36 SITUATING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
‘Collectivist representation’ rests on the assumption that employees have a
right to have their independent voice heard and to exercise legitimate power
in the negotiation of their terms and conditions of employment. In its full
manifestation this is reflected in trade union(s) recognition at local level for
the purposes of collective bargaining over a wide agenda of issues, along
with formal grievance and consultation procedures. In a climate favourable
to trade unions, whether as a result of an adversarial (but only in the context
of full employment) or a collaborative relationship with the employer, one
might look for high levels of union density, reinforcing the institutional-
ization of unionized collective representation. Such collective representation
reached its zenith in the heyday of the twentieth century post-Second World
War Fordist/Keynesian settlement, where the growth of mass production and
public sector services, along with a commitment to social justice, provided
fertile ground for union recognition and the centrality of collective bargaining
in establishing the individual and social wage (Jessop 1994). Nostalgia for
this lost world is theleitmotivof Sennett’s (1998) polemic,The Corrosion of
Character.
The statistics illustrate the parlous state of collectivism in private sector
industry outside of Continental Europe and, arguably, Australia (Morehead
et al. 1997). In the US private sector, by 2000, only 9 per cent of the workforce
was unionized (Reinhold 2000). In Canada union density in the private sector
has declined since the end of the 1990s, from almost 22 per cent in 1997 to
just over 18 per cent in 1999 (Akyeampong 1997, 1999). China, India, Japan,
Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and the Philippines, in spite of variation between
countries, all suffered a steady decline in union density in the 1990s (Kuruvilla
et al. 2002). Even in Australia where, according to the Australian Workplace
Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS), only 29 per cent of locations lacked a
union presence that figure had almost doubled in the last five years (Morehead
et al. 1997: 467). Following the dramatic labour market reforms and lurch to a
neo-liberal economic policy in New Zealand in the early 1990s, union density
fell from almost 45 per cent in 1989 to under 20 per cent in 1996 (Wailes,
Ramia, and Lansbury 2003).
I will look in more detail at this phenomenon in relation to Britain. The
Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 (WERS 98) (Cully et al. 1999)
shows the extent of the retreat from the traditional forms of collectivism over
the past two decades. Guest (2001) provides a good summary of the findings.
In workplaces employing 25 people or more, according to management esti-
mates, about 30 per cent belong to a trade union. This varies with size of estab-
lishment, averaging 23 per cent in workplaces with 25–49 employees but rising
to 48 per cent in those employing over 500—a significant statistic as the trend
is towards smaller workplaces. While 47 per cent of workplaces have no union
members, only 2 per cent have 100 per cent union membership. Whereas
in 1980, 64 per cent of workplaces recognized a trade union for collective