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WORKER PARTICIPATION IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY: SOME CRITICAL ISSUES

Carmen Sirianni

Worker participation has had a great diversity of meanings, forms, and motives over the course of the twentieth century. Many different terms are used to describe—or prescribe—workers’ active involvement in decision making at work: worker participation, industrial democracy, workers’ control, self-management, workplace democracy, codetermination, employee involvement, quality of worklife (QWL), to name just the most prominent. This diversity, of course, reflects not just different historical periods, national traditions, or academic theories but the reality of conflict and contested meanings—over the nature of work, the distribution of power, and, quite often, the future of industrial society itself. Worker participation has thus been a preeminently political phenomenon, even when disguised in apolitical or sanitized human relations terms. It has always been implicated in the conflicts of the workplace, the politics of skill and union organization, and very often in the distribution of political power in the larger social system.

This has been as true in the later part of this century as it was in the earlier decades when worker participation first achieved widespread significance as a result of mass movements for participation, resistance to scientific management, and various managerial, political, and union responses to channel protest and provide manageable structures for worker involvement in industry. As Steve Fraser has noted of this earlier period, workers’ control and industrial democracy were complex metaphors, evocative yet often imprecise, with meanings that varied according to the social grammar in which they were embedded.¹ Leaders of the Betriebsräte in Germany or the consigli di fabbrica in Italy, and revolutionary theorists such as Karl Korsch and Antonio Gramsci, developed very different conceptions of the worker’s role in production than the craft workers and artisans who had practiced local control for decades, or the moderate trade union leaders and corporate managers who tried to adjust in their own particular ways to demands for participation. What was industrial democracy for one afforded either too much or too little democratic power for the other.² In the confrontation over self-management in Poland in 1981 between Solidarity and the regime, this was again the case.³ And as Robert Cole points out, the different terminology for small-group participation in various countries today reflects the relative balance of power and initiative of various actors. In Japan, where managers have been firmly in control of small-group innovations like quality circles all along, the terms participation and industrial democracy have seldom appeared, whereas the Swedish labor movement has possessed the industrial, political, and cultural power to shift the terms of debate toward democratization of various levels of the firm and economy. Those union leaders in the United States who have been supportive of such innovations have also stressed the theme of industrial democracy, although managers and consultants are more likely to speak of employee involvement and participation—and for some, even participation seems to raise more expectations than they are prepared to handle. But the unfavorable balance of industrial power for the unions has made participatory and QWL programs quite controversial and often very divisive among unionists themselves, as I will discuss below.⁴

The discourse on worker participation, at least in the West, has been informed by more general debates on democratic theory, including radical democratic critiques of capitalism and state socialism. Within the liberal tradition, the developmental model of democracy of John Stuart Mill stressed the role of participatory institutions in creating active, informed, and cooperative citizens. And democratically run producer cooperatives were viewed as potentially transforming not only the economic but the moral basis of society.⁵ Various Marxist and syndicalist traditions have looked to workers’ control and industrial democracy as an essential element in egalitarian social and economic transformation, and within Marxism, in particular, participation has been seen as an antidote to alienation.⁶ Recent political theorists, such as Carole Patemen and Robert Dahl, drawing upon both liberal and democratic socialist theory, have argued that economic and industrial democracy is essential to a truly democratic social and political order.⁷ And though normative theories of worker participation are not the focus of this volume, I have argued elsewhere that they not only have been central to the actual development of participatory reform but continue to be a crucial ingredient in the effort to expand the parameters of democratic and egalitarian thought and practice. But a normative theory of participation, one that pushes at the boundaries of a vision of democratic control in economic life, must question the division of labor at the sociotechnical level as well as the broader structures of segmented opportunity, at the same time avoiding idealizations of the one best model for participation in the varied workplaces of complex industrial societies. Normative political theories of participation have often been misleading or incomplete in this regard. Recent sociotechnical, participatory, and work-time innovations furnish us with increasingly concrete and realistic indications of what a pluralist, democratic, and egalitarian division of labor might look like, and thus provide the flesh and bones for further elaborating normative theory.⁸

A survey of the empirical development of participatory reforms in the twentieth century would show several distinct periods of relatively intense innovation, the major ones occurring during and immediately following the two world wars, and the period beginning in the mid- to late 1960s and continuing to the present.⁹ Wartime political crises, and especially lost wars as in Germany twice in this century, have been particularly conducive to the development of worker-control movements and/or the institutionalization of worker representation in the governance of industry. Wartime economic mobilization also has created favorable labor-market conditions for workers to press demands for participation. In the later period beginning in the 1960s, as well, tight labor markets in many advanced industrial countries enhanced workers’ ability to struggle for improvements in working conditions, and this in turn led to another wave of participatory reform.¹⁰ A new breed of younger, more highly educated workers had come into the workforce, and many expected work to provide a source of interest, meaning, self-respect, individual rights, and equity—fertile soil in which participatory themes would grow.¹¹ And yet, as Cole shows, the relative degree of labor shortage was an important factor in shaping managerial responses in different countries to the problems of high turnover, absenteeism, and increasing discontent with working conditions. In Japan and Sweden serious labor shortages prompted managerial elites to experiment with small-group participatory reforms on a broad scale in order to attract and retain workers, especially in industries like autos, whereas American managers, faced with similar discontents and high turnover rates, had little motive to introduce participation because unemployment rates were relatively high and workers could more easily be replaced. As a result, despite some early showcase examples, the United States has lagged behind these and several other countries in participatory innovation, and only the challenges of international competition in the late 1970s and early 1980s have spurred greater attention in this area. And, as George Ross points out, the rise and fall of the more radical autogestionnaire struggles in France were also linked to changing conditions in the labor market.¹²

The later period of innovation in the West seems to be less marked by clear-cut breaks than the previous two major periods, even though workers’ power in the labor market and through the political process have remained important factors in the development of reforms. As Peter Brannen notes, “whilst there are ebbs and flows, the general process is more akin to a ratchet effect: the fall back after the surge always stops at a higher level than before.”¹³ This may not be strictly true in terms of enhanced worker power in all cases—it is certainly questionable where participative schemes are used to undermine union power on the shop floor. But it is undoubtedly true that the forms of participation have often built upon earlier gains while becoming increasingly richer and more diverse, and have more profoundly affected the sociotechnical organization of work itself and not just representation at various levels of the firm.

Changes in international economic and political relations over the course of the century have also shaped participatory reform. In the period of World War I, movements for participation crystalized on an international scale around struggles against mass production and Taylorist rationalization, which had been given a great practical and ideological boost by wartime mobilization. By the end of the war, however, even many European unions that had been the strongest critics of Taylorism were forced to make accommodations in view of the challenge of U.S. industry and the absence of an effective international labor strategy. Older forms of craft control could no longer be effectively defended, especially in view of workers’ own interests in material security and a reduction of the workday to eight hours, which were seen to be contingent on becoming competitive through the adoption of the latest mass-production techniques. Workers’ control was thus redefined to accommodate many aspects of Taylorism, even when, as in the case of the Conféderation Générale du Travail (CGT) in France, this accommodation was not passive but creatively expanded conceptions of democratic control in industry.¹⁴ World War II only further reinforced the mass-production model on a global scale. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, a reversal of this process had become noticeable. As Robert Cole notes,¹⁵ it was countries such as Sweden and Japan, with a heavy reliance on export industries, that experimented more quickly and extensively with participation in their quest for quality and productivity, whereas the United States, having enjoyed a leading position in international trade and a vast domestic market, showed much less concern in this area. Only with the unavoidable challenges in the international market in the late 1970s did American managers begin to look at participatory reforms as a productivity strategy. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, in fact, trace a profound historic shift—a “second industrial divide”—which has led to the reemergence of a craft model with extensive worker participation in the late twentieth century. Various shocks in the international economy, the saturation of markets for mass-produced goods in industrial countries, and increasingly effective Third World development strategies based on mass production have helped revive flexible specialization and the craft model in a variety of industries, from specialty steel production and precision machine tools to specialty chemicals and customized textiles. The newer, more flexible technologies, such as numerical control for machine tools as well as looms, have made possible more rapid adjustment to changing markets and customized production in smaller runs. The mass-production paradigm has entered a period of crisis as a result of shifts in the international economy, even as changes in the early part of the century created the conditions for its original, if always partial, triumph. And new options are now available for reorganizing production in a way that puts a premium on flexible, participatory systems.¹⁶

Worker Participation and the Politics of Skill

In the remainder of this essay I will briefly discuss a number of critical issues that workplace participation schemes raise for the way we think about skills, technological development, work time, health and safety regulation, and union-management relations. Participation has added new dimensions to each of these and has raised questions that will determine the meaning of work and the future of industrial society for many years to come. That future, of course, is quite indeterminate, not only because the new technologies and their uses in the workplace are themselves still very fluid and flexible, but because the power context that shapes their development is unresolved and uncertain.

The first question is how to relate participatory innovations to the labor process debates of the past decade and a half, particularly the debate over deskilling. Braverman set the terms of the most recent debate in 1974 with his argument that, in the interests of lowering the cost of labor and securing control over the workforce, managers in capitalist (as well as state socialist) societies design the labor process to deskill work and to separate the conception from the execution of tasks. And, despite what official statistics might show, he argued further, the general trend has been in the direction of increased deskilling and degradation of work.¹⁷ The argument was provocative, not only because it seemed to describe deskilling strategies and realities in various occupations, but because it introduced questions of power and control in the labor process in a way that had been only faintly if at all present before, particularly in the United States. Soon, however, the central theses of the deskilling argument came to be questioned, even by those more radical critics of power and skill distributions in the workplace. Among the major criticisms were that (1) the deskilling argument overestimates the power and prescience of managers to structure the labor process in a way that will yield them maximum control; (2) it underestimates the degree to which workers’ struggles have themselves shaped the labor process; (3) nationwide studies of the American labor force simply do not support its contention of a deskilling trend; (4) it tends to romanticize the craft worker and the craft ideal of control and opportunity; to neglect, from a historical point of view, the differential interests of the less skilled and women workers for whom scientific management and bureaucratization often brought significant benefits; and, from a normative or ideal point of view, to misunderstand the challenges of creating a more egalitarian and democratic division of labor in a complex society where not all jobs can be reconstructed on a holistic or craft basis; and (5) it underestimates the extent to which new technologies, in order to be utilized cost effectively, depend on higher degrees of worker skill, commitment, attention, responsibility, and the capacity to keep learning, rather than on the mindless repetition of fragmented tasks separated from all planning and conception.¹⁸

Participatory innovations provide evidence for amplifying this critique of the deskilling thesis, although they by no means obviate the need for continued focus on power and control. The famous Topeka system, for instance, designed by Richard Walton of the Harvard Business School for a dog food plant owned by General Foods and others like it, demonstrated the degree to which teams could integrate a variety of tasks, from basic processing and packaging to quality control, purchasing, maintenance, and the like. Team members rotated tasks among themselves and received pay increments for new tasks learned, thus encouraging members to continue learning and teaching each other. Workers would earn the team rate as they mastered all the tasks performed by the team, and eventually the plant rate for all tasks of the plant short of formal managerial ones. The experiment, initiated by management in 1970 in response to labor problems at other General Foods plants with the intent of keeping out the union, has been very successful in terms of productivity, lower absenteeism, and higher product quality, though it went through some difficult times in the mid-1970s. (It was not discontinued, as some commentators wrongly reported.) But one particularly interesting problem that Walton has noted in this and other similarly designed systems is what to do when workers, in response to the incentives of pay and the challenge of learning new tasks, become too smart. In the first few years there existed a “skill gap” as workers strove to master new tasks, and the experience of progressively closing this gap helped produce high levels of commitment. But their learning was so successful that a “skill surplus” soon developed. Since no new products or new process technologies were introduced after 1974, workers’ skills began to outstrip the challenges posed by existing processes, and their high commitment and intrinsic motivation, though still greater than in comparable conventionally organized plants, began to slip. There in fact seems to be a general tendency in carefully designed systems such as these for worker skill and knowledge, and the problem-solving capacities of the teams as teams, to surpass, often considerably, the requirements of the technology, leading to what has been referred to as a “human resources surplus.” This, in turn, produces an “equity gap,” since workers come to feel that as they demonstrate their commitment and capacities for learning, and as the plant itself is economically successful, they neither have the opportunity to keep learning nor to keep earning pay increases at the rate they did in the earlier stages.¹⁹

Examples such as these raise many interesting issues. The most obvious, of course, is that they are living critiques of the Taylorist paradigm, combining participation and skill upgrading in a way that enhances productivity, and that, under certain circumstances, they can be the preferred strategy of management. But they also raise problems for management. The equity gap that Walton has noted seems to become more salient over time, and whether there will be strategies for its resolution on terms acceptable to management, such as profit or gain sharing, is uncertain. Changing products and technologies alleviate the problem to some extent by providing further opportunities for learning. But it does not seem reasonable to expect such continually changing products and technologies to provide the permanent basis for participatory systems in all or even most areas of production and service.²⁰ To the extent that participation becomes more generalized, I suspect that the open-ended learning model will itself have to be broadened beyond the boundaries of particular plants to include lifetime learning, career change, and opportunities for creative, high-commitment involvement outside the market as well as within it. Of course, whether this occurs, and whether the continued tensions surrounding equity and managerial control within participatory systems (which has led some experiments to be discontinued) will lead to challenges to the larger structure of power and ownership (e.g., worker participation in plant governance, worker ownership, control over investment) is uncertain. Participation and power at one level often lead to demands for the same at other levels. But this is not always the case, and often workers participating at the shopfloor level show little interest in firm governance or the election of management. And some argue that participation can be kept bounded.²¹ In any case, there is certainly no internal dynamic leading to the generalization of worker participation, but rather numerous processes and elements of dynamic instability. How these develop is as much dependent on factors in the external environment, such as political and economic crises, trade union strength and mobilization, legislative intervention, and the like. But the open learning model, which is even clearer in the following case, nonetheless raises questions that transcend particular workplaces and challenge systemic obstacles to continual learning and open opportunity more broadly.

An even more ambitious sociotechnical design, developed with the participation of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, is that of the Sarnia, Ontario, Shell Canada plant, which produces specialty chemicals.²² The design was a response, on the one hand, to pressure from highly paid workers for more opportunity to develop their skills and to have greater control over the work process, and, on the other hand, to the suboptimal utilization of the technology under the deskilling assumptions that had guided the engineers who had originally designed the plant. Such suboptimal utilization, including costly errors and downtime, which often result from the neglect of the skills and commitment of the workers who operate complex technologies, has been noted not only by critics of the deskilling argument but by proponents and analysts of worker participation throughout the 1970s.²³ The organizational model chosen at Sarnia aimed to maximize learning and improve the response time to disturbances as they arose. The computer software was designed to respond to queries posed by the operators, but to leave decision making in their hands, and an offline computer served to facilitate learning. It was thus a “passive” information system without closed decisional loops whose purpose, to use Shoshanna Zuboff’s terminology, was to informate rather than automate.²⁴ In order to make informed decisions and respond quickly, workers had to be supplied with technical and economic data conventionally only available to technical staff. The learning model treats the entire plant as the relevant unit for all workers, with no internal boundaries, so that plant-wide learning can take place. As a result of the agreement with the union to forego detailed job classifications and seniority-based promotion in return for the opportunity for meaningful work, continued learning, and participation (with no customary management rights clause in the contract), work could be organized without specific job descriptions, and teams made responsible for overall operations and the rotation of tasks among team members on a day-to-day basis. Each team of eighteen members and a coordinator operates the entire process, including the lab work, shipping, warehousing, janitorial work, conflict resolution, administration, and many aspects of maintenance, and each team rotates over the various shifts in an innovative way that will be discussed further below. The only nonrotating team is composed of maintenance “craftsmen-instructors,” who not only do the basic maintenance work but teach such skills to all teams, as do the two lab specialists who also work the day shift. In this relatively flat organizational structure there are only the plant superintendant and operations managers in addition to the worker teams. And the fundamental premise of the design is that organizational learning requires unrestricted individual learning, and hence a system of open progression. Grade levels are based on skill, measured by exams and performance tests. Each member is expected to acquire all the knowledge and skill modules for process operations. Beyond this, there are different specialty areas, the combination of which define distinct career paths within the plant. Not only are there no quotas as to how many can progress through these career paths, but the expectation is that everyone will reach the top level, though there are no time limits placed on this, and workers are not forced to advance if they do not wish.

This example, and many of the sociotechnical designs that are similar to it, reveal how profound is the shift from the older forms of craft control and the informal or collectively bargained forms of job control based on narrowly defined skill classifications. Participatory sociotechnical systems, especially when combined with the informating potential of the new technologies, allow for multiskilling and permanent learning that cut across old demarcations, and often involve an understanding of the entire process of production. Workers’ horizons become broader, and their skills more theoretical or intellective. Tacit, embodied, and often exclusive skills become more explicit, public, and shared. Technology itself becomes a tool for learning and exercising discretion, and information systems become more open and less blocked by hierarchical controls. And the theoretical skills learned to run one kind of informated process are often applicable to a variety of other areas of production, service, and administration as well. This is not only strikingly different from what deskilling theorists such as Braverman would have expected, but it gives the lie to the more radical version of the Marxist critique that sees capitalist principles to be embodied in the very essence of modern technological development.²⁵ Although such technologies, and the work systems that organize them, remain very much a contested terrain, they represent in many ways a sounder and more effective basis for organizational and workplace democracy than has ever before existed.

Unions and Participation

One way to ensure that the new technologies are not used to deskill work or to deprive workers of control and discretion, however, is for workers to participate in the very design and implementation of these technologies. Many unions, of course, bargain over the effects of new technologies, such as staffing plans, retraining and relocation, rating systems, or limiting their use for individual monitoring of performance. But the great majority of these bargain after the fact, i.e., after the new technologies have already been designed, and little can be done to alter their basic configuration.²⁶ Whether the deskilling effects of new technologies are unplanned, however,²⁷ or whether they reflect deeper managerial fantasies of complete control,²⁸ some unions have begun to demand participation—before the fact—in the design process itself.

Recent analyses indicate some of the innovative ways this is beginning to occur, particularly in the Scandinavian countries, and some of the difficult obstacles faced by workers and their unions in shaping the design process.²⁹ In the case of the UTOPIA project analyzed by Andrew Martin, graphic workers’ unions in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland received public funding to develop new design specifications for a text and image processing system that would preserve the jobs, professional skills, and control exercised by graphics workers, while taking advantage of the flexible uses of the latest technology in printing. In other cases, agreements have been collectively bargained that have allowed worker and union representatives to participate in various stages of the design process. The methods for ensuring worker input have included the formation of local study circles and joint union-management technology committees to analyze the problems of existing technologies and to formulate alternative specifications, the election of data stewards, the hiring of outside consultants approved by the union (in some cases with employer funds), and the use of special laboratories for the development and testing of prototypes. In the case of the Norwegian savings banks analyzed by Howard and Schneider, for instance, working groups established in the different branches spent two-day sessions several times a month over the course of six months learning about system alternatives and making suggestions that they could discuss with the rest of their workmates. At the end of this period some of these people were chosen to go to the computer center for one month to work further with the system designers and to ensure that the workers’ recommendations were followed. Not only were various systems developed that improved the quality of service and work, but the union agreement under which this occurred established a quota of training slots for women to counter the tendency of their becoming trapped in low-wage ghettoes within banking. Swedish metalworkers negotiated an agreement that resulted in the redesign of numerical control systems whereby machinists receive a machine tool design from the design department but utilize software that allows them to develop a program for its manufacture. And they can refine the control program through the successive use of modeling techniques, thus developing their own professional skill in the process.³⁰

A number of very interesting alternative designs have been developed over the past decade that have involved rank-and-file workers and union representatives at various stages in the design process itself, and that have created new possibilities for learning, skill development, and initiative at work. And yet this form of participation presents more formidable challenges than many of the other forms of worker involvement, such as quality circles. To engage in a continual round of design, implementation, and evaluation, and to develop the in-house technical skills both at the rank-and-file level and among union staff to make this effective, requires a major commitment of resources, and the unions can often ill afford to divert such resources (time, training, money) away from the other tasks with which they are engaged. Nonetheless, if union representatives on labor-management technology committees are not to become hostages of managers’ and system designers’ points of view, if local study circles are to develop genuine competence in analyzing work organization and design alternatives, if demonstration projects are to receive funding to get off the ground, if permanent staff members are to develop the expertise to permit them to bargain effectively at subsequent stages, and if outside consultants are to be hired to represent labor’s point of view, then a considerable commitment of resources is needed. Strong union organizations, such as those in Scandinavia, have been able to generate some of these resources internally and to bargain effectively for others, such as the funds from employers to hire outside consultants. But even here, especially as some unions find inadequate a strategy based solely on joint projects with management and seek to build up their own research capacities, the problem of resources remains a difficult one. Where the resources are available and the unions exercise a strong presence, however, they can be quite effective in providing the context for flexible and informal influence by workers on the shop floor—a crucial ingredient for the development of viable alternatives, as Howard and Schneider demonstrate. And strong unions are a key element in dynamizing the complex feedback loop that moves from local knowledge and participation on the shop floor, to the formulation of demands for alternatives and the fruitful collaboration with experts at various levels, to the development of actual prototypes and a new round of testing and local input.³¹

The political strength of unions is, of course, crucial if significant amounts of public funds are to be channeled into alternative technology projects with union participation in the design process. Martin’s study of the UTOPIA project makes clear how critical public funds are, and how the unions cannot hope to compete against the resources of management without such funds. The effective democratization of knowledge and technology cannot occur without extensive public support and a reorientation of the research policy of the state. Even in Sweden, where the legislative context for participation developed quite favorably for the unions in the 1970s, where the Social Democrats have returned to power after a relatively brief interlude by the opposition parties, and where the unions have demanded a reorientation of research policy since 1981, public support for alternative technology projects that protect the skills and control of workers has been neither particularly strong nor coherent.

The other obstacles to a genuinely democratic technology policy with extensive worker participation are also quite formidable. Some of the new technologies, while dissolving old boundaries between professional and nonprofessional or between white- and blue-collar workers, also create the basis for intense occupational struggle over staffing and lines of demarcation. This is the case, for instance, between programmers and machinists on numerical control systems, and graphics workers and journalists working with computerized text and print technologies. And the problem is made more difficult when significant staff reductions are possible, when the general employment situation is not favorable, or when policies for retraining and placement are not well developed. Although some graphics workers and journalists in the UTOPIA project, for instance, were able to work these problems out on a local level, conflicts between their respective unions on the national level were so intense as to lead to a discontinuance of the formal project. As Martin notes, the project developed a rich fund of experience for developing new specifications, and these have served in local negotiations for various graphics workers’ unions and for redesigning training requirements in the vocational colleges. But an effective general strategy for dealing with the shift in demarcations that many of the new technologies entail is contingent on innovative forms of cross-occupational cooperation and retraining. Fixed boundaries can no longer suffice as the basis for an industrial politics of opportunity that is equitable and democratic in an age of increasing technological flexibility. Participation provides some of the answers, but the problem itself is much larger.

In addition, international competition does not always act as a spur to flexible systems with increased participation, but often constrains firms operating within narrow profit margins from experimenting with alternative designs. A market-driven model of participatory work organization development, such as offered by Piore and Sabel, must thus be modified, and the factors in national and international markets favoring and hindering flexible participatory systems must be specified further. As Howard and Schneider point out, increasing participation may require that certain aspects of technology be taken out of competition through a broader framework of social regulation, in a way that health and safety or minimum wage levels have been. Needless to say, this is much easier to achieve on the national level than on an international scale, but the dilemmas are not fundamentally different from previous struggles to regulate health and safety, or working hours, where international competitiveness was also at issue. Of course, the international dominance of multinationals from countries with weak labor movements unable to shape the design process significantly (e.g., IBM), the increasing availability of “package systems,” and the funding of technology and work organization development by the military place severe constraints on local participation in the design process.³²

The challenges facing democratizers are thus quite formidable and complex, and require a multilevel strategy.³³ Unions must not only develop a perspective on the design of technologies at the earliest stage possible, they must generate significant resources so as to be able to present that perspective effectively and coherently at each stage of design, implementation, and evaluation. This is necessary both to facilitate and generate local knowledge and expertise among the rank and file, as well as among union staff. At each of the levels of worker involvement, communication and forms of alliance with technical staff must be developed in order to ensure good systems representing the concerns of workers. Strategies to deal with occupational demarcations and staffing issues must be worked out, and often this will require broader employment and training policies. State-sponsored research must itself be reoriented and sufficient funds provided to permit unions to shape technology policy according to the democratic principles of worker participation and skill enhancement.

The problem of resources, of course, is not confined to the technology bargaining process, but affects all participatory programs in which unions become involved. Even in those countries where the unions are quite strong, such as Sweden and Norway, there is competition for resources among various union activities, including various levels of participatory involvement (e.g., codetermination at the plant level or small-group activity). Where unions are generally weaker and under vigorous attack, as in the United States, the relative distribution of resources that management and labor can devote to participatory programs can determine whether these programs genuinely serve to enhance the quality of work and the input of workers, or whether they undermine the role of the union and the collective-bargaining process. Until now, management in the United States has generally had the upper hand in terms of relative resources. It has been able to commit more staff and spend more time. It has largely controlled the training of QWL facilitators, the writing of materials, and the selection of outside consultants. It has been able to do long-range planning, and it controls the daily resources (e.g., access to typewriters and photocopiers) as well as access to information that makes programs succeed or fail. It has provided channels of mobility for worker facilitators and thus poses a permanent threat of cooptation for even some of the more militant among the rank and file. Critics of QWL programs, such as Mike Parker, argue that such unequal resources fundamentally bias participatory programs against workers and their unions.³⁴ But even proponents of QWL concerned with strengthening labor and collective bargaining through the QWL process, such as Thomas Kochan and his associates, recognize that this requires unions to devote considerably more resources to the training of facilitators, the education of local leaders, and the development of national staff with specific expertise in QWL and its attendant problems. It entails providing opportunities for mobility within the unions for the many talented facilitators who come through QWL, and the cultivation of a broad range of activities (conferences and the like) that can help shape the network of QWL professionals and consultants according to labor’s concerns. And it means that the national unions must be committed to supporting local activities, monitoring developments, and putting out fires when programs run into difficulties, as they inevitably do.³⁵

But ambivalence toward QWL remains profound within American labor, despite the support of prominent unions such as the United Automobile Workers, the Steel Workers, and the Communication Workers—and even in these unions there is skepticism and opposition. The main reason for this is the larger context in which QWL exists. Not only have unions never been fully accepted by American employers, but the current wave of union-busting activity continues to sour labor-management cooperation. QWL is seen by some as part of a larger strategy to weaken or destroy unions. And there certainly has been a link in many cases. In some instances quality circles have been directly used to prevent unionization and to strongarm union supporters, and many union-busting consultants also peddle QWL programs.³⁶ In other instances the relationship has been more subtle and indirect—picking away at union power by using participatory programs to create alternative allegiances, or by making the union appear bureaucratic in its struggle for worker benefits, and management flexible and responsive by contrast. Or programs developed in union plants have been transplanted to nonunion ones, sometimes with attendant job losses in the former. The fact that the second generation of participatory programs developed in response to the external challenge of international competition and was accompanied by concessionary bargaining and layoffs in many instances makes unions considerably more ambivalent than they might have been to management initiatives. And perhaps no factor has been more disruptive of union participation in QWL programs than layoffs, which reduce the trust necessary for joint programs, or appear as an explicit violation of promises that no job losses will result from QWL. Although unions have in some instances been able to use QWL to limit job losses, or to develop more acceptable ways to handle what appears inevitable, the fact remains that it is hard to pinpoint whether efficiencies achieved through QWL are responsible for workforce reductions. Consequently, union leaders who support QWL as a means to prevent job loss are taking considerable political risks. Union leaders thus often feel compelled to respond to QWL initiatives, or to propose some themselves, because of the threat of job loss but continue to feel ambivalent because they do not control the conditions under which reductions are decided and because the larger context has been generally hostile to unions. Both labor proponents and critics agree, however, that the environment within which QWL programs function makes it crucial to link them to the collective-bargaining process and to institutionalize them within contractual agreements, rather than to allow management to take initiatives while the union looks on as a watchdog.³⁷ Both the micropolitics of QWL within the firm and the larger political and economic context outside make participatory programs very much a contested terrain. And it is this macropolitical environment, as Cole argues, that has impeded the development of a national infrastructure for participatory reform.³⁸

In this context, innovative classification systems and sociotechnical designs, pay for knowledge, and flexible team organization are not unequivocably empowering of workers. Many get increased access to training, greater variety of tasks, more control over the way work groups organize their daily activities, and greater access to information on overall plant operations and economic performance. But they trade off greater flexibility to management in the way it can deploy human resources and give up the protective functions that highly formalized and detailed work rules and classifications perform. The tradition of job-control unionism that had evolved in the United States over many decades has been an important source of power for workers on the shop floor, protecting them against arbitrariness, speedup, health and safety risks, and ensuring negotiation over new requirements added to particular jobs. Less reliance on common rule strategies and the increased variability and flexibility that results from the reduction of detailed formal classifications make the union’s task of representing worker interests, limiting managerial arbitrariness, and containing competition among workers more complex.³⁹ The skilled trades often feel most threatened and have least to gain from these new systems. And in some cases the creation of broader categories and “supercrafts” can perhaps function as a form of deskilling, with skilled workers exercising a wider range of tasks but on a narrower set of machines.⁴⁰ Whether workers and unions in the United States can turn these more flexible systems to their own advantage and enhance their power—perhaps extending joint participation in QWL programs and labor-management committees into works councils at the plant level—or whether flexibility and increased access to workers’ knowledge will be used to enhance managerial power and mobilize consent, is at this point quite indeterminate.⁴¹ But the extent to which participation is empowering or cooptative does not depend so much on the formal design of the programs themselves as it does on the mobilizing activity that the unions and rank-and-file workers bring to them.⁴²

Participation in Health and Safety

An area where there has been considerable movement toward increasing participation over the past decade and a half, especially in Europe, has been health and safety. The free-market philosophy that had viewed hazardous work as a matter of free choice, to be compensated by higher wages, had gradually come to be modified by the belief that the state should intervene to ensure protection, and that standards should be developed and administered by neutral bodies of technical experts. Rule-based strategies of state regulation entail the formulation of general rules, applied universally, stating exactly what conditions are to be allowed and disallowed. The process of regulation is one of matching facts to rules in the manner of judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings. More recently, however, the limitations of rule-based strategies have become more and more apparent, and the rights of workers themselves to participate in the process of making workplaces more healthful and safe, as well as their competence in establishing appropriate norms for the work environment, have been increasingly recognized. Workers’ participation has come to be viewed as an effective way of monitoring and preventing hazards, of mobilizing workers to cooperate with safety regulations, and of ensuring collaboration of workers and managers in the process. At a more ambitious level, it has come to be increasingly recognized that workers can directly contribute to the very definition of what constitutes health and safety, and that their local knowledge can form the basis for effective short- and long-term solutions. Participation, however, came to be seen during the 1970s as not only a relevant and effective instrument but as a right—and for some workers and unions, an absolute and inalienable one at that.⁴³

Perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of rule-based strategies is that developed in Norway in the various work research institutes, and whose principles are now embodied in the Work Environment Act of 1977. This critique argues that rules cannot be developed for all relevant hazards, such as ergonomics or stress. Rule-based strategies permit activities unless there is a rule with a positive reason for disallowance, and hence they are not very effective where there is doubt and uncertainty—which is the case with many health and safety hazards, including carcinogens. Such strategies cannot keep up with technical change, and standards quickly become frozen and outdated. The discrete and unambiguous norms that rule-based strategies rely on make it difficult to treat the work environment as a whole, which is particularly important where threats are not the result of discrete hazards so much as the combined effect of interactive factors. In such cases a holistic approach that looks for synergistic effects of interactive factors is most appropriate. Rule-based strategies entail having a general rule for everything that defines exactly what is illegal and specifies what is to be done, and if such a rule cannot be formulated, the potentially hazardous activity is permissible. They focus generally on minimum requirements, for which it is easier to devise such norms, rather than long-term improvements, which cannot be formulated in similar terms. They tend to ignore problems that build up over time, that are not a threat immediately, and that cannot be perceived on short site visits by inspectors. Rule-based strategies also require too many experts, and critics have feared that the continuous expansion of the inspection and research capabilities of regulatory agencies would be required to make them effective. They also place too much emphasis on medical and technical research, rather than on social research into behavioral and social factors. The latter, of course, can seldom develop discrete rules in the way that technical research can, but medical research is limited to designating technical threats, rather than threats that may derive from the social organization of work.⁴⁴

The extent of this critique of rule-based strategies for regulating health and safety has been uneven in the European Economic Community (EEC) countries, but a wide range of participatory reforms have been instituted to secure rights and develop competences at the local level. In Italy, where preeminence is given to workers’ own experience, worker participation in health and safety matters has been established through contractual agreements (and thus unevenly) and has taken place through the consigli di fabbrica and special environmental committees. In other countries, such as France, Belgium, and Britain, statutory provisions exist for the establishment of safety committees, although in Britain it is up to the unions to decide whether or not to appoint representatives. In Germany, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, safety committees are subordinate to the works councils that are established by statute in the larger firms—which, in fact, can lead to health and safety’s not having high priority, given the councils’ other concerns. The mechanisms, thus, are varied, as are the mandated rights and effective powers of worker representatives. In some cases workers can exercise veto power over managerial decisions affecting health and safety, and exercise codetermination over the choice of company health and safety staff. Information rights are widespread, as is consultation over yearly action programs to improve the workplace, and employers must keep detailed records that are open to inspection. Workers are entitled to be involved in workplace inspections and the investigations of accidents, and in Italy many agreements permit workers to hold their own inspection and accident investigation. Workers also have a variety of forms of access to health service experts, and physicians and safety advisers are generally required to cooperate with them. In some cases workers have the right to utilize experts of their own choice, often from local health services or universities, to ensure objectivity and independence of judgment. They also have various forms of access to the public authorities charged with regulating plants and offices, and can request inspections and action on specific hazards. In the Netherlands, for instance, an inspector who refuses to take action at the workers’ request must justify this in writing, and workers can appeal the decision. And in a number of countries individual workers have the right to stop work in case of imminent or serious danger.⁴⁵

Not all these rights, of course, are effectively exercised. In many cases managers refuse to set up safety committees, or unions and works councils do not place enough priority on these matters. White-collar workers generally do not take hazards as seriously as blue-collar ones, even when issues of ergonomics, stress, indoor air pollution, and the like might warrant concern and involvement. In some cases, such as France, institutional confusion and overlap impedes local involvement, and in others, such as Britain, the requirement that trade unions appoint safety representatives obstructs action where no union exists.

The Norwegian and Swedish systems seem considerably more coherent and effective because health and safety have been seen as part of a larger program of industrial democracy over the past two decades, and the “work environment” concept is meant to combine these concerns into a unified approach to upgrading work and enhancing participation. The Work Environment Act of 1977 in Norway was designed to shift the focus of activity to the local level. It provided for forty-hour training courses in health and safety issues and techniques, which a considerable portion of the workforce has begun to take—in the first three years alone 10 percent of all employees completed such courses. Although minimum standards are established and rule-based strategies are not totally abandoned, the goal of a “fully satisfactory work environment” is established in all workplaces. Each enterprise is under the obligation to develop a program for systematic improvement over a period of time, with employees, their committees, and safety stewards mapping out the problems and assigning priorities. Such developmental local activity, which legitimates the evaluations of those experiencing the problems, is meant to sidestep continued debates about the legality of particular norms and actions, and focuses holistically on the environment and its betterment. Most interestingly, lack of control itself is seen as a threat to health and safety, as is undiversified and repetitive work, and explicit recognition is given to the need for variation, initiative, and the use of judgment—and more broadly, to continued opportunity for personal and professional development. This stands on its head management’s usual argument that human mistakes are the main cause of accidents by arguing that lack of power and control, and boring work itself, are the main causes of human mistakes. The validation of local insight, experience, and activity by workers themselves in the area of health and safety leads, in this case, to raising larger questions about control and the division of labor.⁴⁶

The Swedish system has developed a similar emphasis on local activity, social and holistic perspectives, and worker rights to participate secured through national legislation. As a result of the perceived crisis in health and safety hazards and the worker protests of the 1960s, the Swedes moved to revive and expand labor-management safety committees and have progressively extended the power of safety stewards to monitor compliance, stop work temporarily if there exists an imminent danger, participate in follow-up work, and be actively involved in developing study circles with materials written by the union, instead of listening to lectures by company engineers and experts. And though national regulation is not neglected, worker participation and effective power at the local level have made the regulatory process itself flexible. The contrast with the United States, for instance, is striking. Under similar pressures, and for a variety of other political reasons, the United States moved from an essentially voluntaristic system (which amounted to industry’s regulation of itself) to a highly bureaucratic, professionally administered, rule-based and punishment-centered system under the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), established in 1970. The American system was shaped in this way primarily as a response to the fierce resistance by employers to any interference with their managerial prerogatives over workplace organization, and American inspectors have been from the start considerably more pessimistic than their Swedish counterparts have been about employers’ willingness to comply with regulations without compulsion and penalties.⁴⁷

This punishment-oriented system not only has many of the drawbacks noted above but in the United States it magnified the original managerial resentment and led rather quickly to organized attempts to limit if not dismantle OSHA. In addition, because of the adversarial quality of this rule-based and punishment-centered system, the transaction costs of regulation are considerably higher. These include more cumbersome documentation and inspection procedures designed to establish juridical proof rather than quick correction, and various levels of hearings and appeals, with lawyers, cross-examination, and the paraphernalia of judicial proceedings. The Swedish inspection process, by contrast, is considerably more informal, focused on sharing information, giving advice, reconciling differences, and making corrections as quickly as possible.⁴⁸

The main reason that the Swedish system is so much more flexible than the American, with lower transaction costs and a more effective inspection process, is not, as Kelman argues, because of a different set of values of the regulatory personnel or the overhet tradition in Sweden that even now elicits deference to state authority among managers. Rather, there is opportunity for greater collaboration among inspectors, managers, and workers, and less emphasis on rules, fines, and adversarial procedures, because workers have been granted effective rights through national legislation to participate actively in regulation at the local level, and their power here, through the trade unions, and at the level of the state (where there has been long socialist incumbency) has made employer resistance and obstruction less likely to pay off than in the United States.⁴⁹ The statutory rights of workers to participate in health and safety matters are more feeble in the United States, the unions are weaker and have devoted few resources to health and safety at the national level, and the OSHA regulatory process has been subject to intense political and ideological conflict and White House budgetary oversight (through the Office of Management and Budget). The result has been inconsistent and ineffective policies, and ultimately immobility at OSHA. Employers campaigned hard throughout the 1970s to restrict OSHA’s powers (though conceding basic statutory rights) and for the return to the voluntarist system. With Reagan’s ascent to the White House, they have essentially achieved this, albeit invoking the rhetoric of the Swedish model and fostering limited forms of participation in order to exempt employers from inspections. By the late 1970s, however, the labor movement was itself beginning to appreciate that the answer to health and safety was not necessarily more inspectors, but knowledge and participation at the local level.⁵⁰ Future battles may yet be fought over the federal regulatory process. Meanwhile, the forms of participation in health and safety are being contested in the local workplace.

The Self-Management of Time

Working time is yet another area where the issue of participation has begun to emerge. Over the past decade and a half not only has flexitime become increasingly common but a whole range of alternative work-time options has been developed, and working at something different than the standard workweek has become increasingly legitimate. These developments have diverse sources: the increased participation of women in the labor market and concerns over balancing work and family life in a flexible and equitable fashion, changing work values among the baby-boom entrants into the labor force, greater longevity and better health of older people, and employers’ various motives for wanting flexibility and part-time workers.⁵¹ And the debate in Europe on shortening the workweek to spread employment opportunities has begun to raise the question of whether standardized reductions or individual options and voluntary time/income tradeoffs is the best means for achieving this.

Among recent work-time innovations are job sharing, permanent part time, voluntary reduced work time, flexitime and flexiyear schedules, compressed workweeks, innovative shift systems, and sabbaticals in nonacademic settings. Job sharing entails two (or more) partners having joint responsibility for a job that is usually thought to require full-time commitment and that cannot be easily split into separate components. Partners may work a set number of hours, or they may vary this according to their own preferences and the needs of the organization. Permanent part-time options have many of the benefits and opportunities usually associated only with full-time jobs, and people choosing them often do so as entry, exit, or respite from full-time work and career commitment. (Permanent refers less to duration for the individual worker than to legitimation and availability of the option.) Voluntary reduced work time involves variable reductions in hours and pay, negotiated between individual and employer for a specified period of time, and can entail employees’ moving back and forth between full- and part-time commitment. Flexitime can involve relatively minor adjustments in starting and quitting time, or can be expanded to include credit and debit hours over the course of the week or longer, although often with daily core hours to ensure coverage, common meeting times, and the like. Flexiyear schedules entail contracting for a specified number of hours over the course of an entire year, with a range of variations as to how these are distributed. Compressed workweeks and innovative shift systems do not involve a reduction of average weekly hours, but a compression into fewer days, longer shifts, the blocking of more extended periods of time off, and/or the rotation through different shifts. In many cases these various work-time options involve greater employee discretion beyond the initial choice not to work standard full-time hours, and some have developed with the joint participation of unions. Some union contracts, for instance, not only stipulate that job sharing and permanent part-time options be available to workers who want them, but specify a minimum quota of positions that are to be organized in this fashion. Others stipulate different levels of voluntary reduction, which can be negotiated between the individual and management periodically. Many state and local governments in the United States have mandated that part-time career options and job-shared positions be available to public employees, and the Federal Employees Part-Time Career Employment Act of 1978 does the same at the federal level.⁵²

As in the case of health and safety, where division of labor and control issues emerge out of concerns with the work environment, so it is with time flexibility. The time autonomy achieved through flexible scheduling can stimulate other needs for autonomy and participation at work,⁵³ and participation increasingly leads workers to raise issues having to do with control of their schedules.⁵⁴ Flexibility in time commitments often requires flexibility in skill; and flexitime and other time options have in some cases contributed to greater job rotation, cross-training, and multiskilling among different categories of workers. For example, the innovative sociotechnical design at the Sarnia Shell Canada plant discussed above was partly motivated and then modified by an interest in equity and autonomy of working time. Dissatisfied with the burdens of shift work and the fact that the more senior workers tended to monopolize day shifts, workers helped design an innovative shift system to complement the other sociotechnical aspects of the plant. The 37-1/3 hour workweek was expanded to an average of 42 hours, with 12-hour shifts rotated on a regular basis, and the year was divided into eighteen-week cycles. During each cycle each worker received two nine-day blocks of time off (to compensate for the longer average work week), ten full weekends and four partial ones, i.e., in addition to regular vacation time. Workers in the self-managed teams could also decide to swap shifts with workers in other teams, thus providing increased flexibility. In order for such time flexibility to function effectively, however, job rotation, multiskilling, and cross-training within self-managed teams were essential.⁵⁵ Other compressed workweek innovations (4 days/40 hours, 3 days/38 hours) have for similar reasons also led, though often unintentionally, to job upgrading, greater autonomy, and participation in supervisory functions. Even clerical work seems to become more autonomous and varied under flexitime. And participation in the design of schedule changes enhances worker satisfaction with them.⁵⁶ Many participatory programs come to raise work-time issues. In one case discussed by Howard and Schneider, for instance, the QWL committee developed autonomous work groups that allowed workers to schedule and perform their jobs without first-line supervision, and the substantial savings went into a discretionary fund controlled by the committee to finance worker participation in company training programs.⁵⁷ In other cases workers receive the benefits of enhanced productivity from QWL programs in the form of “earned idle time” or “time incentives.” In the joint union-management program launched at Harman’s auto rearview mirrors plant in Bolivar, Tennessee, in the 1970s, for instance, workers who achieved their quota could go home for the rest of the day, or—as was quite common—could participate in one of the many in-plant educational and cultural programs that the workers themselves developed. The programs ranged from ones that were specifically job- or career-related, such as learning computer skills or studying for a high school diploma (also a mark of dignity for some), to car-care for women, theater groups, square dancing, Bible classes, art appreciation, and, of course, day care. The time aspects of the participation were developed in such a way as to spawn a “cultural renaissance” in the plant.⁵⁸ Training and education have been fostered both on and off the job as a result of flexible scheduling and increased time autonomy.⁵⁹ The synergistic and interactive effects of flexible time options and other forms of participatory and sociotechnical redesign thus seem to be diverse, and time autonomy is perhaps a more essential component of participatory reform than heretofore recognized.

Flexible work options provide a range of benefits both to individuals and to organizations, though they also present certain problems. These cannot be discussed here, though it is important to note one parallel in the unions’ response to these and other forms of QWL and sociotechnical designs. To the extent that time options become diversified, the common-rule strategy becomes even less viable as a way of protecting worker interests, and unions must manage greater complexity and variety. Some unions, especially those with substantial numbers of women members (such as many Service Employees International Union and American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees locals in the United States), have welcomed part-timers as full members, and have bargained for seniority rights, benefits, and the general upgrading of alternative time options. But there remains deep suspicion among most unions toward workers who deviate from the standard workweek. Aside from male biases, which are profound among many union members and leaders, there exists the fear that flexible work-time options will make workers more vulnerable to managerial power both on the shop floor and in the labor market. Such options could erode labor standards, put pressure on workers for unpaid overtime, threaten benefits, and ratify even further the inferior status of women in the labor market. Unions fear that employers will use to their own advantage competition by part-timers willing to work for less pay and to accept less job security. They also see part-timers as more difficult to organize and less committed to their jobs and to their union. And part-time options are seen by many as a distraction from other full employment policies and from the goal of a shortened workweek for all with no reduction in pay.⁶⁰ Many of these fears are indeed realistic, since it cannot be assumed that the interests of workers and employers in flexible options coincide—even though in some instances they are mutually beneficial—and since the standardization of hours performs a number of very important protective functions for workers.⁶¹

Flexible time options are thus no less a contested terrain for workers and unions than are other participatory and QWL programs. But as with these others, it is unlikely that labor can advance its interests by simply resisting the new flexibility. New technologies make diverse temporal (and spatial) relationships to work much more possible, and the time preferences of workers have themselves become increasingly diverse. Most part-time workers, for instance, including those who experience serious inequities in the labor market, do not prefer full-time jobs, and even full-time workers who are relatively content with the number of hours they work want greater control over the allocation of those hours. And most innovative work-time options, it is important to keep in mind, have been initiated by workers, not management. Recent attempts to formalize participation and autonomy in working time are not, in fact, altogether new. Not only have workers in the past often established quite flexible arrangements with their employers informally, but historical and sociological studies indicate that shopfloor struggles over the control of time have been persistent and pervasive, and have been very much a part of the broader struggles for control and dignity at work.⁶²

These considerations have led to a number of recent attempts to outline the normative and empirical foundations for expanding worker participation to include the self-management of time. The French research group Échange et Projets, in its provocative La révolution du temps choisi, sees the “autogestion du temps” as a way of enriching self-management and argues for expanding citizen rights to include the right to work at freely “chosen time,” with a variety of time/income tradeoff options that could alter the balance between time spent working in the market and outside.⁶³ Karl Hinrichs, Claus Offe, and Helmut Wiesenthal, in their analysis of the limits of trade union strategies for a general reduction of working time in Germany, have also posed the question of shorter hours in the broader framework of guaranteeing individual options and using welfare state mechanisms to encourage such choices and to support temporary and partial withdrawals from the labor market.⁶⁴ And Sirianni and Eayrs have indicated the centrality of work-time options for a feminist and participatory theory of equality, where the hegemony of the male career model and the structural segmentation of opportunities in the broader division of labor are open to question, along with the sociotechnical and political relations of the workplace.⁶⁵

Concluding Remarks

Work is being profoundly transformed in the late twentieth century, and participatory reforms of great diversity are an essential part of the changes that are occurring. The new technologies are less deterministic, more fluid and flexible, than perhaps ever before, and organizational paradigms of the past are in a state of crisis. Taylorist modes of work organization have been challenged in theory and practice. And yet there is little room for naïve optimism about the workplace of the future. In those sectors that are labor intensive, where workers are easily replaceable, high commitment not necessary, and/or the cost of error much lower than the cost of skill upgrading, many employers continue to pursue strategies of control and modes of work organization that limit skill requirements. Participatory reforms and skill enhancement have, for the most part, been limited to the primary sector of the labor market.⁶⁶ And despite some very successful examples of women’s integration into participatory frameworks,⁶⁷ their disproportionate location in secondary labor markets limits the extent to which sociotechnical designs and the more advanced forms of participation immediately affect many of them. Outside the primary sector, unions themselves are weaker (or nonexistent), state legislation granting participatory rights often does not reach, and workers themselves have developed more negative and transitory attitudes to work, which do not serve as a promising basis for participation. But even in the more advanced sectors upgrading is far from automatic, and employers who may have an interest in better utilization of technologies often attempt to keep skills narrower and more firm-specific in order to enhance workers’ dependence on the company and to limit mobility outside. And the extent to which participatory reform enhances the power of workers or becomes another technique of managerial control is part of the micro- and macropolitics that define participation as a contested terrain. Despite the fact that such reforms will undoubtedly continue to spread, the tasks facing democratizers within the labor movement are complex and formidable, and they warrant very broad, imaginative, and multilevel strategies. Such strategies involve legislative action to secure rights for participation, the shaping of technology research and development policies, the resources to effectively represent workers’ interest in skill development and discretion, and creative alliances with the technical experts who design the new systems. They entail mobilization of resources at different levels of union organization to shape the everyday dynamics of participation on the shop floor, and efforts to manage difficult demarcation issues among production, office, and professional workers. Such strategies require imaginative policies for handling the increased flexibility and variety (of skill classifications as well as time options) in a way that protects collective interests and standards. And, finally, they entail a broad perspective on employment, lifetime learning and training policies, and methods for enhancing opportunity both within and outside the market in a way that begins to unravel and/or compensate for highly segmented opportunity structures. Participation is not in itself a solution to all these problems, but neither can it be cordoned off from them if its full democratic potential is to flourish. Workplace participation is very much embedded in larger structures of power and opportunity, and thus warrants an equally broad democratic and egalitarian perspective.

Notes

1. Steve Fraser, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the ‘New Economic Policy’,” in James Cronin and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Work, Community and Power: The Experience of Labor in Europe and America, 1900–1925 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 174.

2. Carmen Sirianni, “Workers’ Control in Europe: A Comparative Sociological Analysis,” in Cronin and Sirianni, Work, Community and Power, 254–310.

3. See Henry Norr’s essay in this volume.

4. See Robert Cole’s essay in this volume. On the great diversity of meanings for worker participation, see also Peter Brannen, Authority and Participation in Industry (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 13ff.; and Santiago Roca and Didier Retour, “Participation in Enterprise Management: Bogged Down Concepts,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 2, no.1 (Feb. 1981): 1–25. The latter journal contains much useful analysis of participatory reform.

5. Michael Poole, “Theories of Industrial Democracy: The Emerging Synthesis,” Sociological Review 30, no. 2 (May 1982): 181ff.; C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

6. Paul Blumberg, Industrial Democracy (New York: Schocken, 1968).

7. Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and Robert Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

8. Carmen Sirianni, “Production and Power in a Classless Society,” Socialist Review 59 (Sept.-Oct. 1981): 33–82; “Participation, Opportunity and Equality,” in Frank Fischer and Carmen Sirianni, eds., Critical Studies in Organization and Bureaucracy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984), 482–503; Carmen Sirianni and Michele Eayrs, “Tempo e Lavoro: Razionalizzazione, Flessibilità e Uguaglianza,” Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia 26, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1985): 523–67; and Philip Green, Retrieving Democracy (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1985).

9. Sirianni, “Workers’ Control in Europe”; Arndt Sorge, “The Evolution of Industrial Democracy in the Countries of the European Community,” British Journal of Industrial Relations 14, no. 3 (1976): 282. And see, in particular, Poole’s contrast of the cyclical and favorable conjunctures school with the evolutionary school in “Theories of Industrial Democracy.”

10. Industrial Democracy in Europe (IDE) International Research Group, Industrial Democracy in Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and European Industrial Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 8. G. David Garson, ed., Workers’ Self-Management in Industry: The European Experience (New York: Praeger, 1977), 222.

11. For example, see Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “Work in a New America,” Daedalus 107 (Winter 1978): 47–78.

12. See the Cole and Ross essays in this volume.

13. Brannen, Authority and Participation in Industry, 47; also, Poole, “Theories of Industrial Democracy,” 193–95.

14. Sirianni, “Workers’ Control in Europe,” 299ff.; and Gary Cross, “Redefining Workers’ Control: Rationalization, Labor Time, and Union Politics in France, 1900–1928,” in Cronin and Sirianni, Work, Community, and Power, 143–72.

15. Robert Cole, “Diffusion of Participatory Work Structures in Japan, Sweden and the United States,” in Paul Goodman and Associates, eds., Change in Organizations (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1982), 184–85.

16. Michael Piore and Charles Sabel, The Second Industrial Divide (New York: Basic Books, 1984). The authors offer a refreshingly nondeterminist view of the history of technological and productive organization, conceived more as a series of branching points rather than as a narrow track. See also Horst Kern and Michael Schumann, Das Ende der Arbeitsabteilung? (Munich: Beck, 1984).

17. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).

18. See David Stark, “Class Struggle and the Transformation of the Labor Process,” Theory and Society 9, no. 1 (1980): 89–130; Richard Edwards, Contested Terrain (New York: Basic Books, 1979); Sirianni, “Production and Power,” and “Workers’ Control in Europe”; Larry Hirschhorn, Beyond Mechanization (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984); Charles Sabel, Work and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Paul Adler, “Technology and Us,” Socialist Review 85 (Jan.–Feb. 1986): 67–96; Kenneth Spenner, “Deciphering Prometheus: Temporal Change in the Skill Level of Work,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (Dec. 1983): 824–37.

19. Richard Walton, “The Topeka Work System: Optimistic Visions, Pessimistic Hypotheses, and Reality,” in Robert Zager and Michael Rosow, eds., The Innovative Organization (New York: Pergamon Press, 1982), 260–87; and “Establishing and Maintaining High Commitment Work Systems,” in John Kimberly, Robert Miles, and Associates, eds., The Organizational Life Cycle (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1981), 208–90.

20. Piore and Sabel’s hopes for participatory work arrangements, for instance, seem too dependent on continually changing markets. Their analysis here is too market driven, both as an explanation for the rise of participatory systems, and as an anticipation of the methods for sustaining more participatory and egalitarian arrangements where markets are more stable.

21. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Change Masters (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 274; and John Witte, Democracy, Authority and Alienation at Work (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980).

22. See Louis Davis and Charles Sullivan, “A Labour-Management Contract and the Quality of Working Life,” Journal of Occupational Behavior 1 (1980): 29–41. On sociotechnical designs more generally, see, for example, Fred Emery and Einar Thorsrud, Democracy at Work (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). The work of Fred Emery and Eric Trist was particularly important as a practical critique of the Taylorist paradigm.

23. See not only Hirschhorn and Adler, but Peter Brannen et al., The Worker Directors (London: Hutchinson, 1975); the IDE volumes and the Bullock Report.

24. Shoshanna Zuboff, “Technologies that Informate: Implications for Human Resource Management in the Computerized Industrial Workplace,” in Richard Walton and Paul Lawrence, eds., HRM Trends and Challenges (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1985), 103–39.

25. For example, Stanley Aronowitz, “Marx, Braverman, and the Logic of Capital,” in Work and Labor, a special issue of The Insurgent Sociologist 7, nos. 2/3 (Fall 1978): 126–46.

26. See, for instance, Richard Walton, “Challenges in the Management of Technology and Labor Relations,” in Walton and Lawrence, HRM Trends and Challenges, 199–216.

27. Ibid, 200.

28. Zuboff, “Technologies that Informate,” 131.

29. Robert Howard and Leslie Schneider, in this volume; Leslie Schneider, “Technology Bargaining in Norway,” in Technology and the Need for New Labor Relations, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Discussion Paper 129D (1984); Andrew Martin and Giuseppe Della Rocca, in this volume; Äke Sandberg, Technological Change and Codetermination in Sweden (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, forthcoming); and Giuseppe Berta, ed., Industrial Relations in Information Society: A European Survey (Rome: Adriano Olivetti Foundation, 1986).

30. See Sandberg, Technological Change and Codetermination. Compare this to the uses of numerical control to limit workers’ skill and restrict their ability to modify programs, in Harley Shaiken, Work Transformed (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984); David Noble, Forces of Production (New York: Knopf, 1984). For an alternative view, see Sabel, Work and Politics, 63ff.

31. See Sandberg, Technological Change and Codetermination, in particular.

32. See esp. Howard and Schneider, and Robert Howard, Brave New Workplace (New York: Viking, 1985), 210ff., for a discussion of the U.S. Air Force’s $100 million project for a factory of the future, which not only excludes participation by the machinists union, but aims to substantially diminish skill requirements.

33. The term has been used by various Scandinavian researchers, including Äke Sandberg, Bjorn Gustavsen, and Bertil Gardell.

34. Mike Parker, Inside the Circle: A Union Guide to QWL (Boston: South End Press, 1985); see also Donald Wells, Soft Sell: Quality of Work Life Programs and the Productivity Race (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming).

35. Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz, and Nancy Mower, Worker Participation and American Unions (Kalamazoo: Upjohn Institute, 1984); and Thomas Kochan, ed., Challenges and Choices Facing American Labor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

36. Guillermo J. Grenier, Inhuman Relations: Quality Circles and Anti-Unionism in American Industry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

37. See Kochan et al, Worker Participation and American Unions; Parker, Inside the Circle; and Wells, Soft Sell.

38. Cole, in this volume.

39. Kochan et al., Worker Participation and American Unions, 189ff.; Harry Katz, Shifting Gears: Changing Labor Relations in the U.S. Auto Industry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), especially 64–104.

40. Parker, Inside the Circle, 28ff., 83–84, 107ff.

41. Wells and Burawoy argue the latter, while Graham argues from his own case studies that this is not true, that workers’ choice is not simply within narrower limits, and that union solidarity is not broken down, even in cases where management violates joint power-sharing assumptions or no-job-loss provisions. Workers, according to Graham, have been quite capable of distinguishing which programs serve their interests, and have known when to withdraw from those that do not. See Michael Burawoy, “Between the Labor Process and the State: The Changing Face of Factory Regimes Under Advanced Capitalism,” American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 587–605; Gregory Graham, “Who Will Control the Quality of Work Life?” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1985). Kochan et al. cautiously entertain the empowering thesis, but their case study evidence on the extent to which participants in QWL programs feel they have greater influence over their jobs compared to nonparticipants is limited.

42. See also in this regard Evelyne Huber Stephens and John Stephens, “The Labor Movement, Political Power, and Workers’ Participation in Western Europe,” Political Power and Social Theory 3 (1982): 215–49.

43. J. K. M. Gevers, “Worker Participation in Health and Safety in the EEC: The Role of Representative Institutions,” International Labour Review 122, no. 4 (July–Aug. 1983): 412ff.

44. Bjorn Gustavsen and Gerry Hunnius, New Patterns of Work Reform: The Case of Norway (Oslo: Universitetforlaget, 1981), 115ff.; Ragnvald Kalleberg, “Work Environment Reform as Participatory Democratization” (paper presented at the American Sociological Association annual meetings, Washington, D.C., Aug. 26–31, 1985).

45. See Gevers, “Worker Participation in Health and Safety,” for an overview and country-by-country references.

46. Gustavesen and Hunnius, New Patterns of Work Reform, 139ff.; and Kalleberg, “Work Environment Reform,” for a more recent evaluation of the areas of local activity where workers have been more—and less—successful.

47. Steven Kelman, Regulating America, Regulating Sweden (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981); and Charles Noble, Liberalism at Work: The Rise and Fall of OSHA (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

48. Kelman, Regulating America, ch. 6.

49. Vicente Navarro, “The Determinants of Social Policy, a Case Study: Regulating Health and Safety at the Workplace in Sweden,” International Journal of Health Services 13, no. 4 (1983): 517–61; and Fischer and Sirianni, Critical Studies, editors’ introduction to Kelman, 308.

50. Robert Kuttner, “Unions, Economic Power and the State,” Dissent (Winter 1986): 41.

51. See particularly Fred Best, Flexible Life Scheduling (New York: Praeger, 1980); and Hilda Kahne, Reconceiving Part-Time Work (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allenheld, 1985).

52. See Stanley Nollen, New Work Schedules in Practice (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982); Maureen McCarthy and Gail Rosenberg, Work Sharing: Case Studies (Kalamazoo: Upjohn Institute, 1981); Gretl Meier, Job Sharing (Kalamazoo: Upjohn Institute, 1979); and Simcha Ronen, Alternative Work Schedules (Homewood, Ill.: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1984). For Germany, see Bernhard Teriet, Neue Strukturen der Arbeitszeitverteilung (Göttingen: Verlag Otto Schwartz, 1976); and for France, Échange et Projets 27 (Sept. 1981) and 32 (Dec. 1982), special issues on le temps choisi; and Giovanni Gasparini, ed., Tempo e Orario di Lavoro: Il Dibattito in Francia (Rome: Edizioni Lavoro, 1985).

53. Jon Pierce and John Newstrom, “The Design of Flexible Work Schedules and Employee Responses: Relationships and Process,” Journal of Occupational Behavior 4 (1983): 249.

54. Nollen, New Work Schedules, 51ff., 78, 87. On the prominence of work-time options among recent QWL innovations, see also Goodmeasure, Inc., The Changing American Workplace: Work Alternatives in the 1980s (New York: American Management Association, 1985).

55. Nollen, New Work Schedules, 81–101, 25–31, passim, for this and other examples; and Ronen, Alternative Work Schedules, passim.

56. Janina Latack and Lawrence Foster, “Implementation of Compressed Work Schedules: Participation and Job Redesign as Critical Factors for Employee Acceptance,” Personnel Psychology 38 (1985): 75–92; Emily Stoper, “Alternative Work Patterns and the Double Life,” in Ellen Boneparth, ed., Women, Power and Policy (New York: Pergamon, 1982), 93.

57. Howard and Schneider, in this volume.

58. Daniel Zwerdling, Workplace Democracy (New York: Harper, 1980), 48ff.; see also John Simmons and William Mares, Working Together (New York: Knopf, 1982), 70; and Parker, Inside the Circle, 44.

59. Gretl Meier, Worker Learning and Worktime Flexibility (Kalamazoo: Upjohn Institute, 1983); Ronen, Alternative Work Schedules, passim.

60. Nollen, New Work Schedules, ch. 4; Kahne, Reconceiving Part-Time Work, ch. 8. For Germany, see Claus Offe, Karl Hinrichs, and Helmut Wiesenthal, eds., Arbeitszeitpolitik (Frankfurt: Campus, 1982).

61. Karl Hinrichs lists four such protective functions: (1) limiting competition among workers on the basis of hours they are willing to work; (2) establishing a ratchet effect for further wage and hours progress; (3) establishing as socially valid the right to a full income; and (4) permitting workers predictable control over their own time. See “Flexible Working Hours: How to Match Employees’ Preferences and Enterprises’ Interests” (Conference on Critical Perspectives in Organizational Analysis, Baruch College-CUNY, Sept. 7, 1986).

62. See, for instance, Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1964), 21; Melvin Kohn, Class and Conformity (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1969), 174–76; and Pietro Marcenaro and Vittorio Foa, Riprendere Tempo (Turin: Einaudi, 1982), 48 ff.

63. Échange et Projets, La révolution du temps choisi (Paris: Albin Michel, 1980); and two issues of their journal devoted to the experiences and debates on Le temps choisi: Échange et Projets 27 (Sept. 1981) and 32 (Dec. 1982). Also see Giovanni Gasparini, Il Tempo e Il Lavoro (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1986).

64. Karl Hinrichs, Claus Offe, and Helmut Wiesenthal, “The Crisis of the Welfare State and Alternative Modes of Work Redistribution,” in Alfred Kleinknecht and Tom van Veen, eds., Working Time Distribution and the Crisis of the Welfare State (Maastricht: Presses Interuniversitaires Européenes, 1986), 117–39; and Offe, Disorganized Capitalism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), and Arbeitsgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1984).

65. Carmen Sirianni and Michele Eayrs, “Tempo e Lavoro: Razionalizzazione, Flessibilità e Uguaglianza,” 523–67; see also Carmen Sirianni, Of Time, Work and Equality (Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming); “Feminist Theory and Gendered Time,” unpublished paper.

66. Sandberg, Technological Change and Codetermination; Brannen, Authority and Participation in Industry, 73; Charles Heckscher, “Democracy at Work: In Whose Interests? The Politics of Worker Participation” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1981).

67. The case of Scandinavia is especially hopeful, and work–time options hold particular promise for involving women in participation.