Although industrial disputes did not quite dominate the last two years of Conservative government, they did provide a consistent background noise. With the UK Government uninterested in changing the wider nature of industrial relations in the UK and unable to reliably resolve public sector disputes, instead seeking to legislate its way out of difficulty. How much this callow approach to industrial relations contributed to electoral defeat is debatable, though it seems reasonable to assume they contributed to a general sense of ‘nothing works’. The question now is what will a Labour government do differently?
After making a show of meeting with trade union leaders soon after entering office, Labour was quick to start the process of settling ongoing disputes with doctors and train drivers and award the higher-than-expected recommendations of the pay review bodies. This was politically easy/necessary for an incoming government to do. When Labour entered power in 1974, they quickly settled the miners’ pay claim and when the Conservatives entered power in 1979 soon after a mass strike in the public sector in the winter of 1978-79, they expediently implemented the 1979 Clegg Commission’s recommendations for public sector pay. Sometimes political decisions are made for governments by events, and it is too early to say how much the attempt to settle these pay claims reveals about Labour’s approach to disputes in the public sector. What will be more revealing is how Labour approaches the question of ‘reform’ across the public sector, whether that is with GPs, who are currently in dispute with the government, or with education and transport.
This is not to say that both parties are the same- it really does matter who is in power -and there will obviously be some change. Labour, unlike the previous government, is not a party ideologically opposed to working with trade unions, as even Labour MPs from the most anti-union parts of the party are part of a political culture that organised labour is, even now, integral to. Indeed, a Conservative Government would never propose the creation of a National Care Service built on sectoral collective bargaining. However, one only needs to look at the long-running dispute that GMB have with G4S over pay for job centre security guards – which falls under the purview of the Department for Work and Pensions – to see that, quite often, the administering of state functions dictates how the government will act in dispute, regardless of party.
However, there are evident tangible differences in Labour’s proposed legislative approach to industrial relations. Labour has already instructed ministers not to use the minimum service legislation before it is formally repealed, and some variant of the New Deal for Working People will enter into legislation. However, the effect that these changes will have on industrial relations is not clear. It is simplistic to say that these changes will make it easier to strike; in one sense they will, as removing the thresholds of the 2016 Act will remove the legal obstacles in balloting, but passing a ballot is not the same as building mass enthusiasm for strike action. For instance, even though the Royal College of Nurses secured several successful disaggregated ballots in 2022, there was still limited institutional and member enthusiasm for all hospitals to strike at once. Strikes can of course build their own momentum, and the presence of the 2016 thresholds has definitely prevented any chance of this happening with action from National Joint Council workers, after Unite and UNISON rejected this year’s pay offer. However, the real test of Labour’s legislation will not be whether it makes it easier to strike, which can often be a blunt tool, but whether it meaningfully increases union density and influence across the economy.
Thus, the more interesting part of Labour’s role in industrial relations will not be its role in public sector disputes, which largely come down to standard employee vs employer issues, only in this instance the employer has a side-hustle of being the state. Instead, it will be how the Government’s actions affect other areas of the economy and work. These include the Green Energy sector, that Labour will be hoping to shepherd with Great British Energy, but also areas such as oil and steel, or Royal Mail, which currently face existential crisis and where government policy has a direct impact in terms of licenses, subsidies, and service obligations respectively. They also include the parts of the private sector that are used by large sections of the public but do not have liminality with the public sphere, and tend to be trans-national, such as Amazon. It should be noted that none of Labour’s proposed legislative changes would have been particularly helpful in directly changing the result of the Amazon ballot in Coventry.
Essentially, beyond early indicators we still know very little about what this Labour Government will mean for industrial relations in practice. While direct relations between trade unions and politicians in the immediate future will, predictably, be characterised by a lot of give and take (it is telling that Number 10 have appointed a Director of Trade Union Relations) the impact on the tone and balance of power of the processes of production is unknown.
Every period of Labour governance has at least managed to finesse the processes to which workers are subjugated and tangibly improve their lives to this day. The New Labour governments implemented, amongst other things, protections against dismissal for striking workers, a clunky statutory recognition process, and a raft of useful individual employment protections and rights. However, these did not equip organised Labour with the tools necessary to confront a growing gig economy and artificially flexible labour market. The Wilson governments imparted the 1970 Equal Pay Act (now folded into the 2010 Equality Act and a useful tool for pay claims), the first Health and Safety at Work Act, and ACAS, but its wider cooperative and corporatist approach to industrial relations did not survive the advent of 18 years of Conservative government. The only time Labour can claim to have fundamentally changed the nature of industrial relations for beyond its time in office is the Attlee governments (as shown by subsequent Conservative governments leaving industrial relations largely untouched), and even then, this was dependent on a war rapidly expanding the role of the state and wider economic conditions balancing out labour’s power against capital.
Ultimately, the current Labour government will judge its approach to industrial relations to be a success if there are fewer disputes, productivity/growth increases, more secure workers, and if voters reward them for this. Trade Unions will judge it to be a success if the above happens and union density and collective bargaining coverage increase with permanence. Despite positive noises and early pay-settlements, it is still far too early to accurately judge whether or not this will happen.