XII. LABOR STUDIES/LABOR UNIONS,
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING, DISPUTE
RESOLUTION, AND LABOR AND
EMPLOYMENT LAW REFEREED PAPERS

DISCUSSION

Michael H. Belzer
Wayne State University

     My comments will be limited to those on the paper by Robert Bruno of the University of lllinois at Urbana-Champaign--Chicago Labor Education Program. This is an interesting paper on the effects of labor-management teams on union stewards and their jobs. This research is related to the literature on whether teams or employee involvement lead to a weakening of unions, or reduce their ability to organize (for a review of this literature, see Bronfenbrenner et al. 1998).

     Teams clearly have affected stewards as well as lower and middle managers. One of the consequences for middle management is a reduced role and reduced need for front-line supervisors as their role is taken by team leaders. On the other hand, if teams reduce labor-management conflict, then perhaps middle managers are less needed for enforcement and can shift their focus to organizational development tasks. These changes also affect stewards: if shop-floor conflict declines under team-based systems of management, stewards can shift their attention also to organizational development and internal organizing activities, rather than spend their time tied up with day-to-day conflicts. Both union and management front-line officials might experience a change in their role from dispute managers to broader areas of responsibility.

     Bruno collected an interesting data set consisting of six stewards in six locals in twelve establishments in the metal foundry industry. He should acknowledge that this is a nonrandom sample. The fact that this study controls for industry variance helps reduce confounding sources of error; however, it also limits its generalizability. The sample also is unbalanced, with three-fourths of the stewards in establishments with teams. This becomes a problem in the data analysis because some of the cells are quite small.

     The following reported results concern me. First, for hypothesis 1, we see fewer grievances per steward, but we do not know how many workers these stewards represent. We could reach a very different conclusion if all teams are in larger shops or in places where the ratio of stewards to members differs systematically. This problem runs throughout the analysis and raises questions. I am concerned that shop size or number of employees per steward could explain the results, changing the conclusions dramatically.

     Second, Bruno repeatedly refers to "no significant difference" or "significant difference" between labor-management team environments and non-labor-management team counts in the cross-tabs, but no measures of significance are reported. No other measures are used to differentiate outcomes to see whether true significant differences exist.

     Third, it would be interesting to try to predict the number of grievances or another outcome based on the response to the questions. I am sure readers would be very interested to know whether any of these variables predict either satisfaction of members (something that is not in the survey) or satisfaction of stewards with their labor-management relationships. These questions, along with the question of whether labor-management teams inhibit union functioning, are crucial to this debate.

References

Bronfenbrenner, K., S. Friedman, R. W. Hurd, R. A. Oswald, and R. L. Seeber, eds. 1998. Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.