Andrew Pendleton

Characteristics of workplaces with financial participation: evidence from the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey

This article assesses the theory and evidence for the adoption and use of financial participation. It reports finding of a comparison of the characteristics of workplaces with profit sharing, employee share schemes and those with no schemes at all, using data from WIRS3

The Evolution of Industrial Relations in UK Nationalized Industries

This paper explores the development of industrial relations in the UK nationalized industries by examining strategy, structure and industrial relations decisions, and the political influences upon them. It is suggested that the distinctive features of nationalized industry industrial relations lies not so much in particular institutions as in the specific effects of business strategy and organization structure, along with the extent to which political factors influenced industrial relations directly. Three phases of industrial relations development are identified according to the extent and objectives of governmental involvement in the formulation of business strategies, structures and labour relations: the 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s, and the period beginning in 1979.

ESOPs and Employee Relations

The impact of Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOPs) on employment relationships and industrial relations is of fundamental importance in any assessment of this relatively new form of company organisation. In most UK ESOPs a concern to improve industrial relations has been an important, if not always the most important, factor behind adoption of this type of collective employee ownership. This ranges from the comprehensive strategies to increase employee participation and commitment found in some of the bus company ESOPs to less clearly formulated aspirations to improve traditional adversarial low-trust relationships in some of the manufacturing sector ESOPs. The attraction of ESOPs to managers seems to be that they can expand employee participation whilst at the same time maintaining ‘conventional’ management hierarchies and patterns of control (unlike many co-ops for example). For unions the collective nature of share-holding in ESOPs avoids some of the problems associated with other forms of employee share scheme and potentially allows an expansion of employee control of management decision making. The Conservative governments of the 1980s believed that ESOPs were a useful mechanism to generate employee commitment to the ‘enterprise culture’ and hence to weaken employee attachment to traditional trade unionism.