ABSTRACT
UK employers are characterised by a number of special features. These British peculiarities provide some explanation for the public positions adopted by UK employer representatives on European social policy and economic issues, which have often been at variance with the-publicpositions of employers’ organisations from other leading EU member states, and have been heavily tinted by prevailing British Euro-scepticism. At the same time, the policy stance adopted by the Conservative government since 1979 also certainly made it easier for the national employers’ organisation, the CBI, to be less embarrassed by its advocacy of deregulation and voluntarism within European institutions than some other national employer representative bodies, adding to the impression of a distinctively British employer position. These special features include the following:
1 Compared with other EU countries, British companies-if not plantsare relatively large. This is partly a product of British ‘exceptionalism’ (early globalisation, especially in primary industries) and partly the end-result of a long series of mergers and formation of conglomerates (which began to be accompanied by and give ground to a phase of demergers in the early and mid-1990s). In comparison with Germany, the British Mittelstand remains very underdeveloped. The size of British companies was one factor in their reluctance to subject their own personnel and bargaining approaches-in many cases fashioned in the 1930s as companies expanded-to the disciplines of an employers’ organisation: many large British companies have never been members of an industry association, or only on the basis that they did not comply with its collective agreements.
