Photo credit: Solidarity Center, 2023
Workers producing tires at Goodyear’s factory in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, faced major impediments to securing honest representation of their interests. Their employer refused to comply with the sectoral agreement for the national rubber industry won by prior worker struggles. It avoided meaningful collective bargaining by maintaining a contract signed between the employer and a corrupt union acting more in the interests of the state and employers than the workers. Yet, national labor reforms implemented since 2019 required that workers elect their unions, union leaders, and contracts. Today, the national union federation Liga Sindical Obrera Mexicana (LSOM) [Mexican Workers Union League] legitimately represents workers’ interests, including by enforcing the sectoral agreement.
For leverage, in April 2023, workers filed a complaint under the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) Rapid Response Labor Mechanism (RRLM). The RRLM is a powerful and innovative dispute settlement mechanism that provides for expedited enforcement of workers’ free association and collective bargaining rights at the facility level that provides for the suspension of tariff benefits or the imposition of other penalties, such as denial of entry of goods into the United States. Following the RRLM procedures, the US and Mexican governments ordered factory management to comply with the sectoral agreement and cease interference in workers’ freedom of association or risk losing rights to export to US markets. Workers overwhelmingly elected a genuinely representative union, the Independent Union of Goodyear Mexico Workers (SITGM), and won improvements through coverage of the sectoral agreement, including a 30% compensation increase by the end of 2023.
The SITGM case demonstrates effective worker voice, one of several case studies we document in the report “Worker Voice: What it is, What it is not, and Why it matters.”
You might be wondering, what is “worker voice?" And what does it really mean? Indeed, the term has been muddled, particularly when it is used to describe company-controlled initiatives, such as suggestion boxes, participation committees, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Research has demonstrated the failure of such company-controlled mechanisms to address workers’ issues and increasingly finds them to impede workers’ rights. More broadly, in a world in which work is highly impacted by a hyper-competitive global economy, employment relationships are fragmented by practices from outsourcing to digital platforms, and jobs are stratified by nationality, gender, race, and caste, and under-regulated, a clear definition of worker voice is timely and important.
At the Center for Global Workers’ Rights at Penn State University, we examined the evidence, including studies looking back a century as well as seven contemporary case studies. We also convened labor leaders, workers’ rights advocates, and employment relations scholars across the globe for their perspectives. Insights from those conversations, combined with a careful literature review and case study analysis, point to a clear definition:
Worker voice is the capacity of workers to speak up, articulate, and manifest collective agency to improve their terms and conditions of work and livelihoods and to contribute to more equitable and democratic societies.
You may now be thinking, “right, that is the function of trade union collective bargaining.” That is true. In fact, extensive prior literature consistently finds that unions are key to reducing inequality and strengthening democracy. It is also true that, as the SITGM realized, workers face impediments to exercising such power. From bad faith bargaining to outright violence, the challenges that workers face to assert their voice are serious and global. In many countries, the majority of workers are not covered by labor laws and thus considered “informal,” such as domestic workers. Others work in contexts with almost no law enforcement, such as workers in U.S. agriculture, where employers have a 1.1% chance of being inspected for violations of labor standards.
How, then, do workers turn the tide from long declining to increasing union density and collective bargaining coverage? How might international migrant workers fishing in international waters, caring for people in private homes, and building homes under threats of deportation exercise their voice? How might garment workers in Bangladesh or India exercise their voice when employed by a factory with terms and conditions limited by the decisions of multinational corporations based in other countries? How do workers facing authoritarian repression assert their voice, as workers have in resistance to the military in Myanmar since its 2021 coup d’ état and subsequent ban on unions? In other words, what makes worker voice effective in such adverse contexts?
In our study, we found that effective worker voice mechanisms ensure workers are able to elect their leaders, represent their members, protect against retribution, include their diverse members in leadership structure, enable members and leaders to carry out their tasks through trainings and resources, and empower workers to pursue their goals.
Figure 1. Six Components of Worker Voice
Elect: Workers elect their representatives and operate independently without interference from employers and governments. While most unions have these characteristics, state-controlled unions persist in some societies, including in many workplaces in Mexico and China. Similarly, employer-directed initiatives, such as corporate social responsibility, worker engagement programs, and company-dominated certification systems deny discretion to workers by definition and thus are not legitimate worker voice mechanisms.
Represent: Worker voice is the collective representation of workers’ interests. Thus, leaders’ accountability to members and members’ engagement in organizational decisions and actions strengthen worker voice. In contrast, company initiatives for individual workers to communicate to management can provide information to support the business, but lack the legitimacy and power of initiatives in which workers act collectively.
Include: Inclusivity strengthens worker voice. By uniting workers and representing their full scope of interests, workers’ organizations most effectively increase their bargaining power. Organizations build power by prioritizing inclusion, participation, and leadership of the diverse workforces they represent. In contrast, organizations in which workers of a social group are excluded from full participation risk cooptation by employers and state actors standing to benefit from divisions among workers.
Protect: When workers can exercise voice without retaliation, they are more effective. Yet repression of worker voice, including violence and threats against trade unions and workers, persists in many contexts. Equal rights for migrant workers, just-cause discipline requirements, and enforcement of national laws aligned with internationally recognized freedom of association and collective bargaining rights are key protections that support worker voice.
Enable: Workers’ representatives need time, space, information, resources, and training to fulfill their duties to workers they represent. Workers’ time is limited, including by long hours, often gender imbalanced care responsibilities, and limited financial means to gain time from purchasing services. Creating time as well as access to space and information, such as company financial data, enables worker voice.
Empower: Workers and their organizations must be able to use leverage to advance their interests, including by striking and using legally binding dispute resolution procedures. Denying workers’ ability to withhold their labor, through law or other means, impedes worker voice by removing workers’ primary countervailing power. Additional forms of leverage include binding clauses negotiated by workers’ representatives and companies and, in limited cases to-date, trade agreement provisions like the RRLM.
These six components are interdependent, as depicted in Figure 1. A workers’ organization needs workers to elect their leaders; collective organization; inclusion of workers’ diverse perspectives; protection from discrimination, threats, retaliation, and physical harm; the time, space, information, and training to operate; and the leverage to pursue workers’ interests. Without any one of these components, the other components are weakened, and worker voice is less effective overall.
By studying cases in diverse contexts of the world and a variety of economic sectors, we observed workers reach beyond their country or locale and use mechanisms that cross borders to unblock resistance to their exercise of worker voice. Workers used these external leveraging strategies in Mexico, including the case of SITGM, Myanmar, Lesotho, India, Honduras, and the United States, as detailed in our full report and visualized in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Use of international mechanisms to support worker voice
In addition to identifying the importance of these six components for effective worker voice, our findings also highlight the need to examine mechanisms systematically, accounting for the context, mechanism(s), and outcomes. Many theoretically sound plans miss key power dynamics of the situation, and still others produce far less meaningful results than expected. By “context,” we mean the laws and practices, trends of workers’ rights violations, the relative power of unions and allied organizations, and patterns of division and discrimination based on gender, race, caste, nationality, and other identities. With “mechanisms,” we mean how collective bargaining, the complaint system, or other processes function. Outcomes, in turn, refer to what changed and to what effect for workers.
Every actor can contribute to the society-wide outcomes of worker voice and increased equality and democracy. Governments at all levels can enact and enforce laws protecting all workers, require respect for freedom of association as a condition of international business building on experience with the RRLM, democratize policymaking through social dialogue with unions and employers’ associations, and ensure that technical assistance projects support worker voice. Employers, rather than impeding worker voice, can support it by engaging trade unions in collective bargaining in their own facilities and across their supply chains, and support and participate in tripartite policymaking forums that convene workers, employers, and government. In addition to encouraging governments and companies to take such steps, worker organizations can strengthen their power by operating democratically, inclusively, and independently of governments and employers. They can also actively engage in international solidarity and participate in tripartite policymaking. Tripartism is not only the process through which international labor standards are set at the International Labor Organization; it is also the means through which countries have achieved broadly enjoyed high quality of living.
Our report aims to start a discussion on the meaning of “worker voice.” There remains much to understand. Most studies are concentrated geographically, thus, studying worker voice in Africa, Central and South America, and across the Global South will offer further insights. There is also a need to improve cross-disciplinary studies, particularly incorporating the intersectional approach developed in legal and sociological fields to labor relations. Similarly, as the climate crisis deepens and the regularity of economic crises increases, further studies can contribute by focusing on the roles of worker voice in mitigating their effects and advancing just transitions to sustainable production and distribution systems.
