Individual Voice on the Shop Floor: The Role of Unions.

It is commonly argued that unions regularize workplace conflict by substituting formal strikes and grievance procedures for informal forms of resistance. This transformation is interpreted as part of a trade-off under business unionism in which unions help discipline workers and keep them on the job in exchange for the right to bargain collectively in their name. Tests of this thesis have focused on the trades-off between collective voice and exit and have ignored the subtle forms of worker resistance that are central to the argument. I test the hypothesized trade-off between union voice and informal resistance by systematically analyzing evidence from the population of English language workplace ethnographies (N = 95). Craft and industrial unions increase organized conflict with management. Industrial unions reduce some aspects of informal resistance and some aspects of organizational loyalty. The majority of individual reactions to the workplace, however, are: relatively uninfluenced by union presence. As unclaimed terrain, these individual reactions continue as a source of frustration for management and may represent an underutilized resource for unionization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Forces is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)