The politics of employment relations in a multinational corporation during crisis

Stephen Clibborn

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2019, vol. 40, issue 3, 560-582

Abstract: Much progress has been made recognising the importance of power and politics in organisational processes but legal regulatory institutional constraints on actors remain overemphasised in the extant literature. This article provides unique insight into organisational processes during the global economic crisis. The glare of crisis illuminates the negotiated nature of organisational processes and outcomes, demonstrating the range of options available to actors, both within and beyond apparent legal institutional limits. General Motors has received significant publicity for its near collapse, government bailout and restructure through bankruptcy proceedings. During the crisis the company made changes impacting its global workforce. This article tracks three key employment practices from development in the United States headquarters to implementation in the Australian subsidiary in the context of inconsistent local laws. Directives to cut pay for some employees, freeze pay for others and terminate the employment of a large number of workers were received and implemented in the subsidiary in varying and counterintuitive ways. Institutional consistency does not guarantee successful transfer, while even host country legal institutional inconsistency is no guarantee of failure.

Keywords: Crisis; employment relations; legal institutions; markets; multinational corporations; politics; power (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X17748198 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:40:y:2019:i:3:p:560-582

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X17748198

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().