ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the various frameworks which give meaning to democratic participation and workers' interests. It analyzes the views of information and communications technology (ICT) workers on democratic participation and workers' interests and discusses the implications of these views for trade union policies. Employees in the ICT industry make sense of their interests from the perspective of their own status in work and life, and this results in a diversity of meanings. Many workers in the ICT industry have their employment conditions determined on an individual basis, making them into special cases since four out of five workers in the Netherlands overall are covered by collective agreements. Obviously, these three cognitive frameworks – collective bargaining, codetermination and direct participation – offer very different representations of democratic participation and workers' interests. The representation of workers' interests in the area of quality of work is directly related to improvement of company performance.
