THE ETHICS OF HRM 49to where such costs are lower. Similarly, even where firms do not outsource
jobs to developing countries, the threat of relocation may be used to put a
downward pressure on wages (Standing 1999). This has a knock-on effect too.
For those entering the labour market without much education, the jobs in
manufacturing no longer exist in such plentiful supply and they have to look
for temporary or part-time work in low paying service sectors, which are no
longer under pressure to raise wages more in line with the (erstwhile better
paying) manufacturing sector, owing to the depression of wages and lack of
employment in that sector. Hence the income gap, under these conditions and
assumptions, inevitably rises between such routine,disposableproduction or
in-person service workers (to use Reich’s terminology)—generally the young,
the old, women, ethnic minorities, and the unskilled—and thecore, indis-
pensable,knowledge working professional and managerial elites and skilled,
often unionized workers—generally, white, educated, prime age males (if with
increasing numbers of women and ethnic minorities). Given that life choices
can be constrained by low income, negative liberty is further undermined for
routine workers in the largely non-unionized private sector.
The ethics of HRM for employees without
collective representation
So what is the most ethical employment relations system for employees with-
out collective representation? In line with Berlin’s privileging of choice in his
conceptions of liberty, one might suggest that it is a system which employees
themselves might choose. Clearly, in relation to the UK and elsewhere, the
majority of employees arenotchoosing to join a union (to put this choice
at its weakest—some may be activelychoosingnot to join a union). Guest
and Conway’s data (1999) from their 1998 CIPD survey found that workers’
attitudes towards unions were lukewarm to say the least. For example, around
70 per cent of unionized as well as non-unionized respondents felt that union
membership either made or would make no difference to fairness in the
workplace.
So what employee relations system might employees choose? If they sought
the rational self-determination embodied in the idea of positive liberty, log-
ically they might choose a system which they believed would deliver the
good (want satisfaction) in the ‘right’ way (the just distribution of the good).
These two ideas, as Guest (1998, 2001) and Guest and Conway (1998) per-
suasively argue, come together in the idea of a psychological contract resting
on workers’ perceptions of the fairness, trust and ‘delivery of the deal’ in
employment relationships. On the basis of their CIPD surveys (Guest 1999;