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Workplace Participation in Britain, Past, Present, and Future: Academic Social Science Reflections on 40 Years of Industrial Relations Change and Continuity

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Abstract

Works Councils and other forms of statutory workplace consultation play a significant role in many European countries. This has never been true in the British Industrial Relations system. Instead, employers and the state encouraged voluntary collective bargaining from the late nineteenth century onwards. Pluralist academics responded by redefining Industrial Democracy as ‘joint regulation’ by management and trade unions. Other participation forms were marginalized, until Thatcherism and 1980s union decline saw the emergence of weak, managerial employee involvement. Holding fast to the single-union channel, British unions have missed opportunities to spread workplace participation, notably within the EU. Drawing on personal research, I explain the relative failure of active, constructive participation in Britain, notwithstanding some successful workplace partnership agreements.

Participation in management is thus one aspect of pressure group democracy in industry, and there is no difference in principle between collective bargaining, and joint consultation, Works Councils and co-determination in so far as these institutions serve the workers’ interest and protect their rights

Hugh Clegg, A New Approach to Industrial Democracy (1960, p. 132)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK

    Peter Ackers

  2. Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

    Peter Ackers

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  1. Peter Ackers
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  1. Institute for Social Movements and Department of History, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Stefan Berger

  2. Department of Social Sciences, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany

    Ludger Pries  & Manfred Wannöffel  & 

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Ackers, P. (2019). Workplace Participation in Britain, Past, Present, and Future: Academic Social Science Reflections on 40 Years of Industrial Relations Change and Continuity. In: Berger, S., Pries, L., Wannöffel, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Workers’ Participation at Plant Level. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48192-4_29

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48192-4_29

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