Christian Brunelle (Université Laval (Québec)) writes to tell us of the call for papers for the upcoming conference Employee Representation in the New World of Work: The Dynamics of Rights, Voice, Performance and Power. Jointly organized by the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (www.crimt.org) and the Canadian Industrial Relations Association (CIRA), the conference will take place in Quebec City on June 16th, 17th and 18th, 2010. Deadline for submission is November 15, 2009. Here’s a complete description:
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 tenets 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 yield some blend of employee voice and organizational efficiency, and thereby enrich the quality of democracy in industrializing societies.