What Workers Say

This book brings together research in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand to answer a series of key questions:* What opportunities do employees in Anglo-American workplaces have to voice their concerns and what do they seek? * To what extent, and in what contexts, do workers want greater union representation? * How do workers feel about employer-initiated channels of influence? What styles of engagement do they want with employers?* What institutional models are more successful in giving workers the voice they seek at workplaces? * What can unions, employers, and public policy makers learn from these studies of representation and influence? The research is based largely on surveys that were conducted as a follow-up to the influential Worker Representation and Participation Survey (WRPS) reported in What Workers Want, coauthored by Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers in 1999 and updated in 2006. Taken together, these studies authoritatively outline workers' attitudes toward, and opportunities for, representation and influence in the Anglo-American workplace. They also enhance industrial relations theory and suggest strategies for unions, employers, and public policy.

What Workers Say examines the voice that employees have, and want, in the workplace and the role played by unions, employers, and governments in expanding, or restricting, that voice. The authors are interested in assessing and comparing what forms of employee voice are able to meet the needs and wants of workers in six nations: Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States., Freeman, Boxall, and Haynes provide the results of comprehensive on employee voice and the implications of their findings for labor unions in six countries.... Of the countries studied, the US has the most rigid, outmoded form of employee voice. Highly recommended.

Richard B. Freeman is Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard University, Codirector of the Labor and Worklife Program at the Harvard Law School, and Director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also Senior Research Fellow in Labour Markets at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. He is the coauthor of What Workers Want, Updated Edition, also from Cornell. Peter Boxall is Professor of Human Resource Management at the University of Auckland. He is coauthor of Strategy and Human Resource Management and coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Human Resource Management. Peter Haynes is a former senior trade union official. His research spans studies of worker representation and participation, union strategy, high-performance work systems, and service-sector human resource management.