunity

2012-12-11T14:31:36Z

It has been an eventful year in labor relations: attacks on the NLRB, controversial ballot initiatives, strikes at Hostess and elsewhere, and, most recently, an attempt to push through controversial right-to-work legislation in Michigan. But to me, the most striking trend (sorry for the pun) is the continued heightened use of lockouts. A lockout is an employer-initiated work stoppage that stems from a failure to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement. Unlike a strike, locked out workers cannot be permanently replaced so they are entitled to their jobs when the lockout ends. Being able to use permanent strike replacements had been seen as a major employer advantage, so why the increase in lockouts? It comes to down to means, motive, and opportunity.

]]> At first glance, the ongoing and recent lockouts might look dissimilar--professional football referees, professional hockey players, orchestra musicians from the Minnesota Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and elsewhere, and sugar-processing workers from American Crystal Sugar. But dig deeper and we can see that in all of these cases, employers are particularly vulnerable at particular points in time--the playoffs in the professional sports, the concert season for orchestras, harvesting time for sugar beets. Rather than being caught in a strike at an especially vulnerable time--as happened to the baseball owners in 1994 when the lucrative World Series was cancelled--employers are using lockouts to preempt strikes and control the timing of when a work stoppage occurs.

I think this is an important motivation, but by itself, timing cannot explain the sharp increase in lockout activity over the past two years or so because the same was true 5, 10, and 25 years ago. So what's different now? For starters, the global financial crisis. This provides both motive and opportunity. Motive in that employers perceive intense competitive pressure. But again, this is hard to fully accept in many cases--the labor costs of football referees are probably the size of rounding error in the financial statements of the nearly $10 billion a year business of the NFL, and the NHL owners and players face little competition except each other.

So this brings us to opportunity and means. The global financial crisis and the anti-labor / anti-worker political environment provides a ripe opportunity for employers to wrest concessions from their workers. And increased publicity around lockouts has highlighted lockouts as a viable means of pursuing these concessions. In the 1980s, Phelps Dodge demonstrated that it was possible to win a long strike using permanent strike replacements, and many companies followed suit as awareness of this tactic spread. I believe we are witnessing the same thing today with lockouts. Other lockouts have revealed this as a means that other companies can try for themselves.

Unfortunately, this trend is clearly not good for workers, and it's questionable at best for employers--the NHL might very well lose an entire season and with it, many fans, while profits at American Crystal Sugar are down by nearly 30 percent. Hopefully 2013 will bring an end to these lockouts, and a renewed attempt at crafting more productive labor relations strategies. For that, there should always be means, motive, and opportunity.

Dilbert Completes an Employee Survey

2012-11-08T20:45:39Z

In case you missed it, last Sunday's Dilbert comic skewered various of aspects of modern work:

Note the references to paper towels having a purpose (how many workers feel their work lacks purpose?), gross stuff getting to leave (how many workers feel trapped in their jobs?), and the juxtaposition of the organization thinking it values workers and treats them with dignity and respect while actually ignoring their views when it doesn't suit the organization's purpose. Great stuff! But unfortunately, all too real for too many workers.

It's a Shame that We Allow Wall St. Analysts to Dictate Employment and Work

2012-10-27T16:12:29Z

This week, a Bloomberg News article revealed that the 62,600 jobs slated to eliminated by U.S. companies is the biggest two-month figure in two years. These losses include significant cuts by Ford, Colgate-Palmolive, Dow Chemical, and others. Most telling is the article's revelation that "the reductions coincide with a majority of U.S. companies missing analysts' third-quarter revenue estimates." John Challenger, chief executive officer of a Chicago-based human resources consulting firm, is then quoted as saying that these misses are "a sure prescription for layoffs starting to heat up as companies take immediate action to show their shareholders how responsive they are." True. Very true. But such a shame.

]]> It's important to remember that these announcements follow three years of record profits--profits that resulted from aggressive cost-cutting (that is, layoffs) and minimal hiring. In other words, workers and their families have already borne the burden of the recession, and now comes more bad news for them. So why more cuts? Because the companies are failing to meet Wall Street's sales expectations. Colgate-Palmolive's latest earning report included $654 million in quarterly profits, up from the same period last year, but a decline in sales. At Dow Chemical, profits exceeded analysts' expectations, but sales fell short.

So profits are up, but analysts want even more. Since Wall Street continues to see workers as costs, companies respond by shedding more jobs. Economists, in turn, continue to see work simply as a source of income so as long as these workers have alternative income sources such as savings, spousal income, and unemployment insurance, then no big deal.

Unfortunately, all of this significantly misses the true importance of work. Workers should be seen as an organization's source of competitive advantage, not costs on a balance sheet. Work should be seen as a deeply-rich human activity with numerous rewards beyond income. The real costs to workers, their families, and their communities that result from the existence of lousy work and from an absence of work need to be fully recognized. On a broader level, the true purposes of corporations should be questioned, and their responsibilities should include deeper concerns than simply meeting the short-term expectations of a never-satisfied Wall Street. In other words, work is simply too important to let it be dictated by the narrow, short-term focus of Wall St. analysts.

Interview on Employee Voice

2012-10-10T04:02:47Z

While a visiting professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, I was interviewed at Voice Project by my friend Professor Paul Gollan. Here are some excerpts.

]]> Question. In one of your recent journal articles you mentioned that "there has been a sharp increase in interest in employee voice and participation among academics, practitioners, and policy-makers in recent years." Can you shed some light on that? Why is that happening?
Answer: Traditionally, employee voice was largely seen as a collective phenomenon delivered almost exclusively through trade unions. Consequently, academics, practitioners, and policy-makers who were interested in voice were primarily those whose research or areas of practice involved trade unions.

Over the past couple of decades, however, the power and reach of trade unions have declined in many countries. This has led many academics to explore alternative forms of voice, and today employee voice is seen more generally as the expressing of opinions and the ability to have meaningful input into work-related decision-making. This includes individual forms of voice as well as both union and nonunion forms of collective voice.

At the same time, policies for managing an organization's human resources have become more sophisticated in many private, public, and nonprofit organizations. Many organizations don't simply want workers who punch the time clock and do as they are told, they want committed employees who are engaged with their work and willing to share ideas for improvement. There is increasing recognition that giving employees a voice at work can create the higher levels of engagement that many organizations are seeking.

So we have witnessed increased interest in employee voice because of a broadening of how we think about voice combined with a greater recognition of the importance of diverse forms of individual and collective voice in practice.

Question: What do you see as the major value of employee voice for organisations and employees?
For organizations, the major value of employee voice is creating an engaged workforce that is committed to its work and to the organization, and that is willing to share ideas for improving organizational practices and products. A workplace without voice is likely to be one where workers simply put in their time and keep their ideas to themselves.

For employees the major value of voice is being able to participate in shaping one's work life. People generally dislike being told what to do. They want input, they want some degree of autonomy. They want to be able to make decisions. They want to be respected as human beings. Workplace voice allows all of these needs to be fulfilled.

Question: The purpose of Voice Project's "Change Challenge" is to motivate and measure real change in work practices, employee engagement and business outcomes. What do you see is the place of 'voice' in achieving change in organisations?
Answer: In many organizations, it's hard to force change from the top. Workers who have not been consulted and included are more likely to be resistant to change, will view the changes cynically, and might only go through the motions. Employee voice can allow for a more robust change process in which employees are consulted about the need for change, can share their ideas for improvement, and can take ownership in the change process.

Question: You talk in your book about balancing efficiency, equity and voice: Do you see them in competition? What are the factors working against Vvice in organisations?
Ideally, efficiency, equity, and voice can be mutually-supportive. Productive organizations can afford to provide fair terms and conditions of employment along with robust voice mechanisms. Workers who are treated fairly and given opportunities to exercise voice can be committed and productive. But I also believe that there is a tension between efficiency, equity, and voice. Some organizations might want just a little more productivity at the expense of the workers, and workers might want more generous benefits and more extensive voice mechanisms at the expense of profits. So from my perspective, organizations and employees need to continually strive for a balance that supports efficiency, equity, and voice. This can be hard work, but that's what makes human resource professionals, and in some organizations, trade union leaders, so important.

One factor working against voice is a perception that participation and consultation can be time consuming, especially when compared to a traditional method in which a manager makes a unilateral decision. A second factor working against voice is a perceived loss of managerial control because employees have input into decisions.

Question: Voice Project's research has found two core organisational factors that drive employee engagement - 1. Purpose - a strong sense of organisational identity, purpose and values; and 2 - Participation - which includes involvement in decision-making (voice!), and a sense of belonging. Did these themes emerge in your research on the "Thought of Work"? How can we build more Purpose and Participation in work practices?
Answer: My research on the thought of work uncovers 10 fundamental ways in which we can think about what work is. For example, we can see work as a curse, as something we endure solely to earn income, as a source of personal fulfillment, or as a way to care for others. One key finding that emerges from this is that work can mean different things to different people. Moreover, work can mean multiple things to one person! Sometimes my job seems like a curse, but more often it's rewarding. So what does this mean for building purpose and participation? It means that we need to create multiple strategies for building purpose and participation. Not everyone is looking for the same things from their work. We need to be careful not to homogenize a workforce; rather, we need to see workers as individual humans with different aspirations and goals, even within the same workplace or workgroup. Consequently, we need to create voice mechanisms that are diverse enough and robust enough to fulfill the different needs of individuals who are looking for diverse things from their work. More research on voice is needed to help make this happen.

Implicit Public Values and the Creation of Public Value: The Importance of Work and the Contested Role of Labor Unions

2012-09-20T13:09:56Z

Today is the opening day of a conference on "Creating Public Value in a Multi-Sector, Shared-Power World" hosted by the Center for Integrative Leadership at the University of Minnesota. Using Barry Bozeman's definition, public values are the values of a society that provide "normative consensus about (a) the rights, benefits, and prerogatives to which citizens should (and should not) be entitled; (b) the obligations of citizens to society, the state, and one another; and (c) the principles on which governments and policies should be based." One of my contributions to this conference is to make sure that the issue of work is not overlooked.

]]> It is common to see work primarily as an economic activity that generates commodities, services, and income. From such a perspective, work is largely a private activity that occurs between consenting economic actors in a distinct sphere of life, and the favored work-related public values are those that reflect economic individualism. But this is an excessively narrow view of work. Work can be a source of personal fulfillment and psychological well-being that provides more than extrinsic, monetary rewards. Work is a way to intimately care for others, and to serve others through volunteering, civic service, military service, and other means. On an even deeper level, work can be a source of identity by helping individuals understand who they are and where they stand in the social structure. Work is also a source of freedom from the dictates of the natural world--a way to express creativity and build culture. And many believe that work is not simply a commodity traded in the marketplace, it is something done by human beings who therefore merit a set of workplace standards consistent with human dignity. As a result, work should not be seen as a purely a private affair best governed by the private marketplace. Rather, work should be the subject of public values, and non-market institutions that can create work-related public value should be considered.

My examination of work-related public values and the creation of public value suggests at least three important implications for the broader issue of public values and public value. First, values on values matter. In the work-related domain, definitions of public value and methods to achieve them are highly contested. These sharply contrasting perspectives are rooted in different assumptions about how the employment relationship works and in different values on the purpose of work. As such, there is a not a consensus on the desired public values about work, nor on the best ways for creating public value relating to work. It is important to recognize these different values on values and to make them explicit.

Second, the key values of organized labor and other worker advocates align with other perspectives that embrace definitions of public value that go beyond economic conceptions of public value. In some cases, labor unions can add economic value, but their key contributions are toward economic fairness, not efficiency, as well as toward democratic values in the workplace and in society--that is, equity and voice more than efficiency. Following John Benington's definitions, labor unions can contribute to social and cultural value ("adding value to the public realm by contributing to social capital, social cohesion, social relationships, social meaning and cultural identity, individual and community wellbeing") and political value ("adding value to the public realm by stimulating and supporting democratic dialogue and active public participation and citizen engagement"). And to tie this into broader philosophical traditions, it is the ideals of inherent human dignity rooted in secular, humanist, and spiritual belief systems, not the ideals of economic efficiency, that provide the moral foundation for preventing the complete commodification of workers in a materialist, utilitarian world.

Third, the creation of public value is a complex, multi-layered process with many intersecting actors. Labor unions can create public value by bargaining for economic fairness, creating workplace participatory structures, playing an active role in the democratic process, and pushing for democracy where it does not fully exist. In other words, multiple levels of public value creation are important. Moreover, while labor unions have a strong track record of success in promoting equity and voice, their ability to achieve equity and voice is highly contingent on other actors. Consequently, the intersections with many other actors are very important--corporations, political leaders and political parties, the law, religious groups, other civil society groups, and the like. Additionally, as with all human institutions, there is the potential for excesses and abuses so society should worry about safeguards. And all of this brings us back to the first point--society's actors can differ in their perspectives on what work-related public value is and how to create it, so these intersections and safeguards are contested, conflicted terrain. Unfortunately, it is therefore extremely difficult to make progress on these challenging issues.

Note: you can read my complete paper by downloading it from my website.

Celebrating Work...By Not Working?

2012-09-03T18:34:41Z

On Thanksgiving, we give thanks. On Memorial Day, we memorialize those who have sacrificed for us. On religious holidays, we worship. But today, Labor Day, we celebrate work by NOT working. Therein lies the complexities of work. It's important enough to celebrate. Yet in an odd twist of irony, we celebrate through avoidance.

]]> There are many reasons to want to work less rather than more. Work can be a four-letter word. It can be physically, mentally, and emotionally stressful. It can be dangerous, or just plain dull. For centuries, then, work has been seen as a curse. In the opening verses of the Bible, humans are cursed with hard work as God's punishment for human imperfection. There is a long history of using work as the state's punishment of criminals, dissidents, and enemies. Aristotle viewed work as interfering with the desired activities of citizens, and today work commonly conflicts with more desirable pursuits such as spending time with family and friends, pursuing a hobby, or simply just relaxing.

So why work? We obviously work to survive--directly by caring for others and by producing food and other necessities, indirectly by earning money that can be used to obtain these things. But by only seeing work as an arduous means of survival and money, it becomes, in the words of Mark Twain, "a necessary evil to be avoided" that we prefer others do for us. In economic theorizing, work is viewed as a lousy activity endured solely to earn income, and thus corporations and sports teams use incentive packages to elicit effort, old-fashioned supervisors and new technologies are used to monitor workers to prevent shirking, and unemployment and welfare benefits are reduced so that the unemployed and impoverished have greater motivation for enduring the burdens of work experienced by the "productive members of society."

As a result, it is easy to lose sight of why work is cause for celebration. When structured appropriately, work can be a key source of personal fulfillment. It can promote physical health and psychological well-being by satisfying human needs for purpose, achievement, mastery, self-esteem, and self-worth. On an even deeper level, our work helps us and others make sense of who we are and is thus a source of identity; hopefully not our only source of identity, but an important one nevertheless.

When we work, we also create, care, and serve others. We free ourselves from the slavish pursuit of food and shelter, and build culture in a harsh natural world. We expend the physical, cognitive, and emotional energy necessary for raising children and caring for loved ones. Work provides the critical means for serving our communities and nations, whether rooted in humanitarianism, patriotism, or a desire to serve God's kingdom. Even though frequently unpaid, these forms of work merit celebrating. Unfortunately, these important forms of work are frequently devalued by the tendency to only see work as a traded commodity and to determine the worth of work by the salary it commands.

In these and other ways, work is fundamentally important. When we work, we experience our biological, psychological, economic, and social selves. Work locates us in the world, helps us and others make sense of who we are, and determines our access to material and social resources. It is time to reevaluate how we think about work, and by extension, what forms of work are valued or devalued, what defines acceptable employer practices or working conditions, whether there is a need for institutional safeguards, and who is able to craft a positive, healthy identity from their work. Work is too important to be dismissed as a curse, treated as a just another commodity, or seen solely as a source of income. Environmental degradation means that we need to rethink how Western civilization considers work as the domination and mastery of nature. And the need for greater social inclusion of marginalized groups demands a wider embrace of work that goes beyond paid employment.

On Labor Day, the last holiday of the summer, the last thing many people probably want to do is think about work. But that's exactly the problem. We've taken work for granted, and let it become nothing more than the daily grind.

A version of this was published on Labor Day 2011 in the Star Tribune. Read more about different ways of thinking about work, good and bad, in my book The Thought of Work.

Job Quality: An Industrial Relations Perspective

2012-08-15T15:04:53Z

Last month I had the distinct pleasure of participating in the International Expert Conference on Job Quality hosted by Copenhagen Business School. This was a uniquely vibrant conference because it explicitly sought to bring together diverse perspectives on job quality. We need more of these interdisciplinary approaches to important issues relating to work. Unfortunately, job quality is so complex that it might not even be possible to agree on a definition. Indeed, what's a good job for someone might not be perceived as a good job by someone else. But much like debates over art, debates over job quality can be valuable for stimulating thinking, deepening awareness, etc., even if the question of what's good art, I mean what's a good job, is never fully resolved.

]]> My contribution to the conference was to present an industrial relations view on job quality, with a particular emphasis on the pluralist industrial relations perspective. Within industrial relations, workers are seen as citizens entitled to standards of human dignity and self-determination, and labor markets are seen as failing to fulfill the textbook ideal of welfare optimization based on perfect competition. Workers' rights are therefore viewed as central to job quality, and non-market institutions are embraced as necessary for achieving high levels of job quality. Moreover, pluralist industrial relations thought models the employment relationship as consisting of a plurality of competing yet legitimate employer and employee interests, so good jobs are those in which these interests are balanced, typically with the help of non-market institutions.

Pluralist industrial relations thought seeks to understand how institutions and practices affect efficiency, equity, and voice while also trying to design institutions and practices to balance efficiency, equity, and voice. A pluralist industrial relations perspective on job quality, therefore, is one that analyzes job quality through a lens that focuses on the efficiency, equity, and voice aspects of jobs as importantly affected by institutions. Moreover, this reasoning within pluralist industrial relations thought indicates that high-quality jobs fulfill efficiency, equity, and voice, while low-quality jobs are those that lack one or more of these elements. And non-market institutions are needed to promote and protect high levels of job quality while improving jobs that are of low quality.

A pluralist industrial relations perspective therefore uniquely implies that efficiency should be a legitimate dimension of job quality. From a macro or social perspective, good jobs should add value. In other words, a job that provides many favorable benefits to workers and has robust levels of voice, but is a wasteful or unproductive job should not be seen as a good job from a macro perspective. This thinking is reinforced by considerations of meaningful work as part of job quality--namely, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that doing something productive and valuable (broadly-defined) at least adds to, if is not required, for deriving a robust sense of meaning from one's work.

But having a job, even a productive one, should not be enough. High quality jobs must also provide equity and voice to workers. Government policymaking can and should play an important role in establishing minimum standards and crafting other policies to redress bargaining power imbalances and promote the equity aspect of job quality. With respect to voice, the situation is slightly more complex because public policy cannot mandate voice. Some employees might prefer to remain silent or to defer to others; such decisions are legitimate uses of voice and are valid self-determined choices to the same extent as more active modes of participation in decision-making. The role of public policy, therefore, is to facilitate employee voice by protecting individuals who want to exercise various forms of voice and by outlawing actions that restrain employee voice. Unfortunately, U.S. public policies fall far short in promoting robust levels of equity and voice and we need to continue to explore how to create and promote high-quality jobs in a challenging economic and political environment.

Tweets from ILERA

2012-07-06T15:08:50Z

I just returned from attending the World Congress of the International Labour and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) in Philadelphia. With over 400 scholars and policymakers from outside of the United States in attendance, it was a very diverse and stimulating conference. Here are my tweets which I hope others will find stimulating in the questions that they imply.

]]> 2 Jul
On my way to #ILERA World Congress. Delta agent felt sorry for me having to work on the fourth of July. #thethoughtofwork

2 Jul
Glad to see that faculty at Univ of Warwick are still proud to use the term "industrial relations." Not true in the US anymore. #ILERA

3 Jul
#ILERA opening: Tom Kochan on jobs crisis. Need jobs compact to combat financialization & institutional failure. Start with infrastructure.

3 Jul
#ILERA opening: but also need labor law reform to ensure good jobs. But how given that political stalemate has turned to polarization?

3 Jul
Tom Kochan: appropriate that we are in Philadelphia because we need a revolution in employment policy. #ILERA

3 Jul
Former #nlrb chair Wilma Liebman: at least ill-founded rancorous attacks on nlrb have raised awareness of labor law issues. #ILERA

3 Jul
#fmcs dir George Cohen's examples of cooperative labor-mgmt relationships suggests that labor law is not the problem, it's attitudes #ILERA

3 Jul
Depressing state of US employ policy & divisive political rhetoric at least make many intl #ILERA attendees feel better about own countries

3 Jul
Alex Colvin @ #ILERA : mandatory arbitration coverage probably 2x that of union coverage in US.

3 Jul
Great opportunity to learn more about employment issues in China, especially importance of decent #work. #ILERA

3 Jul
Sarosh Kuruvilla: big shift underway in Chinese strikes, from protests of desperation & discrimination to strikes for wages & respect #ILERA

4 Jul
Today I'm a session chair, plenary chair, & panelist so it will be hard to tweet from #ILERA. #workingonthe4th

5 Jul
Bradon Ellem: lobby groups immensely resistant to recent IR law change in Oz, but much employer behavior is routine. Sounds familiar. #ILERA

5 Jul
Rafael Gomez: corp social responsibility typically only occurs after something bad prompts it--see Nike, Apple. #ILERA

5 Jul
John Howe: why is enforcement of building codes stronger than enforcement of construction labor standards? #ILERA

5 Jul
#ILERA ends with appealing promos for future congresses in Melbourne, Amsterdam, and Cape Town. Life is good.

How an Economics Thought of Work Influences Research and Practice

2012-05-25T14:02:02Z

Much has been written about the changing nature of work, but frequently overlooked is the more fundamental question of what is work in a conceptual sense. This is a troubling oversight because unstated definitions of work shape research and practice. As an example, mainstream economic thought implicitly sees work as a lousy activity tolerated only to obtain goods, services, and leisure that provide utility. Early economists saw work as a painful physical or mental exertion while modern economists are more likely to simply assume that whatever the actual nature of work, leisure is more desirable. In either case, work itself is assumed to reduce utility. So why work? To be able to obtain goods, services, and leisure.

]]> Though frequently unstated, this definition of work underlies economic scholarship on work-related topics. Research on labor supply assumes that workers will sell their labor in the labor market until the additional pain or opportunity cost of additional work hours exceeds the additional utility generated by the additional work income. What about economic research looking at work-related topics within organizations? As recognized by Karl Marx, an employer buys the potential effort of workers and must figure out how to get workers to exert this effort. In the absence of perfect contracting and monitoring, economic scholarship focuses on the role of monetary incentives to elicit effort because work is seen as only tolerated to earn income.

Specifically, using basic economic analysis it is straightforward to show that if an employer pays a fixed wage independent of effort, employees will exert the least amount of effort that avoids being fired--that is, employees are predicted to shirk. This assumption of shirking is so pervasive in economic thought that we ought to call this the First Fundamental Theorem of Personnel and Organizational Economics. As a consequence, economic research is full of rich models analyzing the optimal incentive schemes under various assumptions. For example, if workers are risk neutral then the optimal compensation scheme is to sell the worker a franchise in his or her job for a fixed fee, and allow the worker to capture the entire output s/he generates. This is what happens when a hair salon rents chairs to stylists or a taxi company rents taxis to its drivers and allows the stylists and drivers to keep all of the income they bring in.

When such an arrangement is not feasible, the optimal incentive scheme is a commission-based system with revenues shared equally. But if workers are risk-averse, then this is an excessively-risky compensation scheme, and some combination of a fixed salary and variable pay is better. Another incentive mechanism prominent in the economics literature is tournaments. If a prize such as a promotion is awarded to the employee with the highest performance relative to his or her peers, then the prospect of enhanced income can provide an incentive to exert additional effort.

These theoretical approaches guide a rich empirical literature that analyzes a variety of pay-for-performance and tournament situations. Perhaps the most famous is Edward Lazear's study of an auto glass company that switched from hourly wages to piece-rate pay. A careful examination of worker output before and after this change found that changing to piece-rate compensation increased the average output per worker by 44 percent. Other research has looked at pay-for-performance and tournaments among bus drivers, school teachers, tree planters, fruit pickers, shoe makers, military recruiters, and professional athletes in many sports. This research provides important insights into the importance of monetary desires and alternative uses of one's time when employees decide how much and how hard to work.

Whether or not one agrees with the need for incentives for eliciting work effort, it is important to recognize that a specific definition of work underlies economists' almost religious promotion of incentives--that is, work as a lousy activity tolerated only to obtain goods, services, and leisure. Alternative definitions of work focus attention in other directions. Sociological scholarship on work effort focuses on the role of social norms and social dynamics, while psychological scholarship emphasizes eliciting effort through job satisfaction.

And these definitional choices are not purely intellectual affairs. Rather, they have important consequences for how work is experienced in practice. The widespread use of incentive pay packages is rooted in the economics view of work and fear of shirking. The idea that workers are prone to shirking also justifies hierarchical work structures and deflects pressures for granting workers greater autonomy over their work. In the public policy arena, the economics definition of work yields concerns that unemployment benefits and government welfare programs create incentives for people to withhold their labor supply and avoid working. Unemployment insurance programs therefore provide partial income replacement for a limited duration while workfare has replaced welfare.

Whatever one's views on work, the definitions of work need to be explicitly identified and debated. Definitions of work matter for how work is analyzed, legislated, adjudicated, and experienced, so these definitions are too important to be taken for granted. It is time to think more carefully about work.

I initially published this as "What is Work?" in the Winter 2012 edition of the American Bar Association's Labor and Employment Law newsletter.

Employee Free Speech: Protections Needed in the Social Networking World, and in the Real World

2012-05-17T22:01:54Z

As the Presidential election campaigns heat up, we are likely to see increased political conversations by employees. Unfortunately, while corporations and other organizations have free speech rights, employees do not. In fact, in at least two recent cases, employees have been fired for the simple expressive act of liking someone on Facebook, such as the employees fired by a local sheriff after they "liked" the Facebook page of his political rival. And while speech-related conflicts are perhaps as old as employment itself, the explosion of social media has created new opportunities for expression, such as liking, following, tweeting, or blogging, and therefore has increased the need for protecting employee speech.

]]> Freedom of speech means the right to freely express opinions and views. This should go beyond the literal voicing of opinions to also include expressive conduct such as tearing up a memo in front of co-workers, putting up a poster on your office door, picketing an employer, or liking a Facebook page. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects freedom of expression by restricting governmental limitations on freedom of speech, but not organizational limitations on speech. When the First Amendment was adopted more than 200 years ago, the United States was largely a rural, agrarian society. The workplace was not a significant aspect of daily life and social interaction. The few employers that existed were very small and not very powerful. How times have changed!

The chilling effect of a lack of employee free speech is revealed by the statement of a state forester in a newspaper story on a controversial plan to allow off-road truck trails in state forests: "I think it would be inappropriate to give my real opinion. We're good employees, we do what we're told." The denial of freedom of speech rights to employees is hard to justify when organizations enjoy these protections. Either this protection for organizations stems from the importance of political discourse in the workplace or from a deeper recognition that the free exchange of ideas is an essential part of being human and is beneficial for all decision-making. In either case, we must ask the same question--given the deep importance of freedom of speech, how can we exclude employees? At the same time, the extension of freedom of expression to workers does not imply unlimited rights to undermine an employer's business or harass co-workers. As in other areas of the employment relationship, a balance is required.

Steve Befort and I have therefore proposed that in the absence of legitimate business reasons or legitimate employee performance issues, U.S. employees should be entitled to a broad freedom of speech protection. The effectiveness of the political process as well as respect for human dignity require that employees be able to exchange ideas, complain, and blog or tweet about issues of either public or private concern. We believe that this can be accomplished in a straightforward fashion with statutory protections for employee free speech in which private and public employers are not allowed to violate an employee's freedom of expression either in or out of the workplace absent a legitimate business justification for a specific limitation. If a worker who has been disciplined or discharged can make a case that this stemmed from expressive activity, then the employer must demonstrate a "substantial and legitimate business reason" for the action to be legally acceptable.

Additional reading: Stephen F. Befort and John W. Budd, Invisible Hands, Invisible Objectives: Bringing Workplace Law and Public Policy Into Focus (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Labor Relations Advice: The Importance of Being Level-Headed and Respectful

2012-04-27T15:25:28Z

As an author of a comprehensive labor relations textbook (Labor Relations: Striking a Balance, McGraw-Hill), I was recently asked to provide some general advice for future human resources and labor relations managers. Issues within the labor relations arena can often be laden with highly-charged and volatile emotions. For complex reasons, the mere mention of labor unions can raise passions, if not outright hostility, among business leaders and others to a much greater extent than many other business and economic issues. Managers should avoid these traps, and instead approach issues in labor relations in a level-headed and respectful manner.

]]> An important part of being level-headed is seeking to truly understand other perspectives. Business and labor leaders frequently disagree on key issues, and there is a tendency for each side to dismiss the other side as greedy, short-sighted, and other negative attributes. What's overlooked is that business and labor leaders typically have different underlying frames of reference--that is, different implicit assumptions about the workings of the employment relationship. By embracing contrasting frames of reference, business and labor leaders effectively see the world through different lenses, and therefore have contrasting views on best business practices. It is important for managers to understand these frames of references in order to approach labor relations issues wisely.

With respect to the employment relationship, business leaders typically have an interest-alignment frame of reference. From this perspective, it is assumed that the interests of employers and employees can be aligned by well-designed human resource management practices. A pay-for-performance system, for example, can serve employers' interests for high levels of employee performance while simultaneously fulfilling employees' interests in greater rewards. Labor leaders, in contrast, typically have a plurality of interests frame of reference. From this perspective, the employment relationship is seen as having complex stakeholders with multiple interests that cannot always be aligned--higher dividends for shareholders mean less compensation available for employees, longer work hours yield higher profits, but more employee stress, and so on.

Even though these two different ways of seeing the employment relationship are usually implicit rather than explicitly articulated, they yield sharply contrasting views on labor unions. From an interest-alignment perspective, labor unions are seen as unnecessary. Human resource management practice is based on the interest-alignment assumption that what's good for employees is good for business, and vice versa. If there is conflict in the workplace, it is believed that improved human resource management practices will resolve this. Moreover, if markets are seen as ideally competitive, as in the basic textbook model of economics, then any employer that tries to exploit its employees will not be able to recruit and retain employees. Indeed, if markets are competitive in the ideal sense, then labor unions are seen as worse than unnecessary--they are seen as monopolizing organizations that distort the operation of competitive markets to the benefit of union members and at the expense of all others. It bears repeating that this perspective reflects a particular frame of reference that rests on a belief that markets are competitive in the ideal case of the basic economic model.

From a plurality of interests perspective, labor unions are seen in a very different light. Specifically, the belief that conflicts of interest invariably exist in the employment relationship means that employers will not always act in the best interests of its employees. Labor unions are therefore seen as an important voice mechanism that represents employees' interests when decisions are made. Moreover, economic markets are not believed to be competitive in the ideal textbook sense. Rather, employers are seen as having bargaining power advantages over individual employees. Labor unions are therefore seen as a necessary vehicle for striking a better balance between employers' interests and employees' interests when markets favor employers over individual employees. It is this frame of reference, not an interest-alignment frame of reference, that is widely embraced by labor leaders, that provides the intellectual foundation for labor laws that protect employees' right to form unions, and also that helps us understand why employees try to form unions.

Appreciating these contrasting perspectives is a key element of being a level-headed manager within the labor relations domain. At the same time, recognizing these different perspectives is not a magic solution. It does not make the differences between the business and labor perspectives disappear. But it does provide the basis for a rational understanding of the different perspectives. Rather than dismissing labor leaders as selfish or short-sighted, they should be respected for pursuing what they believe is a socially beneficial path. This more respectful view, in turn, provides the foundation for developing a productive rather than destructive dialogue with labor leaders and like-minded employees. Ultimately, whether a labor union is good or bad from a business perspective depends on the specific labor-management relationship within a particular organization. To create a productive relationship, managers should avoid the emotional rhetoric that too often accompanies labor relations issues, and instead should be level-headed and respectful.

When dealing with labor leaders during negotiations and when handling grievances, it is also important for managers to remain level-headed and respectful. In these contexts, managers and unions leaders both have constituencies that they are trying to satisfy. Managers want the approval of other managers and their bosses; union leaders need the approval of the rank and file union members. The difference is that these concerns are played out in a more public fashion on the union side. A disapproving executive can quietly reprimand a labor relations manager, but an unpopular labor leader will be publicly voted out of office.

So managers need to remember that part of what happens during bargaining and grievance handling is a performance to demonstrate strength to the rank and file union membership. Managers therefore should avoid getting emotionally involved in these incidents. Table pounding, yelling, even personal attacks are likely a "show" for the rank and file. Level-headed managers know their roles and the nature of the entire performance, and wait for their opportunities to deal productively with the labor leader out of the public spotlight. In multiple ways, then, remaining level-headed and respectful is a key route to success in the labor relations arena.

Note: For more on the importance of frames of reference in human resources and labor relations, see John W. Budd and Devasheesh Bhave (2010) "The Employment Relationship," in Adrian Wilkinson, Tom Redman, Scott Snell, and Nicolas Bacon, eds., Sage Handbook of Human Resource Management (London: Sage), pp. 51-70.