New book explores what workers want

What do workers want? University professor Joel Rogers answers that question in a new book reporting the findings of the most extensive workplace survey of the last 20 years.

Co-authored with Richard B. Freeman of Harvard University, “What Workers Want,” is based on data of the Worker Representation and Participation Survey.

Joel Rogers

“Despite the importance of jobs to American living standards and employer influence on the quality of jobs, the United States has not seriously examined the basic framework governing employee-employer relations in more than half a century,” Freeman and Rogers write in the first chapter of the book, published by Cornell University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.

“This book’s goal is to redirect the discussion of the laws and rules that govern workplaces, and of ways to improve that governance, so that it addresses what workers want, not what insiders want.”

Among the book’s key findings:

• Most employees want a voice in how their workplace operates.
• Nearly 90 percent want some sort of independent employee organization at their workplace.
• Many nonunion workers favor the creation of unions, and virtually all union members support their union.
• Most employees support the formation of labor-management committees, to which workers would elect their representatives to run the organization and settle conflicts.
• Contrary to popular assumption, workers do not like dissension with their supervisors.
• At the same time, workers strongly doubt management’s willingness to share power and doubt their own ability to overcome management’s resistance.

Giving workers the opportunity to express their opinions and be heard on issues that have an impact on their workplaces would not only raise job satisfaction, but also increase company productivity and profitability, according to the survey.

The inspiration for “What Workers Want” originally came from Freeman’s service on the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, a national panel formed by the Clinton Administration to examine possible changes in labor law.

The commission at first focused on what insiders thought about labor-management relations. Freeman and Rogers, meanwhile, sought to “bring the voice of the American worker into the debate.”

“What is most striking about discussions of American labor policy is that those most affected by it – the workers themselves – are not even part of the discussion,” the authors write. “This is indeed a strange situation – rather like having an election without bothering to count votes.”

Freeman and Rogers constructed the Worker Representation and Participation Survey, which began with focus groups of employees in similar jobs and was followed by 30-minute telephone surveys of more than 2,400 workers across the United States. Of those original respondents, another 800 workers were further surveyed by mail and telephone.

The authors say their survey spawned a number of related surveys to check or reproduce their results.

“We have amassed a huge amount of data that should occupy researchers for some time to come,” they write.

Rogers – whom Newsweek magazine has named one of the top 100 people to watch in the new millennium – is a professor of law, political science and sociology and also director of Center on Wisconsin Strategy, a “think-do tank.”