Avoid UK labour law pitfalls

King’s College professor of law Keith Ewing drew parallels between Australia and the UK experience following the introduction of new union recognition laws by the Blair Government in his speech to the seminar.

He said that while the new laws had been intended to facilitate collective bargaining, the proportion of UK workers now covered by collective agreements stood at 33%, compared to 36% when Blair came to power at the end of the Thatcher years.

“The situation is stark in terms of what this system has failed to deliver,” he said.

Ewing pointed to three lessons from the UK experience that could be relevant to unions in Australia, depending on the shape of the new laws:

* Extending collective bargaining required “courage and commitment” from government to pass legislation that didn’t throw up impediments to union involvement and exclude large numbers of employers from the system, something the UK had lacked;

* Don’t underestimate the ability and willingness of employers to strongly contest legal procedures for collective bargaining – employers in the UK had done everything within their power to manipulate and contest the laws, he said, including setting up “in-house unions” and using every legal avenue to limit their operation; and

* Laws conferring bargaining rights on unions once they achieved majority support were not enough on their own – without mechanisms to assist unions to operate where they had lower levels support, they often struggled to reach the majority threshold.

A system where bargaining took place between employers and unions on an industry wide basis was a more certain path to significantly increasing the proportion of employees covered by collective agreements, he said.

Among countries with decentralised bargaining systems such as the US, UK and Canada there was no major economy with collective agreement coverage above 36%, compared to levels above 70% in countries such as Germany where bargaining took place on an industry-wide basis.

“The higher the level at which bargaining takes place, the higher the level of bargaining penetration,” he said.
From WorkPlace Express 11 november 2008