From Organised to Disorganised Capital? British Employer Associations, 1897–2010

For almost a century, employer associations were a crucial element of the unwritten constitution of industrial Britain. Yet, although there has been an enormous boom in the historiography of employer associations, we still know much less about them than we do about their counterparts, unions. The secrecy of employer associations is a long-standing observation of academic and policy-makers (Clegg 1954: 197–199). An unsuccessful 1995 parliamentary motion by Labour calling for an investigation into employers’ organisations turned on their secrecy and the unknown scope and depth of their influence over legislation: ‘who belongs to these organisations and what do they do? Compared with trade unions, they are cult-like and secretive’.1 This chapter is organised in three sections, beginning with an examination of the different theoretical approaches to employer organisation and collective action. In particular, it argues that the broadly pluralist ‘Oxford School’ approach to industrial relations has dominated research into employer organisations. The second section examines the burst of employer organising during the last decade of the nineteenth century. The foundations of the ‘British industrial relations system’ were laid in these years. The third looks at the fate of employer organisations since 1979. Paradoxically, although the Thatcher administrations attacked unions, this also called into question the system of national bargaining and some comprehensive procedural agreements.