R ESULTATS

Since the prospect of outsourcing initially emerged at Sports-Three in the early 1990s, employment relations between the workers and local authority management contained a history of tension, sometimes involving union action. For example, the outsourcing of two of the leisure centres in 1992 was initially resisted by employees, with unions trying to halter the transfer, or at least ensure terms and conditions remained the same if any transfer did take place. Despite this, the outsourcing transfer actually went ahead and the employee terms and conditions were certainly negatively affected at that time. In particular, because there were reductions in pay, holiday entitlement and pension provisions – and significant erosions in perceived job insecurity.

Importantly, one of the consequences of those experiences for the outsourcing transition studied here was that it embedded an ‘organisational discourse’ about the meaning of how outsourcing affected workers. Indeed, while the vast majority of workers who experienced the second wave of outsourcing had not been employed at the time of the first outsourcing transition, there were a small number of workers who did witness the terms and conditions losses in the previous occurrence – and when the renewed prospect of outsourcing emerged in 2008 they told many workers about those experiences.

Refurbishments

112 Despite widespread worries about the prospect of outsourcing, therefore, the union involvement and response seemed rather benign. There were some minor increases in union membership during the tendering process, which was championed by one union representative campaigning for more union consultation and action. This representative organised a small protest (with less than a handful of other people) outside the local authority offices toward the end of the tendering process, although it did little to stop the outsourcing venture going ahead. Part of the challenge here was that the union representative reportedly had neither the time in her role nor the support from enough other staff to organise any widespread collective action.

Nevertheless, the small protest did result in the union representative being able to participate in meetings with the senior managers from the local authority and the Leisure Trust about the way the outsourcing transfer would affect employees. Here, with the broader backing of the union, the representative was able to ensure that TUPE was fully implemented to the ‘letter’ for all staff, and a

‘no two-tier agreement’ put in place³⁰. On the back of this, the HR departments at the local authority also had meetings with employees to discuss the protection, though one of the notable challenges throughout the pre-transfer process was the lack of information and communication being provided to staff about the transfer itself (and potential bidders) and what it would mean for them. For workers did not find out they were going to be employed by a Leisure Trust until the outsourcing contract had been signed.

After the outsourcing transfer had taken place, the first year of the outsourcing contract was generally seen as positive in terms of the employee relations climate. Indeed, it was reported by some participants that the employee relations climate was better than it had been ‘for years’. The union representative was given regular consultation about wider change plans at Sports-Three, and employees were given information about updates and future plans at the centres and their performances. In this respect, the managers instigated some degree of cultural change on managing and controlling employee performance, becoming more sales oriented and performance driven about worker performance. But overall, the climate of employee relations remained amicable and upbeat.

30 The details of TUPE were rarely known by staff, but it was provided for a duration of one-year and did not include ‘TUPE Plus’

which includes full protection of pension schemes.

113 That said, one important exception to these positive developments happened ten-thirteen months after the outsourcing transfer when five members of staff were made redundant. These redundancies were mainly the result of the centralisation of administrative and technical roles (e.g. marketing and I.T.), which meant such roles were transferred to the head office (located in another part of the country).

One redundancy, however, was the result of the deputy contract manager role and the flag-ship leisure centre manager role being merged into one senior centre manager role. In all these instances, the Leisure Trust managers encouraged the involvement of union support, but made clear that, given the less than expected income and memberships, there was little strategic choice but to take such decisions. The unions were unable to stop any of the redundancies taking place, and unfortunately did not offer much assistance in this regard either.

5.5 CONCLUSION

In drawing these background narratives to a close, it is a clear a number of commonalities and differences existed amongst the case study organisations being studied. In terms of similarities, for example, all three of the organisations were located in the UK public leisure sector and had experienced similar economic challenges in the external and competitive environments. All the local authorities were facing fiscal difficulties in the years leading up to the outsourcing decision and all believed outsourcing was a means of saving on leisure expenditure – and, in one way or another, the decision to outsource primarily emanated from this belief. All organisations also transferred within a few years of each other, against a similar macro-economic and national policy backdrop. All three

organisations were local authority leisure services transferring to non-profit Leisure Trusts.

All Leisure Trusts received performance benchmarks and desired high quality services.

Yet, along with this, there were some differences too. For example, Sports-Three represented a larger consortium of leisure centres and was located in a City Council, whereas Sports-One and Sports-Two on the other hand were small centres located in District and Borough Councils. Sports-Three had also experienced outsourcing and backsourcing in previous years, and so came with an organisational

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‘memory’ of such prospects; whereas Sports-One and Sports-Two had previously only experienced failed tender processes. In terms of process, whereas Sports-One and Sports-Three went through an official tendering procedures, Sports-Two opted for more informal negotiations and no tender process at all. Also, in terms of key events, workers at Sports-Two encountered some critical incidents in the pre-transfer period that did not occur at Sports-One and Sports-Three, namely a problematic job evaluation process and an organisational restructure that resulted in redundancies before the takeover.

Sports-Three was the only organisation to embark on redundancies after the transfer had taken place.

Clearly, then, there were some contextual similarities and differences in how the outsourcing process transpired. However, in terms of the ‘attributes’ of the employee perspective (i.e. in line with Ashforth’s (2001) ideas outlined in the literature review) the experience was broadly similar across the case studies. For example, in terms of similarities, the outsourcing transfer was considered a high magnitude change process for workers across the organisations. All employees were transferring as a collective group of people. All final outsourcing transfers were ‘involuntary’ to workers, in the sense

that the final decision was taken by the local authorities, and often with limited consultation.

All the outsourcing ventures were deemed to be largely unpredictable as the transition commenced and all lasted several years. Finally, although there was resistant at all case studies at various points in the run up to outsourcing, all organisations seemed to embrace cautious optimism about its socially desirable nature at the time of transfer (despite varying rationales for such perceptions).

Overall, then, what this chapter has sought to do is to map out the background narratives of the outsourcing transitions at the case study organisations in order to provide a context through which to understand the analysis of the employment relationship in the subsequent chapters. Having thus introduced the case study organisations, attention is now turned to the analysis of the employment relationship itself using the lens of social exchange. As mentioned from the outset, this will first be done through analysing the changing content of the relationship as the outsourcing transitions progressed.

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