Labour Relations Problems for Managers

Abstract

Those people who have managerial responsibilities for industrial relations at plant and industry level in Britain today probably have more constraints upon their decision‐making than at any other period in the history of western industrial society. There was a time when, in many firms, it was possible for managements to negotiate changes in the terms and conditions of employment of their employees with full‐time trade union officials without looking over their shoulders to find out what the government of the day would allow or to find out whether what the full‐time trade union official was accepting was, in fact, acceptable to the members he represented. In those far off days there was a reasonable chance that agreements made as a result of free collective bargaining would be kept. How unsophisticated that all seems now. How much more complicated is the pattern of industrial relationships in 1973.

Citation

(1973), "Labour Relations Problems for Managers", Personnel Review, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 61-64. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055241