Workplace Partnership: Management and Union Strategy

Abstract

In the unionized sectors, partnership is fast becoming the new orthodoxy in British industrial relations. This is partly a function of employer responses to intensified global competition and neo-liberal imperatives. It is also a function of the post-1997 shift in politicoeconomic conditions and in particular, successive Labour Governments’ quest for a ‘modernization’ of workplace relations. In this context, as Martínez Lucio and Stuart (2002a and 2002b) have argued, partnership is central to a modernizing agenda because it is seen as a means of permanently substituting co-operative relations for class conflict at work. The new co-operative relations are predicated on an extension of employee rights and a commitment by organized labour to work with employers, rather than against them, in the interests of improving organizational performance.