LEADING THOUGHTS

Sweeping changes in the labour market over the past four decades have triggered “the disappearance of ‘workers’ as a political and industrial force, as a social and cultural category and as the concept that organizes our thinking about labour law and policy,” says Harry Arthurs, one of Canada’s leading labour law scholars.

In a recent speech to St. John’s College at University of Oxford, Arthurs listed a litany of tectonic forces: technological change, the shift in employment from manufacturing to the service economy, the “flexibilization” of the workforce, demographic trends, and globalization.

These developments have made employment more precarious, created conflicts or magnified differences among workers, undercut labour solidarity, and shifted the balance of power to employers.

As a result, people no longer define themselves as “workers” or as members of the “working class.” If they experience unfairness, Arthurs says, it is not as “workers” but as members of a disenfranchised group. “The common experience, the solidarity-building experience, of workers — in mines and sweatshops and dark satanic mills— is gone,” Arthurs says. “Gone too is the culture that reinforced that solidarity.”

The transformation of work has also rendered machinery of labour market regulation obsolete. Arthurs offers a number of examples.

“The shift from manufacturing to service jobs has revealed that laws premised on one sort of employment relationship do not necessarily produce the desired results when transplanted onto another.” Implication: Should labour legislation be drafted to take account of sectoral differences?

“Technology enables employers to respond to their customers around the clock, and globalization requires that they do so. But for employers to respond, employees must be available on at least a standby basis.” Implication: Should laws fixing maximum hours of work and requiring premium pay for overtime be changed to accommodate the employer’s business needs, or the employee’s needs for even greater protection against intrusion on his or her free time?

Arthurs says Western economies have three choices:

1. Adopt the perspective of human rights and the principles of freedom, dignity, and equality. “These principles ought to apply to people at work, no less than people at other moments in their lives,” he says.

2. See what can be done to bring more equity into the labour market within the limits of neo-liberal capitalism.

3. Try to resuscitate the labour movement or reinvent the labour movement.

Which one would you vote for?

If you’d like a copy of Harry Arthurs’s presentation, send me an email at Alan [at] AlanMorantz [dot] com

photo credit: Mohammad A. Hamama – A Socialist Blogger

Does age have an impact on having and offering ideas at work? According to the “deficit model”, older people are less likely than younger people to be a source of innovation due to deficits from the aging process. Up to now, there is more evidence for a decline in innovative work behaviour and creativity during older age than for no age effects, though the findings are not conclusive.

To test this assumption, Birgit Verworn (HTW Dresden, Germany) studied the suggestion systems used at two German locations of a large European company, focusing on a sample of 633 submitted ideas. In these systems, suggestions were rewarded depending on their quality; quality was assessed by the resulting potential revenues or savings.

The surprising finding: the over-55 age cohort scored highest. “In contrast to our assumptions, older employees submitted more valuable ideas than younger employees,” Vermorn writes in the journal Creativity and Innovation. “The most and the most valuable ideas came from employees older than 55, who also achieved the highest average value per employee of that age group of EUR24,918.”

“Does Age Have an Impact on Having Ideas? An Analysis of the Quantity and Quality of Ideas Submitted to a Suggestion System,” by Birgit Verworn; Creativity and Innovation Management (Vol. 18 No. 4, 2009, pp. 326-334)

photo credit: Adam Melancon

Fun is in the eye of the beholder. So it is with workplace fun and the growing efforts by organizations to engage employees with games-playing and other officially-sanctioned hijinks.

Researchers are now turning their attention to measuring when workplace fun initiatives have a positive influence and when they are counterproductive. Eric Lamm and Michael D. Meeks (San Francisco State U), for example, conducted a study to find out whether or not there are generational differences in how workplace fun is viewed, and if there are different outcomes depending on generation.

In the journal Employee Relations, the authors write that, based on generational theory, we would expect to see these attitudes:

Baby boomers (born between 1941 ad 1960): “Boomers’ win-at-all-cost perspective and reliance on success as a measure of self worth likely results in a perception that workplace fun is counterproductive to their competitive edge.”

Gen Xers (born between 1961 and 1980): “Since Xers have a preference for fun and embrace balance in their lives, planned organisational fun activities may engage these sometimes disengaged workers and more fulsomely direct their energy toward the organisation instead of individual, non-work pursuits.”

Millennials (born between 1981 and 2000): “Unlike Boomers, who may oppose workplace fun, and Xers, who may be indifferent to workplace fun, Millennials are likely to regard fun in the workplace not as a benefit, but a requirement.”

Armed with this background, Lamm and Meeks surveyed 701 individuals from all three generational groups. They found that indeed there are measurable generational differences in how workplace fun is regarded.

Millennials, for example, showed stronger links between workplace fun and organizational outcomes such as job satisfaction, task performance, and “organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB).”

Surprisingly, though, the authors found that baby boomers were not as negative about workplace fun as originally thought. “This has large implications because Boomers, with a reputation of ‘achievers at any cost’ and thus regarded as likely impediments to the successful implementation of planned workplace fun, may in fact not only benefit from workplace fun, but may be supportive, whether as a participant employee or facilitating manager.”

“Workplace fun: the moderating effects of generational differences,” by Eric Lamm and Michael D. Meeks, Employee Relations (Vol. 31 No. 6, 2009, pp. 613-631)

If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: inf3ktion

“Diversity management” (DM) has become one of the more successful management ideas of the past 25 years. It entered the lexicon in the late 1980s in the U.S. as a response to growing frustration with legislation-based affirmative action and equal employment opportunity initiatives. DM was taken up in Europe a decade later, beginning in the UK and Netherlands.

DM aims to encourage employees to be comfortable with diversity in the workplace and appreciate differences in race, gender, or sexual orientation. It focuses on demographic groups, organizational self-interest, and workplace training. “Diversity” has become an industry in itself, fed by management consultants, conferences, and publications.

Writing in the Scandinavian Journal of Management, Evangelina Holvino (Simmons School of Management, Boston) and Annette Kamp (Roskilde University, Denmark) take a hard-boiled look at diversity management in practice in the U.S. and Europe. They identify a number of DM “dilemmas”:

:: Does DM refer to individual or group-based differences? For some, diversity refers to all the similarities and differences among organizational members. For others, diversity refers to identities based on membership in social groups and their power relations in organizations.

:: Is DM all about reproducing the status quo or “catalysing change in inequalities and power relations”?

:: Should DM be based on a business case or on social justice? In North America in particular, DM is sold as an effective HR and marketing strategy, encouraging team effectiveness, increasing employee retention, and improving financial performance. But as the authors point out, assessing DM outcomes is a tricky affair. Few organizations seem interested in measuring the success of their diversity efforts, and independent findings have been inconclusive or contradictory.

“DM, like other ideas, has become blurred and blunted, distorted through inappropriate quantification, and taken over by academic researchers making it increasingly unsuited for practical purposes,” Holvino and Kamp write. “In the U.S.A., DM has provided an opportunity to discuss differences, identity, power, and equity in organizations like no other management idea has done before, but its ‘success’ as a managerial discourse has hindered its power as an idea that can make more of a positive difference in the world.”

“Diversity management: Are we moving in the right direction? Reflections from both sides of the North Atlantic,” by Evangelina Holvino and Annette Kamp; Scandinavian Journal of Management (2009, 25, 395—403)

If you cannot find this journal is your local library, email me for a copy of the article at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: PaDumBumPsh

Four of every 10 employers in the U.S. profess to be concerned that the aging of the workforce will have a negative impact on their business over the next three years. But it might be all hand wringing and no action: the same survey found that two-thirds have not analyzed the demographics of their workforce and 77 percent have not analyzed the projected retirement dates of their employees.

So what do you make of that seemingly mixed message? According to the Sloan Center on Aging and Work, the unit that gathered the data as part of its Strategic Talent Management Study, part of the answer lies in the tight financial circumstances in which many organizations find themselves.

Researchers at Sloan dug deep into their survey of 696 U.S. organizations and identified four different employer groups:

• “Lower pressured employers” anticipate a positive or neutral impact from the aging of the workforce and are not suffering from the economy (24 percent of the sample).
• “Economically pressured employers” aren’t concerned about an aging workforce but are struggling to keep up in the economy (36 percent).
• “Age-pressured employers” are really worried about the aging workforce but are in decent financial shape (12 percent).
• “Age/economically pressured employers” are stuck in the worst of both worlds (28 percent).

The Sloan report builds the case for organizations to conduct a rigorous assessment of their workforce demographics, projected retirement dates, and future skills needs. The report includes a handy chart outlining workforce planning considerations for employers, depending on where they sit on the “pressure” scale.

Download a copy of the report here or email me at Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com.

photo credit: AMANITO

Charles Cirtwill, Executive Vice President of the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, spoke about the future of unions in a CBC National Radio interview in June 2009. In the conversation, he focused on the demographic shifts in Canada and in many other countries that will see labour shortages in the years ahead, and what those shifts may mean for unions.

“The fact is that this recession is probably the last warm-up round to what we are really going to see in terms of a significant demographic shift not only in Canada but around the globe. That demographic shift is going to put real pressure on unions and unionized workplaces because what’s going to happen is union membership is going to fall. The resources available to pay for unionized service, and that’s typically public sector unionized services, are essentially going to dry up. That is going to put pressure on union contracts, on unionization, on union membership that no one has ever seen. . .”

With power shifting from employers to individual workers, Cirtwell says, individuals will be able to negotiate better terms than if they were part of unions.

“In a period of labour surplus, the unions were a huge value add to the employee, to the individual worker. The unions were able to get benefits, to get a level of security in jobs, which an individual worker wouldn’t have been able to negotiate on their own. What is going to happen on the flip side as we move into a labour shortage is that the workers’ capacity to negotiate all those things is going to be that much stronger. In fact in many instances – and this is really going to take a leap of imagination for some people – the unions actually are going to become a barrier to individuals maximizing their returns from their skills and the scarcity of labour. As a result people are going to be, individuals, are going to be less inclined to support the unions.

“. . .I think the real impact on union numbers is going to be simple pure raw numbers. There are simply going to be fewer of them 15 or 20 years from now. They are probably still going to be paid a premium for doing those jobs, however in a time of labour shortage everyone is going to get that premium. In fact, union membership and the union contract may be a hindrance to getting a premium. In a labour shortage, people who work in high demand jobs can name their price and their perks. Being limited to the benefits outlined in a union contract will make it impossible to negotiate a better deal on your own. So I think in terms of raw numbers you are going to see a significant decline in union membership.”

Do you think unions will become increasingly irrelevant in the future?

For a transcript of this interview, email me: Alan [at] AlanMorantz.com

photo credit: Tertiary Education Union (NZTEU)