3.1 Introduction

"Partnership" is a commonplace word that has gradually acquired the meaning (or rather meanings) it has come to acquire in the fields of public management and labour relations. Consequently, even in the context of the modern vocabulary of those subjects, in which imprecise terminology and flexible usage reinforce each other, the term "partnership" is especially prone to being interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Even in the academic environment, where terminological precision is not frowned upon, there is an array of theoretical and empirical conceptualisations and definitions that vary considerably in their scope and emphasis. The potential for confusion is such that it has even been suggested that the term "partnership" is now devalued currency, being too diffuse to carry any useful meaning (Oxenbridge & Brown 2004).

Within the European Union (EU), "social partnership" is a generic term used to refer to the relationship between employers and trade unions, routinely referred to as the "social partners" by EU institutions and officials. In the 1950s, the term "industrial partnership" was used by G.D.H. Cole to refer to a radical kind of co-management (Cole 1957); even countries in which the EU approach to "social partnership" has lagged others, the general idea is quite well established. Twenty years ago, for example, the British Labour Party was talking about "partnership in industry", arguing that this was

"A way of harnessing the skills and enthusiasm of the workforce and helping workers and their trade unions to play a constructive role in industrial decision making" (Labour Party 1987).

There are many in unions who have a jaundiced view of such an approach, seeing it as a trap for their members, while others, with less negative predisposition, have been disappointed by the results. On the other hand, there are also many who have found that partnership approaches have brought benefits for union members as well as employers and contributed to improving labour relations for mutual benefit, provided the aims and attitudes of participants are suited to it.

3.2 Organisation arrangements and attitudes in partnership

The literature reveals considerable variety in the forms and organisational arrangements for workplace partnership in the public sector and suggests that attitudes may be more important than organisational arrangements in shaping the outcome. Indeed, one of the points on which there is wide agreement in the literature is that the concept of partnership must be defined, not simply in terms of the organisational arrangements, but also in terms of the aims, values and attitudes of participants. This is true not only of normative conceptions - those which propose a theoretically coherent definition of what partnership ought to be - but of empirical conceptions, which aim to describe the characteristics of actual partnership relationships. In the former cases, a consistent element is the adoption of co-operative or non-adversarial approaches to the employment relationship, whether on the collective or individual level (IPA 1997; NESF 1997; TUC 1999; Guest & Peccei 2001; Ospina & Yaroni 2003; Neathey, Regan et al. 2005; Samuel 2005). In the latter cases, a wide range of studies suggest that the distinctiveness of the partnership relationship is frequently lost or undermined because participants either revert to, or fail to leave behind, the attitudes characteristic of more traditional forms of management and industrial relations (Roche & Geary 2002; Stuart & Lucio 2002; Ospina & Yaroni 2003; Payne 2004; Tailby, Richardson et al. 2004; Danford, Richardson et al. 2005; Geary 2006).

Farnham et al. (2005) distinguish between "indirect" and "direct" employee participation in public management, informing their analysis with national studies from 12 OECD countries. Indirect participation is characteristic of "first generation" collective bargaining, while direct participation is associated with a "second generation" in their analysis. Direct participation is a

"wider-based concept than indirect participation and consists of all those management-driven initiatives directed at involving individual employees or workgroups in the workplace. They cover operational issues and are aimed at gaining the individual commitment and personal contribution of employees to organizational goals, the managing of change and high performance." (p.xi; emphasis in original).

In terms of Farnham et al.'s classification, we are defining "workplace partnership" as an expression of their "second generation" of labour relations, in which direct participation is enabled. This implies that it is intrinsic to partnership that workers are organised in independent unions in a mature collective bargaining environment, and this defining characteristic also appears to align well with empirical evidence about conditions for effective employee involvement in productivity improvement. For example, Keefe (2003, p.211), surveying the US experience, found:

"During the past two decades, the majority of private and public sector employers in the United States have undertaken some form of workplace transformation that encourages employee involvement and participation. Among those efforts, the most effective - as measured by productivity and quality outcomes - are those undertaken in unionised workplaces."

Direct participation can take a variety of forms, from the most radical types of worker self-management to simple information sharing between employees and their direct supervisors. Typically, however, it involves some combination of a formal communication process with changes in work organisation to enable team-working, which is in turn intended to increase task discretion and responsibility, and is frequently combined with increased functional flexibility.

The literature suggests that the beliefs with which managers and union representatives confront each other fall into two broad categories. To use the conventional terminology, established by Fox (1966), we can call the first the pluralist perspective. It involves an assumption that employees' interests will inevitably conflict with those of employers and managers, if not at every turn, then at least sufficiently frequently to make it necessary to organise industrial relations around the assumption of conflict rather than that of order.^[1] The second can be called the unitarist perspective. This is the assumption that conflicts of interest are illusory, since managerial plans and strategies are exclusively directed towards maintaining and improving the performance of an enterprise - a goal which is evidently in the long-term interests of owners, managers and employees.

The public sector might be thought to have an intrinsic advantage over the private sector in providing an environment suited to the unitarist end of the spectrum, in that the role and objectives of the employing organisation are not centred on the private enrichment of the enterprise's owners but on the achievement of public policy goals. That is to say, to link this discussion with that of the previous section, the shared goal is the production of public value in which employees have a stake as citizens as well as employees. On the other hand, private sector employees are clearly also affected by the success or failure of their employers' enterprises in a market environment, while the interests of public sector workers clearly do not coincide entirely with those of their employers.

The literature suggests that, typically, though not invariably, partnership is conducted through dedicated institutional apparatus, which might be either ongoing or ad hoc. Some of the literature regards the conduct of partnership arrangements through apparatus separate from pre-existing collective bargaining institutions as a weakness, in that it leaves open the door to retreat from partnership to conventional bargaining. However, some see such parallel structures as a strength, and even as an essential component of success, on the grounds that it distinguishes between and separates partnership from conventional collective bargaining, enabling each to be more able to withstand difficulties in the other.

In any event, the two are closely related, and the Irish National Centre for Partnership and Performance, for example, argues that:

"The desire to solve problems, not structural arrangements, is the priority ... moving IR [industrial relations] issues into partnership offers new opportunities for broader and more innovative discussions, on issues such as staff recruitment and pay structures. It may be that aspects of this issue will move back into the IR process to agree the details of any plan scoped out at the partnership forum. This ongoing adaptation or 'zig-zag' suggests a very powerful process whereby practitioners make maximum use of their ongoing experience to revise and upgrade their best made plans or their stated positions." (NCPP 2003, p.61).

In the UK, on the other hand, a report jointly commissioned by the TUC and the Government's Office for Public Service Reform recommended that no new formal machinery was needed (OPSR 2004a). Nevertheless, according to Farnham et al. (2005a), there is "clear evidence that since 1997 there has been a major increase in the range of mechanisms for direct participation", and:

"A large part of the modernization agenda is about changing the roles and behaviours of front-line staff and the information and communications mechanisms designed to involve staff, along with training and development, are proving effective means for changing the culture, values, knowledge and competencies of civil servants."

In that context, "there is a general view by management" that "staff participation is essential to get the changes in behaviour required to achieve improvement in public services and that it does make a difference." (p.126).

Another British review of the experience, in higher education, found that

"Partnership working is often neither a permanent nor a formalised way of working, and it is often the case that while an organisation takes a partnership approach to a particular issue, it may revert to a more traditional relationship at other times.

For four out of five of the case study institutions partnership working was very much about a change in the nature of union management dialogue around issues which are traditionally within the remit of collective bargaining: pay and conditions, working conditions and the impact of restructuring. In most cases the change in the way of working together had not been formalised in a written agreement, or formally defined." (Neathey et al. undated, no page numbers).

Yet the unions in Britain, in several parts of the public sector, believe that they are insufficiently consulted about structural and organisational reforms, and some divergence between management and employee perceptions of partnership experiences is also evident elsewhere. In Italy, for example, where the Revenue Agency has taken steps to introduce team-based working and a communications programme to "explain" the programme to staff,

"whether and to what extent workers see these new direct participation practices as a way to reinforce or to undermine their influence in the making of decisions relevant to their working life remains an open question." (Cesare 2005, p.191).

In any case, it is clear from the literature that partnership cannot be defined only in terms of its organisational arrangements, but, as defining characteristics, the subject matter of engagement and the attitudes brought into it are at least as significant. This is because making such arrangements work in practice requires that both managers and trade union participants engage with the process in a spirit suited to its objective, which requires co-operative rather than adversarial attitudes. (Farnham et al. 2005).

Farnham et al. point out that, although little attention is paid to staff participation in the public management reform literature, "a key factor in the role they play in the reform process depends on the normative stance taken towards staff and unions within the political culture"(p.47). Taking their definition of "public management reform" from Pollitt and Bouckaert (2004), who define it as "those deliberate changes to the structures and process of public service organisations that have the objective of getting them to run better", they portray staff participation as an expression of a largely European set of influences about labour relations on management reform driven largely by American experience. However, Brock and Lipsky (2003, p.3), citing Slichter et al. (1960), point to long-standing "labour-management interaction" in the United States, commenting that the "basic premise of such relationships is not new" and that they require "a relationship that goes beyond contract negotiation and grievance handling and allows the parties to solve problems of mutual importance that occur between negotiating rounds."

Among the country experiences reviewed by Farnham et al. is New Zealand's, where workplace partnership may be particularly significant in the public sector context because of the country's earlier association with the NPM approach to reform, of which it was widely seen as a particularly consistent and determined pioneer (Schick 1996). New Zealand has established a Partnership Resource Centre within the Department of Labour, which has studied the extent and nature of workplace partnership in the country.

Box 3.1 Workplace Partnership in New Zealand

A 2006 report from the New Zealand Department of Labour's Partnership Resource Centre defines workplace partnership as "an active relationship between unions and employers to deliver outcomes that benefit both institutions and the employees and members who bring them together". Its "core ideas" include:

• a collaborative approach to bargaining;
• wide union and employee consultation practices;
• a focus on extracting "mutual gains" from negotiations;
• a preference for consensus over conflict; and
• mutual investment in protecting relationships.

Based on a literature review, case study research and "a comprehensive survey of all employers and unions parties at the time to registered Collective Employment Agreements", it found that:

• A significant minority of New Zealand employers have had experience of "workplace partnership-type interactions with unions";
• One third of employers, including a minority in the public sector, had current workplace partnership arrangements;
• Most union officials supported workplace partnership and believed it could benefit both parties provided that both were committed to it;
• There were few current examples of "pure" workplace partnerships, and "deeper instances" had been sporadic and had not endured, with "hangovers" resulting from failure;
• Workplace partnership takes time to develop and "appears to involve some natural ordering of circumstances" involving a mature collective bargaining relationship;
• "Reasonable relationships" between the individuals involved, with the nature of workplace relations highly dependent on their leadership roles;
• A "catalyst initiative from one side or a circumstance requiring broader cooperation or joint discussion outside of bargaining and the usual day-to-day interactions".

Source: Partnership Resource Centre (2006).

Most partnership models and agreements settle for vague formulations that emphasise a broad unity of purpose while recognising the legitimacy of the separate interests of employees and employers and committing each party to make all possible efforts to understand and accommodate the needs of the other (Government of Ireland 1996; IPA 1997; TUC 1999; CCSU 2000; PSA 2003).

Box 3.2: Some Examples of Public Sector Partnership Structures

US Federal Department of Transportation

The Department of Transportation has a multi-tiered structure of national, agency, regional and local partnership councils. The national-level partnership council comprises the top labour relations or human resources officer in each of the major agencies together with similarly high-ranking officers from the major unions. Other councils are typically constructed of an equal mix of union and management representatives drawn principally, although not exclusively, from elected union officers and the HR or personnel function. The principal functions of the national Partnership Council are to formulate the department's Labor Relations Strategic Plan, and to monitor and assess the lower-level partnership operations.

Depending on the council, operations are either parallel with but separate from the organisation's managerial structure and decision-making processes, or are to some extent integrated into these structures. The vast majority of councils are constituted as recommending bodies to senior management in which the agenda is jointly set by unions and management. In many cases, senior management refers issues to the councils before taking decisions.

Source: Albright (2004).

South Lanarkshire Council (UK) - Home Care Review

• Home Care - supporting clients with a range of disability and other care needs - is the main service provided by the Social Work service of South Lanarkshire Council. In response to increasing demand on the service arising from the ageing of the population, together with the need to provide a wider range of care services, a review of Home Care was instituted in 2000. A partnership approach to involving staff and unions in the conduct and implementation of the review was adopted.
• A Best Value Review Group was established, along with sub-groups dealing with specific items, for example training and development. As well as trade union representatives, the group included the head of service, service managers, operational managers and operational staff. There were also representatives from HR and Finance, and from the health services with which the Home Care staff worked.
• A Home Care Implementation Team was also established which continues to run to ensure a project-management approach to implementation of the review. The team includes a project leader, a staff support and transitions officer, a customer care and standards Officer and trade union representatives.
• Joint management and staff-side 'road-shows' were held at the start of the process.
• 'Patch meetings' were held by home care managers and their staff to discuss the review and put across their views.
• Managers held 1:1 meetings were held with every home carer to discuss the impact of the review, changes to their conditions of service, etc.
• Home Care newsletters reporting general developments were sent to every home care worker's home address.

Source: OPSR (2004b).

The literature suggests also that, while the attitudes and mindsets of individual leaders at the local level are critical, sustainability requires institutionalisation of the process. When a champion leaves, "innovation often dies", report Brock and Lipsky (2003):

"Thus, adopting labor-management cooperation is a difficult challenge, but institutionalising the process is even more so" (p.7).

Box 3.3 Local Variation in Impact of a National Agreement in UK's Royal Mail

During the 1990s, the Royal Mail in the United Kingdom signed "New Framework Agreements (NFAs)" which:

• "Were reached following an extensive process of preparation and analysis;
• Are unusually far reaching in scope;
• Commit the parties to the 'needs of the business';
• Are novel in their extensive revisions to traditional custom and practice;
• Give considerable recognition and security to unions;
• Give worker representatives access to business information and strategic plans;
• Give union representatives a say in important business operational matters."

Managers pursued the approach in order to overcome opposition from the Union of Communication Workers (UCW) to plans for flexible working. However, while the national agreements were "very important and marked a step change, many key issues of detail remained unresolved, and further investigation revealed important disagreements and subsequent power struggles to establish new precedents and routines. It is these struggles, rather than the agreements themselves, that provide an insight into management values and attitudes. Here we discovered different developments in separate businesses of the same organisation."

In one area, the agreement was used to develop an automation strategy and investment patterns. According to the union, the agreement was used as a vehicle to pursue a more genuine joint problem-solving approach and involve unions in long-term business strategies. Worries among managers that "they would see their plans up on the union noticeboard" gave way to realisation that the unions needed to act responsibly in order to keep their credibility.

In another area, however, managers described their interpretation of the agreement as a "green light to exercise unilateral power". It had been used to "establish a new culture for negotiations", demonstrated during the research visit by a manager sending for a union representative and then dismissing complaints about new shift arrangements. Even in such circumstances, however, local union officials could find the agreement a useful tool. "When managers come along with the old attitude and try to be macho, I quote from the agreement. When they develop policy in isolation and we do not like what they produce, then again I quote from the agreement."

According to the research report authors: "Although these agreements involved integrating trade unions into joint problem-solving activities, few managers considered these new agreements as establishing a long-term basis for union influence or reversing the overall drift away from managing through unions. In certain sections of the business, pluralist management values led to effective partnership arrangements with unions, and these agreements were far from 'hollow shells'. However, where strong union resistance met managers with unitarist values, the result was conflict rather than increased co-operation."

Source: Bacon & Storey (2000).

Brock and Lipsky (2003) also found that negative national governmental attitudes tend to have negative outcomes on partnership (p.18), a commonsense finding perhaps but well-supported empirically (Shaw 2005; Thompson 2005).

3.3 Processes and purposes of partnerships

The particular combination of organisational arrangements and attitudes in any given situation produces the character of the process through which partnership is conducted. A report from Ireland's National Economic and Social Forum (NESF)^[2] states that partnership is based neither wholly on "functional interdependence, bargaining and deal-making" nor on "solidarity, inclusiveness and participation". While involving both of those dimensions, in addition it depends on a transcendent third: "Deliberation, interaction, problem-solving and shared understanding." (NESF 1997). The NESF portrays it as a creative process whose outcome - which the NESF calls a "strategic consensus" - cannot be reached any other way or predicted in advance.

This view is supported elsewhere in the literature. Brock and Lipsky (2003) conclude from several cases that:

"The key to an effective collaborative relationship is that both parties become aware of, and assume responsibility for, issues that are traditionally the responsibility of only one of them. In these relationships public sector employers focus more on the quality of their employees' work life and public sector unions focus more on improving quality." (p.6).

In addition:

"Only when each party is willing to learn about the other's internal culture and leadership pressures can ways be found to expand their interaction." (p.7).

For this reason, it is significant that the influences on workplace partnership derive not only from management and organisational theory, but also from psychology-based research into quality of working life (QWL). This can be seen as providing a dual theoretical basis for workplace partnership that corresponds to the mutual gains objectives that the literature suggests are a condition of sustainable success. In Finland, for example:

"With declining job satisfaction and problems of staff recruitment, it was recognised that QWL had to be given serious attention in Finnish local government. ... The sector was sharply criticised for its high costs, rigid hierarchies, heavy bureaucracy, inefficiency and poor quality of services provided." (Farnham et al. 2005, pp.149-150).

This led to the Municipal Quality Project, led by the Tampere Work Research Centre (Kalliola & Nakari 1999). Its approach is premised on the ideas that "reliance on people's problem solving potential could bring substantial cost reductions and increases in customer satisfaction"; that "strong support to the assumption that it is possible to fit together the demands of productivity and quality of working life in a sensible way"; and that "attempts to improve productivity and quality of working life are necessary conditions of each other". (Farnham et al. 2005, pp.149-150). This is supported by Syvänen 1999. Similarly, in Germany, where social partnership is also institutionalised, the quality of working conditions from the perspective of public employees has been acknowledged as among the determining factors in service quality, on the grounds that the public production process "is an interaction and communication process between public employee and citizen" (Oppen 1995, p.125; our translation).

Box 3.4 Politics and Partnership in the French Public Sector

The French unions are divided on the issue of co-operative relationships with management. This in itself is far from unusual internationally. The difference in the French case is that this difference of opinion is coterminous with the division between the historically Christian and communist union federations, the CFDT and the CGT. These federations have broken free from their confessional roots, but have remained broadly faithful to their respective political and intellectual traditions.

In the case of the CFDT, the emphasis tends to be placed on the dignity and rights of the individual worker, on which basis has been built a case for a certain kind of co-operative co-determination. Indeed at certain points in its history, the CFDT has pressed the case for "autogestion" or "democratie industrielle" with some determination, albeit with few tangible results. For the CGT, on the other hand, the important issue is the class interest of the worker, something to which capitalism itself is thought to be opposed. While the CGT is not opposed in principle to what it calls "union intervention in management", it would argue that it can only be successful if the collective identification of workers with their union is not compromised, and if unions' ability to oppose remains uncompromised.

On the former point, the CGT quotes industrial sociologist M. Tixier, who wonders whether "the participative model would not have the paradoxical effect of leading to the disappearance of trade unionism" (CGT undated, p.11; our translation). On the latter, it cites Jean-Pierre Durand: "If enterprises are to become more deliberative, the paradigmatic forms of union action must be transformed. But this transformation cannot be unilateral: if a different type of unionism is to be acceptable to members, managements will have to share certain prerogatives. Knowing that they will not do so 'naturally', then in order to obtain this sharing of management prerogatives and the development of deliberation within enterprises it is essential to ensure that confrontation and contestation remain part of the unions' social function."

(CGT undated p.17; our translation).

Most partnership agreements and arrangements do not explicitly exclude any area from the ambit of joint consultation or decision-making. In practice, however, it is most common to find partnership being used in processes of operation or organisational change. It is much less common to find that the most upstream strategic decision-making processes involve staff and unions. Indeed, it is rare to find cases in which there has been any significant movement away from traditional patterns of decision-making authority. This may help to explain the gaps revealed in the literature between the stated intentions and actual implementation of partnership in some cases, and the disappointments experienced in others. Keefe (2003), citing Freeman (1996), report that, while 60 percent of public sector unionised employees had participated in labour-management co-operation (LMC) programmes (as workplace partnership tends to be called in the USA), only one in six said they had been effective. Citing Levine (1997), they also report that 82 percent of union leaders involved described the results as "fair or poor".

It is also common that whether or not a particular operational issue is dealt with via partnership is a decision taken by management. The NESF model may be of exceptional interest in that context, because it makes it explicit that the co-operative relationship between the parties ought to extend all the way from the definition of the environmental challenges facing an organisation, and the plans and strategies needed to meet them, through to the design of day-to-day working practices.

US evidence suggests that, national union leadership can positively affect the outcomes, workplace partnership is usually the product of local decisions, often to deal with a crisis or its aftermath and following leadership changes. (Brock & Lipsky 2003, pp.10-11). Ospina and Yaroni (2003a) studied three city examples, and found:

"In all three efforts, LMC [labor-management cooperation] started with an organizational crisis imposed by an external threat. The nature of this crisis and the consequent need for survival led managers to believe that solutions required employees' cooperation, more specifically their involvement in the decision-making process. Organizational survival also motivated union representatives and employees to cooperate with managers." (p.142).

Box 3.5 The Coverage of Partnership Decision-making

• The entire management structure and pedagogical plan of a new high school in Arizona was designed by a group comprising teachers, support staff, administrators and parents (Forberger undated).
• A "Return to Learning" initiative was planned and negotiated by the partnership committee in an Irish city government. The committee determined the design of and "marketing" strategy for the programme, as well as agreeing rules on access for workers (NCPP 2005b).
• The transition to a new 'framework' pay structure in British universities was in many institutions negotiated using a partnership approach (Neathey & Regan 2005).
• A radical plan for the restructuring of management, developed by unions and staff with the help of external consultants, was agreed with management at a major city hospital in South Africa (Von Holdt & Maserumule 2005).
• The mission statement and strategic goals of the new Irish Government Department of Transport were formulated using a partnership process. (NCPP 2004).
• As part of a wider partnership process, ancillary staff in a Swedish hospital, principally cleaners and porters, were organised into self-managing, multi-functional teams with complete discretion over working methods, rostering, functional flexibility etc. (Martin 1996).