Industrial Relations Journal 40:2, 172–179

ISSN 0019-8692

Book reviews

New Labour/Hard Labour? Restructuring and Resistance Inside the Welfare Industry
Gerry Mooney and Alex Law (eds)
Policy Press, 2007, 312 pp., £60.00 (hardback), £22.99 (paperback)

The focus of this edited collection is on the workers who deliver welfare, and the first
two chapters by the editors provide the background. The government’s overall
approach is neoliberal, with the involvement of the private sector in the provision of
public services to make the latter subject to market disciplines. Allied with this,
however, is an emphasis on work as a way out of poverty, which the government sees
as a way of marrying economic efficiency with social justice. In fact, the editors argue,
the result is detrimental to public service workers who are subject to what they call
‘strenuous welfarism’. Essentially, this phrase refers to the pressures on those deliv-
ering welfare to intensify their efforts and to extend their working time, while becom-
ing subject to greater managerial control, for instance through new accounting,
performance management and regulatory procedures and in many cases de-skilling
and work degradation. This often has deleterious effects on the relationship between
those providing and those receiving public services, putting ‘at risk such residual levels
of worker commitment to the service ethos as remain’ (p. 40).
The succeeding chapters flesh out the background and provide supporting detail, by
focusing on workers at the frontline, often drawing on labour process theory. Accord-
ingly, there are chapters on support workers in Private Finance Initiative hospitals,
nurses, school teachers, higher education lecturers, nursery nurses, social workers,
workers in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) at the interface with the
public, for instance delivering Incapacity Benefit/working in Job Centre Plus and, last
but not least in view of the increase in the use of the so-called third sector in delivering
public services, workers in non-profit organisations.
As the subtitle makes clear, however, this book is not just about how welfare work
has been restructured into a welfare ‘industry’, but also how welfare workers have
resisted the new demands placed on them, motivated not only by a desire to protect
jobs, wages and conditions, but also to defend the quality of the services on which the
most vulnerable groups in society depend. In some cases this resistance has been
overt; for instance, the national strike by local authority employed nursery nurses in
Scotland in 2004, the industrial action by higher education lecturers in England and
Wales in 2006, a 10-month strike in 2000–01 by ancillary workers at Dudley hospitals,
campaigns by teachers, supported by parents, against trusts/academy schools for
instance in Oldham, and numerous bouts of industrial action by those working in the
DWP, including the strikes and overtime ban in 2006.
In other cases the resistance has been covert, for instance employees leaving nursing
and leaving a non-profit organisation after having been subject to bullying and

© 2009 The Author(s)

Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St.,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Book reviews 173
victimisation by managers. The unions’ equivocation over these acts of resistance is
considered. In some cases, they are praised for organising and supporting strikes and
in other cases they are criticised for pulling their punches.
The book has a number of weaknesses. First, generalisations are made from often-
limited primary data, pointing to a lack of academic rigour. For instance, Lynne
Poole’s chapter on workers in the non-profit sector draws heavily on issues raised by
five employees in a criminal justice project in Scotland, from which she concludes that
there is a challenge by senior managers to professional power and ‘a gap between the
rhetoric and reality of partnership, community governance and active citizen partici-
pation’ (p. 258).
Similarly, Gerry Mooney and Tricia McCafferty draw heavily on their interviews
with 20 nursery nurses and conclude that the Scottish nursery nurses’ strike was not
just about pay and conditions, but also about professional autonomy. Peter and
Carole Kennedy quote from six Scottish nurses and a student nurse to conclude that
‘Taylorism, [New Public Management] and professional self regulation have failed to
fully control nursing labour either separately or collectively’ (p. 109). Further research
may support the conclusions in this and other chapters, but at this juncture it would
seem premature to expound them with such certainty.
Second, the book is riddled with jargon and is a front-runner for the wooden spoon
in the Plain English awards. Words are concocted, for example ‘massification’ (p. 146)
(not defined but seems from the context to mean increased participation in higher
education) and the use of nouns as verbs, for example ‘foregrounds our concern’
(p. 41). Third, and importantly however, is the failure to put a discussion of gender at
centre stage of the editors’ and other contributors’ analyses. Indeed gender only has
a walk-on part, even though the public service workers who are covered in this book
are predominantly women.
Yet the book has a number of strengths. First, is its clear point of view. The editors
in a preface hope that the book ‘will help in some small way to encourage further
resistance to New Labour’s neoliberal agenda’ (p. viii) and the reader is left in no
doubt where all the authors are coming from. Another strength is the focus on groups
of providers of public services who are often neglected in the literature, particularly
nursery nurses and those working in the non-profit welfare sector. Accordingly, it is
fitting that the book is dedicated to Peter Bain, as it reflects his interest in the working
lives of those who are normally largely disregarded.

Susan Corby
University of Greenwich, London, UK

Managing Employee Performance and Reward: Concepts, Practices, Strategies

John Shields (ed.)
Cambridge University Press, 2007, xviii + 594 pp., £30.00

The development of the ‘reward management’ paradigm in the UK in the 1980s,

driven by the ‘New Pay’ literature from the USA, led to a resurgence of interest in
remuneration systems. While the study of remuneration systems is by no means new
in the UK, earlier research was mainly couched within the industrial relations
tradition. The decline of collective bargaining and the increasing individualisation of
pay and conditions led to a markedly different, more prescriptive approach to
© 2009 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
174 Geoff White
studying remuneration. This new approach was given added impetus in the UK by the
establishment of a separate and dedicated ‘employee reward’ syllabus in the profes-
sional education scheme of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. As
a result, a number of textbooks have emerged to service this growing market.
These textbooks have largely adopted a normative and prescriptive approach to the
subject, exemplified by the encyclopaedic 700-page tome by Armstrong and Murlis,
Reward Management: A Handbook of Remuneration Strategy and Practice, first pub-
lished in 1988 and now in its fifth edition. Other texts include Hume (1995), Arm-
strong (1996, 1999, 2002) and Armstrong and Stephens (2005). Texts by Thorpe and
Homan (2000) and Wright (2004) take a more academic and evidence-based approach
to the issues but still remain stuck in the ‘no-man’s land’ between academic critique
and prescription.
This new text, by John Shields from the University of Sydney, is therefore a
welcome alternative for the student seeking a more theoretical, challenging and dis-
cursive approach to reward. As Shields argues in his introduction, textbooks on HRM
often ‘amount to little more than an assemblage of prolifically illustrated but poorly
connected chapter-length treatments of specific human resource functions’ with ‘no
identifiable integrative argument or thesis to offer’ (p. 7). In contrast, Shields claims
that his book follows ‘an explicit and sustained line of argument’. In the USA, the
study of remuneration systems is dominated, as he indicates, by two disciplines—
labour economics and organisational psychology. A range of equally useful insights
can be drawn, however, from other fields of study, such as organisational studies,
HRM, corporate governance, industrial relations, sociology, business ethics, business
and labour history, cultural studies and critical management studies, and Shields
ranges wide in his research for this book.
The author considers the three main approaches taken to the subject—the prescrip-
tive, the descriptive and the critical. After explaining how each of these can contribute
to an understanding of reward practice, Shields claims that this new volume is ‘a text
written with prescriptive intent but from a pluralist and (constructively) critical
perspective’ (p. 14). This is an audacious claim but the book generally succeeds in
balancing its competing demands, not least between offering a critique based on
research evidence and recommending solutions for practitioners.
The book usefully begins with a section defining the key concepts of performance
and reward management and the underpinning theoretical material, including chap-
ters on the psychology of reward, managing motivation and the competing theories of
contingency versus resource-based models of HRM. These chapters provide both
extensive reviews of the literature as well as drawing out key implications for practice.
The following sections of the book tackle performance management in action, base
pay and benefits, rewarding employee performance and ‘fitting it all together’. Each of
the central three sections ends with a case study. Part 2, covering ‘performance
management in action’, is structured around three horizontal dimensions to perfor-
mance and reward (i.e. inputs, task effort and outcomes) and three vertical dimen-
sions (i.e. individual, group and organisation-wide). Separate chapters deal with
managing for results, managing behaviour and managing competencies while the final
chapter in this section tackles the issue of performance review and development.
The following sections utilise the material from Part 2 to consider the reward
‘system’ as such. Shields overcomes the structural problem apparent in many reward
textbooks by separating out the various strands according to broad conceptual
alternatives. The chapter on ‘position-based’ systems covers both market-based
© 2009 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
 Book reviews 175
systems and job evaluation, leading to systems based on pay scales and narrow
grades, while that on ‘person-based’ systems relates to skills-based and competency-
based pay, which in turn relates to broad bands. These alternatives are therefore
presented as representing fundamental theoretical differences in the purpose of the
reward system, rather than just different reward techniques.
Part 4 of the book concentrates on the various methods for rewarding employee
performance, including merit pay for individual performance, recognition awards,
results-based individual incentives, both short-term and long-term incentives, and
executive incentive schemes. The final chapter deals with the choice of reward prac-
tices available to the reward practitioner within a growing and bewildering set of
alternatives. In this chapter, Shields finally comes off his academic fence and opts for
the ‘best-fit’ model, arguing that the ‘best-practice’ model is likely to lead to the
adoption of reward ‘fads’ or the latest fashions, whether or not they fit the circum-
stances of the organisation. As the author states: ‘The danger here is that the organ-
isation ends up with a bundle of performance and reward practices that amount to
little more than a fashionable pastiche of initiatives bearing little relationship to the
real needs of the organisation, its customers and its employees’ (p. 510).
While this text is a major improvement on earlier reward books, it has two impor-
tant failings from a European perspective. The first is that it almost entirely ignores
the importance of trade unions in determining pay for large numbers of employees in
many countries, especially in larger organisations (collective bargaining does not even
get a mention in the index!). The second is that there is precious little discussion of the
wider constraints on the design of reward systems, including their legal regulation and
role in society. Equal pay is hardly mentioned and in most respects the book appears
gender-blind. Similarly, the fixing of wage floors, either through collective agreements
or minimum wage laws, gets only a very brief mention. The author also skirts the
emotive issue of executive pay levels and the impact of widening pay differentials on
society. Having said that, the book provides the first genuinely academic treatise on
the reward management paradigm and should be welcomed.

Geoff White
University of Greenwich, London, UK

Yes to a Referendum? A Labour View

Bill Wedderburn
Institute of Employment Rights, Liverpool, 2008, 28 pp., £10.00

Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck, some 150 years ago, once claimed to be one of the
only two people who understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, though he
informed us the other was dead and he had forgotten the question. Now the British
Parliament, and ‘informed’ opinion has its equivalent even if those claiming to under-
stand the Lisbon Treaty are more numerous. They also include Professor Wedder-
burn, but even he allows for the possibility that he might have got some details wrong
in this forensic, though concise, examination of the Treaty’s 500 pages and related
documents (p. 16). The people at large, who are not so ‘ordinary’, are sensibly bored
with and dismissive of, the whole thing. They have also far more to worry about as all
the current economic indicators turn consistently up or down and mostly in the
direction, which reduces their well-being and increases their insecurity. Yet, other
© 2009 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
176 Brian Towers
things being equal, the question is as important as Professor Wedderburn tells us it is.
That question, now widely put and across the EU, is are the failed draft, EU ‘Con-
stitution’ and its replacement, the ‘Reform’ Treaty (Lisbon Treaty), substantially the
same, or not? It is, of course, a ‘good’ question. It has two possible answers. If the two
are the same, then we are all being misled and we should have a referendum as the
2005 Labour Manifesto promised. If they are not, and the Treaty is a treaty not a
revised Constitution, then, in the UK as elsewhere, it can pass into EU law, endorsed
by national parliaments, without popular endorsement. The UK Parliament, as
others, has recently done just that, though the Irish, almost at the same time have, in
accordance with their constitutional requirement for a referendum, done the opposite
to the British. Some now say that the entire process, and the Constitution/Treaty, is
now dead. Others are still hoping to find a way towards eventual unanimity of the 27
Member States after appropriate amendments to the Treaty. Yet it is all, as they say,
a can of worms. But whatever the outcome, Professor Wedderburn’s interesting
arguments are on the table and, in their own right, deserve an appraisal. For Wed-
derburn, not surprisingly, given his long record as an acute observer, analyst and
defender of effective individual and collective employment rights (up to and in the
House of Lords), he is mainly concerned with the implications of the Treaty for the
Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Right to Strike.
The charter, legally binding under both the Constitution and the Treaty, is thought
by some in the labour movement, though not Wedderburn, to replace the Thatcherite
collective labour laws, still essentially in place under Blair and now Brown. Wedder-
burn, in his contrary view, cites the precedents set by the European Court of Justice
(ECJ) landmark judgments in the ‘explosive’ Viking and Laval cases. These held that
the right to strike, though undoubtedly a ‘fundamental’ right in line with the EU’s
social and employment policies, had to be placed alongside the employers’ right (or
freedom), to behave as capitalist, profit maximisers—and cost-minimisers. The EU is,
after all, at least a free market club. That allows employers to move capital abut or
locate their activities, under the law, in any EU country they choose. This completes the
doctrine of ‘proportionality’, that is the balancing of conflicting rights. As Wedderburn
reminds us, the ECJ’s judgments are not unlike Law Lord Lindley’s doctrine of
‘justification’ in 1901, limiting the right to strike until the protections, or ‘immunities’,
for unions in the 1906 Trade Disputes Act (pp. 11–12). Add to ‘proportionality’ the
‘primacy’ of EU law, as interpreted by the ECJ, the right to strike becomes a very weak
right indeed. Hence, if I interpret Wedderburn plainly, he advocates a referendum (a
commitment in 2005) on the grounds that the Treaty in an amended constitution in
disguise. That would give the British people the chance to reject it and, somewhat
paradoxically, leave the UK’s Thatcherite/Blairite/Brownite collective labour laws
intact. Better the devil you know? This is a strange place to be when Wedderburn, most
of his colleagues, and the wider labour movement ferociously resisted the Lady’s labour
legislation throughout the 1980s and, under Labour, argued and campaigned for a
restoration of the 1906 Act. The argument could, however, be extended that the
presented British labour law straitjacket is better than the Treaty and the ECJ alterna-
tives because it is at least within our national powers to at least loosen its strings. That
is more wishful thinking than practical politics since the people seem to have been
persuaded, on the approval implied in the words themselves, and the widespread
consensus of all political leaders, that ‘flexible labour’ (i.e. weak employment rights) are
a ‘good thing’ for the economy and employment, much like the repeated dictum in
Sellar’s and Yeatman’s celebrated 1066 and All That.
© 2009 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
 Book reviews 177
Beyond the dangers of the Treaty passing into law, Wedderburn even worries that
the ECJ will become as powerful as the US Supreme Court and, like it, be the final
interpreter and creator of the Constitution. The ECJ, even without its own
Constitution/Treaty is already a ‘creative’ court. ‘It is a court of great power’.
Wedderburn’s analogy with the US Supreme Court is, possibly, an argument too far.
That Court does have its liberal periods when political developments dictate liberal
appointments, notably under Roosevelt when the Wagner Act became law under the
stick of ‘packing’ the Court. Nor do the US States approximate to the latent power,
ancient lineage and fissiparous tendencies of the 27 Member States. Not since 1865 has
there been an issue big enough to threaten the cohesion of the 50 states, though the USA
has not been without its crises, notably over race itself as a legacy of 1861–65.
Yet Wedderburn is persuasive enough to raise alarm bells and put the case for
some pulling back from over-enthusiasm for the European Union and all its ambi-
tions and stratagems. In particular, though British individual employment law has
not been able to avoid the generally beneficial effect of EU membership towards the
needy extension of rights, all governments, from Thatcher, have consistently resisted
the restoration of collective rights, widely accepted on the European mainland and
usefully put together in the Charter. The normally benign influence of EU member-
ship is now called into question by what Wedderburn sees as a self-aggrandising ECJ
under a Treaty, which needs testing by a referendum. Though ignoring solemn mani-
festo commitments is very far from a rarity in British politics, it is perhaps time that
the electorate had some say on what remains a contentious issue, the implications of
membership if not membership itself. But all that has to wait, perhaps indefinitely.
Events are also beginning to intervene, and in a rush. At the time of writing, the
Irish have rejected the Treaty as the House of Lords has voted for it, but with
significant dissenting views. Voices are also now in chorus maintaining that the
Treaty is as dead as the Constitution, including some Member States. Even the
President of the Commission has, though belatedly, called for respect for the view of
the Irish people. Yet the Irish Prime Minister does not seem to have ruled out a
re-run, after revisions to the Treaty, though the British will not get their referendum.
Politically the government is firmly against it, the legal challenge to force one has
failed, and Parliament has approved the Treaty. But it is difficult to believe the
referendum issue is behind us or that we have heard the last of the Treaty, even if it
has to re-emerge as something else. On that, the now lengthening experience of
European integration is instructive.

Brian Towers
Nottingham University Business School and
The Management School, University of Liverpool

European Unions. Labor’s Quest for a Transnational Democracy

Roland Erne (ed.)
Cornell University Press, 2008, xiii + 260 pp., $29.95 (cloth ISBN: 978-0-8014-4648-1)

The European Unions in the title of this book are of two kinds: European trade
unions, and the EU—in the plural because the author argues that different EUs are
possible. Actually, the idea that different alternatives are possible is the thread of the
whole book, and the core of its definition of democracy. The author has a very
© 2009 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
178 Guglielmo Meardi
privileged observation point on both kinds of unions: while an industrial relations
academic, he also has a background in the trade union movement; and while a truly
multilingual European scholar, he can also look at the EU with the healthily detached
perspective of his native Switzerland or his adoptive (and newly Euro-sceptic) Ireland.
The main idea of the book is that there are two main strategic dilemmas for
European trade unions, which affect not only labour’s chances of defending workers
in an integrated market, but also the shaping of the European Union and its
‘democratisation’. The dilemmas are between European or national levels, and
between democratic or technocratic processes of decision making. Combining the two
axes, the author develops a typology of four possible union strategies: an analytical
tool, but also a political one for advocating Euro-democratisation, which the author
considers not only desirable, but also (against the scepticism of Streeck or Hancké)
possible. The theoretical inspiration comes here from Habermas on European public
spaces, and from part of the neo-corporatist literature, on the role of labour in
democratisation.
The research design is originally comparative. It compares opposite union strategies
towards two common challenges and it includes transnational units of analysis. A
broad range of documents, data and interviews from a number of countries are used.
The first comparison is between ‘social pacts’, seen as monistic national-
technocratic strategies, and European coordination as wage-bargaining strategies
under Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) conditions. Erne develops the criticism
of social pacts as ‘beggar-your-neighbour’ spiral originally proposed by Andrew
Martin in the late 1990s. He uses data from the European Trade Union Institute
(originally published in 1999) to show that social pacts in the Netherlands and Ireland
(starting from the 1980s), as well as Italy and Finland (in the 1990s, in direct relation
to the EMU) have translated into wage moderation: real compensation for workers
started falling behind productivity increases. Germany, Austria and Belgium are
shown to follow a similar pattern: in spite of the absence of formal social pacts,
corporatist structures or state involvement achieved the same effect. The final judge-
ment is that countries with competitive-corporatist wage moderation damage workers
more than countries that do not follow any concertation. In short, social pacts and
similar strategies make wages fall, the economy shrink and employment stagnate (the
latter is not entirely true, and more analysis would be needed on this important
variable, which in turn affects productivity).
But learning from the disappointing outcomes of social pacts may help trade unions
to search alternative strategies in European coordination of collective bargaining. The
attention moves then to two sectors (metalworking and construction) particularly
affected by internationalisation—whether through free movement of capital and
goods, or of workers. The analysis is very detailed and multi-level: the author is very
effective at checking information from the European level at the national and even
workplace ones. The strategies of European Metalworkers’ Federation (EMF) (a
European bargaining benchmark of inflation + productivity growth) and European
Federation of Building and Wood Workers (organising migrants and promoting EU
regulations for posted workers) are contrasted to show that sectors are more impor-
tant than countries in explaining union activities. The judgement is mixed: there are
little effects (wage moderation has endured despite EMF efforts), but maybe it is just
the beginning. The main criticism is on the overwhelmingly technocratic nature of the
EMF European approach (elaborated by academics), insufficiently supported by
democratic mobilisation and consultation of its constituencies.
© 2009 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009
 Book reviews 179
The second comparison is at company level: two comparable cases (in terms of
sector, countries, company structure and threatened effects on employment) of cross-
border company mergers of 1999–2000 are contrasted on the basis of the union
strategy. In the ABB–Alstom merger, unions followed a Euro-democratisation strat-
egy based on cross-border mobilisation and politicisation of the issue through pres-
sure on the European Parliament; this escalated through European demonstrations
and electoral pressure resulting in the European Commission abandoning its original
neoliberal creed and allowing French state aid for the company rescue. In the Alcan–
Pechiney–Algroup case, instead, the unions did not mobilise the workers, but gained
representation in the European Commission’s antitrust hearings. It then used its
power of influencing the Commission’s decision to obtain concessions from
management. The merger was initially stopped by the Commission, but eventually,
three years later, Alcan took over Pechiney and imposed restructuring unilaterally.
The lesson is that a Euro-democratic strategy of mobilising workers in the streets is
more viable than a Euro-technocratic one of gaining access to the Brussels rooms of
power (also because the European Commission approves 90 per cent of mergers at the
preliminary stage, before organised labour can obtain representation). The main
condition for Euro-democratic success is cross-border socialisation among workers
and their representatives: as it happens in the construction sector, or as it happened in
the ABB–Alstom case more than in the ACA one.
This promotion of a Euro-democratic strategy is very ambitious, and more research
will be needed to convince the sceptics. One positive case is enough for Erne to argue
the possibility of this strategy, but not yet its generalisability on a larger scale. Many
would also doubt whether today’s union activities can be named ‘strategies’ and
located in such clear typologies. In fact, Erne has to spend much effort and space to
establish whether the EMF approach is democratic or technocratic, but a similar
difficulty exists for social pacts. Their frequent technocratic, monistic nature does
not exclude some democratisation practices (e.g. the referenda in Italy), some real,
pluralist negotiations, and even same gains for labour (such as, in Italy, workplace
representation rights in 1993, or pension improvements in 2007). Nonetheless, Erne’s
concepts work well as definitions of competing tendencies or pressures that exist in the
unions, even if they fall short as discrete classifying criteria.
But the main strength of this book is that its concepts and cases are relevant and
highly readable not only for academics, but also for union and EU debates: whether
you agree or not with it, there is plenty to discuss. Few industrial relations books have
such broad social and political relevance. It deserves to be widely read and discussed,
if not for the sake of democracy, at least for the reputation of industrial relations
research.

Guglielmo Meardi
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

© 2009 The Author(s)

Journal compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2009