ABSTRACT
Recognition of trade unions by employers is vital for union membership in decentralized industrial relations systems such as in the UK. The introduction of the statutory recognition procedure in the Employment Relations Act 1999 (ERA) both provides trade unions with a legal route for achieving recognition and transforms any negotiations about recognition that they may have with employers, since both sides know that the union can resort to the legal machinery. It is thus possible that a statutory procedure can stimulate recognition agreements if employers become more willing to sign agreements, knowing the alternative is union recognition imposed by the state. While it was not an explicit objective of the Labour Government to promote recognition, as it was keen to appear not to be prejudging the value of trade unions, it was concerned to design a procedure that would encourage the voluntary settlement of disputes over recognition without recourse to the legal procedure. Any evaluation of the ERA procedure must examine whether the procedure is working in this way. This chapter thus analyses how the recognition procedure has operated in its first two years in order to assess whether it can provide a right to union recognition that facilitates voluntary recognition with the result that the statutory procedure is de facto used as a last resort.
