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Workplace Justice Without Unions
Hoyt N. Wheeler, Brian S. Klaas, and Douglas M. MahonyUniversity of South Carolina
Introductory chapter | Table of Contents
Justice in the U.S. nonunion workplace operates within the tenets of employment-at-will. Based on the late nineteenth century “Wood’s rule,” this concept led courts to recognize the right of an employer to fire a worker at any time, for any reason. Fortunately for nonunion workers, a workplace justice system has evolved that provides them some recourse when they have been let go without just cause. This is a complex and not widely understood system, but now there is a book that clarifies its workings and compares its effectiveness and fairness to a variety of other workplace justice systems.A "Noteworthy Book" for 2004
as chosen by Princeton University Industrial Relations Section's Selected References.
Wheeler, Klaas, and Mahony provide a thorough analysis of organizational justice systems by exploring nonunion systems of workplace justice and comparing them with the union system, American courts, and systems in 11 other countries. The U.S. nonunion workplace justice system includes protective federal legislation, labor arbitration, and a host of management-initiated procedures including the use of open-door policies, ombudsmen, mediation, peer review panels, and the most recent and controversial method, employment arbitration. The latter method—arbitration of workplace disputes in a nonunion setting—receives special attention from the authors, who include a discussion of the law concerning employment arbitration along with an intensive survey that investigates its practice.
Determining whether any of these procedures provides due process requires studying each of them in some detail. The authors use a combination of literature search and survey questions posed to the various decision makers. Their empirical analysis focuses on the overall win/loss rates by employees in termination cases in labor arbitration, employment arbitration, and the federal courts. Specifically, they attempt to determine the degree to which the same result would be reached in the same cases across different processes by posing scenarios to labor arbitrators, employment arbitrators, managers, members of peer review panels, jurors in employment discrimination cases, and labor court judges from other countries. Analysis of the responses to these scenarios allows comparison of the relative harshness or leniency of the systems toward employees for different disciplinary offenses, and the criteria used to reach decisions. The result is a body of data and analysis that permit the authors to discern the differences among these systems in both outcome and procedure, and to compare them on the basis of their merits.
Wheeler, Klaas, and Mahony conclude by discussing a number of important issues for employment and organizational policy, including the effects of the decline in unionization on workplace justice systems and the trend toward using employment arbitration as a substitute for the court system.
231 pp. $40 cloth ISBN 0-88099-313-8 / $18 paper ISBN 0-88099-312-X. 2004.
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