John W. Leopold

Decentralization of Collective Bargaining

B Reasons for Trade Union Decline

Creating and replicating HRM on greenfield sites: rhetoric or reality?

Greenfield sites have been seen as the most favourable setting for the adoption of human resource management (HRM). Presents a study of two greenfield employers’ attempts to introduce and maintain HRM philosophy and practices. Contrasts one management’s creation of HRM philosophy with another’s efforts to replicate its principles in a new unit. Describes and assesses these managements’ practices over the ten years since start up. Demonstrates that in the face of market pressures, greenfield managers are no more capable of maintaining soft‐version practices than their brownfield counterparts. Shows how these managers attempted to legitimize hard‐version practices by continuing to rely on language which reflected the humanistic principles of HRM. Concludes that without a radical reappraisal of management’s values, the long‐term aims of HRM will elude greenfield and brownfield sites alike.

The Water Industry

Before privatization of the water industry in England and Wales in 1989, the structure of the industry was laid down by statute. The Water Act 1973, established, for England and Wales, ten multi-purpose Regional Water Authorities (RWA) to deal primarily with sewage treatment and disposal and supplying clean water by taking over the functions of over 1000 separate local authorities (Map 7.1). Many authorities were also involved in a range of water-related activities such as flood protection, fisheries and recreation. In addition to the ten Water Authorities, Statutory Water Companies (SWC) supply clean water to a quarter of the population of England and Wales (Map 7.2). These had been established by Acts of Parliament in many localities during the nineteenth century, but by 1989 a process of merger and acquisition had reduced the number to 28, largely in the South East of England.

The Impact of Employee Share Ownership

There has been a considerable amount of interest in employee share ownership schemes in the last few years, and this has been mirrored by an increase in publications relating to the subject. However, the authors argue that this literature leaves much to be desired, in particular in its implicit assumption that management and employee interests will converge with share ownership. The evidence from two of their case studies indicates a divergence between management objectives and employee responses. It also suggests that trade union attitudes to share ownership may be changing as well.

Retail Food Industry

The retail industry employs approximately 2 145 000 people or 9.8 per cent of the total working population in Great Britain. Almost twothirds of those working in retailing are women and a quarter of all employees are aged twenty-four or less. The retail food sector accounts for 818 000 (35 per cent) of those employed in retailing (Retail Pocket Book, 1991). Of these approximately 45 per cent are employed on a part-time basis. Whilst the majority of the retail industry is based in small units spread over a wide area, the industry is dominated by a small number of larger companies.

The Experience of Decentralization: The Case Studies Explored

This chapter will draw together the different strands explored in our five industry case studies. In doing so a number of key features of managing the process of decentralizing collective bargaining will be highlighted. It has already been made clear that we do not pretend to be able to generalize from these case studies. Nevertheless, we can examine issues in more detail than would have been possible had other methods been used and we can identify ideas that might be worth further exploration.

The Hosiery and Knitwear Industry: Coats Viyella

This case study differs from the others in that it is a study of part of a single firm, Coats Viyella plc, operating within one industry, the knitwear industry. Coats Viyella plc is the product of the 1986 merger of three separate firms, Nottinghamshire Manufacturing, Vantona Viyella and Coats Patons. It is organized into seven divisions covering most aspects of the textile and related industries. This case study focuses on the Apparel Division of the company which for collective bargaining purposes was, until 1988, party to the Knitting Industries Federation (KIF) agreement with the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers (NUHKW) negotiated in the National Joint Industrial Council for the Hosiery Trade.

Collective Bargaining in the UK: The Rise and Decline of National Bargaining

The system of industrial relations in the UK traditionally has been dominated by national bargaining. The years of the First World War and immediately after saw the emergence of industry-wide multiemployer bargaining as the dominant model, and the model which remained dominant for the following fifty or so years.

The Steel Industry

The British Steel Corporation (BSC) was formed by the 1967 Iron and Steel Act which took into national ownership the fourteen largest steelmaking companies in Britain. (The criterion for inclusion in the nationalization programme was the capacity to produce 400 000 tonnes of steel.) Nationalization of the steel industry followed a period of under-investment by the private steel companies (Dobson, 1981). Profits in the industry were low, reflecting the constraints of a production process spread over a large number of small plants operating already obsolete technology. There was a widely held belief that the steel industry needed large-scale rationalization in order to shift production to a small number of large plants operating with the latest equipment and technology. Thus, ‘Nationalisation was intended as a method of rationalising production and of bringing about a lot of investment in the latest technology’ (ibid. p.48).