ABSTRACT
‘In a generation,’ as Barbash (1984: 14) has observed, ‘the state has advanced from the periphery to the centre of the economy’ with industrial relations being ‘profoundly affected by the pervasiveness of its presence’. Despite considerable problems in identifying the personnel, locating its various segments and reaching an acceptable definition, the state is indisputably the ‘third force’ in the industrial relations system. Even in laissez-faire political economies of the nineteenth century, there was some legal regulation of hours and conditions of work and the behaviour of trade unions. But subsequently, with governments assuming overall responsibility for the economy and links being forged between specific political parties and either employers or labour, the activities of the state have appreciably expanded. Socialism and corporatism (the two most powerful political movements of the twentieth century) have amplified this influence. And more latterly, its global ubiquity has been ensured by a ‘late-development’ effect which has the consequence that, in the ‘new’ nations of the Third World, the overall impact of the state is on a far greater scale than at the dawn of industrialism in the west.
