Employers, managers and the conduct of industrial relations

Abstract

Until the late 1960s administrators and hospital secretaries carried out the duties of today’s managers. In industrial relations there was little to do. Pay and conditions of service were largely determined at central level of the national system, and hospital and health authority managers implemented Whitley. In the field of ‘managerial relations’ such as discipline and grievance the employers and managers held sway with few rights for individual staff unless they were doctors or dentists. The system fed off the low level of trade union activity at the level of the employer, and the highly centralized and undemocratic nature of most of the representative organizations at national level. The democratic ‘deficit’ that characterized much NHS decisionmaking was nowhere more apparent than in the attitudes and activities of these pre-managerial managers.