Engaging with Stakeholders
CONSULTATION
An effective way to communicate is to consult, but that is not the only reason for consultation. Consultation can also help improve the process and outcomes of work force restructuring.
Role of Consultation
As a two-way process, consultation:
- Offers a way to tap into the experience and knowledge of stakeholders in the design and implementation of labor restructuring proposals
- Provides a source of information to tailor labor strategies more closely to prevailing circumstances
- Provides ideas about how to design the communications strategy, prepare for negotiations, and develop any cooperation projects that might be possible
- Adds legitimacy through involvement of stakeholders in decisions affecting their future.
Focus groups are good exploratory tools.
Consultation should be undertaken with all key stakeholders. Consulting with trade unions has a particular facet, however: union opposition to PPI often has its basis in a belief that the unions are insufficiently consulted about PPI, or consulted too late when there are problems in the process (box 6.4).
Methods of Consultation
As well as one-to-one or small-group meetings, the principal tools that the implementing agency can use to consult are:
- Focus groups, which help the implementing agency to understand what people really think; identify, explore, and design poll questions that matter to the audience; and estimate the intensity of feeling on a subject (which polls cannot gauge). Focus groups are relatively fast, cheap, easy, and reliable. The CD-ROM provides notes on how to undertake focus groups.
Notes on managing focus groups.
- Opinion polls, which offer evidence of stakeholder attitudes. To be statistically relevant, opinion polls require at least 1,000 respondents. Some PPI workplaces are not that large. Even when they are, a problem with polling is that the wrong question might be asked. You might find out that 86 percent favor one solution rather than another, but you might not find out that the best solution is a third one about which they have not been asked.
- Policy papers, which can take various forms and have narrow or wide audie nces. A strategy paper for a cabinet or the council of ministers might seek approval from ministers. A draft policy statement or "white" paper might put policy proposals into the public domain for wide debate, perhaps using Web sites.
Box 6.4: Trade Unions and Consultation
The key issues and agenda for each union will vary, and can only be determined through a stakeholder analysis and through the process of engagement itself. Here, however, is what one global union federation with more than 20 million affiliated members in public services has commented, in general, on what unions want:
Politicians and public managers must be made to state clearly the goals of any particular privatization measure and show how it would achieve them. Trade unions have a right and a responsibility to ensure that those goals are in the public interest, to satisfy themselves that they will be achieved in ways that involve fair treatment of public employees, and to insist that alternatives to privatization and commercialization are fully explored. That is why they must insist on being consulted at every stage of the process and ensure that any changes in service and employment levels and conditions are negotiated (Public Services International 1997).
This statement encapsulates the key issues typically raised by trade unions and workers:
- Fair treatment for employees
- Negotiation rather than imposition of changes in employment numbers and conditions of service
- Consideration of alternatives to PPI–with no or limited private sector involvement
- Consultation with unions at every stage of the process
- Accountability and transparency of decisionmaking on PPI.
The relative importance of each of these issues will vary from country to country and among PPI plans. Some issues (such as fair treatment) are unexceptional, whereas others (consultation at all stages) may not be easy for government to agree with. Whatever the case, it is important that implementing agencies be prepared to discuss these issues with union leaders.
Joint task teams are a common institutional mechanism for enabling consultation.
- Consultation frameworks and joint task teams, which are institutional arrangements to facilitate consultation, debate, and discussion on labor adjustment issues. They can be sector based or national. For example, in the ports sector, task force or task team approaches have been established to provide a forum for government, port managers, port users, and workers' organizations to share views. (See an example from the Ghana port sector in box 6.5, and the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility [PPIAF] Port Reform Toolkit). Several countries also have long-standing institutional arrangements for consultation through tripartite forums of government, business, and labor.
PPIAF Port Reform Toolkit.
