| The paper explores the proposition that cooperative labor relations leads to increased corporate performance and employment security for a firm's labor force in an increasingly competitive international economy. This interdisciplinary study is a case study of the unionized, A. O. Smith Corporation's Milwaukee Automotive Works, nationally praised as a model for labor-management cooperation. While the paper begins with an analysis of the impact of global economic restructuring, the principal focus is on how corporate strategies, public policy, union politics and historically evolved labor-management relationships shape local labor relations and economic performance.The paper employs qualitative research techniques to examine the conditions (economic, strategic and historical) under which cooperative labor relations have developed at the Milwaukee Works and evaluates the impact of such changes on corporate performance with an emphasis on workers' wage/benefit levels and job security. These are critical policy issues being debated by academicians, policy wonks and union activists. The research adds to the debate by rooting this discussion, which has for the most part been conducted in theoretical and ahistorical terms, in the reality of a first tier automobile supplier and its local union.The study argues that while cooperative labor relations may contribute to or facilitate a particular corporate strategy, cooperation is not a comprehensive strategy in and of itself and its adaptation does not guarantee employment security. Rather it is market forces, public policies, union politics, institutional relationships, and the corporate strategies shaped by and developed in response to these forces, that are the key factors in determining a firm's competitive position, and which set the context for a firm's industrial relations. The study further argues that labor-management cooperation at the A. O. Smith has been part of a corporate union avoidance strategy that has resulted in the loss of 5,000 jobs at the Milwaukee Works and the construction of eleven nonunion satellite facilities.The implementation of employee-management cooperation at the Milwaukee Works has not led to worker control or employment security, but facilitated corporate downsizing, weakened traditional union prerogatives and resulted in a decline in the strength of the local labor union. |
