Unions and Procedural Justice: An Alternative to the ‘Common Rule’

New management thinking on work organisation and pay brings it into direct conflict with long-established methods trade unions have used to defend their members’ interests and their ideas of fairness. No doubt, this has contributed to the declining management interest in ‘joint regulation’ with unions in recent decades, and not just in Britain and the U.S. As employers have striven to make their organisations more responsive to more competitive and faster changing markets, they have sought to devolve decision-making in their organisations, and to rely more upon employees thinking for themselves and using their initiative. To break away from bureaucratic patterns of organisation, they have needed to adopt more performance-oriented reward systems so that they can reward initiative and flexible working, and reinforce the message about the need for ‘performance’ (Cappelli et al., 1997, Ch. 1).