I want to start by highlighting features of the British experience of work and industrial relations which emerge from comparative case-studies which span the countries we are looking at in the course. You have already met Dore’s study of British and Japanese electrical engineering factories, and we touched on Scase’s research on the attitudes of engineering workers in Britain and Sweden. I now want to add Gallie’s study of British and French oil refineries as another comparative study that compares Britain with another of our national cases - and we will return to Gallie when we look at France.

All of these studies were conducted during the late 1960s and early 1970s, a period of growing workplace union strength and industrial conflict in Britain and elsewhere, and from this distinctive vantage point offer evidence of some of the key features of employment relations in British manufacturing over a much longer period. As we will see in the next few weeks, it remains open to debate:

With these qualifications in mind I would highlight the following features revealed by these case studies:

We now need to consider how the distinctive character of British industrialisation, compared with the later industrialisation of Japan, France or Sweden, might be relevant to an understanding of such features. [Those of you who have taken the first year historical sociology option, Gender, Class and Empire, or who have studied British social and/or economic history can also draw on their additional knowledge here].

Consider the significance of Britain being the first nation to develop industrial capitalism:

With these questions in mind I would highlight the following aspects of the historical development of work relations and industrial relations in Britain, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as important elements in explaining the centrality of the features highlighted in section 1

Britain has developed a diversified and regionally specialised employment structure, with distinctive areas associated with long established, traditionally organised but long declining sectors such as textiles, coal and ship-building, or with newer sectors such as motors, chemicals and electricals. Ingham suggests that this diversity and heterogeneity has been an obstacle to strong unified employer federations.

A key feature of the organisation and reorganisation of many work processes across these diverse sectors has been that they have often been modified in an incremental fashion over a long period of time. This has meant a widespread and continuing bias towards labour intensive methods of production; considerable reliance on the initiative of workers and immediate supervisors to progress production; and often the recasting rather than by-passing of hierarchies of craft and non-craft work (Hyman calls this the continuing importance of ‘unscientific management’; for more details see Samuel on the nineteenth century; Littler on the twentieth century; Fox for the long-term pattern; or Lazonick for a classic sector case-study on cotton).

Another significant feature of the evolution of work organisation and job hierarchies has been that women workers have largely been confined to the bottom levels of job hierarchies, both in clerical and manual work, where their work skills have often been "naturalised" and unaccredited. Furthermore, the work of women in some of the newer manufacturing sectors, such as electricals, has been subjected to more extensive standardisation than work in many male dominated sectors (see Littler; Lane or Cavendish for more detail on the new industries of the inter-war period, and/or Walby for a broader overview).

(ii) The pattern of union organisation:

The growth of trade union organisation in Britain reflected these features of the development of employment relations. The first unions were local associations which led a spasmodic existence, but most of those that achieved a relatively stable organisation during the nineteenth century were either increasingly nationally organised craft associations (like the Amalgamated Society of Engineers) or industrial unions with strong regional bases among relatively skilled workers (like the Spinners and the Miners).

Co-existing with such organisations were more fragile but inclusive movements which sought to embrace all wage workers, but it was only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that "inclusive" and nationally-based industrial and general unions achieved a relatively stable existence and began to establish continuing bargaining relations with employers (for Hobsbawm this more or less concides with the emergence of an increasingly homogenous ‘working class consciousness’ in Britain in this period).

This has provided the basis for the complex patchwork of union organisation and workplace multi-unionism in contemporary Britain: the product of the gradual evolution of ex-craft unions towards more inclusive recruitment strategies; the varied organising and representational rationales of the different industrial and general unions; competition among these diverse unions to organise workers in new and expanding sectors; the establishment of new unions to organise the growing public sector and white-collar workforces; all overlaid by mergers between unions which have continued to reflect diverse organisational, political and sectoral considerations (this is discussed by Hyman, Fulcher and/or Fox).

Within this patchwork an important feature was that unions tended to have relatively low membership subscriptions and a relatively small cadre of full-time officers, and continued to rely heavily upon lay activists at branch or workplace level, though the extent and character of ‘grass roots’ involvement varied across ex-craft, industrial, general and white-collar unions.

Giant corporations now dominate both private manufacturing and private service sectors, despite the recent revival of small enterprises and self employment, while the growth of state employment in Britain also meant that large groups of state employees have shared a common employer. However, the concentration of private capital was distinctly slower and more uneven in Britain than within such key competitor economies as the USA, Germany and Japan in the decades surrounding the turn of the century.

Furthermore, when rationalisation and concentration occurred it often left the constituent businesses with considerable local autonomy, and in manufacturing the progressive imposition of tighter central financial control tended to co-exist with the continuing decentralisation of operational decision-making (Hannah’s [1974] classic case-study of the formation of ICI provides a clear view of this). The range and internal diversity of sectors, coupled with the persistence of competitive relations between substantial numbers of employers, may help to explain the historically comparatively weak role of sectoral and national employers associations in Britain, especially in regard to industrial relations (see esp. Fulcher).

This weakness should not be overstated: for example, the Engineering Employers’ Federation (EEF) three times succeeded in imposing national agreements on the engineering craft union (the Amalgamated Society ofEngineers [ASE], later the Amalgamated Engineerinmg Union [AEU], first in 1851, then in 1898 and again in 1922. Each time the agreement underwrote the employers’ "right to manage" and enforced an employer-dominated appeals procedure. Nevertheless, in practice employers often failed to capitalise on their victories and continued to rely heavily on the initiative of skilled workers. Furthermore, in periods of relative prosperity the co-ordinated policies of the EEF often gave way to more diverse employer policies and coexisted with a piecemeal and parochial pattern of bargaining, involving significant concession-making on the shop-floor.

Under this heading it should also be noted that some commentators about the distinctiveness of the British experience have emphasised the importance of the historical separation of industrial and financial capital, and the extent to which state policy has been constrained by the priorities of the latter rather than the former, especially in defending the international role of sterling - though others have seen this policy constraint as related more to the highly internationalised character of the operations of British firms, both financial and industrial, rather than a reflection of any clear sectoral split between manufacturing and the city.

Most of the unions in Britain - craft, industrial, general and more recently white-collar - have become members of the Trade Union Congress, founded in 1868. The TUC has survived as a unitary trade union federation with no serious competitors. It successfully adapted to embrace the expanding industrial and general unions during the union expansion of the early decades of the century and the growing public sector, white-collar and professional unions of the 1960s and ’70s, though as Fulcher emphasises, this inclusiveness has itself been facilitated by the limited power of the TUC over its affiliates and has still involved considerable internal tensions and periods of policy conflict.

A further crucial feature of the British labour movement is that the Labour Party was founded after the consolidation of a significant trade union movement, and important unions were key agencies in the formation of the Party. This meant a strong institutional linkage between the Labour Party and many trade unions, but also the clear priority of a ‘Labourist’ rather than a Socialist agenda for the Party. A major corollary of this linkage was an acknowledged division of labour between the political and industrial wings of the labour movement. In particular, the Labour Party would seek to protect the rights of unions to organise and bargain, but leave unions free to pursue their members’ interests in the bargaining arena, while the unions would muster financial and organisational support for the Party while underwriting the political caution of the Party leadership.

However, the imperatives of managing a declining capitalist economy have meant that such a division of labour has become contentious and precarious whenever Labour has been in government. During the post-war period, and especially during the 1970s, the resulting tensions and conflicts were particularly focused around recurrent episodes of incomes policy/ pay restraint (see Fulcher or Crouch), a theme we will focus on in Britain 3.

Early trade unionism, up until the late 1820s, survived in the shadow of draconian anti-union legislation which outlawed collective organisation. During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the consolidation of skilled unionism was accompanied by legal changes which protected certain forms of collective organisation and activity through the granting of limited immunities from prosecution rather than any provision of positive rights (esp. in legislation of 1875, when the "responsibility" of the skilled unions was rewarded by protections against prosecution for criminal conspiracy, and in the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 when unions were granted ‘immunities’ from fresh judge-made liabilities, so long as the action was "in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute").

The history of the legal regulation of trade unionism from that period until the 1980s primarily involved an oscillation between the statutory provision of limited protections (primarily through immunities from certain common-law actions and later specific individual rights as trade unionists) and an erosion of those protections through the legal interpretations of a hostile judiciary, though as Fulcher notes the state also resorted to troops and strike-breaking when necessary in the inter-war period. The crucial benchmark episodes for the pattern of judicial restriction and legislative support for "voluntarism" were those of the Taff Vale judgement of 1901 and the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 (see Hyman for a brief summary, or for more detail Phelps Brown or Fox or Wedderburn ch. 1).

While the 1970s saw some attempts to extend the legal framework, first as a structure to regulate unions and constrain union members under the Heath government (1970-74), then as a structure which supported collective bargaining and extended some individual worker rights under Labour (1974-79), there has been a massive stream of reforming and constraining legislation since 1980 (see Britain 4). However, the basic framework of limited negative immunities remains in place, even though it is now more narrowly interpreted.

(vi) Workplace bargaining and workplace trade unionism:

Many features of the development of work and industrial relations in Britain have been influenced by, and further reinforced, a widespread pattern of parochial bargaining between managers and workers at workplace level, over issues of manning and workpace as well as wages. Among such features have been: the incremental character of much organisational change; the relative autonomy of plant managements; the widespread reliance of relatively untrained managers on workers’ experience and tacit skills to operate labour-intensive production processes; an established craft tradition of local bargaining autonomy and occupational job control; a pattern of competitive multi-unionism coupled with only small numbers of full-time union officers, which has enhanced the role of lay activists in recruitment and representation; and the "demonstration effect" of the efficacy of shop-steward organisation as a model for work-place trade unionism (see Fulcher or Dore or Gallie).

Thus a key distinguishing feature of British trade unionism and industrial relations (especially from the late 1930s to the 1980s, but still significant in the 1990s) has been the central role played by workplace union (shop-steward) organisation. At the same time it should be emphasised that:

Indeed, a common criticism of attempts to depict a single British model of industrial relations has been that such models often generalise unjustifiably from the arrangements which have characterised only some of the most visible sectors of the economy, especially engineering. This criticism is a valuable reminder of the continuing diversity of work experience and industrial relations arrangements contained within the fragmented and often decentralised British employment ‘system’.

All of the following commentators share a recognition of the importance of the distinctive features of British work and employment relations outlined above, but they differ quite markedly in the emphasis of their explanations:

The main features of each of these accounts is summarised below, and these summaries plus either Fulcher’s or Hyman’s article should be sufficient to prepare for the seminar discussion.

Fox’s massive study of the History and Heritage of the British industrial relations pattern emphasises the deep historical roots and continuities which underpin a ‘voluntarist approach’, that is a presumption in favour of collective bargaining between autonomous employers and unions unencumbered by state intervention. Fox traces origins right back to pre-industrial social relations characterised by the emergence of local power centres which restrained monarchical authoritarianism, and provided space for a culture of individual rights and liberties. This culture informed the evolution of guild regulation into craft unionism as part of an evolving pattern of class accommodation and political alliances, especially among skilled workers and small employers.

His key argument is that this pattern, though it suffered shocks and spasmodic challenges and excluded the poor, was consolidated during the economic prosperity of the later nineteenth century, not by a conspiracy of social control but by the incremental accommodation of "responsible" trade unionists, reforming administrators and powerful employers.

He does not argue for any simple and automatic continuity but for the resilience of both the ideology and practice of class accommodation once they were entrenched, despite intermittent challenges by the state (especially the judiciary), hard-line employers and radicalised workers. However, he argues that a combination of the immediate attractions of institutionalised industrial relations in the circumstances of British capitalist development and the active support of sophisticated administrators and politicians, sustained these key features and consolidated them into a quasi-corporatist form during the first half of the twentieth century (see also Middlemass on this theme). This perpetuated a pattern of decentralised compromise bargaining which had paradoxical features as it (a) involved modest concessions and avoided the politicisation of conflict, but (b) entrenched an adversarial pattern of conflict and parochial shop-floor restrictions on managerial prerogatives.

Assessment: Fox provides an impressive overview of the development of the British pattern of industrial relations, but (i) probably overstates the theme of resilient continuity (in which Thatcherism pops up at the end of his account as a threatened rupture); (ii) focuses one sidedly on the impact of ideological themes and the commitments of sophisticated state administrators; and (iii) leaves changes in the specific patterns of work organisation and workplace bargaining which made these themes and commitments more or less viable less well explored.

[An additional note on the sources of the peculiar legal framework of trade union ‘immunities’ in Britain: Phelps Brown focuses specifically on this aspect of the incremental development of British industrial relations, in a way which is broadly compatible with Fox. He emphasises that the development of a "respectable and responsible" craft trade unionism in the second half of the nineteenth century provided the basis for relatively peaceful relations between these unions and progressive employers, and a sympathetic political response to the argument that the constraining legal framework of industrial relations required reform. He then notes that such reforms were compromised by the more aggressive opposition of some employers and the creativity of the judiciary as they sought to protect individual property rights and contractual conditions against any form of collective action, just at a time when wider and less ‘respectable’ forms of mass trade unionism were emerging. Finally he argues that the crucial moves to provide legislative protection for union organisation and strike action took place at a moment when labour was increasingly well organised in unions but did not have its own political party. This meant that the pressure was for immediate reforms rather than a codified set of rights, and this, coupled with the preferences of the legislators for simple but limited problem solving, led to the "golden formula" of union immunities for action "in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute".]

An alternative emphasis on discontinuities and readjustments is to be found in James Cronin’s research, which focuses on strike patterns rather than the development of the institutional machinery of compromise bargaining. Having noted that in Britain the strike increasingly displaced the riot as a form of protest during the nineteenth century, Cronin identifies several substantial and distinctive strike waves since the 1880s. He argues that each of these waves have been linked to wider transformations of class relations, as workers’ experiences of restructuring prompt new patterns of mobilisation and demands before losing momentum in the face of crisis and defeat.

From this perspective he emphasises the sources of challenges to the established pattern of industrial relations, and the ways in which such challenges have been contained only through important changes in the forms of class accommodation. In particular he identifies the linked strike waves of 1910-13 and 1918-21 as the results of an increasingly widely shared working class experience of work intensification and wage stagnation, which involved the long organised craft workers, the growing groups of semi-skilled workers, and more fleetingly groups of unskilled workers. As Lazonick, Littler and others have shown, this period was one of increasing, but characteristically piecemeal and uneven, work rationalisation (and corporate concentration).

Thus British industrial relations became much more volatile between the 1880s and the 1920s, as mass trade unionism was extended through several waves of often transient mobilisation, and Liberal political allegiances increasingly gave way to competition between Labourist, socialist or syndicalist conceptions of the relationships between economic and political conflict. Other marxist writers, such as Burgess, also stress the crisis and restabilisation of the British pattern of class accommodation and industrial relations between the 1880s and 1920s.

For Cronin the period between 1921 and the abortive General Strike of 1926 represents the long-drawn out aftermath of this period of increasingly inclusive and politicised worker mobilisation, when harsh economic conditions and industrial defeats eroded trade union membership and consolidated a distinctive form of class compromise. This was increasingly founded upon a widespread worker passivity and fear of unemployment; on the weakness of union organisation in many of the growing regions and sectors; on centralised accommodative bargaining by increasingly bureaucratised quasi-general trade unions; and on hopes of eventual political progress rather than workplace advance.

In this view there was a fundamental shift in the forms of accommodation between workers and employers in Britain between the 1880s and the 1930s, the key features of which help to explain both the absence of a major upturn in strikes and union organisation during the 1930s (in contrast with both France and the USA) and the gradual erosion of national bargaining arrangements which culminated in the next substantial British strike waves of 1957-62 and 1968-72.

Assessment: Cronin’s emphasis on the distinctive restructuring of both work and industrial relations in the early decades of the twentieth century places a much sharper emphasis on the changed bases of class accommodation than does Fox, and also emphasises the costs of the new accommodation for wage workers. His analysis highlight the distinctive forms taken by the restabilisation of industrial relations in the early decades of this century, but in so doing may underplay important continuities in (i) underlying production relations (note how Littler, Lazonick and others have highlighted incremental change) and (ii) the shared values and joint benefits which have underpinned the devolved and voluntaristic features of industrial relations.

Fulcher uses his comparison with Sweden to highlight the particular importance of the relatively weak co-ordination of both employer and worker interests in explaining the distinctive forms of class accommodation and conflict which have characterised the British experience. (As we will see when we look again at Fulcher when we consider Sweden, that country provides a particularly sharp contrast with Britain because it has been characterised by highly centralised and disciplined employers associations and union federations).

He suggests that the diversified employment and fragmented labour market generated by the long, slow process of capitalist industrialisation in Britain led initially to the effective organisation of a range of craft and quasi-craft unions, which represented only a small minority of the workforce, whilst the attempts of the mass of workers to organise failed because of their recurrently vulnerable market position. This laid the basis for the prolonged survival of strong craft and ex-craft trade unions which guarded their autonomy against any strongly disciplined central organisation and instead produced the relatively weak but unified TUC.

The entrenched position of craft unions meant that less skilled workers were organised by rival industrial and general unions, thus creating the patchwork of British trade unionism. These unions organised workers who had less bargaining power at a local level than the craft and quasi-craft unions, and thus had an interest in more centralised forms of union action, but they were unable to establish a more disciplined trade union centre (nb the failure of the GFTU) because of the established position of the older unions and the TUC.

The long development of trade unionism much predated the development of a socialist movement in Britain. This meant that the stronger nineteenth century unions had established ways of representing the interests of ‘labour’ within the existing political framework, and especially through alliances with radical Liberalism; that, as many unions became disillusioned with Liberalism they gave priority to ‘labour representation’ rather than socialism; and that the unions were instrumental in establishing the Labour Party as a coalition of ‘Lib-labs’ and socialists.

Meanwhile the fragmented structure of employment and of trade unionism meant that British employers were often able to inflict defeats on their workforces at industry level without the need for their own central organisation. Even when war-time developments prompted such an organisation, its role remained primarily that of lobbyist. When, in the early decades of the twentieth century, many unions became more strongly centralised and established alliances (such as the Triple Alliance of rail, miners and steel) these developments did not achieve the level of central discipline characteristic of Sweden, and the employers were able to depend upon the state to confront and defeat the "challenge" which culminated in the 1926 General Strike.

Assessment: Fulcher’s account, then, emphasises the distinctive institutional legacy of Britain’s early, slow, fragmented and craft-based industrialisation, and particularly the way in which this limited the scope for effective centralised corporatist forms of bargaining. What remains less clear from his account is how we explain the relative effectiveness of the class accommodations achieved within these fragmented and weakly co-ordinated institutions of interest representation.

(d) A final note on the role of women in paid work in Britain. None of the above accounts say much about the distinctive experience of women workers in the British labour market and industrial relations. However writers in a variety of feminist traditions, such as Glucksmann, Walby and Witz have explored the ways in which:

(i) in the context of the limited laissez faire regulation of male employment, protective legislation was developed which regulated the hours of work and working conditions of women and children, in a way which reinforced the gendered domestic division of labour;

(ii) the ways in which nineteenth craft and quasi-skilled unions were organised around local bargaining which consolidated the male bread-winner role, either by excluding (engineering, print) or subordinating (textiles) women workers in ways which continued through into the twentieth century;

(iii) how there was a major shift from young women’s paid work in domestic service to employment in the new areas of assembly-line manufacturing (electrical goods, food), which allowed greater freedoms than dometic service but also more systematic routinisation of work than in areas of male, unionised manufacturing;

(iv) a long standing exclusion of women from the professions and their subordination to male professional dominance in low paid caring roles (consider the relation of doctors and nurses)

(v) finally, Rubery argues that a major contribution to a notable British pattern of relatively labour intensive low wage, low skilled work in manufacturing and services has been the way in which employers have been able to draw upon a female workforce constructed in terms of a male bread-winner wage and limited state support for childcare.

We will come back to the specific character of the gendering of British employment and industrial relations in UK 3, but here we should consider how such features mesh in with the analyses discussed earlier in this note.]

Read at least one of the following overviews:

** Richard Hyman ‘The Historical Evolution of British Industrial Relations’ in Paul Edwards (ed) Indsutrail Relations: Theory and Practice in Britain (good up to date resume of historical research)

* Paul Edwards et al "Great Britain: Still Muddling Through" in A. Ferner and R. Hyman (eds) Industrial Relations in the New Europe pp 3-10 only for this seminar

** James Fulcher "On the Origins of Industrial Relations Diversity" British Journal of Industrial Relations 26, 1988

For more detailed arguments you could look one of:

James Fulcher Labour Movements, Employers and the State: Conflict and Co-operation in Britain and Sweden chapters 3,4 & 5

Alan Fox History and Heritage: the Social Origins of the British Industrial Relations System. chapters 4,6 and 9 (esp pp 170-173; 266-276; 432-439)

John MacInnes Thatcherism at Work pp 7-16

James Cronin Industrial Conflict in Modern Britain. chapters 3, 5 and 6

Henry Phelps Brown The Origins of Trade Union Power chapters 1-3

Craig Littler The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies part 2, esp chapters 6-8

Mike Savage and Andrew Miles The Remaking of the British Working Class 1840-1940 esp chs 3 & 5

It might be valuable to consider one of the following comparative case-studies:

* Ronald Dore British Factory- Japanese Factory (1973) chapters 4, 5 and 10 and concluding summaries of chapters 2, 3, 8 and 9

* Duncan Gallie In Search of the New Working Class (1978) esp pp 164-176; 252-257; 263-265 and chapter 12

Richard Scase "Relative deprivation: a comparison of English and Swedish manual workers" in D Wedderburn (ed) Power, Inequality and Class structure

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On a low wage, low skill ‘production regime’

Jill Rubery ‘The British Production regime: a societal-specific system’ Economy and Society 23.3 1994.

On the employers associations and the TUC:

Peter Jackson and Keith Sissons "Employers Confederations in Sweden and the UK" British Journal of Industrial Relations 14 1976

Geoff Ingham Strikes and Industrial Conflict

On legal regulation, ‘voluntarism’ and state intervention::

Lord Wedderburn The Worker and the Law (third edition) chapter 1 esp pp 16-38

Allan Flanders "The tradition of voluntarism" British Journal of Industrial Relations 1967.

Keith Middlemass Politics in Industrial Society, chapter 11-13

On the crises and remaking of British industrial relations:

Keith Burgess The Challenge of Labour esp chapters 3 and 6

On the historical reorganisation of work relations:

Eric Hobsbawm Worlds of Labour (browse)

E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class (browse)

William Lazonick "Industrial Relations and Technical Change: The Case of the Self-acting Mule" Cambridge Journal of Economics 1979

Raph Samuel "The Workshop of the World" History Workshop 3 1977

On the reorganisation of firms and management

Sidney Pollard The Genesis of Modern Management (browse)

Leslie Hannah ‘Managerial innovation and the rise of the large firm in interwar Britain’ Economic History Review 27 1974 or his The Making of the Corporate Economy chapter 6

On gender relations:

Mirian Glucksmann Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-war Britain (browse)

Christel Lane ‘Gender and the labour market in Europe: Britain, Germany and France’ Sociological Review 1993

Sylvia Walby Patriarchy at Work (browse)

Anne Witz Professions and Patriarchy (browse)

1. What have been the key features of the historical British pattern of employment relations?

2. Why has Britain been characterised by a long history of fragmented and decentralised bargaining?

3. What role have the state and the law played in British industrial relations and why?

4. Have relations between employers, workers, unions and the state been marked more by continuities or discontinuities?

_______________________

1. In what ways has craft unionism contributed to the distinctive pattern of British work and industrial relations?

2. Why did the legal regulation of industrial relations in Britain take the form of ‘negative immunities’ for trade unions?

3. What role have employers played in defining the character of British work and industrial relations?

@ Copyright Tony Elger and course team 2000