Explaining British voluntarism

Abstract

This article deals with one of the most distinctive features of the British system of industrial relations – its voluntarist nature – and focuses on internal divisions within the labor union movement as an explanation for its persistence. It is widely recognized that the British labor union movement was throughout the twentieth century far more reluctant to accept government interference with wage bargaining than its counterparts in most other countries. Yet much of the literature has ignored the crucial importance for this of labor union attitudes towards the redistributive consequences of such intervention. This article shows that much of the resistance of British unions to government interference with wage bargaining can be explained by their opposition to its redistributive consequences. Based on an analysis of several decades of wage bargaining, the article advances another way of looking at the failure of British policy-makers to create durable incomes policies aimed at achieving wage restraint in the post-war period and the long-standing opposition of the British union movement to the introduction of a statutory national minimum wage.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.