By McDonough, Peggy Worts, Diana; Fox, Bonnie; Dmitrienko, Klaudia
Cette etude presente une enquete selon la methode mixte sur l’association qui existe entre les relations travail-gestion et la sante mentale d’employes d’un secteur municipal subissant une restructuration de style nouvelle gestion publique. L’analyse des donnees du sondage (N = 902) demontre qu’il existe une relation relativement forte et constante entre les pratiques de gestion et la sante psychologique des employes. Des interviews realisees aupres d’un sous-echantillon de 54 travailleurs revelent que le controle excessif, l’incompetence et l’indifference des gestionnaires combines avec un minimum de recompenses soulignant les efforts consentis par les travailleurs ont pour consequence que le personnel se sent devalorise. Nos resultats demontrent que la sante mentale des travailleurs a ete ebranlee, en sapant leur estime de soi et en leur faisant perdre des possibilites d’ameliorer leurs conditions de travail. This study is a mixed-method investigation of the association between labor-management relations and employees’ mental health in a municipal sector undergoing New Public Management-style restructuring. Analysis of the survey data (N = 902) demonstrates a relatively strong and persistent relationship between management practices and employee psychological health. Interviews with a subsample of 54 workers reveal that management’s excessive control, incompetence, and unresponsiveness, combined with minimal rewards for workers’ efforts, left staff feeling devalued. Our findings suggest that workers’ mental health was harmed by the undermining of their sense of self-worth and the loss of avenues to improve their working conditions.
MAJOR STRUCTURAL SHIFTS IN THE GLOBAL economy have led to dramatic restructuring of paid workplaces and, as might be expected, researchers are finding that this is harming employee health and quality of life (Vahtera et al. 2000; Anderson-Connolly et al. 2002; Brenner, Fairris, and Ruser 2004; Bourbonnais et al. 2005). The state has not remained untouched by economic globalization, as neoliberal calls to reduce public expenditures spawn retrenchment, restructuring, and privatization at all levels (Barry, Osborne, and Rose 1996; Shields and Evans 1998; Campbell and Pedersen 2001; Jessop 2002; Hay 2004). In some jurisdictions, municipal governments have eliminated work units, amalgamated remaining units, and contracted out work to produce a smaller, more compact organizational hierarchy with compressed job ladders (Young 1996; Doogan 1997; Bach 2000; Jorgensen and Bozeman 2002; Korunka et al. 2003). Through the deployment of managerialist practices from the private sector, New Public Management (NPM) promises to make service delivery more efficient and cost effective, but its detractors suggest that NPM is yet another mode of regulating public-sector workers (Poynter 2000).
Empirical studies of health and workplace restructuring in the public sector have focused on “downsizing.” Cutting the labor force has increased workloads and fostered job insecurity among the remaining employees (Ferrie et al. 2002; Ladipo and Wilkinson 2002). These working conditions are, in turn, linked to poor health (McHugh 1998; Kivimaki et al. 2001). Although fewer studies examine labor- management relations in the public service, one of the most striking findings of our own pilot interviews with municipal employees experiencing workplace restructuring was the consistency of complaints about an uncaring, unresponsive, and uncommunicative management, and a sense that this harmed workers and workplace relations. In this paper, we report the results of a mixed-method follow-up study of employees from the same municipal site, where restructuring was (and is) ongoing. We begin by outlining the context of public-sector reform, as well as the research that tells us something about the effects of these changes on working conditions and employee health. We then turn to our own study, which uses survey data to examine the association between management practices and workers’ health, and interviews to better understand the nature of this relationship.
PUBLIC-SECTOR REFORM
Reform has long been a feature of the public-sector landscape in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. In the context of economic globalization and neoliberalism, its contemporary manifestation involves a fundamental rethinking of the nature of government. This rethinking means a growing reluctance of, and sometimes refusal by, the state to provide public services. While differences in contexts may create variation in the type of public-sector responses to these pressures (Tuohy 1999; Pollitt and Bouckaert 2000; Lian 2003), current changes aim to make government smaller, leaner, and more efficient.
If neoliberalism rationalizes state reform (Osborne and Gaebler 1992), NPM concretizes it by offering a management solution to the problems of globalizing capitalism (Pollitt 1993; Walsh 1995). Although it has dominated the bureaucratic reform agenda in many OECD countries since the late 1970s, NPM is a rather loose concept. Nevertheless, seven overlapping elements appear in most discussions of it: (i) greater hands-on professional management or “freedom” to manage; (ii) emphasis on explicit and measurable standards of performance in terms of services; (iii) greater emphasis on output controls by stressing results; (iv) greater disaggregation of publicsector organizations into separately managed units; (v) enhanced competition within the public sector and between the public and private sectors; (vi) use of private-sector management styles; and (vii) an emphasis on greater labor discipline and parsimony in resource use (Hood 1995).
Proponents of NPM argue that injecting market discipline into the management of public services will overcome problems with motivating, monitoring, and controlling the performance of public- sector workers, and thereby improve the quality of service to the public. But NPM’s critics argue that restructuring the public sector to “get more for less” involves developing new, more sophisticated forms of organizational control aimed at intensifying the public- sector labor process (Hoggett 1996; McElligott 2001). Some critics contend that the reforms have fundamentally altered public-sector employment relations, creating a division between managers who are oriented toward budget concerns and front-line staff who remain focused on service provision (Pollitt 1993; Sinclair, Ironside, and Siefert 1996). Indeed, while the extent to which NPM’s goals of cutting costs and improving the quality of services have been achieved is contested, it is undeniable that recent changes have altered the terms and conditions of work within the public sector. Five consequences affecting employees are evident: job loss, increased job insecurity, work intensification, increased surveillance, and an erosion of the strength of organized labor (Sinclair et al. 1996; Burchell 2001).
Job loss and the subsequent reduction of the public-sector workforce are the most apparent consequences of public-sector restructuring. Canadian federal public-sector employment decreased annually from 1992 through 1999, so that even a recent upswing leaves current numbers below those of 1992 (Statistics Canada 2006). Much of the decline is due to the shifting of jobs out of the public sector via privatization and contracting out. However, the decrease in public-sector employees is also attributable to redundancies and forced retirement, both relatively new phenomena in the public sector with its tradition of guaranteeing lifelong employment (Lloyd and Seifert 1995). Along with job loss, restructuring has led to the spread of nonstandard, part-time, and contingent employment, and thus growing job insecurity for public-sector workers. Job insecurity also reduces, or places at risk, employees’ hours, benefits, and salaries (Morgan, Allington, and Heery 2000).
Work intensification is another consequence of the increasingly flexible public-sector workforce. Staff reductions and a shift toward replacing fulltime positions with part-time positions mean increased work responsibilities for those who remain (Ladipo and Wilkinson 2002). Such work intensification is a fundamental component of the drive to increase public-sector workers’ productivity. Moreover, it is often accompanied by increased managerial supervision (Colling 1999). Under NPM, the role of public- sector managers is one of enforcing cost-saving and efficiency measures that necessitate greater surveillance of employees. This may involve direct monitoring and inspection of work (Mclntosh and Broderick 1996), and/or regular performance measurement via reviews and staff-appraisal systems (Hoggett 1996).
Deteriorating working conditions are related to a decline in trade unionism and collective bargaining in the public sector (Morgan et al. 2000). For example, contracting out leads to an increase in part-time and contingent employees, who are less likely to be unionized than full-time workers. Unions must play catch-up, to reorganize or reunionize workers and to negotiate a new collective agreement with a potentially more hostile employer. Whether unionized or not, however, public-sector workers are not all similarly affected by restructuring. Job insecurity, work intensification, and increased surveillance are more often borne by front-line service providers than senior managers, and by support staff rather than professionals (Cohn 1997; Bach 2000). The combined evidence also suggests that male-dominated positions have been subject to all-out cuts, while female-dominated positions have mostly experienced cutbacks in hours or benefits (Farnham and Horton 1997; Bach 2000; Geddes 2001). These changes have caused further feminization of the public-sector workforce and subsequent worsening of conditions of work for these female employees.
It seems reasonable to expect that the effects of public-sector restructuring would be reflected in deteriorating health. Downsizing, the change most often investigated, has been associated with more sick leave among Finnish local government workers (Vahtera, Kivimaki, and Pentti 1997; Kivimaki et al. 2000); more depression, anxiety, and burnout among Swedish social-service employees (McHugh 1998); more psychosomatic illness and burnout for a sample of Ontario nurses (Burke 2003); lower morale among Australian nurses (Moore and Mellor 2003); and declines in general health and increases in back pain and neck pain among personnel in a Canadian teaching hospital (Shannon et al. 2001). Allan’s (1998) findings of higher staff counseling rates, quit rates, and workplace injury and illness during reforms at an Australian hospital echo the results of these studies. In fact, a growing body of evidence indicates that public-sector restructuring damages employee health by increasing work stress (Siegrist 2001; Denton et al. 2002).
In sum, transferring public services to the private sector or exposing them to competition and managerialism has had a significant impact on the terms and conditions of work. Research indicates that NPM practices are associated with changes in the employment relationship (i.e., increased job insecurity, declining remuneration, and altered work hours), the nature of work (via work intensification, surveillance, and performance reviews), and labor relations (primarily, the declining strength of labor). A handful of studies raises concerns about the consequences of such change for health, but their emphasis on downsizing means that the health effects of labormanagement relations under the new managerialism have been largely overlooked. In our examination of the relationship between management practices and employee health, we are guided by the heuristic model depicted in Figure 1. The model suggests that NPM affects the labor process and labor relations in ways that generate work stress, which, in turn, affects employee mental health.
RESEARCH CONTEXT
The local government in Toronto has been undergoing extensive restructuring over the past decade. Fiscal restraint throughout the 1990s was followed by a provincially mandated amalgamation of seven municipalities in 1998 that brought about massive and ongoing workplace change. Practically, this meant a decade or more of downsizing; departmental reorganization; work intensification; reductions in, and the privatization of, some services; and the introduction of new technologies, a “new corporate culture,” and employee performance indicators. Within 3 years, nearly 10 percent of the municipal labor force was laid off (Garrett 2001), and staff that remained faced a period of dramatic upheaval. Frequently, workers were relocated or reassigned to new jobs as the City moved to reorganize office space and integrate hundreds of services, programs, and operations that had been both geographically and operationally separate. Also, new computer systems were installed with the aim of homogenizing and expediting service delivery, and new reporting systems were introduced to increase accountability. Amidst all of this, union representation shifted, as the former municipalities’ separate unions were collapsed into much larger bodies.
Figure 1 Heuristic Model of Workplace Relations, Working Conditions, and Employee Mental Health in the Context of Municipal Sector Restructuring.
A pilot study, conducted in 2000 to 2001 and consisting of in- depth interviews with 45 unionized City of Toronto workers, suggested that these changes were taking a toll on the people who retained their jobs. A majority of these front-line employees reported negative experiences. Noting the considerable increase in workload and responsibilities, participants described increased management surveillance of their activities that heightened workplace tensions and left people feeling undervalued. Deteriorating relationships with management constituted a pervasive concern. The pilot study also suggested links between restructuring and workers’ physical health and psychological well-being.
This paper reports findings from our subsequent study aimed at determining the prevalence of workers’ negative experiences and better understanding their concerns. Before undertaking this research, we tried to secure the support of the employer, but were unsuccessful. One reason given by senior management was that their endorsement would raise employee expectations for change, expectations that they would be unable (or unwilling) to meet. In stark contrast, labor groups representing front-line staff were very supportive of the study. Thus, we were able to collect data from front-line staff with the cooperation of the unions, but we could not obtain detailed information about the employer’s strategies for workplace change. Nevertheless, public documents outlining the postamalgamation orientation to local government and providing progress reports (Garrett 1999, 2001) suggest that several key elements of NPM were part of their plan (see Verma and Lonti 2001 for the federal and provincial context). These included more formal performance evaluation, greater labor discipline and parsimony in resource use, an emphasis on private-sector management styles, and a shift to greater competition. Indeed, these general themes were evident in workers’ accounts of their experiences in a changing workplace. Following an outline of our methods, we discuss the findings from our survey that demonstrate a negative association between poor labor-management relations and employee well-being, then draw on our interviews to show how City of Toronto front-line staff experienced these relations and why they may be detrimental to their well-being.
METHODS
Survey Data and Analysis
The two unions from which the survey sample was drawn represent “inside” employees (i.e., majority white collar, female) and “outside” employees (i.e., majority blue collar, male) working fall- time for local government in Toronto.1 Because the union membership lists are confidential, union officials agreed to handle sample selection and data collection, following our instructions. A questionnaire was mailed to 2,100 people randomly selected from the lists. A thank-you/reminder card was sent 1 week later to all selected respondents, and 3 weeks after that another questionnaire was mailed to those who had not yet responded (Dillman 2000). We received 902 completed surveys (78 addresses were incorrect and 60 people refused to participate) for a response rate of 45 percent- well within the range of similar research (Swanson and Power 2001; Korunka et al. 2003; Jimmieson, Terry, and Gallon 2004). Fortyfour percent of respondents were from the “inside” worker union.
Survey questions covered health; job characteristics; working conditions; relations with coworkers, supervisors, and management; demographics; and work-life balance. Two measures of psychological health are used in this analysis. The first is the mental health component of the SF12 (Ware, Kosinski, and Keller 1995), where questions assess fatigue and energy levels, ability to carry out activities as usual, role limitations due to emotional problems, and general feelings of well-being or distress. The second measure of mental health is personal burnout (range 0-100), defined as a state of prolonged physical and emotional exhaustion and taken from the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory (Borritz et al. 2006).
Our measures of workplace relationships and working conditions are drawn from well-known conceptual models in the work stress literature (Karasek and Theorell 1990). They include management practices, as well as working conditions previously found to be associated with health: workgroup relations, relations with supervisor, workload, control,2 skill underutilization, and job security. The items, assessed on a 5-point Likert scale, are adaptations of items that appear in the Job Content Questionnaire (Karasek et al. 1998), the National Institute for Occupation Safety and Health (NIOSH) Generic Job Stress Questionnaire (Hurrell and McLaney 1988), and (for one item) a survey of Canadian auto workers. Percentage distributions of the items constituting each working condition variable are given in Table 1. Because we used the average of the summed items constituting each work variable in our multivariate analyses, Table 1 also presents Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients for variables consisting of two or more items, along with means and standard deviations.
Finally, our models also adjust for age (X = 46 years, SD = 9) and gender (coded female = 1; male = 0), variables that may be related to our predictors and health outcomes but are not of central interest to this analysis. The control for gender also addresses a bias in the composition of the two unions. Although the total sample was roughly equally split along gender lines (45 percent were women), the union representing mainly “outside” (mostly manual) workers is three-quarters male; the other union, comprising mainly “inside” workers doing nonmanual work, is three-quarters female. While a control for gender addresses some of the differences in the two unions, earlier in-depth interviews suggested that the dominant “culture” within the two unions might be different. For example, we noted a more conflictuel representation of working conditions and relationships among the outside workers, compared with their counterparts inside. To capture the effect of this culture that may not be subsumed through a gender control, we also include a union membership variable in our models: female-majority union (coded yes = 1; no = 0). Table 1
Percentage Distribution of Working Condition Items; and Reliability, Means, and Standard Deviations of Working Condition Variables (N=809)
Table 1
Percentage Distribution of Working Condition Items; and Reliability, Means, and Standard Deviations of Working Condition Variables (N=809)
Our analytical strategy involves running ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models that assess the relationships between management practices and our two continuous outcomes, burnout and mental health, while controlling for workers’ sociodemographic characteristics and other working conditions and relationships. On the basis of prior research suggesting that the consequences of workplace restructuring may vary according to gender (Bach 2000; Geddes 2001), we tested for, but did not find, statistically significant interactions between gender and working conditions. Hence, data for women and men are pooled in the analyses.
Interview Data and Analysis
After collecting the survey data, we conducted 54 in-depth interviews with respondents who indicated their willingness to be contacted for this purpose. The choice of participants at this stage was guided by a preliminary analysis that identified areas calling for in-depth exploration. Based on this initial analysis, we selected volunteers who indicated that they were worn out, burned out, or emotionally exhausted (N = 26), or who were experiencing problems with management and/or job uncertainty (N = 19); in addition, we selected respondents who stood out for their positive feelings about their working conditions and relations, as well as their general wellbeing (N = 9). Our aim in choosing respondents who fit these profiles was to gain greater insight into employees’ experiences of the aforementioned problems, which the survey indicated were widespread in the sample.
The interviews lasted from 40 minutes to more than 2 hours and averaged approximately 90 minutes in length. The interview guide consisted of a set of semistructured questions probing their responses to the survey items on labor-management relations, working conditions, morale, commitment, coping strategies, relationships with coworkers, health and well-being, and life outside work. All interviews were digitally recorded and fully transcribed before analysis.
Because our inquiry into workers’ experience of change was fairly openended, the interview data were analyzed using grounded-theory methods (Glaser and Strauss 1967; Creswell 1998). The transcribed materials were reviewed several times to identify themes and then open-coded. Themes pertaining to labor-management relations and psychological well-being provided the basis of the analysis here. Four themes captured employees’ experiences of postamalgamation working conditions and relations: excessive control, incompetent supervision, unrewarded labor, and unresponsive management.
RESULTS
Management Orientations and Worker Psychological Health
Table 1 gives distributions for the measures of management practices and working conditions and relations used in the analysis. Most striking here is worker dissatisfaction with management practices. Only about a quarter of respondents agreed that management was concerned about employees’ well-being, paid attention to employee’s concerns, and had fair policies. Although a slightly higher proportion (39 percent) believed that management valued the work they did, many (31 percent) disagreed with this statement.
Other workplace relations were much more positive (Table 1). Just under half of the sample said that they received much or very much support from their coworkers, 44 percent believed that there was team spirit in their work group, and only 26 percent thought that there was conflict in their work group. Almost three-quarters said that there was no conflict between themselves and their supervisor.
The organization of the work itself, in the form of too-heavy workloads and minimal control over how they did their work (Table 1), also was problematic. Two-thirds of respondents believed that they had too much work to do, 43 percent had little control over the amount of work they did, and 21 percent had little control over the pace of their work tasks. Even higher proportions said they had little control over proposed changes to the way they did their work, or policies and procedures that affected their work unit (51 percent and 67 percent, respectively).
Making matters worse, front-line staff did not always have the support they needed to do their jobs well. While almost half felt that they received the feedback they needed from their supervisor, only 36 percent agreed that they could count on his/her support when things got tough. A substantial proportion of workers felt that they lacked the help, supplies, and equipment to do their work.
Many of these employees also lacked the kinds of workplace opportunities that might foster well-being. One-third of respondents said that they were rarely or never given the chance to do the things they were good at, and fully 45 percent reported rarely or never having the opportunity to develop their skills and abilities. Even more striking, especially given the long-term service record of these front-line staff (X = 15.5 years, SD = 7.2), is the extent to which they did not know what the future held for them at work. Anywhere from nearly one-half to two-thirds of the sample reported some degree of uncertainty about future job responsibilities, opportunities for promotion, value of their skills, or security of their jobs.
In sum, while this is a workplace characterized by reasonably good relations among workers and between workers and immediate supervisors, it is also one in which employees face problems involving the organization of work, inadequate support, and a scarcity of future opportunities. Accompanying all of this is considerable evidence of poor labor-management relations, with employee perceptions of management’s uncaring attitudes and unfair policies dominating more benign characterizations.
These workers may be suffering psychologically. The sample mean for general mental health was 45.6 (SD = 11.4), compared with an average mental health score of 50 in a random sample of Americans aged 18-75 years (Ware, Kosinski, and Keller 1995). Similarly, the average burnout score for City workers was 44.9 (SD = 23.4), well above an average of 38.5 reported for a sample of Danish human- services employees (Borritz et al. 2006). Although we do not have comparable Canadian data for general mental health and burnout (the SF12 and Copenhagen Burnout Inventory were developed and tested outside of the Canadian context), evidence from several representative surveys suggests that City of Toronto workers are in worse overall health than other working-age Ontarians in full-time employment. Fully 22 percent of our sample rated their health as fair or poor, while estimates for the general population are consistently much lower than this. For example, using data from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), we found that only 9 percent of full-time employees aged 25-64 and living in Ontario were in fair or poor health in 2004 (the year of our study). Estimates from the 2005 CCHS and earlier waves (2001, 2002, and 2003) ranged from 6 to 7 percent. Clearly, there is cause for concern about the health status of City front-line staff.
To what extent are the poor labor-management relations linked to employee well-being? We examine the impact of management practices on worker psychological health, controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and other working conditions that might be associated with both health and management practices. The results, shown in Table 2 (Model 1), demonstrate that having a fair, supportive, and caring management lowered burnout scores. The standardized estimates also indicate that, while many of the other variables influenced burnout, the relationship between management practices and employee burnout was among the strongest of those considered.3 A similar pattern is seen for general mental health (Table 2, Model 2).
Table 2
OLS Regression of Burnout and Mental Health on Workplace Relations, Working Conditions, and Sociodemographic Characteristics of City of Toronto Front-Line Staff
Overall, we find a robust relationship between management practices and worker psychological health. Yet, this finding leaves at least one important question unanswered: What about their working conditions lead a majority of front-line staff to characterize management as unconcerned, unappreciative, and unfair. To better understand workers’ experiences of these management practices, we draw on data from in-depth interviews with survey respondents.
Employees’ Experiences of Workplace Change
Four themes emerged as prominent features of workplace relations in the interviews with front-line staff: excessive control by management, incompetent supervision, unrewarded labor, and unresponsive management. Among these, excessive control by management was the most recurrent and obviously distressing. A few respondents described management directives in especially harsh terms. Helen4 likened her current experience of work to being in the military. “You’re just told [what to do]… it’s like being in the army.” Neil characterized the new style as dictatorial: “If you question anything [our manager] says about any policy he wants to impose, he just says, ‘if you don’t like it, you know what you can do.'” And Elizabeth compared the current state of affairs with schoolyard bullying, arguing that restructuring had brought in “people who were bullies and more used to working in a ‘power over’ position.” Some front-line staff were bothered by what they described as a general increase in monitoring. Closer scrutiny of how they spent their time on the job meant they had little breathing room. But perhaps more important, tighter direction conveyed the message that they could not be trusted to do their jobs in a competent and responsible manner. Many found this demeaning or anxiety-provoking, sometimes intolerably so. One widely disliked manifestation of tightened control was a recently established Attendance Management Program, designed to restrict employees’ use of sick days. Marie, who viewed “harassment [over] absenteeism” as “the biggest problem” at work, found the scrutiny so disturbing that she was considering leaving her job altogether. In general, these workers expressed the view that tighter control by management eroded their sense of themselves as responsible adults and valued workers.
Management’s excessive control was all the more galling in light of the second major theme in the interviews: incompetent supervision. This problem was often attributed to direct supervisors, but also applied to mid-level managers, with whom many of these workers had regular contact. Although the complaint was not always directly about management, incompetent supervision was generally understood to reflect management strategies. Some City staff believed that hiring practices during restructuring had bloated upper-level ranks with unqualified individuals. Elizabeth’s assessment of what had taken place was typical:
[It was] ’98, ’99 that they decided, “well, we’re gonna have a full-time supervisor position.” And they did that right across the City. They recruited all these supervisor positions and manager positions, and basically put people-the majority of whom are underqualified-into these positions.
In a time of fiscal restraint, too many supervisors and managers meant too few people to do what respondents saw as the “real” work of their units-the front-line work. Cheryl put it succinctly: “There’s too many power heads and not enough staff.” Beyond that, workers described being directed by individuals who had no previous experience with the work being done in the unit. The result, they said, was a series of inadequate, inappropriate, or contradictory directives, which often left workers “holding the bag.” Mike recalled being told, in response to a query about how he should prioritize his time, “it’s not my job to find you work; you have to find your own work.” His conclusion, like that of many others we spoke with, was: “quite literally speaking, she’s not qualified to do the job she does.” Although others were slightly more forgiving, the end result was that not only the work, but much of the responsibility as well, fell to front-line staff. Their anger was palpable at times. As John told us, “They are getting paid big bucks and they don’t do zero. We are the front-line workers. We’re the ones that make [the supervisors] look good.”
Ultimately, incompetent supervision was demoralizing. Marie, a longterm City employee with a strong commitment to her work, struggled to convey her exasperation: “It doesn’t matter that I know the legislation better [than the supervisor], that what they’re doing is breaking the law. It doesn’t matter. How [would] you feel?” In a similar vein, Helen lamented, “I’ve lost respect for the management. … They don’t even know what it is we’re trying to do half the time. So, that’s really discouraging.” Clearly, poor- quality direction left many front-line staff feeling disheartened.
The sense that many superiors were superfluous or underqualified was linked to a third theme that ran through the interviews: unrewarded labor. Two aspects of the postamalgamation reward system, frozen pay and declining opportunities for advancement, were particularly problematic. Both were keenly felt as losses by City workers. Interviewed shortly after the completion of a lengthy wage harmonization, Tina’s dismay was over the settlement’s failure to acknowledge the value of her work: “We’re so disappointed. … We’re rated at the same scale as people I know that don’t do a quarter of what I do.” For others, the issue was a belief that restructuring (including the hiring practices that had brought in “underqualified” managers) had closed off opportunities to most front-line staff. As Joseph, a disillusioned long-term City employee, explained,
[In the past] you had small expectations that when your boss retired, you would move up the ladder. Now … they can hire whoever they want from wherever they want-inside, outside, parachute this, that, and everything else. The opportunities are decreasing. They told us that if you made it to a foreman, congratulations, you will never get any higher.
While some were disturbed by the loss of concrete work-related rewards, others mourned the disappearance of less tangible returns- what Suzanne referred to as “the pat on the back.” Tina, although unhappy with her pay, also stressed the importance of intangibles. “It’s hard not to compare myself to other people that are in my field … and not to see what they’re doing and how they’re compensated for it. And just the fact… not so much the compensation, but the fact that it’s not acknowledged.”
Key to these employees’ distress was the perception that dedication and quality no longer mattered at work. Helen-so committed to her job that she spent personal time and money on professional development and thought of her work as “my contribution to the world”-noted wearily that her devotion was lost on management: “If you mentioned to the powers-that-be here that I spend a lot of my own time just getting the job done, they’d say, ‘Well don’t’. … You know, the quality doesn’t matter to them.” In the eyes of these employees, then, there was no longer any payoff at work for dedication. Those who valued their job precisely because they felt it allowed them to make a real contribution in the world found this especially troubling.
While dedication and quality seemed not to matter in the new City of Toronto, the same cannot be said about “connections.” Indeed, a number of respondents directly linked unrewarded labor to the favoritism they believed was rampant in the organization. In keeping with the survey finding that respondents were more likely to see management policies as unfair than fair, Linda commented that, “even if you’ve been an absolutely horrible [front-line] worker… if you have pleased somebody in management and you have a powerful advocate, you can still get ahead.” Several workers who felt that connections mattered more for promotion than dedication and quality had abandoned efforts to improve their situation.
On several levels, then, poor management-labor relations played out in the lives of these workers as a low sense of their worth as employees and low expectations of being rewarded. But they also found themselves with little power to change their situation. Indeed, the fourth major theme in the interviews involved these workers’ encounters with an unresponsive management. Several respondents tried to raise concerns with their superiors following amalgamation, but were simply ignored or dismissed. Rick described his manager’s response to a request for two-way communication between front-line staff and management: “[He said] ‘we don’t have to talk to you; we’re management.'” Julia painted a similar picture of a workplace in which communication traveled in one direction only, leaving workers’ concerns ignored or dismissed: “If you question, ‘why do we do this?’ [you’re told], ‘well, here’s the policy. You got a problem with it? Here it is again-it’s in large print now.'” As Elizabeth noted with exasperation, “it doesn’t matter what we say or who we say it to … it has no effect.” The result was that many gave up trying to change things for the better.
Taken as a whole, front-line worker narratives give us a window on the meaning behind the widespread negative views about management expressed in the survey. They also suggest why management practices may be detrimental to mental health. The new top-down, top-heavy approach and the lack of rewards signified disregard for workers’ knowledge, integrity, and value to the organization. Front-line staff experienced these practices as assaults on their identities as valuable workers worthy of dignity and respect. They also expressed a keen sense of powerlessness to change, for the better, the ways in which they did their work. Indeed, threats to identity, and the corresponding helplessness that emerges from the belief that one’s actions are ineffectual, are widely known in the health literature to harm mental health (Helgeson 1994; Thoits 1999; Rosenfield, Vertefuille, and McAlpine 2000). For the municipal workers in our survey, this meant feeling tired, worn out, and compromised in their daily activities.
CONCLUSION
In this paper, we utilized data on municipal workers to examine labor-management relations and employee mental health in the context of public sector restructuring. We found compelling evidence that problems with management, documented 3 years earlier in a pilot study conducted just aftter amalgamation, continued to plague this work site. The survey data suggested that these problems affected workers’ psychological well-being, regardless of the nature of other working conditions. Although we cannot infer causality here, the interview data allowed us to “look beneath” these findings, to explore what workers found most problematic about their relationships with management. Our findings make three contributions to the literature on work, public-sector restructuring, and health. First, by directly linking labormanagement relations with psychological health, we expand existing knowledge about possible health consequences of public-sector restructuring for workers. As noted, most studies focus on the fallout from downsizing-increased job insecurity and work load-and the resulting intensification of the labor process. However, the relative strength of the associations between health and management practices suggests that more research attention should be devoted to this neglected area in health research on work.
Second, our multimethod approach enables us to develop a deeper understanding of workers’ experiences of restructuring in this workplace. Because we supplement our survey findings with qualitative data, we are able to identify some possible dynamics of labor-management relations and worker mental health. Existing research suggests that the link between reorganization and health is through work stress, but does not elaborate on the meaning of this relationship (Huuhtanen et al. 1997; Swanson and Power 2001; Korunka et al. 2003; Jimmieson, Terry, and Callan 2004). We find that for many City of Toronto front-line staff, the pathway is one in which management’s single-minded focus on the bottom line found expression in several concrete managerial practices-excessive control, supervisory incompetence, failure to reward, and unresponsiveness. These practices, in turn, may have harmed psychological well-being by undermining workers’ sense of themselves as valued employees, and ultimately, as individuals worthy of dignity and respect. Importantly, these workers also felt powerless to change things. Marie aptly summarized the damage done by restructuring as she reflected on what had been sacrificed in the reorganization of her workplace: “You know,” she said, “what it’s about is dignity.”
Third, we shed new light on labor-management relations by bringing together insights from bodies of work that are seldom in direct communication-the separate literatures on the social relations of work and on restructuring and health. Management’s violation of worker dignity, whether deliberate or unwitting, is not a new theme in studies of the social relations of paid work. For example, Hodson (2001) places lost dignity at the core of poor labor- management relations, and Marxist discussions of worker alienation and the degradation of paid work are implicitly about assaults on worker dignity (Braverman 1974). The dynamics in labor-management relations that Hodson identifies as most problematic to workers’ dignity closely align with what we found for City of Toronto employees, suggesting that our findings may have relevance for workplace reorganization more generally. However, those who study the social relations of work focus on the strategies that workers develop to contend with lost dignity, rather than on health per se, and its consequences (Westwood 1984; Burawoy 1985; Harris 1987; Hodson 2001). We extend this work, and thus our understanding of restructuring more generally, to show that the problems that have been identified may also affect mental health. Importantly, our interview material shows that these consequences may actually interfere with workers’ abilities to resist or transform workplace changes that run counter to their best interests.
Despite these contributions, the study is not without limitations. An important one is that we know very little about the employer’s formal plans and implementation of NPM: management refused to participate in the study. Nevertheless, unlike most other research on public-sector restructuring that focuses on management practices of NPM and managers’ or professionals’ responses (Connor 1997; Armstrong-Stassen 1998; Ferrie et al. 2002; Jorgensen and Bozeman 2002; Roper, James, and Higgins 2005), our study provides information on how unionized workers experience such practices. A second limitation concerns our lack of direct access to employee lists. Had we been able to telephone nonresponders in an additional contact attempt, we may have been able to raise our response rate by roughly 10 percent (Dillman 2000). Whether this would have drawn in people whose views diverged from those we report remains an open question. A third possible concern is that our in-depth interviews were conducted largely, although not exclusively, with those who expressed negative views of their working conditions and labor- management relations. This was a deliberate strategy based on the survey results; we were interested in learning more about the meaning of adverse experiences so clear in the survey data. Nevertheless, by privileging this strategy over a “constant comparative” approach that would have included front-line staff with a wider range of views, we may have missed important information about workers’ experiences. Related to this, the negative relationships in the survey data between mental health and work might reflect a negative affectivity bias-the tendency to respond negatively to all questions. However, the high proportion of workers who said on the survey that they were committed to their work and loyal to their employer provides some evidence against a charge of bias (McDonough 2005).
What broader conclusions about the overall effectiveness of public-sector restructuring programs can be drawn from our findings? Hodson (2001) argues that management practices that undermine dignity also, in the process, erode employee commitment and productivity. This presents a special challenge to the public sector where workers typically carry out their duties on the basis of a high level of commitment to public service (Pratchett and Wingfield 1996; Hanlon 1998; Richards and Smith 2000; Hebson, Grimshaw, and Marchington 2003). Our earlier work found this to be true of City of Toronto front-line staff-although many were struggling over how to stay committed following amalgamation (Worts, Fox, and McDonough 2005; McDonough 2006). If the loss of dignity goes hand in hand with declining commitment, the present study suggests that NPM-style strategies may make it difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish the stated goal of “doing more with less.” In the end, the costs of restructuring may be borne not only by front-line staff but also by the public they serve.
1. Although one of the study inclusion criteria was being a full- time employee, two respondents were working part-time when interviewed some months after the survey.
2. Following work by Carayon and Zijletra (1999) that highlighted the multidimensional nature of control at work, we assess this construct in three ways: task control, resource control, and decision control.
3 Interestingly (while only marginally significant), control over the resources needed to do one’s work raised burnout scores, an association that may reflect position in the organizational hierarchy. Although all survey respondents were nonmanagement, it may be that those with greater resource control had jobs with more responsibility and, thus, experienced more burnout. We were not able to examine this contention with these data; however, an earlier analysis of the pilot study interviews identified this as a problem among those front-line staff (often women) for whom new opportunities had opened up during reorganization.
4 All employees’ names are pseudonyms.
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PEGGY MCDONOUGH, DIANA WORTS, BONNIE FOX, AND KLAUDIA DMITRIENKO University of Toronto
Peggy McDonough, Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Toronto, 155 College Street, 6th Floor, Toronto, ON, Canada M5T 3M7. E-mail: [email protected]. We thank Linn Clark for her editorial assistance. This research was support by an SSHRC Standard Grant 502-202-106.
Copyright Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, c/o Concordia University Department of Sociology and Anthropology May 2008
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