Paul Davies and Mark Freedland, Labour Legislation and Public Policy
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1995.tb02036.x |
| Author | Debi S. Saini |
| Date | 01 July 1995 |
| Published date | 01 July 1995 |
REVIEWS
Paul Davies and Mark Freedland,
Labour Legislation and Public Policy,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, xxxiii
+
692 pp, hb 245.00, pb $19.95.
During the past thirty years, the history of labour relations law in the United
Kingdom has been quite tumultuous. In writing this book, Davies and Freedland
felt concerned for their students, who ‘were finding it increasingly difficult to
arrive at their own snapshot of labour law’ and were ‘finding the picture an
impossibly kaleidoscopic one, and were accordingly disenchanted with the subject’
(p
1). Their outstanding study
-
drawing on policy documents and parliamentary
debates as primary sources of evidence
-
offers a history of labour legislation in
Britain since 1945.
Davies and Freedland’s book
-
like the works of Bill Wedderburn and
Otto
Kahn-Freund before them
-
is likely to become a classic within British labour law
literature. It is likely also to be accepted as a standard teaching text. The most
distinctive feature of the book is its emphasis on labour law development as a
political process. In analysing the politics of industrial justice, the authors, without
lapsing into either sociological or legal jargon, have managed to connect legislative
initiatives with economic, political and social developments. Chapter One
examines the theoretical underpinnings of collective
laissez-faire
as expounded by
Kahn-Freund. More than half of the book focuses upon the demise of this concept,
the implementation of which has, in the past, led liberal industrial relations
scholars to treat the British system of industrial organisation as the epitome of
voluntarism. Collective
laissez-faire
worked during the 1950s
-
its glory years
-
and it legitimated Kahn-Freund’s treatment of collective labour law as a footnote to
collective bargaining. Davies and Freedland provide two explanations of the
tension implicit in collective
laissez-faire.
First, overprivileged unions, they
argue, were responsible for encouraging social disorder as well as for the
diminution of economic objectives. Secondly, they claim that autonomous
collective bargaining, certainly as compared with distinct legislative frameworks
setting out statutory rights, tended not to meet the demands of certain interest
groups.
The authors explain very clearly how Thatcherite conservatives were able to
transform labour law from a common law to a predominantly statute-based
subject. By the 1980s, they demonstrate, theories of ‘legally regulated bargaining’
and ‘bargained corporatism’ stood discredited. The move towards deregulation
required an increase in legislation because it demanded that the government
‘impose one of the most restrictive regimes of strike law in Europe’ (p 659).
Towards the end of the book, they raise the question of whether it might ever be
possible to return to collective
laissez-faire
and, if not, if it is possible ‘to evolve a
system of labour law which will be sufficiently strongly based in principles of
industrial justice, and yet sufficiently recognising of the need for effective
representation of the workforce in collective bargaining’ (p 664). If this latter
objective is to be achieved, they suggest, there will have to be introduced
legislation which combines ‘individual industrial justice with collective
representation’ and which balances ‘the demands of industrial justice, of
representation, of responsibility and of autonomy’
(loc cit).
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OX4 1JF and 238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
@
The Modern Law Review Limited
1995
(MLR
58:4,
July).
Published
by
Blackwell Publishers,
613
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