Toward a Political Economy of British Labor Law

Abstract

Throughout the past quarter-century, British labor markets have been characterized by an unusual degree of conflict, as measured by the number of agreements between employers and unions abrogated by unofficial union decisions, by days lost in strikes during the currency of existing agreements, by the prevalence of intimidatory and secondary picketing, by the evident political objectives of much strike behavior within public-sector industries, and by the strength of union opposition to trade-union reforms that are treated as commonplace elsewhere in Western Europe and in North America.' A significant concomitant of such turbulence has been a relatively low rate of investment in British industry and a correspondingly low rate of productivity growth, whether measured in terms of output per man-hour or of total-factor productivity.2 In this paper I will argue that labor-market turbulence on the scale witnessed in Britain over the past twenty-five years is primarily the consequence of a system of legal immunities for trade unions, trade-union officials, and individual trade-union members unprecedented in the Western world. The legal immunities availa-