Content area
Full Text
The first of our two linked articles(1) on union autonomy, in the previous issue of Employee Relations, examined the wide-ranging and detailed regulations for the conduct of union internal affairs introduced in the UK by the Conservative Government since 1979 and compared their treatment of union autonomy with that of the state in seven other Western European countries, the USA, and the Conservative and Labour Governments in the UK prior to 1979(2). The incoming Conservative Government had turned, from 1983 on, to legal means to promote the ideal of union democracy, justifying this action particularly by asserting that British unions were led by unrepresentative minorities, who were not compelled by law to take account of individual members' interests and who had refused to take advantage of opportunities for voluntary reform. Other commentators (see, for example[1]) interpret their actions as an adoption of a "contestation" approach to unions, a desire to restrict union activities in the labour market and to a moral absolutism need to regulate union internal affairs.
The table in our first article on the state control of union internal affairs demonstrated a clear divergence between state approaches in the UK and Greece, on the one hand, and other western European countries on the other. While the USA and Ireland shared some features of the British approach, that in the USA was far less prescriptive and that in Ireland less comprehensive(3). Greece traditionally has a different pattern of anti-labour, authoritarian and pro-capitalist motivation and an industrial relations system enclosed in a comprehensive and complex legal framework. In contrast, the approach in a number of other western industrialized countries, corporatist or pluralist, has been to continue their traditions of relying on unions of regulate their internal affairs in a democratic fashion, believing unions to be both responsive to members' desires and to have respect for individual rights. The UK's traditional voluntary approach, and also its approach in the neo-corporatist 1970s, closely resembled that of our selected western European countries.
This second article considers state control of union activities in a wider context and examines two questions:
(1) Whether there is any "balancing" between state respect for/control of union internal affairs and state confidence that unions will follow prescribed rules for the conduct of collective bargaining...