Industrial Relations and the Limits of the State: Can a Left Labour Government Resurrect Comprehensive Sectoral Collective Bargaining and Restore Trade Union Power? (original) (raw)
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A common feature of economic restructuring over the last two decades has been the reorganisation of the state. In the United Kingdom, from the 1980s onwards, this took the form of a major reorganisation of the public sector, resulting in the fragmentation of the state via internal reorganisation of the state apparatus and the redefinition of state boundaries via privatisation. The argument is that state sector restructuring has brought about not only widely acknowledged changes in organisation but also changes in the labour process and class relations. In the process of this restructuring, state sector unions face a set of challenges which both threaten and open up opportunities for them. The question faced by unions is how to respond to these developments. Since 1980, the British state as an employer has changed in complex and contradictory ways. In the context of increasing difficulties with private capital accumulation, growing trade union militancy in the state sector and a shif...
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The collapse of Britain's powerful labor movement in the last quarter century has been one of the most significant and astonishing stories in recent political history. How were the governments of Margaret Thatcher and her successors able to tame the unions? In analyzing how an entirely new industrial relations system was constructed after 1979, Howell offers a revisionist history of British trade unionism in the twentieth century.
The past few decades have seen a marked decline in the influence of trade unions. While membership density stood at 55.6% of the workforce in 1979, it currently stands at around 27%. The membership level has been especially poor in the private sector, with just 14% of the workers being members of unions. While, at a point there were ‘closed shop agreements’ where joining a union was a pre-condition to employment at a few workplaces, now a good number of employers don’t even recognize unions. This decline can be attributed to various economic, legal and political factors and to changes in workplace relations. The trade unions have been trying to reinvent themselves in an effort to reverse this trend or to at least arrest it. While there have been a few instances of radical unionism, there has been a general shift towards greater co-operation and partnership with employers. For trade unions to regain their lost glory, they should first try and increase membership. This will only happen if they can convince workers that there is a clear benefit in joining them. This is tricky in the current scenario as they don’t enjoy the same kind of legal and political protection they once had.
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Oxford Handbooks Online, 2010
This article deals with the emergence, presence, and gradual transformation of workplace voice in Britain. Britain is an interesting case because it has sustained one of the longest and most prolonged falls in union representation in the Western world. Some have interpreted this as a move away from institutionalized voice by both workers and employers in the face of global product market competition and attendant needs for greater labour flexibility. The article shows that union collective representation has been supplanted by non-union voice in new workplaces and, where union voice persists in older workplaces, it has been supplemented by non-union voice. The absence of formal voice in a significant minority of workplaces can be linked to certain observable firm characteristics, such as size, network externalities, ownership, and age of enterprise. The article defines workplace voice by partially drawing on insights from consumer theory, industrial organization, and transaction-cos...
Journal of Law and Society, 2002
A key objective of British unions is to develop their representative role so as to establish their relevance to the workforce and thereby reverse the overall decline in trade union membership. To many, the legislative reforms undertaken by New Labour since 1999 offer some hope that this can be achieved. These reforms seem to provide a pyramid of representation, whereby trade unions can establish their relevance when they ‘accompany’ individual employees in grievance and disciplinary proceedings, and when they act as recipients of information and consultation. By attracting members in this fashion, there would seem to be the promise that unions can reascend to the position of recognized and effective parties in collective bargaining. However, this paper suggests that a barrier to the achievement of this objective is the particular conception of ‘partnership’ adopted by New Labour, which deviates from that of the TUC. This ‘partnership’ is essentially individualistic in character, procedural in form, and unitary in specification. These characteristics are reflected in the relevant statutory and regulatory provisions and are therefore likely to inhibit the progression of a trade union to recognition in collective bargaining.
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2001
The Labour government's goal of social partnership embodies a particular view of the appropriate role of labour within the employment relationship, which requires the marginalization of trade unionism as an autonomous force. Its programme of employment law reform combines a dual focus: first, the reaffirmation of measures that weaken workers' collective power through the exclusion of autonomous trade unionism, and second, initiatives to regulate the labour market, strengthen workers' rights within the employment relationship, and include enterprise-confined, cooperative unions as subordinate`partners'. However, the second policy dimension has been diluted because of the commitment to free-market values.
WAGE-LABOUR: TRADE UNIONS AND THE STRUGGLE TO DETERMINE THE VALUE OF LABOUR-POWER
Bulletin of the Communist Platform, 1978
For over a century, trade unions have been the organisations by means of which the workers have fought for their interests. When we compare the condition of the working class as a time when trade unions were in their infancy with the condition of the working class where strong trade unions exist, it has to be acknowledged that they have been formidable weapons of struggle. And yet it has also become apparent that they suffer from limitations, which at certain points have led workers to reject or go beyond them in a search for alternative forms of organisation. What are these limitations and why do they exist? Can they be overcome, or are they inherent in the structure and mode of functioning of trade unions? Given both their efficacy as organs of struggle and their limitations, it is important to determine their role very exactly.