3
intracommittee communication, hazard abatement) and the views of committees held by labor
and management representatives who serve on them.
Given the debate over the effectiveness of safety committees in union and non-union
contexts, and the omission of other forms of effectiveness in previous literature, this paper
provides a close examination of worker and management perceptions of safety committee
effectiveness in a union and non-union worksite. Simply put, the literature on safety committees
ignores several possible dimensions to committee effectiveness (or lack of effectiveness) that
might better be illustrated through an examination of committees “on the ground.” As such, I
illustrate how workers and management come to terms with their committee duties, relationships
between themselves and the rest of the personnel in the firm, and the role of the committee as an
institution of workplace self-governance. The upshot of this paper is not to provide a strong
statement on committee effectiveness in union and non-union workplaces
5
; rather, the upshot is
to illustrate how the actors involved perceive the effectiveness of committees in a union and non-
union context, and how these perceptions generate alternative viewpoints of committee
effectiveness previously overlooked in the literature.
Such an approach reflects recent rethinking of labor-management relations theory
regarding interest-formation, trust, cooperation, and collaborative learning in the workplace. To
this end, I discuss recent theories connecting relationships of trust to collaborative probing and
problem solving among adversarial economic actors more generally, and within labor-
management collaboration more specifically. This theoretical turn in labor-management
relations is a useful lens through which to read the narratives of the worksites in this study.
Finally, I provide narratives of safety committee members at the two worksites in this
study: a unionized lumber mill and a non-union high tech facility.
6
Through open-ended
interviews conducted during the summer and fall of 2002, worker and management committee
members suggest that they perform effectively and engage in effective collective learning if a
relationship of trust is built upon; conversely, committee effectiveness and collective learning are
compromised with an erosion or absence of perceived trust. In light of the literature on
committees in union and non-union worksites, I find that the union does not play a direct role in
5
In this respect, this paper does not speak directly to the previous literature on the effectiveness of safety
committees; rather, I intend to examine how actual committee members come to an understanding of effectiveness
(or ineffectiveness) through their narratives regarding the committees on which they serve.
6
The logic of this “case selection” is discussed below, directly preceding the narratives of my open-ended
interviews.
Convention