1170: What About Labor?: A Broader Conceptualization of Worker Voice (CANCELLED) (13020)

Worker voice has been conceptualized in various ways both across and within related fields dedicated to the study of work, including Organizational Behavior (OB), Human Resources (HR), and Industrial Relations (IR). While OB and HR have generally viewed the voice of workers as a means to improve organizational performance, IR has been broader in understanding voice not only as a way to improve performance, but as an objective in its own right. Particularly, this broader conception of voice involves the extent to which workers can value their contribution to an organization, improve their lives in the workplace and at home, and speak up within and beyond the workplace towards broader organizational, occupational, societal, and economic goals. As young scholars of voice, we suggest that the current voice conceptualizations do not fully account for work and workers in the modern era of organizations, and may leave out important perspectives from other stakeholders to organizations. While performance-related voice is important, there are other salient dimensions of worker voice involving different mechanisms, enactments, targets, and results that may be overlooked when the focus is almost exclusively on organizational performance. We further assert that clarifying these different aspects of voice can help develop a stronger theory and more comprehensive understanding of the complexities of the 21st century workplace, which has been riddled with challenges for labor on the frontlines. Given the state of the labor movement in the US, we also hope our IR perspective can help illuminate why workers’ voices are important to organizations as well as to workers themselves and other stakeholders. The papers in this symposium thus cover understudied formal voice mechanisms facilitated by unions, such as labor-management partnership, labor organizing, and strikes, as well as other voice mechanisms in non-union organizations. In light of the many social, economic, and workplace challenges and inequities that were only exacerbated during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the waves of labor action and unrest that have followed in both the private and public sectors, we contend that a broader perspective of voice will be a necessary and central contribution in order to better understand the future of work, workers, and organizations alike.