“Something’s gotta give”: trade unions and the road to team working

Abstract

IntroductionA fundamental feature of modern management theory and practice is team working. Human resource management (HRM), total quality management (TQM), just-in-time (JIT) and business process re-engineering (BPR) each share an implicit unitarist ideology and a common emphasis on teams. In terms of HRM, the whole organization may be viewed as a team (Guest, 1987). TQM entails teams of workers coming together in order to solve problems in the interests of all (Crosby, 1979); while the most recent management buzzword -BPR -emphasizes "teams" of multiskilled workers (Hammer and Champy, 1993a) and aims "to develop systems built around teams" (Grint, 1994, p. 181). Trade unions are often deemed incompatible with HRM (Guest, 1987) and are rarely considered in relation to TQM (Wilkinson et al., 1991) or BPR. According to Ackers et al. (1996), team working "follows a long standing effort by employers to weaken occupational consciousness" (p. 15). Yet Keenoy (1990) has asked, if HRM is to meet the interests of all, why should trade unionism be inconsistent with HRM? Moreover, if after BPR, "work becomes more satisfying" (Hammer and Champy, 1993b, p. 10), why should unions be incompatible with BPR? Such organizational conceptions pay only passing attention to issues of power, politics, conflict or competing interest groups. It is assumed that such issues fade away, either as a consequence of visionary leadership, or following the introduction of team working. By team working we refer to innovations such as cellular manufacturing, autonomous working, flexible working practices, employee involvement, consultation and supervision through team leaders. It is both an "ideological construct" expressing a unitarist understanding of the world and "a mode of organizing the shopfloor" (Pollert, 1996, p. 179).Team working may be resisted by trade unions where it threatens employment levels and if team leaders are used by management to by-pass shop stewards (Garrahan, 1986), or if it accompanies work intensification (Berggren, 1993;Parker and Slaughter, 1988). It is not possible to know what the responses of shop stewards are, or what the implications of team working will be for shop stewards, as trade unions have generally been neglected within the

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