Abstract

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This article, drawing on the latest insights into organisational silence, considers how employers seek to withhold information and circumvent meaningful workplace voice when confronted with regulatory requirements. It offers novel theoretical insights by redefining employer silencing as characterised by the withholding of information and the restriction of workplace dialogue. In outlining three principal routes of non-compliance-avoidance, suppression, and neglect-we empirically illustrate the path to silence in the regulatory context of the European Union Directive establishing a general framework for informing and consulting employees. Rather than considering how employers utilised the regulations, as existing research considers, we look at how employers circumvented the regulatory space in three case studies in the United Kingdom and Ireland and the significant role of employer silencing as a tool for explaining this dynamic.

This article examines the responses of the industrial relations actors to the economic crisis in Ireland and the impact on collective bargaining. The data were collected at national, sectoral and workplace levels. We find the existence of both change and continuity, with increased diversity in collective bargaining in manufacturing, including a distinct shift to enterprise bargaining shaped by the capacity of management and local union representatives to adapt to wider pressures. We consider the implications for government, employers and unions.

Abstract