Blunting Neoliberalism — Tripartism and Economic Reforms in the Developing World – Edited by Lydia Fraile
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2010.00843_6.x |
BOOK REVIEWSbjir_843583..599
The Evolution of the Modern Workplace, edited by William Brown, Alex Bryson, John
Forth and Keith Whitfield. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. 2009,
405 pp., ISBN 978 0 521 51456 9, £65.00, hardback.
The British Workplace Employment Relations Surveys (WERS) represent the best
source of data on the evolution of any single country’s industrial relations system and
workplace employment practices. What is unusual about the WERS surveys is that
they provide both a series of snapshots of workplace employment relations across
three decades and a great breadth of information that allows examination of a wide
range of workplace issues with authoritative data sources. The strengths of WERS are
evident in this volume, which includes chapters investigating a wide range of different
subject matter, written by a veritable who’s who of leading British industrial relations
scholars, drawing on evidence from the 1980 through 2004 WERS surveys (or WIRS
as the early versions were designated).
Taken as a whole, The Evolution of the Modern Workplace can be seen as fulfill-
ing two different, but equally important roles. The first is as a compendium of
information and data on key aspects of workplace employment relations. One could
imagine it serving as an excellent assigned reading for a graduate seminar on British
employment relations, as well as a useful reference guide and handbook for
researchers in this area. At the same time, the contributions to the volume also
combine to provide a picture of employment relations system change that should
shape thinking in this field and inspire future research. The volume fills this second
role in part because it captures the evolution of workplace employment relations
during a period of major transformation of the system. Most notably from an
industrial relations perspective, this era saw a major decline in union membership
levels and in collective bargaining coverage. Attendant to this shift were a series of
other, interconnected changes: the increased legalization of employment relations;
the increasing influence of the European Union (EU) on the UK; the decline of
manufacturing and rise of private service sector employment; the rise of human
resource management and high involvement work practices; and the growing influ-
ence of foreign ownership.
The first key theme running through a number of contributions to the volume is the
declining reach of collective representation, with only 38 per cent of workplaces in the
2004 WERS recognizing unions compared with 64 per cent of workplace in the 1980
WIRS. This has led to a general weakening of union bargaining power. In chapter 3,
Blanchflower and Bryson document the diminished economic impact of British
unions, such as the relatively small 5–6 per cent union membership wage premium.
Interestingly, they find that this weak union wage effect has been accompanied by a
decline in negative union effects on employment growth, such that union employment
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2010.00843.x
49:3 September 2011 0007–1080 pp. 583–599
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2011. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
effects disappear after 1990. What this appears to be capturing is a general phenom-
enon that as the ability of unions to extract unusual above-market advantages for
their members, so also some of the more negative impacts of collective bargaining on
economic outcomes are disappearing. Unions may produce less goods, but also fewer
harms. Why has this happened? In chapter 2 of the volume, Brown, Bryson and Forth
argue that increased product market competition was a key driver in the transforma-
tion of British labour relations. They provide a convincing array of evidence that
competitive pressures were a major factor. Most noteworthy is the especially steep
decline in unionization levels in industries that were suffering declining profit levels
over this period.
The declines in British union membership and weakening of union power are
dramatic. However, just as striking, and more unusual from a comparative perspec-
tive, is the degree of shift in employment away from manufacturing and towards the
service sector. Table 1.1 of the book shows this change from a situation in 1980, where
38 per cent of employees were in private manufacturing compared with only 26 per
cent in private sector service, to a situation in 2004 where only 15 per cent of
employees were in private manufacturing, and fully 56 per cent were in private
services. By comparison with other major economies during the same period, neither
Germany nor Japan suffered such a dramatic drop in manufacturing employment,
while the USA already had a much higher proportion of private service sector
employment in 1980. Thus, it is worth remembering when reading the subsequent
discussions of the major changes in British labour relations over this period that this
is occurring in the context of an economy undergoing a relatively high degree of
transformation in focus and character.
Although a number of chapters do an excellent job of documenting the declining
reach of collective bargaining coverage and weakening of union power, the current
state of union weakness in the UK may also appear somewhat out of proportion due
to the unusually high degree of British union power in the 1960s and 1970s. For
example, in Figure 3.1 in the chapter by Blanchflower and Bryson on trade union
decline, the authors compare unionization levels in Canada, the USA, and the UK
from 1900 to the present. As the authors note, unionization levels in the three
countries followed similar patterns until the 1960s and 1970s, when US unionization
went into decline while British unionization increased to historically unprecedented
levels. The decline in unionization in the UK after 1980 is steep, mirroring that in the
USA. However, from around 1990 onwards, the British pattern starts to look a lot
more like that of Canada than that of the USA. More generally, throughout this
volume, there are indications that collective bargaining in the UK, while substantially
weakened from its dominant position in the post-World War II period, is beginning
to stabilize into a state of a narrower but still substantial influence on the economy,
more akin to the Canadian situation than that of more radically limited collective
bargaining as in the USA.
The story of British labour and employment relations captured by the WERS
surveys is in many respects a tale of two eras. The period from 1979 to 1997 under the
Conservative administrations of Thatcher and Major was characterized by the sharp
decline in the importance of collective bargaining and the steady weakening of the
trade union movement. The subsequent New Labour era from 1998 to the present did
not see a restoration of the ancien régime of labour-centred voluntarism, but rather
the rise of a new employment relations system characterized by increased legalization
of the employment relationship, greater service sector employment and more flexible
labour market structures.
584 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2011.
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