Labour Law, Employees’ Capability for Voice, and Wellbeing: A Framework for Evaluation

ABSTRACT

Labour power has significantly declined across affluent democracies in recent decades, resulting in a widening scale of power inequality within the contemporary employment relationship. Employee voice is a key component of labour power that represents a human capability according to Amartya Sen’s conceptualisation: a real freedom to achieve states of being that one has reason to value. Employees deficient in the capability for voice lack sufficient bargaining power to influence workplace decision-making, which threatens their wellbeing by increasing their risk of exposure to work-related stressors and limiting their opportunities to improve their welfare. In this article, employee voice legislation is argued to be a necessary social conversion factor of employees’ capability for voice that can promote further advantage. However, research assessing its effectiveness at enhancing wellbeing is greatly limited due to an over reliance on neoliberal and new institutional forms of economic analysis that reveal little about the quality of employees’ lives. A comprehensive framework for evaluation based on Sen’s capability approach is proposed that when operationalised for empirical analysis, can advance our understanding of employee wellbeing in the twenty-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• Capability Approach
• employee voice
• employee wellbeing
• policy evaluation
• labour power
• labour law

Acknowledgements

I am sincerely grateful to Aaron Reeves, Paul Anand, Tania Burchardt, Mark Fabian, Pietro Ghirlanda, Giulia Greco, Tom Stephens, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments at various stages of this article’s development.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cherise Regier

Cherise Regier is a PhD candidate in Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis examines the wellbeing implications of declining worker power across high-income countries through the evaluation of interventions that promote or inhibit employee voice in the workplace. Her research aims to enhance our understanding of how worker power functions as a determinant of employee wellbeing, and how it is produced and sustained in the contemporary employment relationship using the Capability Approach as a theoretical framework. Cherise is a Research Associate for the University of Oxford’s Wellbeing Research Centre where she contributes to various research projects investigating the dynamic link between work and wellbeing to inform business practices and public policy.