The Twin Track Model of Employee Voice: An Anglo-American Perspective on Union Decline and The Rise of Alternative Forms of Voice

Abstract

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The “good workplace”

“…In terms of the mechanisms by which commitment-led HR improves productivity there is suggestive evidence that it accrues through employee engagement and through improvements in workers' well-being. One study has identified a causal linkage between individual worker happiness and individual productivity (Oswald et al, 2015) while other recent studies suggest this link also exists at an organizational level (Bryson, Forth and Stokes, 2017;Bryson, Freeman, Gomez and Willman, 2017;.…”

“…With our full set of controls and typically "hard-to-observe" worker attitudes added to standard multivariate analyses, the relationship between unionization and employee satisfaction is expected to turn positive. Interestingly, the new empirical studies establishing neutral or positive associations between unions and employee satisfaction have appeared at the tail end of a steep decline in the number of workers covered by collective agreements in Britain (Bryson, Freeman, Gomez and Willman, 2017). And yet, British employers appear to still value worker input into decision making processes, as evidenced by the fact that since the early 1980s the percentage of workplaces (and workers) with some formal mechanisms for employees to express their voice has remained steady at around 80 percent (Willman et al, 2006;Bryson and MacKerron, 2016).…”

Productivity Dynamics: The Role of Competition in a Service Industry

“…Union locals in the United States are reliant on the recruitment and retention of members (their customers) as their primary income source. 3 To do so they must organise employees under the Wagner Act by winning majority support among employees in the same bargaining unit and efficiently servicing those members through the provision of union membership (Bryson et al, 2019).…”

Hpws in the Public Sector: Are There Mutual Gains?

“…With our full set of controls and typically 'hard-to-observe' worker attitudes added to standard multivariate analyses, the relationship between unionisation and employee satisfaction is expected to turn positive. Interestingly, the new empirical studies establishing neutral or positive associations between unions and employee satisfaction have appeared at the tail end of a steep decline in the number of workers covered by collective agreements in Britain (Bryson, Freeman, Gomez and Willman, 2017). And yet, British employers appear to still value worker input into decision making processes, as evidenced by the fact that since the early 1980s the percentage of workplaces (and workers) with no formal mechanisms for employees to express their voice has remained steady at around 20 percent (Willman et al, 2006;Bryson, 2017).…”