Employment

Baroness Donaghy Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Donaghy]

I add my thanks to those offered to the noble Baroness, Lady Prosser, for the giving us the opportunity to talk about this extremely important topic. Too often when the world of work is mentioned, it is in terms only of employment law and conflict or of unemployment, rather than employment relations. Yet work is often where people spend most of their waking hours, make friendships and help build dignity and self-sufficiency. That is not to claim that everything is rosy, but to emphasise that the world of work is a vital part of our lives.

I should like to raise the issue of social media and their impact on workplace relations. I am grateful to ACAS for its research and advice on this. Noble Lords will know that I had the privilege to be chair of ACAS for seven years. Social media in this context are mobile phones, e-mails, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and websites with chatrooms, discussion groups or even avatars. Their impact on employment relations has been and will continue to be phenomenal. They raise legal and ethical questions about acceptable norms of behaviour in a new social space at an individual level. They have the potential to offer new ways of both sharing information and consulting employees. They support a stronger collective voice for employees and change the conduct of collective disputes and collective bargaining.

The key features of social media are their reach, which can be zero or global; their accessibility—they are available at little or no cost; their usability—as little or no training is required; their immediacy—they are virtually instantaneous and can be edited at a stroke; and their permanency, as they are extremely difficult to remove. As millions of digital copies can be made and transmitted instantaneously, they are hard to delete. Twitter, for example, has its archive preserved in the United States Library of Congress.

Phase 1 of the web’s development, from the early 1990s onwards, led to the rise of corporate websites, intranets and the adoption of e-mail and workplace policies to deal with it, together with the growth of e-commerce and websites for campaigning purposes. Phase 2, from 2002 onwards, saw the development of corporate pages on platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, interaction with customers through social media channels, including direct sales, and stages in supply chains bypassed. Whoever would have forecast the huge rise in parcel deliveries due to direct online sales? It led also to the adoption of read/write campaigns, location-based awareness campaigns and recruitment campaigns. When we get to phase 3, from approximately 2010 onwards, you have to hold your breath. We will see the development of multiplatform communications, engagements and approaches, real-time management decision-making, rapid business model innovation and, perhaps most importantly, the further loosening of the ties of professionals as knowledge brokers—everyone is a lawyer and doctor now. It will be interesting to see whether this will lead to a looser, less regulated model of workplace relations, relying on professional ethics rather than rules.

Let us look at the scale of social media. Twitter reported in March 2011 500,000 new accounts created each day and 1 billion Tweets written each week. The Google+ social networking platform is gaining 800,000 new users per day. Facebook has over 500 million users, and 250 million of them access the site through mobile devices. In a straw poll of human resources professionals, 50 per cent said that social media had featured in recent disciplinary or tribunal proceedings.

For both employers and trade unions, this new space offers opportunities and challenges to the way in which they engage with their constituents. ACAS is already offering advice—online, of course—to managers and employees about social networking and the importance of mutually agreed guidelines that cover the posting of workplace grievances or being perceived to attack the company brand. We have all read about cases of the dismissal of an employee for commenting on their job on social networking sites. One woman was dismissed for calling her job “boring” online, not to the world at large but privately to a friend. This was then spread around and people put two and two together to identify the workplace. So there needs to be an understanding about when and in what circumstances punitive measures should be taken. They should be proportionate and ethical. A report by the Institute of Employment Studies on this topic concluded that norms of behaviour had not yet been defined, and there was a blurring of private and public areas.

Noble Lords may have read about the virtual strike in 2007 used by IBM workers in Italy. They were protesting against potential pay cuts. The 9,000 workers were joined by 1,800 supporters from 30 countries in a virtual picket line. IBM had signed up to the virtual world website Second Life, and avatars representing users could be seen carrying banners in support of the strikers. IBM was caught off guard by the strike, the first of its kind. It eventually led to renewed dialogue and the workers getting a better deal. While there has not been a huge increase in this activity, it is an example of the potential for different kinds of communication and activism that faces the world of work.

In Germany, some trade unions have adopted the technique of flash-mobbing as an organisational tool. Flash mobs have been defined as,

“a public gathering of complete strangers, organised via the internet or mobile phone, who perform a pointless act and then disperse again”.

The German trade union Ver.di organised a flash mob of 150 people at a shopping centre following disagreements over pay and work conditions between Ver.di and retail employers across the three central German states. The group filled shopping trolleys with a range of products, but when it came to paying for the goods, they handed over cards inscribed with the slogan “fair wages” instead of credit or debit cards.

Lest anyone thinks that I am planting ideas in people’s heads, I will not use any of the many examples deployed in UK disputes. Nevertheless, some employers see only the downside of these developments. If I were a German supermarket owner, I could well see why. However, some employers use the social media tool as a means of engaging with the workforce, not always as an anti-trade union device. Some are setting aside established corporate intranets in favour of what are called “enterprise wikis”—I hope someone comes up with a better name one day. These enterprise wikis become the main means of capturing and disseminating corporate information and knowledge.

Allowing employees to discuss work-related issues on social media can bring real business benefits. Some firms have accepted that they can fully benefit from social media in this way only if employees are given as much freedom as possible in their use of the technology. BT is already removing some of the blocking barriers that it has in place, so it will have less of an overview of what its employees are doing on the internet. There are two main reasons for this. First, it feels confident in this approach as it has a great deal of trust in its employees. Secondly, it will improve both the cost and the efficiency of the organisation and enable its workforce to have global access. Some organisations struggle to come to terms with social media and focus only on the threats. An organisational response to block corporate access to, for example, Facebook, becomes untenable when the most active of its account holders use smart phones to access and update the site.

Some trade unions are suspicious of using public social networking sites, as they are commercial sites with their own agenda. The TUC has referred to Facebook as,

“3.5 million HR accidents waiting to happen”.

However, some unions are adapting social media portals, single-issue campaigning and digital activism. The traditional conduct of employment relations may well change, given the ease of availability of information. Knowledge can be used as leverage in negotiations.

Employers and unions are failing to recruit the very people who are most adept at social networking: the young. According to David Blanchflower, the economics editor of the New Statesman:

“Since May 2010, unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds has risen … to 991,000”.

We can debate for ever whether these developments represent the tools of capitalism or revolt, but we must be aware that it will change the world of work and we must look to the younger generation, who are much more skilled—let us face it—than we are to be useful in that future world of work.