Workplace Partnership and Work-Life Balance: A Local Government Case Study

Abstract

This chapter explores the links between work-life balance and workplace partnership, principally through a local authority case study. This was one of six organisations studied in our research on ‘patterns and prospects for partnership at work in the UK’, part of the ESRC Future of Work programme.1 The local authority case study is of particular interest to the concerns of this book. In 2001, the Council introduced a work-life balance policy that was the product of a trade union — management partnership. It was among the ‘exemplars’ in the local government sector where the employers and trade unions identified workplace partnership as the means of extending flexible working practices to the benefit of employees, local authorities and users of council services. Our interest was in the benefits that employees stood to gain. This section sets the scene by introducing briefly the concept of partnership at work, sketching the public policy context of local government ‘modernisation’, and identifying the issues that guided our case study investigation.