Trade Unions
Robinson started his career at a time when trade union power in Britain was significant and increasing. Immediately after the Second World War, trade union density (the percentage of the workforce unionised) stood at about 44%.
From the late 1960s, it started to increase and reached its peak in 1979 when 55% of employees were union members. In the same year, about three- quarters of workers were covered by collective agreements. There were two reasons why the coverage figure was so much higher than membership. The first was that in many workplaces, individuals who chose not to join a union were nevertheless beneficiaries of the wages negotiated by the recognised union. The second was that workers in the public sector, large swathes of manufacturing and in parts of private services were covered by national agreements, which in the case of the private sector were multi-employer. As a consequence, an employee in a non-union firm, which at least complied with the rates set by the relevant national agreement, was covered by that agreement.It was against this backdrop that Robinson believed that wages and wage structures were capable, to an extent, of being “administered”. Notions of fairness and the exercise of bargaining power could play a fundamental role. Many years later, Atkinson (1999) wrote about pay norm models based on social codes, examples of which are solidaristic wage bargaining in Sweden and sectoral collective bargaining in the Netherlands, which effectively limited the dispersion of pay. This belief that there was room for social choice in constructing wage structures motivated much of Robinson’s work. It underlay the many commissions he undertook for the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the findings of some of which were published, including his report on civil service pay in Africa and his comparison of occupational pay structures in Singapore and elsewhere.
His belief in unionism was firmly based in the liberal-pluralist tradition. This was at the heart of the report of the Donovan Commission published in 1968. To give Donovan its full title, it was the Royal Commission on Trade Unions and Employers’ Associations (1968), set up by the government to investigate the problems of industrial relations and what could be done to mitigate them. This was in response to concerns about the UK’s relatively slow growth rates and attempts to diagnose the reasons why. Prominent among these reasons was the view that the industrial relations system was functioning inefficiently. The Donovan Report’s stated operating assumptions were that workers had a right to a say in decisions affecting their everyday working lives and that an efficient collective bargaining system was the most appropriate
way of ensuring this. Remarkably to modern eyes, these were relatively uncon- tentious assumptions to most of the political establishment of the day. This version of pluralism emphasised that there was an irreducible minimum of issues where there was bound to be a fundamental conflict of interest between worker and employer. It would be pointless and indeed illiberal to pretend otherwise. The aim should be to mediate such conflicts of interest as efficiently and costlessly as possible. The Commission recognised that reform was needed and believed that this could be achieved voluntarily. It saw the underlying problem as a structural one. UK industrial relations had developed into a dual system. As we have seen, in most of private manufacturing and in some private services as well as in the public sector there was an infrastructure of national bargaining. In the private sector, this bargaining was multi-employer. For example, in engineering, the Engineering Employers’ Federation negotiated with an amalgam of the relevant unions to agree basic rates of pay for a variety of grades as well as some other minimum terms and conditions. It was then open to individual employers to offer more, whether as a result of local bargaining or by fiat.
The 1950s and 1960s saw a massive growth of this company or even establishment wage bargaining. Accompanying this was an increase in the number of shop stewards—ordinary workers at the establishment who took on trade union duties. Increasingly, it was at the establishment that wages were determined. The problem was that all of the rules and procedures that helped bargaining work remained at the national level and so there was the potential for chaos. In the relatively tight labour markets of the 1960s, shop stewards used their bargaining power to pursue their wage demands. There was a rising trend of strike activity and most of these strikes were unofficial, that is, not sanctioned by the national union leaders.Donovan’s voluntaristic solution was essentially to bureaucratise the shop steward movement in an approach that became dubbed “giving up control to regain control”. Giving up control meant relinquishing managerial prerogative over a whole range of issues. By giving shop stewards full information about finance, production and marketing and about future plans and by, to an extent, making all of these things part of the bargaining process, they could make bargaining more of a non-zero-sum game. The vast majority of shop stewards, Donovan believed, were reasonable individuals who could be made to see that the interests of their members more often coincided with those of management than not.
Robinson firmly believed in the essence of this approach and that wage determination should be achieved, as far as possible, through collective bargaining. In part, it was this desire to make collective bargaining work that led him to become one of Barbara Castle’s advisers when she became Secretary of State for Employment in the Harold Wilson Labour government of the late 1960s. Robinson was influential in the production of the famous, some would and did say infamous, White Paper entitled In Place of Strife (1969). However, as a result of Cabinet infighting and sustained union opposition, it never found its way on to the statute books.
It was in many respects a more radical and coherent intervention than Edward Heath's Industrial Relations Act of 1971 that rapidly entered the demonology of the union movement. Strong though his belief in liberal pluralism and in voluntarism was, Robinson belonged to a group within Labour circles who believed that on their own these elements might not be enough. Something was needed to control the militant extremists amongst the shop stewards and in some union head offices. This was what In Place of Strife was intended to do. It proposed that the Secretary of State could order an employer to recognise a union or unions for bargaining purposes and that there should be a cooling-off period and/or a ballot of members before a strike could be called. An Industrial Board was proposed, which would have judicial power to impose penalties on any organisation or anyone failing to comply with such orders.Union opposition to both In Place of Strife and Heath's subsequent legislation was in large part motivated by concern that the customary legal foundations of unionism were being threatened. Since the early years of the twentieth century, the UK had been unusual among developed countries in having what Otto Kahn-Freund (1972) called an abstentionist tradition. Rather than having their rights and obligations defined by statute, British unions gained their abilities to function through the operation of tort law. A tort is a civil wrong. Trade unions essentially had immunity from actions in tort taken by another party when they were engaged in or in contemplation of a trade dispute. Many union activists, as well as senior figures in the Labour government, resented the intrusion of the law, since they saw it as threatening this absten- tionist tradition.
This episode seems to place Robinson very much on the right wing of the Labour Party. His involvement in government department discussions about the introduction of a national minimum wage and about tackling gender pay gaps would, in the late 1960s, have appeared to put him closer to the union movement.
This was not in fact the case, at least as far as the national minimum wage was concerned. When, in early 1968, its possibility was discussed with the TUC, Castle's Department was met with indifference and, in some cases, outright opposition. There were two strands to this opposition. The first was very much linked to the reaction to In Place of Strife:. This was an anxiety to keep the law out of industrial relations and to preserve “free collective bargaining”. The second related to wage differentials between different groups of workers. Differentials between the skilled and less skilled had remained remarkably stable for the first forty years of the twentieth century, but they narrowed noticeably during the Second World War. Subsequently, through the 1950s and 1960s, these differentials widened and those unions representing more skilled workers were worried that a national minimum wage might compress differentials again. Meanwhile, policy makers speculated that in order to avoid this compression, skilled workers would simply obtain compensating increases. If this indeed happened, then a national minimum wage award designed to improve the relative pay position of the low paid would have no such effect. This possibility alarmed many in official circles because, it was calculated, knock-on effects such as these would triple or even quadruple the impact on the national wage bill. Against such opposition, legislation to promote a national minimum wage did not see the light of day and it was only thirty years later that the UK saw its introduction.Interestingly, it would appear that officialdom exhibited very little concern about possible impacts on employment. This was in stark contrast to the prevailing orthodoxy among academic economists. For them, monopsony was a rare occurrence. They had been brought up on textbooks that defined it in ways such as “a single employer in a remote geographical area”. Unsurprisingly, therefore, they tended to underplay its significance.
It was a number of years later that more sophisticated ideas about monopsony emerged from authors such as Card and Krueger (1997). Evidently, however, Robinson was fairly relaxed about negative employment effects. Undoubtedly, this was because of his research on local labour markets. As we have seen, this made it clear to him that worker supply response was often limited. It was inelastic labour supply curves which subsequently formed the basis of more nuanced developments of monopsony theory from the likes of Card and Krueger, which in turn made the mainstream of the profession more relaxed about potential adverse employment effects of minimum wage legislation.Whilst Castle's minimum wage plans came to naught, another important pay intervention came into law shortly before the Labour government left office in 1970. This was the Equal Pay Act. Coming fully into force in 1975, the Act declared that an employer was obliged to ensure that:
(a) for men and women employed on like work, the terms and conditions of one sex are not in any respect less favourable than those of the other; and
(b) for men and women employed on work rated as equivalent, the terms and conditions of one sex are not less favourable than those of the other in any respect in which the terms and conditions of both are determined by the rating of their work.
Of necessity, these requirements applied to individual employers. Robinson (1998a) realised that women were often concentrated by firm or occupation and that the Equal Pay Act could do little for them.
4