Eleanor Kirk

Striking out in a new direction? Strikes and the displacement thesis:

Strike activity in Britain continues at its historically low ebb. The level of strikes is likely to remain low or even fall further as a result of the introduction of the Tory Trade Union Act 2016 on 1 March 2017. This raises the issue of whether other means of the expression and resolution of workplace grievances are being used instead when strike action is not or cannot be used. An examination of the available data on the frequency of these other means indicates such displacement has not occurred to any great extent, in part because we have also seen successive attempts by government to suppress the level of individual disputes over the last three to four decades.

The ‘problem’ with the Employment Tribunal System: reform, rhetoric and realities for the clients of Citizens’ Advice Bureaux

Successive reforms of the Employment Tribunal System, based upon the interlinked assumptions that there are too many claims and that it is too easy for people with nothing to lose to lodge deliberately vexatious claims in the hope of a large payout, have made it progressively more difficult to bring claims against employers. This article challenges these persistent, though unsubstantiated assumptions, used to justify weakening employment rights enforcement and further deregulate the labour market. It draws upon the experiences of 158 clients of Citizens’ Advice Bureaux, who were tracked over the course of their disputes, as they sought to resolve work-related grievances. Among this group, it can be argued that rather than too many, too few claims go forward, discouraged by the real and imagined costs of making a claim. Financial compensation is usually the only (less than satisfactory) remedy offered.