The theory of employee relations

Abstract

The empirical roots of employee relations enquiry lie in the coincidence at the end of the nineteenth century of the two faces of the ‘labour question’: the issues of social welfare and social control (Hyman, 1989a:3). The theoretical roots of the subject can be traced principally to the clash between Marxian political economy and the emergent neoclassical economics at around the same time (Marsden, 1982:236–8). In terms of empirical enquiry, the problematic nature of the ‘labour question’ was epitomised at this time by two significant disputes: the Match Girls’ strike of 1888 and the Great London Dock Strike of 1889. At that time, being a match girl ‘rated somewhere practically below prostitution in the social scale’ (McCarthy, 1988:57–8), their conditions of work dangerous and unpleasant, their pay meagre. The match girls’ victory in the 1888 dispute, however, secured with public opinion on their side, had a significance beyond the strike itself. It ‘turned a new leaf in Trade Union annals…. It was a new experience for the weak to succeed … [and] The lesson was not lost on other workers’ (Sidney and Beatrice Webb, quoted by Stafford, 1961:79). The following year, the social convulsion sparked by the match girls at Bryant & May’s reached the river Thames and the men who worked on the docks and wharves. The dockers’ strike became the ‘symbol of new unionism’ that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century (Clegg et al., 1964:55), not only a great victory for the dockers but a dispute that ‘changed the whole face of the Trade Union world’ (Webb and Webb, 1920:401). For radicals such as Henry Champion, one of the leaders of the strike, the dispute was won ‘despite our socialism’ (quoted by McCarthy, 1988:50), but for others, such as Frederick Engels, lifelong companion of Karl Marx, the strike was