ABSTRACT

Over the course of this century, nonunion employers in Canada have experimented with a variety of ways to involve their employees in work-and workplace-related issues. Their efforts have been shaped by social, legal, and economic constraints. In the 1920s the rise of the human relations school saw a variety of plans to involve workers in work-related concerns. In later years similar plans evolved into quality circles and work teams to seek worker input into work-related concerns such as quality and productivity. Other firms went on to create formal employee organizations such as Joint Industrial Councils (JICs) 1 to solicit employee input into decisions ranging from wages and benefits to grievances and job classifications. While some of these plans seek workers’ participation in integrative issues such as quality and productivity, other initiatives seek employee input on distributive issues such as wages, benefits, and grievances. Direct input from the rank and file is often labeled as participation, while indirect input from employees’ representatives is seen as representational input. Both participative and representational forms have waxed and waned in popularity over the years. As outlined in the earlier chapters, their evolution in the United States has been shaped, at least in part, by legal strictures, such as Section 8(a)(2) in the National Labor Relations Act, which prohibit the employer from creating or dominating labor organizations that deal with issues of wages, benefits, and working conditions. Such restrictions on employer-sponsored employee involvement (EI) plans have never been enacted into law in Canada. Thus, if legal provisions were the defining constraint on EI forms, we may expect a different outcome for employee participation and representation in Canada relative to the United States. The lack of empirical research on this issue makes it difficult to address this hypothesis.