{"title":"Changing Gender Roles and Public-Policy Perspectives since Donovan: A Trade-Union View","authors":"S. Ferns","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.11","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘Oxford School of Industrial Relations’, centred at Nuffield College, was one major instance of academics entering the ‘corridors of power’ and attempting to resolve national problems of unofficial strikes, inflation, and restrictive practices, most notably via the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations (Donovan), 1965–68. For historians today, there are two reasons why this mattered. First, because, in effect, they had created a new social-science field of industrial relations. Oxford was not the only industrial relations centre, but during the 1950s and 1960s it was the strongest and most politically influential. Second, and more important at the time, the Oxford School addressed a central policy moment in the development of social-democratic ‘bargained corporatism’ and the role that trade unions might play in this. In many respects, the Oxford School were representative figures of the post-war progressive generation, dedicated to ‘reconstruction’. It had had a powerful impact ...","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.11","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70518090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Canadian’s Reflections on the Oxford School","authors":"G. Bain","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.8","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘Oxford School of Industrial Relations’, centred at Nuffield College, was one major instance of academics entering the ‘corridors of power’ and attempting to resolve national problems of unofficial strikes, inflation, and restrictive practices, most notably via the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations (Donovan), 1965–68. For historians today, there are two reasons why this mattered. First, because, in effect, they had created a new social-science field of industrial relations. Oxford was not the only industrial relations centre, but during the 1950s and 1960s it was the strongest and most politically influential. Second, and more important at the time, the Oxford School addressed a central policy moment in the development of social-democratic ‘bargained corporatism’ and the role that trade unions might play in this. In many respects, the Oxford School were representative figures of the post-war progressive generation, dedicated to ‘reconstruction’. It had had a powerful impact ...","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70518564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conflict, mobilization, and deindustrialization: The 1980 Gardner strike and occupation","authors":"S. Mustchin","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.5","url":null,"abstract":"The diesel engine manufacturer L. Gardner and Sons saw two long strikes in 1968 and late 1972, after which a militant shop-steward leadership emerged. In 1980 a high-profile strike and occupation against mass redundancies at the height of the manufacturing recession won significant concessions. The organization exhibited by the Gardner workforce was remarkable and represented a partial victory in a period when strikes were declining and increasingly difficult to organize. However, a countermobilization by the company led to the erosion of the gains: established practices based on ‘mutuality’ (where working times and work organization were agreed between unions and management) were eroded, with managerial control reasserted through regular redundancies. The erosion of the concessions won by the 1980 strike and occupation demonstrates the fragility of gains achieved through trade-unionism. It also demonstrates the difficulty of maintaining strong workplace organization in the face of recession, deindustrialization and counter-mobilization by employers and the state in Britain in the 1980s.","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70518243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Oxford School at Donovan","authors":"W. Brown","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.9","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘Oxford School of Industrial Relations’, centred at Nuffield College, was one major instance of academics entering the ‘corridors of power’ and attempting to resolve national problems of unofficial strikes, inflation, and restrictive practices, most notably via the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations (Donovan), 1965–68. For historians today, there are two reasons why this mattered. First, because, in effect, they had created a new social-science field of industrial relations. Oxford was not the only industrial relations centre, but during the 1950s and 1960s it was the strongest and most politically influential. Second, and more important at the time, the Oxford School addressed a central policy moment in the development of social-democratic ‘bargained corporatism’ and the role that trade unions might play in this. In many respects, the Oxford School were representative figures of the post-war progressive generation, dedicated to ‘reconstruction’. It had had a powerful impact ...","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70518143","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Symposium: The Oxford School of industrial relations: Fifty years after the 1965–1968 Donovan Commission introduction: Who were the Oxford School and why did they matter?","authors":"P. Ackers","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2016.37.7","url":null,"abstract":"The ‘Oxford School of Industrial Relations’, centred at Nuffield College, was one major instance of academics entering the ‘corridors of power’ and attempting to resolve national problems of unofficial strikes, inflation, and restrictive practices, most notably via the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations (Donovan), 1965–68. For historians today, there are two reasons why this mattered. First, because, in effect, they had created a new social-science field of industrial relations. Oxford was not the only industrial relations centre, but during the 1950s and 1960s it was the strongest and most politically influential. Second, and more important at the time, the Oxford School addressed a central policy moment in the development of social-democratic ‘bargained corporatism’ and the role that trade unions might play in this. In many respects, the Oxford School were representative figures of the post-war progressive generation, dedicated to ‘reconstruction’. It had had a powerful impact on public policy because its pluralist underpinnings were consistent with the needs of social-democratic public policy, sympathetic to trade unions, and could be translated into practical, applied public-policy solutions","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70518512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Trade Disputes Bills of 1903: Sir Charles Dilke and Charles Percy Sanger","authors":"Paul M. Smith","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.6","url":null,"abstract":"No paper trail exists in The National Archives to cast light as to how the Trade Disputes Act (TDA) 1906 emerged in its final form. The succession of private members’ bills, many sponsored by the Trades Union Congress, and the Liberal government’s bill, and associated parliamentary debates, are very useful but the process of negotiation within Parliament that produced the finished statute is obscure. The reports of the Parliamentary Committee of the Trades Union Congress are a valuable source, but they are cryptic at times. The documents published here for the first time thus have an importance that belies their brevity in that they provide evidence of Sir Charles Dilke’s position in 1903 on the reform of trade-union law, which came to fruition with the TDA, his radicalism, and that Labour MPs were too modest in their ambitions.","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.6","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70517322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Striking Facts about the ‘Winter of Discontent’","authors":"Dave Lyddon","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.8","url":null,"abstract":"The recent books by John Shepherd and Tara Martin Lopez on the Winter of Discontent of 1978–79 provide an opportunity to examine the experience and tactics of several of its strikes and to challenge standard statistical views of its strike record. The main conclusion is to stress the continuity of the local authority and National Health Service disputes of 1979 with their antecedents from 1969 to 1973. Evidence is provided to show that previous instances of mountains of rubbish and unburied corpses did not attract much opprobrium (it is likely that earlier industrial action in the NHS was also generally tolerated). The sensationalization of events by politicians (of both hues) and by some of the media was contingent on a particular set of economic and political circumstances.","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.8","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70517971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In praise of collective bargaining : the enduring significance of Hugh Clegg's trade unionism under collective bargaining","authors":"K. Sisson","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.5","url":null,"abstract":"Hugh Clegg’s Trade Unionism under Collective Bargaining was published nearly forty years ago. It is far from being just a work of antiquarian interest, however. Its core argument, that the main influence on trade-union behaviour is the structure of collective bargaining, which depends on the role of employers and their organizations, remains as challenging as it ever was. Its approach, comparative and historical, is a watershed in the theoretical development of industrial relations, paving the way for an emphasis on theory ‘in’ rather than theory ‘of’. It also implicitly raises two questions of enduring significance. The first is the wider contribution of collective bargaining and what its decline means not just for trade-union members but also society as a whole. The other is the conditions necessary for the survival of collective bargaining. The policy implication is that, if society wants to have the benefits of collective bargaining, there will be a need for legislation to boost collective bargaining’...","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70517255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Public-Sector Strikes in the ‘Winter of Discontent’","authors":"R. Seifert","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.9","url":null,"abstract":"John Shepherd’s chapter on public-sector strikes provides a useful overview of what happened, giving due weight to the plight of both the low-paid manual workers and their trade-union leaders. However, he tends to ignore the sector-by-sector negotiations; he lacks understanding of the politics inside each union; and he ignores the vital role of left groupings (especially the Communist Party) in the strikes. He is over-reliant on accounts by political leaders, with the benefit of hindsight, and fails to appreciate the nature of struggle, in particular the difficulty of striking against the state.","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.9","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70518076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The neoliberal labyrinth","authors":"J. Eldridge","doi":"10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.10","url":null,"abstract":"The three books under review all deny that neoliberalism is dead and that it remains pervasive as a comprehensive world view and not just an economic doctrine. Its vitality, notwithstanding premature death-notices, is due its role as a political doctrine serving certain interests which sought to reform society by subordinating it to the market. Support for neoliberal values and policies crosses political boundaries. The role of the state is limited but important: a strong state to create and supervise the market. The response of neoliberals to crisis, some directly of their own making, is additional neoliberal measures. For employment, this entails more privatization, contracting out, anti-union legislation, and deregulation of the labour market (including health and safety, and employment protection). Each of the books reviewed is infused with a generous humanism and offer hopeful approaches to challenging, resisting and overcoming the hydra-headed monster that constitutes neoliberalism.","PeriodicalId":36746,"journal":{"name":"Historical Studies in Industrial Relations","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-08-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/HSIR.2015.36.10","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70517397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}