The role of a local trade union in the promotion of direct employee voice in workplaces: Towards organised disintermediation?

Set against the background of the increasing centrality of knowledge in production processes and the subsequent affirmation of managerial-led forms of cognitive employee participation in many Western economies, this research project concentrates on the role of trade unions, considered as traditional bulwarks of workers’ voice, in response to this trend. In the context of a large literature generally depicting a quite conservative trade union approach to these changes, the purpose of this research is to empirically assess how and why trade unions do intervene in the promotion, regulation and implementation of non-union, and usually managerial-led, forms of employee voice (e.g. meetings of temporary groups or committees, continuous improvement groups, suggestion schemes, employee surveys, etc.). Given the direct and immediate (since not mediated by unions) labour-management relationships that these practices would imply, the concept of organising disintermediation is introduced in the first section to sythetise this trade union orientation. To achieve the research purpose, a longitudinal case study is developed and based on the experience of FIM-CISL of Brescia, a local metalworkers’ organisation situated in the North of Italy, which since 2016 has engaged in the development of 4 projects of work organisational innovation via direct employee participation in 4 different productive units. After describing the environmental and institutional contexts where the trade union operates as well as its own identity (by following a theoretical framework which essentially draws on Dunlopian systems theory and new-sociological institutionalism), data and information concerning the trade union’s discourse and action are collected mainly via the methods of field research, participant observation and the conduction of semi-structured interviews with union officials (7), delegates (10) and a union-selected consultant. Results show: the reality of the perspective of union-organised disintermediation, that by taking up a Polanyian approach, is viewed as a union-led countermovement for the (re)embeddedness of workers’ knowledge and participation within the framework of collective representation and industrial relations; the relevance of the theme of the reconciliation between apparently opposite domains (i.e. union functional and institutional goals; environmental pressures and union subjective features; the logic of membership/organising and the logic of influence/partnership of labour’s association) both as a trigger for union proactive mobilisation and as an enabler of the effectiveness of union actions; the openness of industrial relations to new players (i.e. consultants) and instruments (i.e. communal project management complementing collective bargaining) as the topic of organisational innovation requires to shift the focus from interests and rules to goals and processes; and the potential role of industrial relations, embodying the seeds of a self-organisation of commons, for the communal management of knowledge in profit-oriented firms.