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Book Review: Labor-Management Relations: Public Sector Employment in a Time of Transition

Public SectorEmployment in a Time of Transition is an important volume of considerable value to scholars and students of human resources, industrial relations, and public management. It is the third in a series of IRRA volumes on trends in public sector employee relations. While the first two examined the maturation of public sector unionism and bargaining, respectively, the third focuses on issues relating to the transition that is occurring in the public employment relationship as governments in the United States and elsewhere respond to common pressures to reduce budget deficits, downsize or privatize operations, and improve efficiency and quality in the delivery of products and services. Thus, its focus is necessarily broader, incorporating not only bargaining-related activities but also human resource management practice and innovation. The book includes eight chapters and an introductory overview. The editors' introduction identifies the economic and political pressures (such as budget constraints and stagnant incomes) that are pushing governments away from the bureaucratic civil service model. In effect, they argue, government is being impelled to catch up with the private sector by re-engineering or reinventing itself. While government in the past may have been an HRM leader rather than laggard, it fell behind and is just recently beginning to undergo the changes that have rocked the private sector for more than a decade. The public sector transition, like the one in the private sector, poses difficult strategic choices with regard to the role of employees: the "slash-and-burn" or cost-cutting response, which views employees as an expendable variable cost, or the employee voice/value-added strategy. Unlike private sector employers, however, government as employer faces strong political currents. One is a groundswell of opposition to taxes and resultant demands to pare government, which urges the cost-cutting treatment. Another is the importance of promoting equity and fairness, a strong consideration in favor of the value-added, voice alternative. The chapters update public sector law (John Lund and Cheryl Maranto); compare public and private sector employees' attitudes on the workplace and union representation (Richard Freeman); review developments in public sector dispute resolution (Robert Hebdon); examine public employee compensation trends (Dale Belman and John Heywood); trace new directions in federal workplace practice (Peter Doeringer, Linda Kaboolian, Michael Watkins, and Audrey Watson); present case studies on innovative workplace changes (Anil Verma and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld); and provide comparative perspectives from Canada (Morley Gunderson and Douglas Hyatt) and Europe (Phillip Beaumont). The book has several valuable features. First, it reviews important recent legal developments. In particular, Lund and Maranto look at statutory developments in state public sector bargaining since 1987, observing a slowdown in activity compared to the previous two or three decades. They also highlight growing legislative and court challenges to the finality and binding nature of collective bargaining agreements and interest arbitration awards. Further, they review case law on chargeable agency shop fees. Second, the volume is a veritable gold mine of valuable data and analysis, from Freeman's survey results comparing public and private employees' attitudes toward unions and the workplace (public employees are more prounion) and Hebdon's review of trends in dispute resolution procedures and outcomes (which are under increasing scrutiny) to Belman and Heywood's informative analyses of publicprivate sector wage differentials, which suggest that the federal premium may be overstated by the purely human capital model of wage determination. Third, Public Sector Employment in a Time of Transition contains useful case studies on public sector transitioning. Of relevance here are Doeringer et al.'s case studies on reinvention at the Internal Revenue Service (a timely subject) and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. They note that the IRS and the National Treasury Employees Union have been aggressively pursuing a labor-management partnership, which has produced some evident successes. More broadly, however, the federal sector's twin reinvention and partnership initiatives have failed to address core problems,