Abstract
Recent decades have witnessed some substantial changes in both the nature and the extent of workplace conflict in the UK. The number of collective disputes has declined significantly, but those that do take place are increasingly large in scale. In contrast, claims to employment tribunals have grown rapidly, with volumes heavily influenced in recent times by claims from groups of employees, rather than individuals. In spite of this changing picture, there do not appear to have been dramatic changes in the quality of employment relations inside the workplace, even though the UK has just experienced the longest recession in living memory. This suggests that the visible signs of conflict are shaped not only by the scale of underlying tensions but also by the available mechanisms for their expression (see Dix et al. 2009, for one discussion).
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Notes
- 1.
Author’s calculations from Carley (2010) after excluding Norway.
- 2.
The discrepancy between the UK and France is largely due to the fact that the French public sector is particularly strike prone, with days lost in the private sector broadly on a par in the two countries (Milner 2015: 135).
- 3.
Figures for Australia and the USA are calculated for 2005–2009 from data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- 4.
Approximately one-in-ten private sector workplaces have recognized trade unions, compared with around nine-in-ten in the public sector.
- 5.
- 6.
The fees currently stand at £160–£250 for registering a claim and £230–£950 for a claim to progress to a hearing. The amount depends on the type of case and may be remitted in full or in part if the claimant meets criteria for not being able to afford to pay. The tribunal can also order the fee to be repaid if the claim is successful.
- 7.
The introduction of EC restores the availability of a ‘free’ method for acquiring external intervention in a dispute (albeit from Acas conciliators rather than through free access to a tribunal). One might then seek to compare the total number of EC notifications under the current arrangements with the total number of ET cases filed in the ‘pure tribunal’ period before PCC. The latter are in fact larger, even though EC notifications from ‘multiples’ are only counted as one case. Around 84,000 EC notifications were made by employees between April 2014 and March 2015 (Acas 2015b); this compares with around 60,000 ET cases lodged between April 2012 and March 2013 (Ministry of Justice 2015).
- 8.
With a greater number of employees, there is a higher chance that at least one case will arise.
- 9.
WERS also indicates the reasons for grievances and disciplinary sanctions. The most common causes of grievances in 2011 were unfair treatment by managers (52 %), followed by bullying or harassment (30 %) and issues over pay or conditions (17 %). The most common causes of disciplinary sanctions were poor performance (59 %), poor timekeeping or absence (44 %) and theft or dishonesty (24 %).
- 10.
As noted earlier, data on the causes of collective conflict indicate that redundancies accounted for at least 65 % of working days lost in 2009/2010 and 2010/2011, but for less than 5 % of working days lost in adjacent years.
- 11.
Britain is not unique in that respect (see Roche and Teague 2014).
- 12.
In the British Social Attitudes Survey, the percentage of employees agreeing that “management tries to get the better of employees” has fallen over time, from around 60 % in the period 1998–2003 to around 50 % in the period 2004–2010. The 2011 figure of 56 % may represent something of a reversal, but there is no data available beyond 2011 that can be used to corroborate this.
- 13.
The corresponding figure for non-union reps was 44 %.
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Forth, J., Dix, G. (2016). Exploring the Nature and Extent of Workplace Conflict. In: Saundry, R., Latreille, P., Ashman, I. (eds) Reframing Resolution. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51560-5_3
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