Employers against Unions: The British Experience of Union Victimisation

The coverage of union recognition — spanning the institutional rights at the enterprise level of information, consultation, representation and negotiation — has fallen markedly in Britain in the last thirty years. This has resulted from, inter alia, the decentralisation of collective bargaining, transfers of operations, sub-contracting, fragmentation of organisations, the creation and maintenance of non-union operations (sometimes through so-called ‘doublebreasting’) and, occasionally outright derecognition. Moreover, the scope of remaining recognition has also been increasingly narrowed. Even though collective bargaining remains for some items contained within workers’ terms and conditions of employment, performance-related pay has commonly superseded bargaining over wages. At the most, the amount of money to be distributed for performance may be subject to some bargaining. Consequently, both the breadth and depth of the co-determination of the employment relationship through unions have been diminished as the power of capital has grown, leading employers to be able to act in an increasingly unilateral and unitarist manner. This is notwithstanding that unions in the last fifteen years taken fairly widespread and pro-active measures towards defending and extending union recognition through ‘union organising’ projects.