IS EMPLOYABILITY DETRIMENTAL TO UNIONS? AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE RELATION BETWEEN SELF-PERCEIVED EMPLOYABILITY AND VOICE BEHAVIOURS

Abstract

Beyond the debates surrounding the concept of
“employability” and the question of how to divide
responsibilities between workers and employers, an
emerging literature discusses the effect of self-perceived employability on worker behaviour with
respect to trade unions. Based on Hirschman’s seminal Exit-Voice-Loyalty model, the present paper
aims at contributing to a subject which remains
empirically underexplored. Existing research offers
no decisive results about the relation between
employability and voice behaviours, and it remains
unclear about the effects of employability enhancement practices on union constituencies: on the one
hand, employability tends to lower the cost of the
exit option, and is consequently detrimental to
voice; on the other hand, employability can act as a
resource in a power struggle and, as a prerequisite of
exit, it makes the voice option less risky or costly,
especially when industrial relations take place in a
fairly positive climate. In this paper, we propose to
go deeper into the examination of this set of relations by introducing a distinction between internal
and external employability, and between direct
voice and representative, union-mediated voice. To
test our hypotheses, we collected data from a survey
administered in a French retail bank in 2011. Our
findings show that internal employability would
favour direct expression to management, with external employability associated with no specific voice
behaviour, except when the industrial relation climate is cooperative. This confirms the need for
more attention paid to the internal vs external nature
of employability. Lastly, our results do not allow us
to conclude once and for all that employability is
detrimental to unions, and it is not necessarily
through their bargaining power and opposition
activities that unions are most effective in improving workers position, but through a cooperative attitude with management instead.