Union Autonomy in Context: An International Comparison
| Pages | 3-26 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/01425459310043306 |
| Published date | 01 April 1993 |
| Date | 01 April 1993 |
| Author | Patricia Fosh,Huw Morris,Roderick Martin,Paul Smith,Roger Undy |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Union
Autonomy in
Context
3
Union Autonomy in Context:
An International Comparison
Patricia Fosh
The Management
School,
Imperial
College,
University of London, UK
Huw Morris
Kingston Business
School,
Kingston
University,
UK
Roderick Martin
Glasgow University
Business
School,
UK
Paul Smith
School
of Management and
Finance,
Nottingham University, UK
Roger Undy
Templeton
College,
Oxford
University,
UK
The first of our two linked
articles1
on union autonomy, in the previous issue
of
Employee
Relations,
examined the wide-ranging and detailed regulations for
the conduct of union internal affairs introduced in the
UK
by the Conservative
Government since
1979
and compared their treatment of union autonomy with
that of the state in seven other Western European countries, the
USA,
and the
Conservative and Labour Governments in the
UK
prior to
19792.
The incoming
Conservative Government had turned, from
1983
on,
to legal means to promote
the ideal of union democracy, justifying this action particularly by asserting
that British unions were led by unrepresentative minorities, who were not
compelled by law
to take
account of individual
members'
interests and
who
had
refused to take advantage of opportunities for voluntary reform. Other
commentators (see, for example[l]) interpret their actions as an adoption of a
"contestation" approach to unions, a desire to restrict union activities in the
labour market and
to
a moral absolutism need
to
regulate union internal affairs.
The table in our first article on the state control of union internal affairs
demonstrated a clear divergence between state approaches in the UK and
Greece, on the one hand, and other western European countries on the other.
While the USA and Ireland shared some features of the British approach, that
in the USA was far less prescriptive and that in Ireland less comprehensive3.
Greece
traditionally
has a
different pattern of anti-labour, authoritarian and
pro-
capitalist motivation and an industrial relations system enclosed in a
comprehensive and complex legal framework. In contrast, the approach in a
number of other western industrialized countries, corporatist or pluralist, has
been to continue their traditions of relying on unions to regulate their internal
affairs in a democratic fashion, believing unions to be both responsive to
members' desires and
to have
respect for individual
rights.
The UK's
traditional Employee Relations, Vol.
15
No.
4,
1993,
pp.3-26.
©
MCB
University
Press 0142-5455
Employee
Relations
15,4
4
voluntary approach, and also its approach in the neo-corporatist
1970s,
closely
resembled that of our selected western European countries.
This second article considers state control of union activities in a wider
context and examines
two
questions:
(1) Whether there is any "balancing" between state respect for/control of
union internal affairs and state confidence that unions will follow
prescribed rules for the conduct of collective bargaining and industrial
action; in particular we ask why the Conservative Government chose to
introduce controls for certain union activities in the UK and not for
others.
(2) How the state in the UK was able to shift radically from a general
approach of non-intervention to a position of tight legal control of union
internal affairs and other aspects of union activities such as forms of
industrial action.
The full range of union activities which a state could restrict and regulate is too
wide for this article to cover; some items have thus been omitted from the
analysis.
The complex issue of
the
right
to
strike per
se,
which may
be
vested in
the union or in the individual and which may or may not be protected in a
country's Constitution, is not the focus of the comparison between the different
countries4. However, we need as a preliminary to point out the significant
difference between the UK, together with Ireland, and most of the countries
selected for comparison in terms of the meaning of "strike". Many European
systems accept the meaning of striking as nothing less than total cessation of
work: go slows, work-to-rule, bans on voluntary overtime, working without
enthusiasm and so on are not included[2,
p.
278]5.
Table I, presents a comparison of the selected countries in terms of state
restrictions, regulations and provisions for
collective
agreements and industrial
action6[3].
Wedderburn[4, p. 258] aptly points out the fallacy of classifying
different countries' collective agreements solely in terms of whether they are
legally binding or not legally binding. Indeed, collective agreements have two
functions,
the
contractual and
the
normative.
The contractual function concerns
the collective agreement as a contract between the employer and the union and
is "an industrial peace treaty", though this "peace obligation" has received
different interpretations "at different times and
places"[5,
p.
122].
It should not
be indiscriminately assumed that all legally binding collective agreements
impose "peace
clauses";
the presence of
a
peace clause is related to the vesting
of the right to strike in the union. The normative function ensures that the
conditions, rules or codes (the norms) agreed in the collective agreement are
applied to the individual employment relationship. There are two legal
attributes of
the
collective agreement
in its
normative function that need further
determination: whether it is "inderogable", i.e. whether the employer is free to
contract individually with his/her employee for greater or lesser benefits than
those contained in the collective agreement; and whether the benefits of the
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