Paul Blyton

Employee involvement and participation

It is 8 a.m. and the start of another shift in the press shop at the Nissan car plant in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. The supervisor and the twenty men (comprising two teams, each with a team leader) leave the meeting room where they have been chatting and reading newspapers prior to the shift commencing, and go out onto the shopfloor. They congregate in a circle by the presses while the supervisor discusses a problem they had encountered the previous day with some faulty pressings, which had got through as far as the paint shop. The upshot of this discussion is that one of the group is detailed to go down to the paint shop and go through the stack of parts waiting to be painted, in order to find the faulty ones (Popham, 1992).

Re‐casting the politics of steel in Europe: The impact on trade unions

In this article we explore the response of European trade unions to the 1990s steel crisis. Trade unions have faced wide ranging challenges including: the globalisation of the industry; steel companies becoming increasingly international; privatisation; the eastern European steel market; the liberalisation of world trade; the new emerging priorities of the EU and internal company reorganisation. Our key argument is that their response has been highly traditional and unsuited to the new challenges. When we consider the more progressive responses they have made, there is little sign that these alternatives will be anymore successful.

Partial Pension Scheme Insights from the Swedish Partial Pensions Scheme

Among the changes occurring in patterns of working time there is evidence of a growing interest in ‘phased’ or ‘partial’ retirement, which seeks to ease the transition between work and retirement. Though a small number of companies in other countries have introduced this option, Sweden is unique in operating partial retirement on a national scale. The development of the Swedish partial pension scheme, since its introduction in 1976, is examined and reactions of older workers and employers reviewed. The final section draws a number of conclusions from the Swedish experience and considers some of the obstacles to the more widespread development of partial retirement.

The dynamics of industrial Conflict

An ambulance crew ‘refused to deal with a newborn baby found abandoned in a ditch’ declared the headline in the Sun on 23 November 1989. The ambulance unions were on strike. Or were they? ‘We’re very concerned about one thing’, said Derek Turner, an ambulanceman at Deptford Station, ‘the public think we’re on strike. We’re not on strike. All we’re doing is what we are contracted to do’ (quoted in the Financial Times, 23 September 1989). That meant working their 39-hour week (a ban on overtime) and ‘working-to-rule’. The unions were demanding a pay increase large enough to restore parity with the fire service; a pay formula similar to that in the other emergency services (linking pay increases to the upper quartile average earnings for adult male manual workers); premium rates for overtime; improvements to holiday entitlement and long-service leave/pay; and a further reduction in the working week. The first two demands, a substantial pay rise and a pay formula, were the key issues. What incensed the ambulance workers was the unequal treatment, as they saw it, between themselves and the police and fire-fighters. As Eric Robinson, a 40-year-old ambulanceman with 15 years’ service put it, ‘we stand shoulder to shoulder with the police and fire service on jobs, but we don’t stand shoulder to shoulder on pay. And yet the ambulance service handles more emergency calls each day than either the fire or police’ (quoted in the Financial Times, 25 October 1989). They were, quite simply, ‘third among equals’ (Kerr and Sachdev, 1992).

Processes of Decision Making in a Trade-Union Branch

Whether the loci of power are to be found within the rank and file membership or the branch leadership in a British trade union are investigated by focussing upon the decision-making processes attendant upon four decisions. Comparison of the processes characterizing different decisions reveals significant shifts in the loci of power within the branch structure. Some decisions are shown to favour more bureaucratic handling with minimal membership participation, while others tend to draw authority away from the branch leadership. Tendencies to bureaucratic elitism are shown to be inhibited by (a) the leaderships dependence upon membership support for the implementation of many decisions, and (b) ambiguities and tensions in the formal organizational structure which are revealed under conditions of extreme pressure. Attention is also paid to the theoretical issue of whether decision type can be seen to affect organizational structure, or vice versa.

Managing without unions

In an industrial town on the outskirts of the Greater Manchester conurbation, Marks & Spencer has a well-placed and invariably busy store. In this respect the town is like many others, as virtually every desirable high street in the country plays host to the UK’s most profitable retailer. Every week 14 million customers pass through the doors of MS they are of great importance if a business is to be efficiently run’ (1990:56). The latter is certainly true of Marks & Spencer, a company hailed by Peter Drucker (1974:98) as one of the most efficient in the world, and recently voted Britain’s ‘best managed company’ for the third year in succession by a panel of institutional investors, captains of industry and business journalists (Financial Times, 19 March 1997).

The future direction of employee relations

With more than half a million enterprises spread across scores of industries, attempts to draw general conclusions about the current state of employee relations, not to mention possible future directions, must necessarily be a cautious activity. And ever more so with the recent election of a Labour government. In the foregoing chapters, however, we have sought to take account of some of the main aspects of this diversity. The case studies, for example, have purposely been drawn from the public and private (and recently privatised) sectors, as well as from services and manufacturing, domestic and foreign-owned enterprises, unionised and non-unionised settings and, in our case of Sew & Son in Chapter 9 and the discussion of union recruitment activities in Chapter 5, smaller as well as larger establishments. What these cases and the wider analysis underline are the dangers of drawing too simple or overgeneralised conclusions: conclusions, for example, about whether employee relations in the recent past have been characterised by change or continuity, and whether individualism has or has not become the defining principle of employee relations in contemporary UK organisations.

The theory of employee relations

The empirical roots of employee relations enquiry lie in the coincidence at the end of the nineteenth century of the two faces of the ‘labour question’: the issues of social welfare and social control (Hyman, 1989a:3). The theoretical roots of the subject can be traced principally to the clash between Marxian political economy and the emergent neoclassical economics at around the same time (Marsden, 1982:236–8). In terms of empirical enquiry, the problematic nature of the ‘labour question’ was epitomised at this time by two significant disputes: the Match Girls’ strike of 1888 and the Great London Dock Strike of 1889. At that time, being a match girl ‘rated somewhere practically below prostitution in the social scale’ (McCarthy, 1988:57–8), their conditions of work dangerous and unpleasant, their pay meagre. The match girls’ victory in the 1888 dispute, however, secured with public opinion on their side, had a significance beyond the strike itself. It ‘turned a new leaf in Trade Union annals…. It was a new experience for the weak to succeed … [and] The lesson was not lost on other workers’ (Sidney and Beatrice Webb, quoted by Stafford, 1961:79). The following year, the social convulsion sparked by the match girls at Bryant & May’s reached the river Thames and the men who worked on the docks and wharves. The dockers’ strike became the ‘symbol of new unionism’ that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century (Clegg et al., 1964:55), not only a great victory for the dockers but a dispute that ‘changed the whole face of the Trade Union world’ (Webb and Webb, 1920:401). For radicals such as Henry Champion, one of the leaders of the strike, the dispute was won ‘despite our socialism’ (quoted by McCarthy, 1988:50), but for others, such as Frederick Engels, lifelong companion of Karl Marx, the strike was

Employee relations and the state

On Thursday 6 April 1989 Norman Fowler MP, then Secretary of State for Employment, made a surprise announcement in the House of Commons. To roars of approval from Conservative backbenchers, the government announced its intention to abolish the National Dock Labour Scheme (NDLS), first introduced in 1947 under the Dock Workers (Regulation of Employment) Act 1946. Predictably, the following day saw unofficial strikes across the country at eleven ports, but this action was quickly called off the following Monday after nervous union instructions to return to normal working. Not only had the spontaneous action by the dockers not been preceded by a ballot, but the leadership of the Transport & General Workers’ Union (T&GWU) feared that any industrial action at this stage against the abolition of the Scheme might be deemed ‘political’ (and therefore unlawful) and eventually result in the sequestration of union funds. Thus began a protracted legal argument in the Courts to establish, first, whether there was a legitimate industrial dispute between the employers and the dockers, and secondly, at the Appeal Court, whether such a dispute was in breach of a statutory duty on the part of the dockers to work. The legal argument was eventually won by the Union, but not without considerable delay. While the courts debated the dockers’ right to strike, the government rushed the Dock Work Bill through Parliament under a guillotine that severely limited debate. By the time the Union had established its right to strike, the Scheme had already been abolished.

Developments in the process and outcomes of collective bargaining

In 1978 annual crude steel production in the UK stood at just under 21 million tonnes. Most of the 165 000 employees involved in producing that steel worked for the nationalised British Steel Corporation (BSC). In that year it took BSC 15.3 man hours to produce each tonne of liquid steel. A decade later, in 1988, the output of the UK steel industry was just over 19 million tonnes, 8 per cent lower than the 1978 level. Employment in the industry, however, had been cut by a massive 67 per cent to a little over 55 000. BSC’s productivity levels had correspondingly risen dramatically (to 5 man hours per tonne) and as a result BSC had gone from being a comparatively high-cost producer of bulk steel to one of the world’s lowest-cost producers. Since 1988, the year BSC was privatised and renamed British Steel plc (BS), rationalisation has continued as management have made further cuts and concentrated activity at the most efficient works. By 1992 the BS workforce had fallen to below 45 000, partly reflecting the closure of the Ravenscraig works early in that year.