ABSTRACT
Employment relations in the United Kingdom 2 underwent a dramatic transformation starting in the last quarter of the twentieth century and continuing into the fi rst decade of the present century (see Table 10.1 ). The structure of the economy shifted away from manufacturing and towards services, both private and public, and the large manufacturing plants of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to far smaller plants. A growing number of companies were increasingly exposed to international product market competition while the labour market operated at historically high levels of unemployment. Many fi rms outsourced basic organizational functions such as catering, cleaning, security and IT services to other companies, either in Britain or increasingly overseas (a phenomenon described as ‘offshoring’). Collective bargaining covered almost three-quarters of the workforce in 1979 and was then the dominant method of pay determination. By 2010, the position was transformed: unilateral regulation of pay by the employer had become the norm and collective agreements covered only a minority of the workforce. Between 1979 and 2010, the level of trade union density was halved and by the early 2000s the number of days lost to strikes was a small fraction (less than 10 per cent) of the average 1970s fi gure. In other words the power resources of workers had substantially declined and so had their capacity to infl uence terms and conditions of employment through negotiations, and collective action was severely diminished.
