Labour Relations Problems for Managers
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055241 |
| Pages | 61-64 |
| Published date | 01 April 1973 |
| Date | 01 April 1973 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
review
article Labour Relations
Problems for
Managers
Management by Agreement
an alternative to the Industrial Relations Act
W E J McCarthy and N D Ellis
Hutchinson, 1973, 209 pp, £3.50 (paper £1)
Those people who have managerial responsibilities for
industrial relations at plant and industry level in Britain
today probably have more constraints upon their
decision-making than at any other period in the history of
western industrial society. There was a time when, in many
firms,
it was possible for managements to negotiate
changes in the terms and conditions of employment of their
employees with full-time trade union officials without
looking over their shoulders to find out what the
government of the day would allow or to find out whether
what the full-time trade union official was accepting was, in
fact, acceptable to the members he represented. In those far
off days there was a reasonable chance that agreements
made as a result of free collective bargaining would be kept.
How unsophisticated that all seems now. How much more
complicated is the pattern of industrial relationships in
1973.
One of the root causes of the change in the climate of
industrial relations is the post-war phenomenon of a
generation of people who expect an ever rising standard of
living. Whole sections of the working population have been
induced by the media to expect a steady improvement in
their material lot. Previous generations had no such
optimism about ever being better off. In the years before
1939 those people who were at work did not expect their
salaries or wages to increase and during the Twenties and
Thirties there were massive wage reductions. All that has
changed for the better so that in 1971 some 69% of
households in the UK possessed a refrigerator; well over
52%
had a car and more than 364,000 new dwellings were
completed. The pressure on wages and salaries by
employees in order to meet their ever rising demands as
consumers is, however, an essential ingredient in the
post-war inflationary situation that is common to all
western industrial countries. Another ingredient is the
world shortage of some commodities and foodstuffs.
Britain's problems on the inflationary front are worse than
those of our competitors in that our rate of increase in
productivity is lower than theirs and we have to import
most of our food and raw materials for manufacture.
Whoever we blame for the relatively low increase in the rate
of our industrial productivity, the fact remains that for too
long we have paid ourselves too much in wages and salaries
and, what is more, the distribution of this money has often
been unfair in that the highly paid have received the higher
proportion of
it.
The low paid worker stays with us because
every attempt to improve his lot leads to the upsetting of
wage and salary differentials all up the ladder. For these
and other reasons government control of incomes policy is
likely to be with us for some time to come. The manager
concerned with labour relations problems is caught between
the upper millstone of government incomes policy and the
lower millstone of workers' pressures on pay demands. It is
only one of
his
problems but it is a big one.
Successive governments have found, reluctantly, that they
can't get along without an incomes policy. The present
government's Stage Two is to be succeeded in the autumn
by Stage Three and the current round of talks between the
government and the TUC is designed to produce a
voluntary incomes policy as distinct from the present
involuntary £1 + 4%. It is high time that the government
and both sides of industry woke up and faced the facts of
experience which show that a voluntary incomes policy just
doesn't work. This is because trade unions are not in
business to solve the government's problems of inflation,
nor to do managements' job of improving productivity, but
to promote the sectional interests of their members. Trade
unions are no more to be blamed for this than managers are
to be blamed for running businesses in the interests of the
shareholders. Trade union efforts on behalf of their
members are inevitably bound to have inflationary effects
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