7 - The State and Industrial Relations: Debates, Concerns and Contradictions in the Forging of Regulatory Change in the UK

Summary

Introduction

The role of the state in the UK has been the subject of extensive discussion within the industrial relations literature. All states, to some extent, have their idiosyncrasies; however, the historical fault lines and the progressive fragmentation of the state in the UK are curious characteristics, the consequences of which have become clearer in a context of increasing neoliberalism and labour market fragmentation. Yet, what is noticeable are the fundamental contradictions and tensions in the economic and social remits of the state – something that industrial relations scholars have studied and highlighted across a range of issues. As discussed later, much of the debate that engages with the changing nature of the state does not explicitly frame itself in terms of ‘the state’; however, it does form an interesting set of insights about the contradictory and ongoing interventionist nature of the state in the UK. The chapter will show how the debate on the state has been key to industrial relations in various ways, though not always in an explicit manner. Furthermore, different periods of debate within industrial relations have captured the changing character of the state, as explored later. More recently, there has been increasing attention paid to the way in which the state has remained a significant factor in the context of a greater emphasis on marketization and what is often labelled ‘neoliberalism’, albeit in a decentred and increasingly contradictory fashion. The contribution of industrial relations academics to the debate on the state is therefore more engaging than first meets the eye, partly because the discipline has always been concerned with addressing some of the more informal and discreet features of regulation.

The problem of the UK state: trust and industrial relations autonomy

Keeping the state out of the direct regulation of worker representation and collective action has been a mainstream characteristic of UK industrial relations – supported by organized labour and capital – since the early 20th century. Recent work by Dorey (2019) on the then Labour government's attempts to reform industrial conflict and worker representation in the 1960s shows us how strong the defence of an autonomous sphere of worker representation was in shaping the debate on the state's reach, even as intervention was increasing elsewhere in terms of welfare and health services.