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policy-makers and shaped the perceptions of those groups impacted by industrial relations reform. If the granular archival work in this book provides the specifics of the governing process, this chapter points to the most pertinent areas for examination. The first ‘theme’ details the historical development of the British system of industrial relations, focusing on the origins of trade union distrust of judges and the courts. It traces how the hard-won immunities protecting trade unionists from legal action in the criminal or civil courts underpinned
3 The trade union movement While she did certainly not desist from socialist or suffrage politics, Wilkinson’s principal preoccupation during the First World War was trade unionism.1 Her long association with the shop workers’ union began with a job application. The Co-operative Employé’s May 1915 issue advertised a women’s organiser’s post at £2 5s per week, to reside in Manchester with responsibilities including ‘correspondence, the organisation of trade union movements for women, canvassing for new members, platform speaking’.2 On 18 July 1915, the AUCE
9780719081033_2_C03.qxd 1/20/10 9:06 Page 47 3 Skills and trade unions It is an undoubted fact that my trade is the Aristocrat of trades in general, having as its Patron, one Noah, of Biblical fame, whose masterpiece, the Ark was a triumph of the Shipwright’s art, and independent of the aid of all the other trades.1 Britain’s skilled craftsmen were always vying with each other for prime status through such references to mythical and Biblical origins, and there is no doubt that the shipwrights were indeed an ancient and highly skilled group. Each of them had
6 The trade unions’ implacable hostility The trade unions constitute the industrial wing of the organised labour movement, while the Labour Party is the political wing, but from the start of the twentieth century the two have been inextricably linked and bound together. Indeed, the trade unions were instrumental in creating the Labour Party, in order to ensure Parliamentary representation for ordinary working people, and inter alia defend the unions themselves from political (Conservative) attacks and hostile judicial decisions. As such, the decision by senior
1 Car workers, trade unions and public discourse As trade unionism developed in post-war Britain, hostility towards labour militancy steadily increased in mainstream public discourse. After a comparative lull in ‘union-bashing’ between 1945 and 1955,1 unions came in for ever more criticism from politicians, the press and social commentators and even in popular fiction. These attacks intensified in the 1970s as Britain experienced more major strikes and deeper economic problems. In the wake of a series of government strike defeats in that decade, journalists
4 The trade unions and legal services Trade union legal services emerged through the development of tort law in the nineteenth century as industrialisation led to new or different kinds of injuries that could be sustained in the workplace.1 The trade unions responded to the impact of their members being injured at work or contracting major illnesses through the negligence of employers in three ways: first, through the collective push for legislation to improve conditions, such as the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1867 and the Trades Dispute Act 1906; second
This chapter outlines the contextual framework, within which German and British trade union politics at Ford and General Motors evolved between the late 1960s and the early twenty-first century. The chapter starts with a brief sketch of the post-war development of the British and German automobile industries, followed by a synthetic overview of the development of the two national industrial relations systems and the description of the specific trade
If post-1945 trade union scholars have shown little concern for nations and nationalism, and have only recently started to engage with the impact of internationalization on domestic trade union practices, interest in cross-border cooperation has traditionally been much stronger. However, much of this literature does not explicitly deal with economic internationalization. For example, there is an extensive body of scholarship concerned
things, a decline in trade union density, a shift from collective to individual employment regulation, and the decentralization and fragmentation of regulatory frameworks (Katz and Darbishire, 2000 ; Howell, 2003 ). In the case of multinational firms, these trends were magnified by direct headquarters’ policies to reshape human resource practices in subsidiaries (for US firms, see Almond and Ferner, 2006 ). On the other side, embedded in the wider current of globalization
5 The trade union contribution to the British Labour Party A ndrew Thorpe The debate about the relationship between the trade unions and Labour politics in Britain is older than the Labour Party itself. It has been the stuff of great controversy, arousing considerable comment as well as important academic work. Lewis Minkin, in particular, has offered a series of detailed analyses of the relationship.1 Essay and article-length works look at various aspects the relationship, particularly for the period since 1945.2 The fifteen years or so after the Second World