Fissured Employment and Network Bargaining (PDF)

FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING: EMERGING EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS DYNAMICS IN A CONTINGENT WORLD OF WORK MARK ANNER, MATTHEW FISCHER-DALY, AND MICHAEL MAFFIE* For decades, direct employment relationships have been increasingly displaced by indirect employment relationships through networks...

FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING: EMERGING EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS DYNAMICS IN A CONTINGENT WORLD OF WORK MARK ANNER, MATTHEW FISCHER-DALY, AND MICHAEL MAFFIE* For decades, direct employment relationships have been increasingly displaced by indirect employment relationships through networks of firms and layers of managerial control. The firm strategies driving these changes are organizational, geographic, and technological in nature and are facilitated by state policies. The resulting weakening of traditional forms of collective bargaining and worker power have led workers to counter by organizing broader alliances and complementing structural and associational power with symbolic power and state-oriented strategies through what the authors term ‘‘network bargaining.’’ These dynamics point to the limitations of dominant theories and frameworks for understanding employment relations and suggest a new approach that focuses on a range of direct and indirect work relationships, evolving forms of worker power, and networked patterns of worker– employer interactions. T he rise of workplace fissuring is one of the more discussed and researched phenomena of modern employment relations (ER) (Weil 2014). While previous eras of ER scholarship were built on the assumption of mutual recognition (Dunlop [1958] 1993; Kerr, Dunlop, Harbison, and Myers 1960) or the strategic choices of labor and management, the workplace fissuring literature requires ER scholars to revisit some of the core assumptions of our discipline. The central change is the nature of the firm. *MARK ANNER ( https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6822-2166) is a Professor in Labor and Employment Relations at The Pennsylvania State University. MATTHEW FISCHER-DALY is a PhD candidate in the ILR School at Cornell University. MICHAEL MAFFIE ( https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4794-1310) is an Assistant Professor in Labor and Employment Relations at The Pennsylvania State University. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘‘Toward New Theories in Employment Relations,’’ MIT, Sloan School of Management, May 12–13, 2018. The authors thank Chris Howell, Tom Kochan, Alex Colvin, Matthew Bidwell, Jianwu Jiang, Virginia Doellgast, Peter Cappelli, and other participants in the conference for all their helpful feedback and suggestions. Authors’ names are listed in alphabetical order. For information regarding the data and/or computer programs used for this study, please address correspondence to [email protected]. KEYWORDs: collective bargaining, digital technology, industrial relations theory, informal labor, international comparisons, multinational corporations, outsourcing, subcontracting, fissuring, network bargaining ILR Review, 74(3), May 2021, pp. 689–714 DOI: 10.1177/0019793920964180. Ó The Author(s) 2020 Journal website: journals.sagepub.com/home/ilr Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions 690 ILR REVIEW Companies have reorganized into production and service networks, both internationally with global supply chains (GSCs) and domestically, such as by sourcing labor from temporary hiring agencies. Unlike dominant ER paradigms that focus on direct, bilateral employment relationships between employees and an organization, the fissuring literature has highlighted the importance of direct and indirect employment relationships across organizations. Substantial scholarship has explained how firms use networks to exercise power, yet how workers may be able to also leverage this organizational form to achieve their demands remains under-theorized. This imbalance is not attributable to a lack of empirical examples; in recent years, workers in several countries have organized in what may be considered a networked structure. Drawing on the sociological and ER literatures on networks, this article develops a framework to explain how labor is able to use a networked form to pursue its demands by engaging with employer networks. We refer to the resulting labor–employer interaction as ‘‘network bargaining.’’ We argue that the network structure empowers labor to draw on a wider range of allies and power resources and to strategically target collective actions. Because of this structure, labor networks offer potentially effective conduits of symbolic and associational power. The network bargaining framework thus helps explain why some precarious workers—such as ride-hail drivers, Florida farmworkers, and Bangladesh seamstresses—were able to form alliances and achieve labor victories. We also caution against seeing network bargaining as an easy remedy to employer fissuring. Limitations of networks (e.g., tenuous structure and implicit coordination problems) can reduce their effectiveness. But perhaps more important, legal and technological changes have allowed lead firms to consolidate and accumulate unprecedented power, creating enormous challenges even for the most coordinated labor networks. Yet, despite these limitations, some labor networks have had significant success taking on and ultimately bargaining with networked firms, which makes this form of bargaining worthy of our analysis. The article proceeds in three steps. First, we argue that dominant patterns of collective bargaining in the modern era can be understood in relation to the degree to which firms and labor interact directly or indirectly. We thus extend prior ER theory, which has largely focused on direct employment relations between relatively centralized employers and labor organizations. This section grounds the discussion of network bargaining in the breakdown of traditional, direct employment relationship and the emergence of union-led ‘‘envelopment bargaining.’’ Second, the article develops the three strategies that companies use to shift from hierarchical organizations to networks: organizational, geographic, and technological. Organizational strategies refer to reductions in firm obligations to workers through outsourcing, separating intellectual from physical property, and subcontracting labor. Geographic strategies refer to the organization of GSCs to insulate business from strikes, reduce FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 691 labor solidarity, and minimize labor costs by selecting and encouraging jurisdictions with nominal levels of labor regulation. Technological strategies refer to the substitution of technologically administered work rules for human managers, often called algorithmic management. Here, we argue that these developments have contributed to employer-led ‘‘dispersion bargaining.’’ Third, and last, the article explores labor’s bargaining power in the context of networked firms. We examine how labor is able to wield symbolic and associational power to develop networks and target new actors that can be out of reach of hierarchically organized labor actions in what we label network bargaining. This section also highlights the limitations of this form of mobilization. Most notably, while labor alliances are often relatively small and under-resourced, employer networks led by mega-lead firms, such as Amazon and Uber, wield unprecedented and growing power. Evolving Employment Relations Frameworks With the changing nature of industrial organization and structure of workers’ power, the field of industrial relations has developed a series of frameworks to explain the relationship between labor and management. In his seminal Industrial Relations Systems ([1958] 1993: 7–8), John Dunlop presented a framework built upon the assumption of mutual recognition between labor, management, and the state. These three actors created and implemented rules to govern their relationships, based on a shared belief in the legitimacy of each other’s roles in the system (Dunlop [1958] 1993: 13– 18). With declining unionization and rising management hostility toward organized labor, Thomas Kochan, Harry Katz, and Robert McKersie ([1986] 1994) introduced the strategic choice framework to emphasize that governance of the workplace was a product of several factors removed from the immediate execution of labor–management agreements, including the external environment, union and firm strategy, consumer responses, and, in an updated text (Katz, Kochan, and Colvin 2015), nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international agencies. This framework helped advance the field by correcting for a fading ideological alignment between labor and management and incorporating managerial choice into a model of industrial relations (Kochan et al. [1986] 1994: 4). Union avoidance continues to shape ER, illustrated by the Volkswagen campaign at its US plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This trend also has been prevalent to varying degrees in Europe (Doellgast, Lillie, and Pulignano 2018), Asia (Deyo 1989), Africa (Kenny and Webster 1999), and Latin America (Drake 1996). Implicit in these evolving frameworks is an understanding of how labor and management organize and exercise power. The ‘‘firm’’ in these earlier models is organized as a hierarchy to resolve coordination problems, most 692 ILR REVIEW notably transaction costs and holdup problems (Davis 2016). This organizational form grants firms the power to make decisions via administrative fiat regarding production, sales, and investment. In parallel, labor unions organize in a hierarchical fashion to coordinate their demands and exercise power in the form of collective action and bargaining. Most ER frameworks are grounded in this understanding of how labor and management solve their coordination problems by adopting a hierarchical organizational form. With the economic transformations since the 1980s, the view that companies exist as distinct, individual hierarchies is increasingly untenable. Popularized by David Weil’s (2014)The Fissured Workplace, scholars now recognize that firms operate in a constellation of organizations that coordinate their economic decisions (Hopkins and Wallerstein 1977; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). In this economic alignment, firms can source much of their labor from third-party organizations and tiers of outsourcing through global supply chains. Power is asymmetrically distributed within these networks, creating dynamics between firms that influence how work is governed. For the ER field, this change requires scholars to revisit the centerpiece of extant frameworks: the firm as the central unit of analysis. At the same time, workers have been responding to employer fissuring strategies with new forms of organizing and power. Many of the most successful labor actions in recent decades have notably come from outside the formal collective bargaining process. Often, as a first step, labor moves toward coalitional strategies in what we call envelopment bargaining. At times, labor coalitions target the state. For example, the Sans Papiers campaign in France mobilized an alliance of migrant workers, NGOs, and unions to regularize standards for undocumented workers by appealing to the state on the basis of civil rights (Tapia and Holgate 2018). Teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona coordinated strike activity via Facebook and, with parents at their side, directed demands to the state (Emma 2018). Envelopment bargaining evolves into network bargaining as coalitions of labor actors take on fissured business enterprises. To do so, they often resort to nontraditional sources of power. In the Fight for $15 movement, a traditional labor union—the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—joined grassroots organizations, and their network combined worker mobilization with aggressive social media activism to build symbolic power and take on a network of firms in the fast food sector (Pasquier, Daudigeos, and Barrios 2020). These actions, and others, have led to calls for examining how workers mobilize outside of traditional collective bargaining to improve employment conditions (Eaton, Schurman, and Chen 2017; Maffie 2020). As developed subsequently, labor networks increasingly build on coalition-led campaigns targeting a single firm to seek binding agreements with multiple firms in a network. FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 693 Reflecting on these changes in ER and drawing from literatures on supply chains, fissured workplaces, social movement unionism (SMU), worker centers, and ‘‘alt’’ labor, this article develops a framework to explain ER involving networked firms and workers. We argue that these two configurations, employer networks and labor networks, interact to create a conceptually distinct form of bargaining called network bargaining. Conceptual Terrain In extant ER frameworks, hierarchically organized firms spur workers to organize hierarchical associations to increase their bargaining power and improve upon market-based, individual contracts with collective bargaining agreements (Webb and Webb 1920; Katz et al. 2015). Individual workers lack leverage to negotiate and therefore work under market-based terms and conditions. Associating enables workers to collectively pressure their employer to increase their share of value from the labor process, depending on the labor market and firm’s competitiveness and sensitivity to disruptions (Wright 2000). Bargaining structure, understood as the degree to which hierarchies extend across entire industries and national economies, significantly affects workplace and social outcomes (Katz 1993). Networks provide a conceptually distinct middle category between markets and hierarchies (Powell 1990). These types of organizations are neither truly hierarchical nor market-based but possess elements of each. For Powell (1990), whereas conflicts are resolved in markets through haggling and in hierarchies through administrative fiat, networks rely upon reciprocal behaviors between actors. Networks also require shared belief in the network’s purpose and considerable maintenance work, and, if successful, networks allow actors to achieve gains beyond what they could realize individually or through hierarchies (Powell 1990). While actors connect through networks laterally, that does not imply that power is absent from these relationships. Central organizing nodes—or lead firms (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994)—can exercise power over suppliers because of their centrality to the network. In firm networks, the lead firms coordinate production, sales, and investment by controlling the connections between the companies involved, giving them power to set terms and conditions of participation in the network, with direct and indirect influence on ER (Russi 2013). Firm networks also tend to reduce labor’s bargaining power by insulating most capital circulating throughout the network in lead firms, away from labor-intensive nodes, and decreasing workers’ ability to influence ER through appeals to their direct employer, which is subject to the lead firms’ terms. Although the fissured workplace literature has explored how firms are shifting from vertically integrated hierarchies toward networks, increasingly, workers have engaged in collective actions that are neither hierarchically organized (i.e., traditional union structures) nor market-based 694 ILR REVIEW (i.e., individual contract negotiations) but instead borrow elements of each. The networks developed by workers include union alliances (e.g., global union federations and the International Trade Union Confederation), union and non-union alliances (e.g., Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, digital platform workers in Europe, and the Fight for $15 in the United States), and non-union networks (e.g., Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, Coalition of Immokalee Workers in the United States, and Uber drivers’ global strike prior to the company’s public offering). Though labor alliances are not new, we argue that their organizational form and the bargaining structure they pursue have evolved in response to the increased use of the networked form by firms. These labor actions exemplify network organizing. First, they focus on lateral coordination across groups of workers and other social actors instead of developing a hierarchical union leadership and institutionalized decision-making to exercise power. Second, these worker networks tend to include both workers in hierarchical bargaining structures and others in individualized contracts. Third, they seek negotiations with firms across networks, sometimes across national boundaries, including lead firm(s), direct employers, and investors. Fourth, labor networks use a broader range of power resources. Tactically, they often use digital technology to coordinate action across their diverse participants and to engage the multiple, often distant nodes of the firm network. Of course, the rise of worker networks in response to firm networks does not mean worker networks are always successful in achieving their goals. As in all ER, the parties’ networks interact dynamically in varied political, economic, and social contexts. We return to the contingency of network bargaining after further elaborating it as a bargaining pattern. The interaction between networked labor and networked employers is network bargaining, a structure based on persuasion and consent (not hierarchy) and featuring lateral coordination and loose connections. Network bargaining involves a series of tactics—alliances with consumers and policymakers, symbolic power—through which labor coalitions seek to bring a network of companies to a discernible endpoint (e.g., a contract, a binding commitment to honor a labor standards agreement, and so on). Symbolic power, the ability to define the terms on which society is understood and developed, is often asserted by using ‘‘morally charged language’’ designed to appeal and mobilize support of civil society (Chun 2009: 4). Practically, network bargaining could be thought of as a solution to the moving target problem that arises when firms can quickly fissure or exit an institutional setting. To address this structural concern, in network bargaining labor uses symbolic power and a wider, more horizontal alliance to reach beyond enveloping a single site and contest an entire production network. FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 695 Figure 1. Employment Relations Structures and Patterns of Bargaining States: Facilitation and Constraints Worker Organizational Structure States: Facilitation and Constraints Firms' Organizational Structure Traditional Hierarchical Corporations Firm Networks Traditional Labor Union Organizations Firm/Industry Bargaining Dispersion Bargaining Networks of Unions and Civil Society Organizations Envelopment Bargaining Network Bargaining Employment Relations Structure and Bargaining Patterns To ground our discussion of network bargaining, it is helpful to understand other forms of bargaining and how they relate to network bargaining. At one extreme is individualized contracting (Katz 1993: 10); however, in this article we focus on ER that involve some degree of worker organization. We argue that patterns of bargaining are related to employer and worker organizational forms. When firms fissure employment relationships and workers organize labor and non-labor alliances in response, they can engage in network bargaining. As modeled in Figure 1, the organizational structures of management and labor in relation to each other tend to produce a range of bargaining patterns. What is important here is the point of contestation in the bargaining relationship. Collective bargaining institutions tend to focus the site of contestation toward a particular point, usually the metaphorical collective bargaining ‘‘table.’’ In this arrangement, employers derive economic power through their hierarchical structure, and labor is granted the legal recognition to form a similar hierarchical structure. This is the hierarchy– hierarchy pattern of bargaining, what we refer to as traditional firm or industry bargaining in Figure 1. When labor is able to shift the site of contestation beyond the traditional bargaining table by networking with civil society organizations, allies, the public, or the state, it forms what we refer to as envelopment bargaining. In this bargaining pattern, the site of contestation is the entire employer 696 ILR REVIEW network while maintaining the main focus of the campaign on the direct employer. Labor applies pressure wherever it can gain leverage—potentially including the employer’s buyers, investors, and consumers—and often with the support of a coalition. The goal of labor here is to expand the point of contestation in order to bring the direct employer to the bargaining table. The employer analogue of envelopment bargaining occurs when employers are able to network while labor is left attempting to exercise power through the collective bargaining institutions. We refer to this case as dispersion bargaining because labor’s attempt to focus power through an institution is countered by an employer’s ability to escape direct confrontation by restructuring into a network around the institution’s constraints. Finally, when labor responds to dispersion bargaining by developing its own network strategy to engage the full employer network—including the indirect employers—the result is network bargaining. In this pattern, management draws on their network to avoid sites of labor’s bargaining strength, and labor deploys coalitional and symbolic power to bring multiple firms of a network to negotiate with direct and especially indirect employers. Bargaining structure is also contingent on historically developed institutions. By granting management more or less flexibility in allocation of capital and the location of such investment, the state channels ER into one of these patterns. Internationally, states facilitated the organizational restructuring of firms into networks with protections of mobile capital established through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and bilateral trade and investment agreements. National states have tended to push actors toward more individualized contracting through neoliberal labor market and financial policies (Baccaro and Howell 2017). Alternatively, they can encourage collective bargaining by enacting more inclusive policies (Doellgast et al. 2018), for example, enforced labor protections. For this reason, in Figure 1 we include the role of the state in facilitating or constraining employer structures and workers’ organizational forms. The implication is that the state plays an important role in the evolution of bargaining dynamics. Since there are variations in degrees to which firms and labor adopt organizational forms and variations in state intervention, patterns of bargaining vary across sectors, countries, and time. However, distinguishing bargaining patterns enhances prediction of social outcomes. As the supply-chains and fissuring literatures highlight, traditional collective bargaining pattern’s assumptions that political boundaries and social contracts constrain management strategies are no longer tenable. SMU, worker center, and other labor movement studies have identified labor organizing across boundaries and negotiating binding agreements despite the lack of state support. We contend there has been a general rise in network bargaining. As firms restructure, a process articulated by way of contracts, labor increasingly reorganizes to establish new enforceable agreements across the firm network. Three patterns illustrated in Figure 1—firm or industry bargaining, FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 697 envelopment bargaining, and dispersion bargaining—clarify the development of the fourth pattern: network bargaining. After reviewing the first three patterns, we turn our focus to the emergence of network bargaining, its dynamics, and its implications for how we study ER. Bargaining with Hierarchically Organized Employers Firm and Industry Bargaining Traditional collective bargaining is characterized by hierarchically organized management and labor. How this hierarchy emerges is an institutional question. In some European markets, institutions channel industrial conflict through industry-wide bargaining agreements whereas in the United States and many developing market economies, it is channeled through establishment-level bargaining. In either system, constraints on capital’s mobility and flexibility lead management to a firm-level structure and/or an industry-level structure. Under this pattern of bargaining, labor organizes into unions to develop its associational power and to wield its structural power, based on the firm’s market competitiveness and workers’ ability to disrupt management’s production, sales, and profit by withholding their labor (Wright 2000). Management seeks replaceable labor supplies, alternative production sites, stockpiling, and diversified profit streams to build its capacity to sustain strikes (Katz et al. 2015). Both parties consider the sensitivity of employment levels to changes in wage rates. The parties’ power relative to each other leads to bargaining outcomes, such as the compromise of labor exchanging disruptive tactics for contractual grievance resolution. Note that the hierarchically organized bargaining structure is largely confined to the formal labor relationship. The focus of both labor and the employer is on regulating the formal labor relationship of the firm and/or the industry (depending on how the industry is structured and on national labor laws and norms). Envelopment Bargaining In recent decades, union density has declined across most of the industrialized world (Visser 2019).1 The exceptions are almost entirely limited to European countries with multi-employer bargaining and administrative extension of collective agreement. Even in western Germany, however, a region with a strong history of collective bargaining, collective bargaining coverage has declined between 1998 and 2016, from 76% to 59% (Schulten 2018). In countries with single enterprise bargaining and fragmented union movement, collective bargaining coverage rates are now below 10% and 1 The decline in northern Europe is particularly slight, and union density there remains far higher than in the rest of the world. Nonetheless, as Visser emphasized, the average unionization rate in manufacturing in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden dropped from 90% to 68% from 1980 to 2017. 698 ILR REVIEW lower than national unionization rates (Hayter and Visser 2018). Many factors might explain these declines in unionization rates and collective bargaining coverage. With fewer resources to draw from and increasingly outdated labor institutions, this transformation of the industrialized world has limited organized labor’s ability to exercise structural power. In response to this new reality, organized labor has started pursuing strategies that expand the sites of contestation and people who are involved in the bargaining process. In these actions, labor’s goal is to negotiate a collective contract with an employer. Strategically, labor targets all elements of the firm—its investors, reputation, customer base, and relationship with lawmakers. Strategic corporate campaigns are an illustration of such an approach (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1999).2 The primary examples of such campaigns include the United Steelworkers of America’s Ravenswood campaign of the early 1990s and the Bridgestone-Firestone campaign of 1996 (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1999; Juravich 2007). In both these campaigns, labor organizing and mobilizing were combined with civil society alliances to pressure the entire employer organization, including financial lenders, consumers, and lawmakers. The ultimate focus of the envelopment bargaining outcome, however, remains on improving terms and conditions of employment at the target firm at the center of the strategy. Thus, the focus is on the traditional direct employer. Other actors are leveraged to facilitate that outcome. Bargaining with Networked Employers Dispersion Bargaining In dispersion bargaining, when labor uses institutional power, it results in the object of that power exiting the bargaining relationship. In essence, the use of worker power is met with the collapse of the target. Firms use three strategies to behave in this fashion: organizational, geographic, and technological. These strategies allow firms to escape institutional constraints through a networked form. In industrial labor systems that locate workers’ bargaining power at the establishment or national level, these networks are used to short-circuit institutional labor protections that grant workers bargaining power. This is because a mismatch exists in the location of bargaining power between firms (flexible networks) and workers (fixed on individual establishments and in a location), generating a precipitous decline in workers’ bargaining strength. Similar to dualistic bargaining found in many European countries, the mismatch between union and employer structures places labor at a disadvantage vis-à-vis employers. 2 Juravich referred to these as ‘‘strategic corporate research and comprehensive strategic campaigns’’ (Juravich 2007: 39). For simplicity, we refer to ‘‘comprehensive strategic campaigns’’ or just ‘‘strategic corporate campaigns.’’ FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 699 Dispersion bargaining poses challenges for workers because it simultaneously expands the relevant labor market and allows firms to adjust their networks in a manner that penalizes actors who attempt to improve labor conditions. Using this bargaining pattern, management gains greater bargaining power with which to demand concessions from labor. Furthermore, the threat of automation or internationalization has granted management a structural advantage over labor that has no immediate remedy in enterprise or even national-level bargaining. Thus, we find the aforementioned pattern of declining union density unsurprising. We outline the three mechanisms behind dispersion. Organizational strategies describe how firms are changing their core-periphery division of labor in order to decrease their reliance on labor at any given production site. Geographic strategies explore how firms are moving to new institutional environments to escape labor obligations. Finally, technological strategies explain how firms use new technology to weaken labor’s bargaining position. Then we explore how firms’ network organization empowers a central node to fissure and restructure around labor’s bargaining strength at the establishment level. Organizational Strategies For decades, scholars have documented organizational strategies, essentially restructuring the contractual relations between firms and labor, that undermine labor’s bargaining power (Weil 2014; Helfen, Sydow, and Wirth 2018). In recent years, firms have split their brand and intellectual property from the actual production of a durable good. Starting with outsourced production in the 1960s and developing the corporate brand in the 1970s, Nike was the forerunner of firms using this strategy (Davis 2016). Today, Nike is mostly an intellectual property company; virtually none of Nike’s current 50,000 employees are directly engaged in producing athletic shoes and gear, functions that are outsourced to its global supply chain. By dividing the intellectual property from the construction of the physical product, lead firms shrink their obligations to labor as previously core production employees work for another firm in the network, thereby insulating capital from labor and making production workers increasingly interchangeable. At the same time, companies are internally fissuring (Rubery, Cooke, Earnshaw, and Marchington 2003; Pulignano and Signoretti 2016). While companies still require cleaning services, office staff, security, and other onsite support, firms often decrease their legal obligations to labor by hiring contingently, usually from external agencies and vendors or internal temporary-labor pools (Greer 2008; Weil 2014). In many institutional contexts, this approach places workers outside of collective agreements and, when these workers are labeled independent contractors, outside of some state-protected individual employment rights. This trend to fissure the workplace and outsource all workers who are not part of the core workforce is 700 ILR REVIEW seen across industries—in the United States, 50% of workers in IT, 70% in trucking, and 80% in hotels (Weil 2014). In the most pronounced version of such outsourcing, firms have restructured their entire operation to offload risk onto workers in the so-called gig economy (Aleks, Maffie, and Saksida, forthcoming). The fissuring of employment relations has been traced back to both a greater focus on financial capital and stagnated or regressive labor and employment laws (Appelbaum and Batt 2014; Weil 2014). Geographic Strategies Companies have also been relocating tasks both internally within home countries and offshore to form global supply chains. Strategically, supply chains provide companies with flexibility by externalizing certain risks, particularly ensuring ‘‘that labor will truly remain variable capital, whose quantities and costs can be fit to the needs of the production process’’ (Appelbaum and Gereffi 1994: 44–45). Even in producer-driven supply chains—quintessentially automobile production, in which unions have been relatively strong—the contracting out of increasingly complex components to independent firms weakened unions and forced many to modify their strategies (Anner 2011). Geographic restructuring separates the circuits of production, circulation, and consumption and establishes barriers between production workers, consumers, investors, and often lead-firm management. Global supply chains shift labor and management’s bargaining power. Companies gain greater capacity to replace workers with options for production using various national labor markets, power to set prices for supplies and sales in more and larger markets, and protection of profits with diversified assets to mitigate losses in the face of a labor strike affecting any production, distribution, or sales process. Thus, while workers at any given link in a chain may have structural power, namely the ability to disrupt profits by withholding labor at an essential link in the supply chain (Wright 2000; Silver 2003), companies mitigate disruptions by opting for another supplier or location for their subsidiary. Workers’ associational power is also weakened. Such mobility pits workers from distinct locations in competition with each other, pressuring them to concede lower wage bills (Anner et al. 2006). Additionally, companies have been found to select jurisdictions unfavorable to collective bargaining (Distelhorst and Locke 2018). In other words, global organization of production, circulation, and consumption challenges two main strategies of workers in standard ER: limiting competition and engaging employers in ‘‘planned cooperation’’ (Lebowitz 2003: 84). The apparel industry illustrates the pattern. To this day, the majority of garments are made by workers using individual sewing machines within a system of outsourcing. Constantly changing fashion and the pliant nature of cloth have made further automation difficult (Piore 1997). This condition FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 701 facilitates outsourcing, because production can be done in a factory of any size. Beginning in the 1990s, changes in the retail industry contributed to a dramatic consolidation of mass merchandizers, and thus the consolidation of buyer leverage for lead firms such as Walmart over suppliers in apparel supply chains (Abernathy, Dunlop, Hammond, and Weil 1999; Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000). Mass merchandizers increased profits by selling large volumes, displacing smaller retailers, and using their supply chain power to squeeze down the price they pay outsourced factories to produce their goods (Anner 2019). The dynamics of lead firms deploying monopolistic practices is not unique to apparel. In the automotive industry, prices paid to parts suppliers remained flat in real dollars even while supplier input costs increased more than 50% between 2001 and 2010 (McKinsey & Company 2012: 28). In consumer electronics, brands enjoy gross margins up to six times greater than the margins of their primary suppliers, while factory workers receive approximately 0.5% of the retail price in wages (Harris 2014). Technological Strategies While technology’s influence on ER is not a new area of academic inquiry (Dunlop [1958] 1993; Kerr et al. 1960), algorithmic management represents a new tool to divide tasks and control workers (Kellogg, Valentine, and Christin 2020). Algorithmic management, a term originally coined by Lee, Kusbit, Metsky, and Dabbish (2015), refers to the use of intelligent machines to routinize work traditionally conducted by managers. Whereas industrial relations research has mainly focused on the use of technology to simplify individual tasks (e.g., the conveyor belt), intelligent machines replace pattern recognition and judgement decisions. These machines can be inserted into many diverse points of a production process, including algorithms that read and sort résumés or Amazon’s bracelets that track workers’ movements within distribution facilities. They allow firms to use fewer managers to monitor and control an increasingly dispersed set of workers, whether directly or indirectly employed. For example, some technology firms have implemented algorithms to expand the scope of their physical workplace and allow employees to ‘‘digitally check in’’ to work. Unlike previous conceptualizations of work rules, intelligent machines can independently update employment rules from the data they gather from the workforce. Uber’s performance management system (the ‘‘five star’’ driver ratings system) constantly updates workers’ expected performance based on the aggregate behavior of the drivers in an area (Maffie, forthcoming). These tools enable managers to delegate large functions of the firm to an intelligent machine. Algorithmic management has also created gaps in the employment relationship that allow firms to (at least in current institutional contexts) avoid employment obligations to their workers. In this scenario, the algorithm is 702 ILR REVIEW used to restructure work around a whole labor market, not an individual labor force. In essence, the algorithm fissures the relationship between workers and an organization. Exemplifying this scenario, ‘‘crowdwork’’ refers to firms fissuring jobs into tasks and sourcing labor from around the world, not a defined, individual workforce (Berg et al. 2018: xv). Under this style of employment relations, workers rarely meet other workers, do not share a physical shop floor, and have little knowledge of the rules that govern their work (for example, Uber drivers are never given information about deactivation procedures or required trip acceptance rates). In this sense, algorithmic management functions similarly to organizational and geographic strategies; all three establish barriers between labor and leadfirm management. Network Bargaining As employers have strategically organized flexible networks, labor has begun networking (Maffie 2020; Pasquier et al. 2020). Structurally, networks consist of a loose association of autonomous actors who coordinate through trust-based, lateral connections. Similar to envelopment bargaining, labor networks often connect diverse workers, civil society organizations, members of the public, and/or the state for the purposes of increasing leverage, often wielding symbolic power. Yet the distributed nature of networks distinguishes these actions from envelopment bargaining in that they are not controlled by a centralized labor organization. Because of this, in envelopment and network bargaining labor may act similarly in that they coordinate with other actors and use these connections to exercise power, but the nature of the organizational form and targeted counterpart differs across these two bargaining patterns. First, networks decentralize power throughout the network to allow for more autonomous decision-making by networked groups (Powell 1990). In a hierarchical labor organization, power is allocated within the organization and exercised using administrative fiat. For example, union leaders in envelopment bargaining may decide which civil society organizations to ally with during a labor dispute. Networks, however, are autonomous groups of workers and allies that share similar interests and desires. When ride-hail drivers organized a global protest prior to Uber’s initial public offering (IPO), it was composed of a series of autonomous driver groups, labor advocates, and unions. Although these groups shared a similar goal, groups maintained the autonomy to make their own decisions regarding direction, resource allocation, and messaging. The distributed nature of these networks builds in space for diverse viewpoints among network members, which research suggests improves organizing outcomes (Tapia, Lee, and Filipovitch 2017). Numerous examples characterize distributed network-based labor actions. Observing the rise in worker centers, Janice Fine (2005) found FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 703 overlaps with SMU and defined them as organizations that aim to regulate labor markets while also operating as or as part of social movements. Examples include the India-based SEWA, which has organized informal groups of women workers around demands for basic-needs security since the 1970s; the Independent Democracy of Informal Economy Association (IDEA), representing workers despite being denied trade-union status by the Cambodian state; freelance musician collectives in Europe’s live-music industry (Greer, Samaluk, and Umney 2018); and non-union guilds organizing ride-hail drivers in New York City. Unlike formal unions, these labor organizations are structured as lateral associations of individuals and coordinate activity through mutual interest and trust, not hierarchically. This structure expands the kinds of workers involved in a labor action. Furthermore, while not all networked labor actions expand to include civil society organizations, these examples suggest it is not an uncommon practice. Furthermore, since leveraging social norms is a key element of network bargaining’s power, civil society is part of the network-bargaining dynamic, even when civil society organizations do not participate directly. Second, the logic of digital connection allows networks to develop and scale quickly. Information technology has allowed workers around the world to build networks based on their collective experiences (Tufekci and Wilson 2012; Tufekci 2017). Information science scholars have documented a shift in the architecture of digital communication; contemporary IT has increasingly replicated the most salient features of offline communities in their digital spaces (Lange 2007). Using this form of connection, people have developed relation-based collectives evocative of traditional worker-toworker labor organizing (Guan and Tate 2013; Wood 2015). The lateral nature of network connections allows these groups to rapidly scale into a larger, connected network (Margetts, John, Hale, and Yasseri 2016). Finally, networks demand enforceable agreements from both indirect employers as well as the direct employers in the firm network. Studies of transnational advocacy campaigns conceptualized the boomerang model of actors pursuing leverage globally to affect concerns locally (Keck and Sikkink 1998; de Bakker, den Hond, King, and Webber 2013). In the apparel industry, allies of factory workers worldwide have boycotted brands into committing to standards and have used their political voice to pressure US and European governments to limit trade of sweatshop products (Esbenshade 2004). In the cotton sector, workers subjected to forced labor allied with labor organizations and socially responsible investors worldwide. Together they persuaded apparel brands to sign an ethical-sourcing pledge, and as a coalition pressured the government and companies processing cotton in Uzbekistan to sign agreements that have reduced rights violations (Fischer-Daly 2019). Of course the shift from the type of pressure characteristic of envelopment bargaining to the type of pressure characteristic of network bargaining’s enforceable agreements is challenged by the very fissures that define firm networks. Thus, Uber drivers struck prior to the company’s 704 ILR REVIEW Figure 2. Network Bargaining Contested Social Norms (blue area) Lead Firms (Indirect Employers) Unions Workers Associaonal & Structural Power Plaorms & Sub-Contractors (Direct Employers) Allies Investors Local Governments Naonal States Inter-State Organizaons IPO to pressure investors, but fell short of a mechanism to hold the firm accountable. By contrast, United for Respect pressed private-equity firms KKR, Bain Capital, and Vornado Realty into paying severance to workers of the bankrupt Toys ‘‘R’’ Us. Figure 2 illustrates the dynamics of network bargaining. Here, direct employment might be through a platform, such as Instacart, or through an outsourced production unit, such as a supplier factory. Lead firms set the purchasing terms, own the platforms, write the algorithms, and otherwise control exchanges among nodes in the network that directly employ most labor. Workers are networking with allies and through unions and other forms of representation, given the decline in unionization in many countries of the world. Workers are thus complementing union representation with other forms of organization and collective action, for example, wildcat strikes and demands to indirect employers. Allies are also increasingly important, especially as workers seek to leverage employers by influencing public discourse. This symbolic power (which seeks to influence the ER institutional environment) complements traditional forms of structural and associational power (center of the figure). The arrows go in both directions, indicating that these are contested dynamics and that employers also have structural and associational power. Finally, the state in many ways has become more important as a site of contestation. State regulations play a crucial role in shaping these increasingly diffuse employment relationships, especially in the face of declining unionization and traditional forms of collective bargaining. The state also consists of multiple targets. French workers may protest the national state; gig workers in Washington State may pursue action by local governments; FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 705 and internationally dispersed garment workers and their allies may demand inter-state organizations such as the WTO adopt a more worker-friendly global trade regime. Employers clearly also use their political leverage to influence the state. We depict these political power dynamics with twodirectional arrows. (See Figure 2.) Power Resources of Network Bargaining The network structure presents several benefits for labor, including expanding the scope of labor actions and workers’ power to strategically select the most critical nodes in capital’s network as targets of collective action. The traditional industrial relations frameworks (e.g., Dunlop [1958] 1993; Kochan et al. [1986] 1994) imagined that labor could withdraw its labor in the form of a strike in order to put pressure on management. When firms began fissuring-and-reforming around labor’s bargaining sites, management became moving targets. Network bargaining takes aim at two elements of the firm that are more difficult to fissure: the brand and investors. First, labor can target investors and those who benefit from fissuring. The SEIU Justice for Janitors campaign shifted targets from the temporary hiring agencies that employed janitors to the building owners and their company occupants as nodes of the network indirectly employing the janitors (Savage 2006; Chun 2009). The investors and companies benefiting from the labor process limited their legal liabilities and insulated capital from workers’ pressure by fissuring and operating as a network. By using public pressure on the network, SEIU was able to focus public attention on the gap between the sizable amount of capital circulating through the workplace and working conditions, and to then bargain union contracts (Erickson et al. 2002; Chun 2009). Second, networks can target company’s brand reputation by using symbolic power. As capital’s increased flexibility and mobility have weakened labor’s traditional sources of power, associational and structural (Wright 2000), it has also exposed a weakness in its prioritization of brands and finance—highly concentrated capital in unproductive forms entirely dependent on public legitimacy. Use of symbolic power is evident in the many examples of workers organizing in network form to gain leverage vis-à-vis employer networks. Third, network bargaining occurs when the labor not only organizes a coalition but deploys it to establish binding agreements at key nodes of the firm network. Labor has used various organizational forms (including digital networks), has pressured one or multiple firms, and used various power resources (including symbolic power) in traditional and envelopment bargaining patterns. By combining these strategies and deliberately seeking contracts from multiple firms in the relevant network, labor is able to shift from dispersal to network bargaining. 706 ILR REVIEW In agriculture, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) shifted strategies when strikes and demonstrations alone failed to bring employers to the bargaining table (Asbed and Hitov 2017). The CIW communicated their struggle in the language of human rights, evoking, for example, the US Civil Rights Movement and Latin-American popular education tradition, to encourage society to join them in a fight for dignity (Gouge 2015). This use of symbolic power forged a coalition of religious leaders and students—the Fair Food Alliance—and the coalition’s use of digital media has sustained it. The network has led boycotts against the restaurants and grocers that buy tomatoes from the striking workers’ employers and taken public action against their investors. The campaigns pressured companies into the Fair Food Program, under which binding agreements commit buyers to purchasing products from participating farms and to paying a premium to workers, commit suppliers to complying with labor standards developed by the CIW, and grant workers the ability to file grievances, with arbitration as the final step (Asbed and Hitov 2017). In apparel, labor negotiated the Accord for Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza collapse, which killed 1,134 workers and injured thousands more. Rana Plaza became a focusing event that raised ‘‘awareness around a specific, morally charged issue’’ (Schuessler, Frenkel, and Wright 2019: 554). In part by leveraging the symbolic power this event generated, Bangladeshi unions, international unions, and NGOs successfully pressured global brands into participating in the Accord program (Donaghey and Reinecke 2018). In it, the buyers are contractually bound to pay for some factory safety improvements, to purchase from suppliers for multiple years, and to end business with noncompliant suppliers. Suppliers are bound to improve occupational health and safety, to include worker and union representation on health and safety committees, and to respect freedom of association. A committee comprising unions, companies, and the International Labour Organization (ILO) as the neutral chair governs the Accord and oversees its grievance system, which also features arbitration as the final step. Other examples of network bargaining are emerging, including some that establish state-level commitments that constrain firm networks. Workers employed to promote global beer brands in Cambodia organized in a coalition that included IDEA and domestic and global unions, challenged the firms’ claims of compliance with international labor norms, and succeeded in establishing formal contracts that provided new protections (Evans 2017). Of course, labor’s leveraging of the state is not new in labor struggles. Ever since national states established national labor laws, set minimum wages, and developed economic policy, labor has sought to influence state policies and practices. What differs about leveraging the state as part of network bargaining is that the goal is to alter the state policies that made firm fissuring possible. In the ongoing Fight for $15 campaign, unions, worker centers, and social-movement organizations have organized online, FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 707 pressured the reputations of parent companies of franchised fast food restaurants in public media and through shareholder actions, and thereby increased wages through enforceable commitments by firms and state actors (Pasquier et al. 2020). Under network bargaining, the relevant members of the bargaining coalition expand to anyone who could directly or indirectly strengthen labor’s or weaken management’s bargaining positions, with appeals linking labor demands to social norms. Limitations of Network Bargaining We emphasize that we do not claim that network bargaining provides labor with an equal counterweight to capital’s ability to fissure so that lead firms can avoid bargaining with labor. In many cases, if not most, fissuring makes it difficult for labor to gain leverage over lead firms. Empirical studies of online movements find that the vast majority of these actions fail to gain the attention of the public, legislators, or investors needed to achieve leverage (Margetts et al. 2016). Other actions have limited gains by overly relying on attention (one aspect of symbolic power) without developing adequate associational power (Rosenblum 2017). Furthermore, studies of networks illustrate how their informal nature makes them prone to collapse because they require greater effort to coordinate actions and resources to maintain than do hierarchies (Powell 1990; Cant 2019). The most successful cases of network bargaining seem to yield most results immediately, because maintaining engagement in networked protest can become difficult over time (Ley and Brewer 2018). Other times, networks can be captured by hostile interests or undermined by outsiders (Tufekci 2017). Finally, persistent barriers to worker organizing, such as language, race, and class-based interests, can undermine solidarity (Tapia 2019). And unlike their hierarchical counterparts, networks are more likely to lack the institutional resources, such as labor law expertise or a strike fund, to aid their efforts. Networks, as with hierarchies, are embedded within larger institutional structures that influence their capacity to wield power. States have more often facilitated firm networks and their attendant impediments to collective bargaining (e.g., combining legal protection of international capital with non-enforcement of labor standards). Such (socially) exclusive institutional contexts allow firms to more easily exit direct employment relationships and provide labor with fewer state protections, especially of associational rights (Doellgast et al. 2018). In this configuration, workers lack the institutional footholds and thus face greater barriers to developing networks and exercising coalitional or symbolic power. Alternatively, in (socially) inclusive institutional arrangements, firms face greater obstacles to exiting direct employment relationships, and workers enjoy more means to develop power (Doellgast et al. 2018). Firms can face a number of barriers, such as collective bargaining agreements, codetermination rights, and enforced employment protection legislation (Doellgast, Sarmiento-Mirwaldt, and Benassi 708 ILR REVIEW 2016). Under these conditions, firm networks lose geographic mobility and managerial flexibility, creating fixed targets for workers to assert structural and political power. These institutional arrangements make firms more likely to fall under the jurisdiction of a single institutional system, meaning that the labor network is more likely to hold political rights to punish public officials who ignore the demands of the network. The West Virginia teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019 resemble this arrangement. Conclusions and Future Research Directions In this article, we have argued that collective bargaining has taken on four dominant forms depending on employer and worker organizational forms: traditional firm- or industry-focused bargaining, labor-led envelopment bargaining, employer-led dispersion bargaining, and network bargaining. The network bargaining framework, which is our focus, builds on extant theory to explain ER in a world in which the environment is a primary site of contestation. Recognizing management’s pursuit of flexibility and mobility and labor’s pursuit of stability and security, the framework broadens the scope of analysis from enterprises to networks and highlights the salience of symbolic power. The framework explains predominant contemporary ER trends as strategic management–labor interactions. First, the separation of individual firms into multiple, interconnected firms with asymmetrical power has become the dominant organizational form of capital, the firm network. Assisted by states and IT, the core is increasingly a brand (essentially an intellectual-property holder), and finance (essentially a speculator). As core, they set the parameters for production, sales, and investment across networks of firms. Without material interests in long-term labor relations, they prioritize the network’s flexibility to segment and restructure to avoid labor regulations. The network form supports redistribution of capital to the core. Empirically, this contemporary structure of capital has been linked to the spread of unstable employment arrangements. Case studies on European nations have identified capital flight as a key limitation on workers’ bargaining strength (Doellgast et al. 2018), echoing critiques of structural adjustment programs imposed on developing-world workers since the 1980s (Stiglitz 2002; SAPRIN 2004). Under such neoliberalization programs, since extended to industrialized countries (Baccaro and Howell 2017), states have relaxed employment regulations while reducing trade barriers (e.g., WTO), enhancing intellectual-property protection (e.g., WTO’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects Intellectual Property Rights), and granting international investors primacy over local law (e.g., investor-state dispute settlement). That is, states have reinforced capital flexibility and mobility. For states looking to balance employment relations that emerge from fractured firms, the network bargaining framework demonstrates why multi-faceted regulations are necessary to reduce and prevent precarious labor. FISSURED EMPLOYMENT AND NETWORK BARGAINING 709 Second, the network bargaining framework helps explain strategies of workers who have low structural power vis-à-vis their employer(s) and have been able to successfully engage in coordinated labor actions in recent years. These workers do not rely on their local bargaining con