Worker Voice: Employee Representation in the Workplace in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US, 1914–1939 by Greg Patmore (review)

Greg Patmore has spent more than fifteen years working on this comparative history of employee representation practices in five countries. The result is an astonishing piece of research that is both wide-ranging and thorough. It covers both individual firms with particularly important employee representation plans (or erps) as well as the broader political economies of each of these five countries between the two world wars. For this reason alone, it deserves to find a broad audience amongst readers from a wide variety of countries and disciplines.

Those readers should understand, though, what the book is and what it isn't. Patmore is a labour historian working in a business school. Therefore his approach is more in tune with the social sciences than it is with the humanities. For people who are familiar with the history of industrialization, his work is closer to the economist Bruce Kaufman or perhaps even John R. Commons than it is to the historian David Brody or any of the other practitioners of the "New" Labour History. This is not the place to go to read the author's denunciations of what the American labour movement has traditionally referred to as "company unions." This is the place to go to understand how and to lesser extent why all company unions were not the same.

Some countries, and some employee representation plans inside those countries, get more attention in the book than others. America, a pioneer in non-union employee representation plans, perhaps gets the most space in these pages. The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company of Pueblo, Colorado, a pioneer in its own right thanks to its primary stockholder John D. Rockefeller, Jr. (whose picture graces the cover of the book), gets the most attention among the many possible employee representation plans from which Patmore might have chosen. On the other hand, while British Whitley Works Committees are the primary subject of the sections devoted to erps in the United Kingdom, no one company is the particular focus of this analysis.

Potential Canadian readers should know that erps in their country get less space in the book than most (with the possible exception of Patmore's native country of Australia). This section focuses primarily on the steelworks at Sydney, Nova Scotia and to a lesser extent upon the Canadian National Railway. Patmore rightfully points to the influence of the Rockefeller Plan and its primary author, William Lyon Mackenzie King, here, which may explain the relative lack of space devoted to the Canadian situation. Much of the underlying analysis of the motives of Canadian erps applies equally to those in the United States. What Patmore does offer here is a detailed analysis of Canadian political economy that includes the kinds of details that seldom appear in labour histories of any kind.

The influence of the Rockefeller Plan on Canada is but one instance of cross-cultural influence in the book. As Patmore notes, "There was general interest in looking at all these concepts, irrespective of their national origins." (88) Australians, for instance, tried to both import British Whitley Committees and visited the United States looking for ideas. This is the primary advantage of any transnational historical study, particularly a work as ambitious as this one: It serves as a welcome reminder that globalism has had an impact long before the tightly-connected economy of today ever took hold.

The most disappointing part of Worker Voice is its short conclusion. Patmore restricts himself to noting the cyclical rise and fall of erps, when so many different kinds of historical analysis could have been undertaken. For example, any cross-country approach to a historical subject like this practically begs for an examination of the effect of culture upon the object of analysis, but Patmore seems reluctant to leave the realm of traditional political economy. His subject matter is restricted mostly to companies, unions...