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 industry.
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, temporary agencies. Based on the findings of ten case studies of incumbent telecom
companies in Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, UK, US, Czech Republic, and Poland, this book provides an original framework in restructuring strategies and outcomes.
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Theorizing exit, voice, and solidarity
Chapter 2: Mapping exit, voice, and solidarity in the case studies
Chapter 3: Downsizing
Chapter 4: Performance management
Chapter 5:
Externalization: Outsourcing, agency work, and subsidiaries
Chapter 6: Conclusions
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
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 Böckler Stiftung.
Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
Reconstructing Solidarity - Edited by Virginia Doellgast, Nathan Lillie and Valeria Pulignano
Innovation in Real Places - Dan Breznitz
