Decentralization of Collective Bargaining

There are few, if any, areas of industrial relations that have not been subject to major change over the past fifteen years. The decline in union membership, the development of human resource management strategies and the introduction of a range of legislation affecting the operation of trade unions and industrial conflict have been extensively debated. The decentralization of collective bargaining is of equal moment and is linked to many of them.

The system of industrial relations in the UK traditionally has been dominated by national bargaining. The years of the First World War and immediately after saw the emergence of industry-wide multiemployer bargaining as the dominant model, and the model which remained dominant for the following fifty or so years.

This case study differs from the others in that it is a study of part of a single firm, Coats Viyella plc, operating within one industry, the knitwear industry. Coats Viyella plc is the product of the 1986 merger of three separate firms, Nottinghamshire Manufacturing, Vantona Viyella and Coats Patons. It is organized into seven divisions covering most aspects of the textile and related industries. This case study focuses on the Apparel Division of the company which for collective bargaining purposes was, until 1988, party to the Knitting Industries Federation (KIF) agreement with the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers (NUHKW) negotiated in the National Joint Industrial Council for the Hosiery Trade.

Local government is one of the largest service employers in Great Britain, employing 2.9 million full and part-time staff in over 500 separate local authorities. The present structure of local government was established by a series of legislative changes in the mid-1970s which reorganized 1400 separate local authorities into the current 500 or so. The nature of each authority varies considerably in terms of geographical area, size of population and the physical environment.

The British Steel Corporation (BSC) was formed by the 1967 Iron and Steel Act which took into national ownership the fourteen largest steelmaking companies in Britain. (The criterion for inclusion in the nationalization programme was the capacity to produce 400 000 tonnes of steel.) Nationalization of the steel industry followed a period of under-investment by the private steel companies (Dobson, 1981). Profits in the industry were low, reflecting the constraints of a production process spread over a large number of small plants operating already obsolete technology. There was a widely held belief that the steel industry needed large-scale rationalization in order to shift production to a small number of large plants operating with the latest equipment and technology. Thus, ‘Nationalisation was intended as a method of rationalising production and of bringing about a lot of investment in the latest technology’ (ibid. p.48).

Before privatization of the water industry in England and Wales in 1989, the structure of the industry was laid down by statute. The Water Act 1973, established, for England and Wales, ten multi-purpose Regional Water Authorities (RWA) to deal primarily with sewage treatment and disposal and supplying clean water by taking over the functions of over 1000 separate local authorities (Map 7.1). Many authorities were also involved in a range of water-related activities such as flood protection, fisheries and recreation. In addition to the ten Water Authorities, Statutory Water Companies (SWC) supply clean water to a quarter of the population of England and Wales (Map 7.2). These had been established by Acts of Parliament in many localities during the nineteenth century, but by 1989 a process of merger and acquisition had reduced the number to 28, largely in the South East of England.

This chapter will draw together the different strands explored in our five industry case studies. In doing so a number of key features of managing the process of decentralizing collective bargaining will be highlighted. It has already been made clear that we do not pretend to be able to generalize from these case studies. Nevertheless, we can examine issues in more detail than would have been possible had other methods been used and we can identify ideas that might be worth further exploration.