ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to offer a critically informed contribution to the complex debate about trust in the sphere of employment relations. It draws on the united kingdom context to discuss the ways in which employers, workers, trade unions, and state policy interact and what this may all mean for how trust might then be conceptualized. The state provides the regulatory framework within which employers, workers and their organizations interact, as well as being a major employer in its own right. The problem is that unitarism tends to 'oversimplify the intricate network of power-based relationships between employees, employers, unions, management and the state'. The pluralist perspective explains the inherently conflictual nature of the employment relationship while allowing for a discussion of how workers respond to their material conditions as waged labour, especially through the logic of collectivism. Both accounts afford little attention to the imbalance of power between the parties, and a Marxist perspective offers one way forward in this debate.
