The evolution of employers' organisations in the United Kingdom: Extending countervailing power

Abstract

The concept of countervailing power has been used to suggest that the power of unions explains the origins and development of employers' organisations (EOs). However, unions have declined since the 1970s, but EOs continue to play an important role in employment relations. If pressure from unions is not sufficient to explain continuing employer organisation, what does account for it? This article pursues this question by examining the evolution and activity of UK EOs between the 1960s and 2016. Our countervailing power argument goes beyond a sole focus on unions to include changing pressures and demands on EOs caused by the state such as individual rights legislation and campaigns by civil society organisations. The changing force exerted by these societal pressures helps to explain the shift of EOs' focus from collective bargaining, nowadays only pursued by a minority of EOs, to lobbying, provision of services, legal support, and training.

The decline of Employers’ Associations in the UK, 1976–2014

“…Our second data source is drawn from our project examining contemporary employer organisations in the UK (Gooberman et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2017d; Heery et al., 2017), of which 13% conduct collective bargaining. We carried out 98 interviews with collective employers’ organisations and linked bodies such as trade unions and governments.…”

“…The other dataset is our interviews with 98 representatives of collective employers’ organisations and linked bodies such as trade unions and governments. Interviews were conducted between 2013 and 2017 as part of a broader project on employers’ organisations in the UK (Gooberman et al., 2017a, 2017b, 2017c, 2017d), and interviewees often had detailed historical knowledge of the changing landscape of collective organisation.…”

Revisiting voluntarism: Private voluntary regulation by Employer Forums in the United Kingdom

“…The existence of this new form means that voluntarism in UK ER is not in secular decline as has been suggested (Dickens and Hall, 2003). Our research contributes to the literature on changing forms of employment regulation (Moran, 2010;Gooberman et al, 2019b), for whom we identify a new form of voluntarism that differs from collective bargaining, but which is generating a new corpus of employment rules within the UK's regulatory space. Our identification of this new form has utility when examining private voluntary regulation and its enabling actors in the UK.…”

Brexit and British Business Elites: Business Power and Noisy Politics

“…Our argument also relates to a broader transformation of collective action by business, including changes to employer associations, which have fewer members and increasingly engage with new issues and civil society organizations rather than traditional collective bargaining. 58 In 1975, the British economy was predominantly organized around British-owned firms. Although foreign direct investment (FDI) into the United Kingdom had been increasing slowly, it was mainly confined to car manufacturing with UK-based subsidiaries of Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler, dating in some cases from much earlier in the century.…”