Focus: A recognition strategy is not a bargaining strategy

Abstract

INTERNATIONAL union rights Page 10 Volume 20 Issue 4 2013 The UK had a remarkable history of State intervention to secure collective bargaining. Collective bargaining density (including wages councils) was 82 percent in 1979 FOCUS ❐ RECOGNITION AND BARGAINING SYSTEMS K D EWING is Professor of Public Law at Kings College London, Vice President of ICTUR, and President of the Institute of Employment Rights. JOHN HENDY QC is a barrister, President of ICTUR, and Chair of the Institute of Employment Rights A strategy for collective bargaining requires an investment of regulatory resources by the State. Collective bargaining structures do not just happen: the infrastructure needs to be built. This appears true in every State of which we are aware with a successful collective bargaining structure and a successful economy. The State has to be involved in building these structures , and the more ambitious the collective bargaining framework proposed, the greater the State involvement required. The UK had, for the first three quarters of the last hundred years, a remarkably successful history in State intervention to secure collective bargaining. In 1916 the war-time government asked a former Speaker of the House of Commons (J H Whitley) to chair a committee established to ‘make and consider suggestions for securing a permanent improvement in the relations between employers and workmen’. The impetus was the necessity of planning for reconstruction when peace would eventually come. The Committee produced five reports on industrial relations issues, with the first recommending that the government should ‘propose , without delay, to the various associations of employers and employed, the formation of Joint Standing Industrial Councils in each industry’. Where they did not already exist, the second report recommended ‘an adaptation and expansion of the system of trade boards working under an amended Trade Boards Act 1909 for ‘trades where organisation is at present very weak or non-existent’. The sheer ambition of the project was revealed in the final report of the Committee, where it was said that ‘taking our first and final reports together, they constitute a scheme designed to cover all the chief industries of the country and to equip each of them with a representative joint body capable of dealing with matters affecting the welfare of the industry in which employers and employed are concerned’. According to H A Clegg, the government of the day accepted the recommendations of the Whitley Committee, with the result that ‘during 1918 and 1919 the new Ministry of Labour called meetings of the two sides of almost every industry which lacked an industry-wide procedure agreement in order to promote the establishment of joint industrial councils’. Though subsequently reduced in number, this led to the creation of 73 Joint Industrial Councils (‘JICs’). It is an important feature of this initiative that it took place not as a result of a statutory obligation of employers and trade unions, but as a result of the exercise of discretionary power of the newly created Ministry of Labour. The system was established without legislation but not without legal authority, the State intervening not by statutory means but by administrative means. It was not suggested that there should be legal intervention to set up the JICs, and none was introduced except in industries in which unions did not have sufficient organisational strength to form the employee side of a JIC. In these industries the Trade Boards Acts 1909 and 1918 (subsequently the Wages Council Act 1945) allowed the creation of tripartite boards (employers’ representatives, workers’ representatives and independent members appointed by the relevant Minister) to set terms and conditions of employment in the particular unorganised sector. These Wages Councils functioned effectively by collective bargaining with the independent members acting, in effect, as in-built mediators and, in the event of impasse, arbitrators. This was certainly true of the last of the many, the Agricultural Wages Board, abolished in 2013. It was an important feature of this system that wages councils could be abolished by the minister where a JIC was established representing substantial proportions of the employers and workers previously covered by the wages council. This was because the wages councils were designed to foster an environment in which collective bargaining would take root in...