26 June 2009 • First Call for Papers

Employee Representation in the New World of Work: The Dynamics of Rights, Voice, Performance and Power

47th Annual CIRA Conference / International CRIMT Conference

June 16–18 2010, Université Laval, Québec, Canada

The world of work is changing and this has tremendous implications for employee representation. Workplaces are continuously reconfigured through new information technologies and the transnational organization of production and services, economic globalization and financial crisis. Women’s labour market participation, labour migration and greater ethnic diversity are all changing the composition of workforces. New values regarding the relationships between work and career alter expectations about the balance between work and family life. The proliferation of different forms of employment is altering individuals’ relationships to their work and their life chances, increasing disparities between so-called “winners” and “losers”, with important repercussions for equality and opportunity in our societies. The search for competitive advantage through flexiblization and high-performance practices prompts some firms to enhance employee engagement, social dialogue and forms of partnership with their workforce while others seek to re-engineer or dispense entirely with employee representation.

These new realities are a challenge to traditional notions of employee representation. Crafted for the most part in the decades leading to the zenith of the industrial era (and 2010 will mark the 75th anniversary of the Wagner Act, which established some of the core tenants of employee representation in the United States and Canada), employee representation systems in the most industrialized countries were constructed on conceptions of paid full-time male employment, through the prism of Fordist work organization, in which collective representation at work, most often through unions and collective bargaining, would give yield some blend of employee voice and organizational efficiency, and thereby enrich the quality of democracy in industrializing societies. There are increasing questions about the access to and efficacy of existing forms of workplace representation, about the nature and affinity of the groups to be represented, about the possibility and coherence of grafting new rights onto older systems of representation, about disparities in voice regimes between public services and the private sector, about achieving both social and economic performance, and about the capacity of existing and emerging collective actors to negotiate these transitions, to deal with the challenges they face and to reconstruct systems of employee representation for this new world of work.

This diagnostic raises important questions for our understanding of the transformations of employee representation in comparative perspective.

- What are the founding principles that contributed to the construction of different representative systems? Are the conditions that gave rise to them still relevant?

- How do different types of employee representation regimes deal with key issues facing the contemporary workplace? What are the results for workers and their families, firms and their managers, governments and other societal stakeholders?

- What are the emerging models and actors for employee rights, voice and representation? What are the coherence, efficacy and potential power of these contending sources and systems? What are the actor strategies for dealing with them?

- What kinds of public policy, actors, experimentation, strategies, capabilities, and research are necessary to rethink employee representation for this new world of work?

These and all other questions relevant to our understanding of the current and future dynamics of employee representation will be the focus of an international conference to be held in from June 16th to 18th 2010 in Québec City, Canada. This conference is a special collaboration between the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT) and the Canadian Industrial Relations Association (CIRA-ACRI). CRIMT is committed to organize an “open architecture” international conference on employee representation in the new world of work as part of its Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Canada Major Collaborative Research Initiatives project “Building Institutions and Capabilities for Work and Employment in a Global Era: The Social Dynamics of Labour Regulation”.  Since CIRA organizes an annual conference, it was decided that this special thematic conference will be its 47th annual CIRA conference. Other partners will also join this initiative.

The conference will take place at Laval University in the beautiful environment of Québec City. Presentations will be made in both English and French. Participants include researchers in various social science disciplines, those in charge of developing public policies and representatives of social actors and labour market partners including management, unions, legal advisers and other representative organizations. The conference is now open to multidisciplinary academic and practitioner proposals from industrial and employment relations, human resource management, labour and social law, labour studies, sociology of work and social science and other disciplines relevant to the study of work and employment.

Scholars interested in one or more of these questions (see the detailed identification of themes and questions by following this link) are invited to submit an original paper proposal in English or French. The papers can be theoretical, analytical, empirical or policy-oriented. Priority will be given to studies which significantly contribute to the understanding of employee representation, either in a specific national context or from a comparative perspective.

All proposals for this thematic call for papers should be submitted by October 30th, 2009 and will be subject to a competitive review by the Scientific Committee. Paper proposals should be a maximum of 2 pages and should outline the nature of the study, the methodological approach, and the main lines of analysis to be developed. The selected authors should submit a first draft of the full version of their paper by May 1, 2010, which will be made available at the time of the conference on a special Web site for participants. The paper proposal should be sent by electronic mail to: Nicolas Roby, CRIMT Scientific Coordinator at the following address: nicolas.roby@umontreal.ca.

The Canadian Industrial Relations Association (CIRA-ACRI) is a national network promoting discussion, research and education in the field of work and industrial relations. CIRA is open to any individual interested in industrial relations, work and employment, including union-management relations, labour law, human resources management, unionism, etc. CIRA brings together industrial relations specialists from both labour and management, as well as from government and universities. For further information, please visit the CIRA Web site.