Evidence of further decline of the British shop steward?

This feature highlights the key findings of the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey concerning the extent and role of workplace representatives in the UK. The survey shows that in most British workplaces there are no shop stewards or other type of employee representatives present, and that where they do exist they are seen as largely ineffective.

The shop steward is perhaps the best-known figure in British industrial relations - the lynch-pin of a decentralised, enterprise-based system of collective bargaining. Shop stewards are elected directly by their fellow workers and act as their representatives in individual and collective dealings with management. They are the organisational base of most British trade unions, responsible for membership recruitment and local union activity. The 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey (UK9811159F) ("Britain at work", Mark Cully et al, Routledge, 1999) provides a detailed picture of the state of shop steward and employee representation systems after 20 years of trade union decline.

The representation gap

The survey (of workplaces with 25 or more employees) showed that "almost three in five workplaces had no worker representatives of any kind, and this was the case for nine out of every 10 workplaces where there were no union members". Some form of representation was found in about 75% of workplaces with recognised unions, implying that in a quarter of workplaces where unions were recognised union members had no direct access to a local representative. Among workplaces with recognised trade unions, 10% had non-union as well as union representatives.

These findings confirm that employee access to a local system of representation is now confined to a minority, and that such access is still very closely identified with the presence of a recognised trade union. In only about 15% of workplaces where trade unions were not recognised were any employee representatives found. In the UK in the late 1990s, employee representation was largely confined to the public sector, the privatised utilities such as gas, electricity and water, and large workplaces in the manufacturing sector, following the contours of trade union recognition.

The typical employee representative is male and has been employed at his workplace for 11 years. The survey confirms that within workplaces the proportion of female representatives is close to their proportion in the workforce, but that there is an marked tendency for representatives from the ranks of professional, white-collar workers to be present in greater numbers than their proportional employment (and the converse for manual workers). In terms of representativeness, there is increasing "gender balance" but a significant occupational imbalance. The latter perhaps reflects professional employees' greater access to the basic facilities needed to do the job of acting as a representative and, perhaps, less intensive working patterns.

The time spent on representational activities is generally low; impressionistic evidence suggests that it has declined. Thus a majority of senior representatives spent less than two hours per week, and 29% less than one hour on such work. However a marked "size effect" is at work, such that in the largest workplaces (500 or more employees) 60% of senior representatives spent more than 10 hours per week on representational activities.

What do shop stewards do?

When asked, representatives state that they spend most of their time dealing with issues related to health and safety issues, the "treatment of employees by management", employment security, wages and other benefits. They also spent significant time "resolving conflicts between employees and managers" and "finding ways to improve workforce performance". Their priority activities have not changed in several decades. What is striking, however, is what the survey reveals concerning the nature of their engagement with management over these and other issues.

The survey identified nine standard workplace issues, including pay, health and safety, and grievance handling, and asked both management and employee representatives to indicate the process through which it was handled (negotiation, consultation, information provision, or nothing). Negotiation, the "strongest" form of interaction, took place over pay in 39% of workplaces. On the other issues, negotiation was rarer, and in 48% of workplaces no negotiating took place at all. In about two-thirds of these there was at least some consultation and/or information-sharing. In 7% of workplaces with trade union representatives there was no local union involvement in any of the nine identified issues. Even more astonishingly, the survey appears to reveal that "the degree of joint regulation is no greater in workplaces with union representatives than in those with non-union representation" - and pretty low in both cases.

No good time-series data exist dealing with such issues. However, the impression is of a significant decline in shop steward influence at the workplace. The notion, influential in analyses of UK industrial relations for three decades, that stewards and managers engage in a process of joint regulation, sharing responsibility for local decisions, is now untenable. Insofar as joint regulation was identified as the central source of legitimacy in the regulation of the employment relationship in a "voluntaristic" system such as the UK, it is clear it no longer applies.

Indirect confirmation of this may be inferred from the data dealing with employee views of local union effectiveness. Generally, union members agreed that their unions took notice of problems and complaints, but only a bare majority (52%) felt that unions were "taken seriously by management" and less than half agreed that they "make a difference to what it is like at work". The views of non-unionists were significantly less favourable in all cases. In a decentralised union system, in which shop stewards act as the principal recruiters of members, such perceived ineffectiveness is unlikely to help garner new recruits.

The factors at work

These changes are a straightforward reflection of the general and well-documented decline of trade unions in the UK, which will, in a decentralised system, have an obvious impact at workplace level. This is clearly reflected in the strong continuing association between shop steward effectiveness and the density of workplace trade union membership revealed by the survey. Managers and workers take strong trade unions more seriously than weak ones. However, in a decentralised system with few legal rights to representation, and at a time of general union weakness, responsibility for the state of trade union organisation lies more with management than unions. The survey reveals this both through the widespread indifference and occasional hostility of local managers to the existence and operation of shop steward systems, and through the strong association between supportive managerial attitudes and effective representation systems.

The low priority attached to local consultation through systems of indirect employee representation is seen in the preference of 72% of workplace managers who would rather consult directly with employees than with trade union representatives. Even on an issue such as redundancy (mostly where numbers were below the threshold for mandatory consultation) managers consulted directly with employees affected in 82% of cases, supplemented by indirect union consultation in most cases. However, even in unionised workplaces 36% "bypassed union representatives either by consulting employees directly or not consulting at all". Even the provision of basic information is low. The survey reveals that in workplaces with trade union recognition no information was made available by management on performance appraisals (in 52% of workplaces with union representatives), recruitment (52%), payment systems (46%) and training (43%). It is difficult to see how any representative system could function effectively in such an environment. The survey data emphatically bear out earlier arguments that the "representation gap" is in many ways a symptom not of employer hostility - an "employers' offensive" - but of managerial indifference and "marginalisation". In most workplaces in the 1990s managers preferred either direct engagement with individual employees, or none at all.

Commentary

The survey took place in 1998, less than one year after the election of Tony Blair's Labour government, too early to reveal any general effects of the change of political climate and before the specific introduction of important new legislation, most particularly the union recognition procedures of the Employment Relations Act 1999 (UK9912145F). The survey "benchmarks" the transition from two decades of "Thatcherism" into the birth of "Blairism"; the next survey will be vital in assessing the impact of "New Labour". The survey also coincides with the flourishing of government, managerial and trade union interest in the concept of "partnership" (UK9906108F). While still lacking precise definition, the concept, at least in unionised settings, brings with it the notion of managerial engagement with active, informed and authoritative representatives jointly dealing with an increased range of issues (UK9907214F). The picture of the present state of shop steward organisation painted by the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey does not suggest that this is near. Nevertheless there are at least some grounds for thinking that the next survey may reveal some resurgence in shop steward activity. (Michael Terry, IRRU)