Downsizing, outsourcing, and intensifying performance management have become common features of corporate restructuring. They have also helped to drive up job insecurity and inequality. Under what conditions do companies take alternative approaches to restructuring that balance market demands for profits with social demands for high quality jobs? In Exit, Voice, and Solidarity, Doellgast compares strategies to reorganize service jobs in the US and European telecommunications industries. Market liberalization and shareholder pressure pushed employers to adopt often draconian cost cutting measures, while labor unions pushed back with creative collective bargaining and organizing campaigns. Their success depended on the intersection of three factors: constraints on employer exit, support for collective worker voice, and strategies of inclusive labor solidarity. Together, these proved to be crucial sources of worker power in fights to keep high quality jobs within core employers, while extending decent pay and conditions across increasingly complex networks of subsidiaries, subcontractors, and temporary agencies. Based on research at incumbent telecom companies in Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, UK, US, Czech Republic, and Poland, this book provides an original framework for analyzing cross-national differences in restructuring strategies and outcomes.

About the Author
Virginia Doellgast is Professor of Comparative Employment Relations in the ILR School at Cornell University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Wirtschafts-und Sozial-wissenschaftliches Institut (WSI) of the Hans Boeckler Stiftung.

Reviews
Doellgast finds that worker solidarity enhances worker power, leading to better working conditions, pay, job security, and well-being. Doellgast's work updates classic industrial relations to the broader concept of "employment relations." The goal is the same: to understand the changing world of work. * Choice *



Book Information
ISBN 9780197659786
Author Virginia Doellgast
Format Paperback
Page Count 312
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 476g
Dimensions(mm) 156mm * 237mm * 22mm