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Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith, is reviewed.
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"High performance" management systems in unionized workplaces have the potential to create a more microcorporatist workplaces have the potential to create a more microcorporatist industry relations system in Canada. Microcorporatist tendencies reflect more active worker cooperation in achieving management productivity, quality and flexibility goals. Analysis of development of these tendencies in the major appliance industry suggests that microcorporatism has contradictory implications. In one direction lies the displacement labor politics by a local-centered unionism that is increasingly captured by the logic of market competition. In a second direction lies a logic of greater worker resistance related to increased worker control of labor processes.
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The industrial relations system at Magna International is an example of an integrated, coherent, non-union human resource management strategy. It includes significant mechanisms of worker voice and conflict resolution as substitutes for union representation. Potential labor-management conflicts associated with Taylorized labor processes are often translated into group problem-solving. Redistributive conflicts are re-framed as mutual gains through profit-sharing. Corporate communications promote an ethos of competitiveness. Individualized pay and promotion schemes, segmented internal labor markets, and the exposure of individual plants to competitive pressures, promote cultures of labor cooperation in the pursuit of productivity gains. The success of this union avoidance model is situated in a context of the erosion of unionized labor relations, the disciplinary effects of precarious labor markets, and the vulnerability of workplaces to transnational competitive forces. Continued success is predicated on Magna's ability to survive sectoral and macroeconomic restructuring forces which are, in large measure, beyond management's control.
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The emergence of internationalized production in the context of weakening state regulation of labour rights and of increasing employer dominance in industrial relations systems raises significant questions about the nature and future of worker representation. A crucial issue is the transferability of company-specific models of worker voice across national boundaries. This issue is the focus of this case study of Magna International, a leading member of a small group of transnational automotive parts manufacturing firms that are central to the contemporary restructuring of the international automotive industry. The paper compares the transformation of worker representation at Magna in Canada and Mexico. In crossing international borders, the Magna industrial relations model has taken on national and local features of the host country. However, the underlying industrial relations structure is one which has elicited a successful reconfiguration and containment of much, although by no means all, of the adversarialism inherent in labour-management relations. This reconfiguration has aligned worker representation to an essentially unitarist project oriented to management's productivity goals. More than merely suppressing independent unions, Magna has constructed a coherent, management--dominated model of worker representation in both Canada and Mexico. The paper concludes with an assessment of the implications of this model for independent unionism.
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- Journal Article (4)