Newsletter
April 2006
Spotlight: What's to Love About Employee Ownership?
Unions usually dislike the idea of employee ownership. So why did several unionized companies in crisis overcome their aversion and embrace it as a strategy for saving jobs? IRC Director Carol Beatty, co-author of Employee Ownership: The New Source of Competitive Advantage, explains ...more
This Issue:
- Spring Fever: Sign up now for the few remaining seats on IRC's upcoming programs ...more
- Alumni in Action: Petra Holic recalls a valuable technique from OD Foundations ...more
- Union Blues: Buzz Hargrove lectures at IRC on the labour movement's ills ...more
- Downloads: Check out new original research on high performance professional teams ...more
- Spotlight: What's to love about employee ownership? ...more
Spring Fever: Sign Up Now, or Repent at Leisure
It continues to be a record-breaking spring session at Queen's IRC. Right now, Business Strategy and Industrial Relations are filling up fast; Negotiation Skills and Dispute Resolution Skills are at or near capacity; and there is a waiting list for Labour Arbitation Skills and Change Management. We encourage you and your colleagues not to wait to register if you are considering joining us this spring. All Queen's IRC programs qualify for 10 points a day toward CHRP recertification.
Go to: Business Strategy and Industrial Relations
Alumni in Action
Petra Holic is an Associate in the People Portfolio at Northwater Capital Management Inc. in Toronto. We asked what memorable tools or techniques she brought back to the office after the OD Foundations program in Kingston last fall:
"I learned about the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) technique during OD Foundations. Because of interest from quite a few of the participants, [IRC faculty] Brenda [Barker] very spontaneously put together a workshop over lunch one day where she shared with us her experience using this technique: how AI questions are formed, its intent, advantages over other methods, etc. I found AI very appealing because it focuses the attention of participants on positive and forward-looking change; takes their mindsets to 'what’s possible' rather than 'what’s broken.' For us, it also proved to be a wonderful opportunity to reminisce and reflect. We used AI as an exercise to solicit thoughts, feelings, and memories from long-standing and new employees about their first experiences when they came into contact with, and later joined, our firm. This and other group sessions are part of a larger project we are working on to develop an 'Owner’s Manual,' our non-policy version of what is traditionally called the 'Employee Handbook.'"
The next OD Foundations programs will be held April 18-21 in Regina; and September 24-28 in Kingston.
Union Blues: Buzz Hargrove on the Labour Movement's Ills
The labour union movement is fighting for its life and has to act accordingly, Buzz Hargrove told a capacity crowd of 200 people at Queen’s University on March 16.
Hargrove, national president of the National Automobile, Aerospace, Transportation and General Workers’ Union of Canada (CAW-Canada), was sharing his perspective on labour relations in Canada as the Industrial Relations Centre/MIR’s Spring 2006 Don Wood Visiting Lecturer.
The fight for survival, he added, “means ruthlessly reviewing what is working, and what is not working, in our current organizing, bargaining, education and political activism. It means being willing to fearlessly innovate.”
This will no doubt be a painful, controversial process, he said, mentioning a recent magazine article that said that at one time or another, he had “pissed off just about everyone in the labour movement.”
Hargrove said he doesn’t consider that a criticism. “Perhaps it reflects that I am doing a good job challenging the movement to innovate, to get better. This isn’t a popularity contest, after all. It’s a fight for the heart and soul of society.”
Unions need a long overdue a makeover in many areas, including their political activism, he said. For one thing, they need to stop viewing the NDP “as the natural and automatic expression of the labour movement’s hopes and dreams in the political arena.”
Talking about the controversy and criticism surrounding his election support for the Liberal Party and his subsequent ejection from the NDP, Hargrove was unequivocal: “I am 100 percent convinced that the CAW’s independent approach to the federal election was fundamentally correct. And the unfortunate decision of the NDP to expel me from the party will, if anything, cement our union’s determination to build an independent, union-based politics. The party is forcing CAW activists to make a choice between the party and the union. Most of them will choose their union.”
It is essential that unions begin to rebuild an independent political capacity, he said, ensuring their presence in the political arena as the union, and not the party, in future.
The Don Wood Visiting Lectureship in Industrial Relations is organized by the Queen’s University Industrial Relations Centre and Master of Industrial Relations program, School of Policy Studies. It features distinguished individuals, such as Hargrove, who have made an important contribution to industrial relations in Canada or abroad.
Free Downloads: Queen's IRC Papers on High Performance Professional Teams
A research symposium organized by Queen’s Industrial Relations Centre has yielded original research now available in the IRC’s online Knowledge Centre.
The symposium, held last October, attracted original papers from three Queen’s University research groups:
- A Meta-Analysis of the Virtual Teams Literature, by A. Ortiz de Guinea, J. Webster, and S. Staples from the School of Business
- High Performance Teams in Primary Care: The Basis of Interdisciplinary Collaborative Care, by D. Delva and M. Jamieson from the Department of Family Medicine and the School of Rehabilitation Therapy
- Incentive Pay, Teams and Earnings: Evidence from Toronto Firms, by C. Riddell from the School of Policy Studies.
Download the papers here: http://www.industrialrelationscentre.com/industrial-relations/symposium-papers.htm
Spotlight: What's to Love About Employee Ownership?
By Carol Beatty, Director, Queen’s Industrial Relations Centre
Unions often feel uneasy about employee ownership, Dr. Beatty says. But in these cases drawn from her research, they learned to love it, embracing it as a potent strategy for saving jobs, keeping plants open, and building better union-management relationships.
Surprising fact: in 2002, unionized workers made up a larger percentage of U.S. employees holding stock options than non-union workers (General Social Survey for 2002 – Rutgers University).
Surprising fact: U.K. workplaces with employee share ownership have much higher union membership than those without it.
Numerous carefully controlled studies have shown that companies with significant employee ownership grow faster, by about three percent annually. Furthermore, faster growth of eight percent to 11 percent was experienced by companies implementing employee ownership (EO) “well” (Beyster Institute website). For example, UPS, called “the tightest ship in the shipping business,” is majority owned by its 300,000 unionized employees.
So why aren’t unions jumping on EO? It seems that unions become enthusiastic about it only when it provides a way of saving jobs during looming crises. Some union leaders have become suspicious because the term "ESOP" has become associated with union busting during high-profile failures such as United Airlines. Others have a philosophical reluctance to participate in corporate decision-making because of their duty of fair representation. Also, some unionists view minority representation on corporate boards as a waste of time.
But my case studies of five unionized Canadian plants that adopted EO during a threatened closure might convince them otherwise. Two of the five, Great Western Brewery and Algoma Steel, survived as independent entities; and two others, Spruce Falls and Provincial Papers, were turned around and sold to larger companies. EO proved a potent strategy in the union’s struggle to save jobs and keep the plants open.
To read the full Spotlight article, go to: http://www.industrialrelationscentre.com/infobank/articles/
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