IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nsr/niesrd/318.html

Competition and the retreat from collective bargaining

Author

Listed:
  • Alex Bryson
  • John Forth
  • William Brown

Abstract

For most of the twentieth century, collective bargaining provided the terms on which labour was commonly employed in Britain. However, the quarter century since 1980 has seen the collapse of collectivism as the main way of regulating employment. Our argument is that the tacit settlement between organized labour and employers was undermined by increasing product market competition. The paper first provides an overview of the changing map of collective bargaining, focusing on the private sector. It then moves on to ask why the retreat took place, and to explore the part played by product market competition and, in particular, by the profitability of different industries. The paper concludes with an analysis of the consequences of privatisation.

Suggested Citation

  • Alex Bryson & John Forth & William Brown, 2008. "Competition and the retreat from collective bargaining," National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) Discussion Papers 318, National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
    • Handle: RePEc:nsr:niesrd:318
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://niesr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/DP318.pdf?ver=01TBv3rMVvWOFPeMAbUL
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. John T. Addison & Alex Bryson & Paulino Teixeira & André Pahnke, 2011. "Slip Sliding Away: Further Union Decline In Germany And Britain," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 58(4), pages 490-518, September.
    2. John T. Addison & Alex Bryson & Paulino Teixeira & André Pahnke & Lutz Bellmann, 2013. "The Extent of Collective Bargaining and Workplace Representation: Transitions between States and their Determinants. A Comparative Analysis of Germany and Great Britain," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 60(2), pages 182-209, May.
    3. Crafts, Nicholas, "undated". "The Postwar British Productivity Failure," Economic Research Papers 269090, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    4. Nicholas Crafts, 2013. "Returning to Growth: Policy Lessons from History," Fiscal Studies, Institute for Fiscal Studies, vol. 34(2), pages 255-282, June.
    5. Crafts, Nicholas, 2012. "Creating Competitive Advantage: Policy Lessons from History," CAGE Online Working Paper Series 91, Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE).
    6. Dr Alex Bryson & John Forth, 2009. "Unions and Workplace Performance in Britain and France," National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) Discussion Papers 327, National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
    7. Crafts, Nicholas, 2012. "British relative economic decline revisited: The role of competition," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 49(1), pages 17-29.
    8. Bryson, Alex & Dale-Olsen, Harald & Nergaard, Kristine, 2016. "Gender Differences in the Union Wage Premium? A Comparative Case Study," IZA Discussion Papers 10435, IZA Network @ LISER.
    9. René Böheim & Martina Zweimüller, 2009. "The employment of temporary agency workers in the UK – with or against the trade unions?," Economics working papers 2009-12, Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.
    10. Robert A Hart, 2022. "Labour productivity during the Great Depression and the Great Recession in UK engineering and metal manufacture [The Productivity Puzzle: a Firm-level Investigation into Employment Behaviour and Resource Allocation over the Crisis]," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 74(2), pages 431-452.
    11. Crafts, Nicholas, 2011. "British Relative Economic Decline Revisited," CEPR Discussion Papers 8384, Centre for Economic Policy Research.
    12. John T. Addison & Alex Bryson & Paulino Teixeira & André Pahnke & Lutz Bellmann, 2013. "The Extent of Collective Bargaining and Workplace Representation: Transitions between States and their Determinants. A Comparative Analysis of Germany and Great Britain," Scottish Journal of Political Economy, Scottish Economic Society, vol. 60(2), pages 182-209, May.
    13. Crafts, Nicholas & O’Rourke, Kevin Hjortshøj, 2014. "Twentieth Century Growth*This research has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement no. 249546.," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 6, pages 263-346, Elsevier.
    14. Bell, David N.F. & Hart, Robert A., 2019. "The Decline of Overtime Working in Britain," IZA Discussion Papers 12651, IZA Network @ LISER.
    15. Devicienti, Francesco & Manello, Alessandro & Vannoni, Davide, 2017. "Technical efficiency, unions and decentralized labor contracts," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 260(3), pages 1129-1141.
    16. Alex Bryson & John Forth & Patrice Laroche, 2009. "Unions and Workplace Performance in Britain and France," CEP Discussion Papers dp0920, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    17. Alex Bryson & John Forth, 2010. "Trade Union Membership and Influence 1999-2009," CEP Discussion Papers dp1003, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    18. Linda Clarke & Ian Fitzgerald, 2020. "The changing nature of labour regulation: the distinctiveness of the National Agreement for the Engineering Construction Industry," Industrial Relations Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(1-2), pages 58-74, March.
    19. Brown, William & Marsden, David, 2010. "Individualisation and growing diversity of employment relationships," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 121713, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    20. Erling Barth & Karl O. Moene, 2009. "The Equality Multiplier," NBER Working Papers 15076, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    21. David N. F. Bell & Robert A. Hart, 2023. "The decline of paid overtime working in Britain," British Journal of Industrial Relations, London School of Economics, vol. 61(2), pages 235-258, June.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D40 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - General
    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General
    • J50 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor-Management Relations, Trade Unions, and Collective Bargaining - - - General
    • L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Comparison of Public and Private Enterprise and Nonprofit Institutions; Privatization; Contracting Out

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nsr:niesrd:318. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Library & Information Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/niesruk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.