Industrial relations in the 1960s

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1970s, the Industrial Relations Act was an unambiguous — if short-lived in its particular form — indication that the principles that had governed British industrial relations since the 1894 Royal Commission on Labour, distinguishing them in many significant ways from the American or European models, were no longer underpinned by the 70-year-old consensus that had become a central element of the broader post-war consensus. The 1971 legislation, seen by some as an attempt to Americanize industrial relations (Moran, 1977, p. 83), and by most as an unmitigated failure and the cause of Edward Heath’s defeat in 1974, was a clear departure from the British model that had prevailed hitherto. That model was based on voluntary collective bargaining and limited intervention by the state which, while supportive and willing to create the right conditions for collective bargaining, was all the more loath to legislate since there was a consensus among employers and trade unionists that any ‘legalization’ should be resisted absolutely, not least the legal enforceability of collective agreements which characterized other systems. It was thus described, in prescriptive terms, as ‘voluntary pluralism’, ‘voluntary collectivism’, ‘collective laissez-faire’, or ‘legal absenteeism’, though there are authors who deplore the fact that the last expression is too dismissive of the role of the state, of ‘its intervention in industrial disputes, with the goal of creating permanent bargaining institutions’ and of its fostering of a ‘climate of opinion in which collective bargaining with trade unions was presumed to be in the national interest’ (Howell. 2005. p. 80).