Partnering against Insecurity? A Comparison of Markets, Institutions and Worker Risk in Canadian and Swedish Retail

Abstract

This article provides insights on how union power influences the outcomes of labour‐management partnerships, with a focus on insecurity. It examines matched pairs of food retailers in Canada and Sweden. Trends in wages, scheduling and union coverage from 1980 to 2016 are compared. Actors in both contexts adopted partnering strategies in response to intensified price competition. However, the Swedish partnerships produced stable work arrangements, while working conditions eroded considerably in Canada. Bargaining structures, union security and identity are examined to explain the variations. As market competition intensified, the Swedish union gained leverage by using partnerships to fight unfair competition and promote sectoral well‐being in the process. Meanwhile, the Canadian union lost leverage, instead using partnerships to align employment practices with those of low‐cost market entrants and enhancing store‐level performance at all costs. The argument is that markets can be a resource for unions, even in low‐skilled service sectors, but only under inclusive institutions.

Collective labor relations and juridification: A marriage proposal

“…Benassi and Dorigatti, 2015). The case therefore supports the assertion that the ability of the social partners to promote effective representation depends at least partly on their promotion of regulation that encompasses the entire sector, as well as strategically mobilizing their constituencies while maintaining cross-class cooperation (O’Brady, 2019).…”

“…So while support from state agencies for rights-based representation can ‘erode collective industrial relations processes’ (Currie and Teague, 2016: 380), in this case the focus on the joint regulation of rights enhanced the legitimacy of collective bargaining at sectoral level. This underlines the importance of context and the position of the trade union within law and norms (O’Brady, 2019; O’Sullivan et al, 2015): while in decentralized IR systems unions can be overwhelmed by litigation, due to employer strategies of avoiding collective frameworks (Guillaume, 2018: 239), and juridification embodies the ‘line of conflict’ between unions and employers, in the context of Israel’s corporatist institutional legacies this conflict is ‘contained’ within the sphere of social partnership. Where the union has (historical) institutional support, employers are more likely to engage with the union in addressing individual disputes within collective frameworks.…”

Situating human resource management in the political economy: Multilevel theorising and opportunities for kaleidoscopic imagination

“…Scholars in the comparative employment relations and HRM fields study how national varieties of capitalism or business systems may encourage different sets of HRM policies that complement employers' competitive strategies in global markets (Bamber et al, 2021; T. Edwards & Rees, 2017). Stronger or more inclusive national regulations, labour laws, welfare states, and collective bargaining arrangements may also strengthen labour's countervailing power; which, in turn, encourages employers to invest in “high road” models of HRM through constraining “low road” alternatives (O'Brady, 2020).…”

New Directions in Employment Relations Theory: Understanding Fragmentation, Identity, and Legitimacy

“…At the same time, mutual gains appeared to still be possible given the right set of coordinating institutions. Researchers could point to examples such as Germany and Sweden where unions retained more of their past institutional power, as well as to positive cases of labor–management partnership in more liberal Anglo-American economies (O’Brady 2020). Such optimism has become more difficult to sustain as labor’s power has continued to decline relative to that of employers, states have begun to lose their traditional capacity to regulate employment relations, and the vestiges of normative consensus among employment relations actors have further eroded.…”