April 2011 Newsletter

BUIRA NEWS
BUIRA Executive
At the conference in July, the AGM of BUIRA will be electing a number of new executive members. If you are interested in standing for election, you may find Melanies personal view of being on the executive of interest. Details of the nomination procedures will be available in a pre-briefing. Being on the BUIRA Executive a personal view Being elected to the BURIA Executive Committee in 2005 was a surreal experience. I was elected in my absence and, to my shame, had never attended an AGM. Despite that, I knew I was committed to BUIRA and valued the annual conference and the contribution of colleagues to my work and ideas. The six years since then (two full terms of office) have been a remarkable experience and I have been privileged to see BUIRA develop an increased confidence to defend and promote the subject. My first few meetings were spent getting up to speed with how the Association runs itself (on a shoestring and with the good will of excellent administrative support from host institutions) and how decisions are made (after appropriate - and sometimes heated - debate and discussion). It quickly became clear that the workload was manageable and that it was often delightful to have an opportunity to catch up with friends and colleagues 4 times a year. The major business reviewing abstracts for the conference was generally dealt with quickly and effectively. But in 2008, Keele University threatened 10 of the 12 staff in the industrial relations department with redundancy and BUIRA Executive decided to organise resistance against what we saw as a deliberate attack on the subject. This was a defining moment for BUIRA. There were lengthy debates about the appropriate role for the Association and how we could involve members in the decision making and subsequent action. We are clear that we are not a trade union. But when the subject is under attack, the learned society must say something - and we did, loudly. Since then, we have organised a conference and published a booklet re-stating the case for industrial relations as a discipline. We continue to debate the direction of research and teaching in the area. And we are just as keen to promote industrial relations for the future.

I have a strong sense that I am leaving my term of office with BUIRA in a stronger position than when I joined. I encourage all members to get more involved its not onerous. Its your association and you get a say in how its run. If youre not sure, drop me a line and Im happy to convince you. Melanie Simms Melanie.Simms@wbs.ac.uk

BUIRA SEMINARS
BUIRA International & Comparative Employment Relations Study Group Seminar:
Internationalisation of Labour Markets, Migration and Trade Union Responses Date: Time: Wednesday, 11 May 2011 1.30 to 4.00 pm

Venue: Keele Management School Training Suite, Darwin Building, Keele University, ST5 5BG o Ian Greer (Leeds University) - "Organizing workers in a single European market: Leading cases from the automotive and construction sectors." Rachel Annand (Keele University) - "Who cares about the Posted Workers Directive?"

o o For further details or to indicate that you would like to attend, please contact Carola Weissmeyer (01782 733603) or email c.weissmeyer@hrm.keele.ac.uk

BUIRA Public Sector Study Group meeting at 2011 BUIRA Conference,

University of Greenwich Saturday 9th July, afternoon (after final conference lunch). All BUIRA members welcome. Comparative Reform and Resistance in the Public Sector Speaker: Heather Wakefield (National Secretary: local government. police and justice section, UNISON): Resisting the UK Coalition Government's austerity programme. Further speakers to be confirmed. The international financial crisis, bank and currency bail-outs from 2008 have exerted huge pressures on state finances, leading many countries to propose or accelerate plans to restructure their public sectors and welfare regimes. In some places (such as Ireland and the Baltic states) these are already having profound consequences for public employees and their collective organisations, and there is every reason to suppose such trends will become more widespread. Some repeated themes emerge from the actions being taken in different countries, including cuts in public sector employment and/or pay and pensions, reform of pay and bargaining systems, and a growing unilateralism by governments in driving short- and long-term changes. Some countries have been less affected than others, and the extent and patterns of worker resistance have also been highly variable. Yet, even high profile cases of resistance, such as Greece and France, seem to have been

largely unsuccessful in preventing the implementation of austerity programmes and cutbacks to date. This session intends to address questions such as: - What accounts for the specific restructuring initiatives being pursued in particular countries, and what will be their effects on employment and pay systems, equalities, or worker representation? - Where does the trend towards state-imposed reform leave those countries characterised hitherto by social concertation and dialogue? - What has been the role of trade unions in mobilising opposition, and why have campaigns met with little success to date?

OTHER SEMINARS
Industrial Relations Research Unit, Warwick Business School, University of Warwick Seminar Series
Seminars are held on Wednesdays, 2.00 to 3.30pm with refreshments to follow TERM 3 2010/11: 11th May Bill Roche, University College Dublin Human Resources in the Recession: Managing and Representing People at Work in Ireland S2.81, Social Sciences building Michel Goyer, IRRU/IROB, Warwick Business School Contingent Capital: Complex Causation and Institutional Hierarchy S2.81, Social Sciences building Antonina Gentile, IRRU Visiting Fellow Labor repertoires, neo-liberal regimes, and US hegemony: What ''deviant Italy and hybrid southern Europe can tell us about normal OECD unions paths to power S2.81, Social Sciences building

1st June

8th June

Please contact Melanie Simms Melanie.Simms@wbs.ac.uk or Val Jephcott, IRRU Val.Jephcott@wbs.ac.uk, (024 7652 4268) for further details.

RESEARCH NEWS
Acas Research Partners In the BUIRA Newsletter in October 2010, Acas invited applications from academics wishing to undertake research under the Acas employment relations research partnerships programme.

A large number of high quality responses were received and we would like to thank all those who expressed an interest in working with us. The successful applications were as follows: Social Networking and Employment Relations: a literature review and case studies on good practice being undertaken by Andrea Broughton and Annette Cox from the Institute of Employment Studies. Conflict management: examples in the private sector: Dr Richard Saundry from UCLAN is undertaking a case study in a company in the North West on strategies for conflict handling. This is a companion study to an earlier project exploring the use of mediation in a PCT (see Saundry et al, 2011, www.acas.org.uk/research) Employment Relations and the Supply Chain: Dr David Holman from Manchester Business School is leading a team researching the use of the supply chain to improve employment relations. Two case studies will explore the issue, one from a client organisation perspective, the other starting from the perspective of the contractor. The TUC has contributed to this research. It will feed into a wider project being undertaken on unions and the supply chain, under the leadership of Dr Chris Wright. The experience of multiple discrimination at work: two parallel studies exploring multiple discrimination. Dr Maria Hudson from PSI is researching the experience of Employment Tribunal claimants; and Dr Sian Moore is leading a team from London Metropolitan University exploring the issue from the perspective of Equality Reps. The TUC has contributed to this research. The experiences of envoys in the face-to-face delivery of downsizing decisions: Dr Ian Ashman from UCLAN is researching the impact of redundancy and change processes on those with responsibility for imparting redundancy information to employees.

All research projects are scheduled for completion before the summer 2011 and research reports will be published on the Acas website. In July we will announce a further round of applications. Gill Dix and Fiona Neathey Head of Research and Evaluation (Joint), Acas For further information contact us on gdix@acas.org.uk or fneathey@acas.org.uk

PUBLICATIONS AND REVIEWS

WARWICK PAPERS IN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS New paper in this series: No 95 Understanding the Crisis: Can we move from Austerity to Prosperity? Brendan Barber, April 2011

available to download at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wbs/research/irru/wpir

The challenges of globalization: Tim Sandle Book review: Globalization And Precarious Forms Of Production And Employment: Challenges for Workers and Unions. Edited by Carole Thornley, Steve Jefferys and Beatrice Appay. Published by Edward Elgar, 2010. There have been many books in recent years on globalization: how increasing global interconnectedness locks the developing word into a more rigid relationship of dependency with the West or how the greed of bankers, in re-packaging debt, triggered the economic recession of 2008. Where there has been little published critical inquiry is with the direct changes to the form of work, in shifting away from full-time stable employment to part-time work made increasingly precarious for workers by being subject to flexible employment practices, minimal rights and diminished security. Precarious work is coupled with the very real threat of unemployment, as the introduction to the book makes clear: the financial collapse of 2008 alone led to 20 million job losses worldwide. This analysis alone would make Globalization And Precarious Forms Of Production And Employment a timely book to help navigate through the various employment strategies of employers and governments. Where the book, written by three leading academics of industrial relations and the economy of work, adds additional insight is in analysing the implications of changes to work for workers and their trade unions. This is somewhat in keeping with the tradition of Marx for those engaged in critical social science should not simply describe the world, for there is also a responsibility to provide a pathway for how the world can be changed. Here the thoughts centre on how unions can engage in a power struggle: trying to shift the balance back towards workers and to create a society where economic outcomes are more equitable. The book consists of a fifteen chapters by international authors. Some of the chapters analyse what has changed with the world of work, charting the decline of mass production, the norms of collective bargaining and full employment (the relative stability of the 1950s and 1960s) to the era of flexible labour markets and secondary employment. Other chapters describe what is actually going on in workplaces like Wal-Mart, the car industry, rail and the public sector where the rapid changes to employment, as experienced by workers based in different countries, are drawn out. By adopting a global perspective the book is able to provide a useful insight into the trajectory that capitalism is taking, in both mature states and to the less developed regions of the world and the fallacy of the neo-liberal economic arguments of most political parties over the past twenty years. Most interestingly, the most vulnerable group of workers are women not least because they are over-represented in jobs most vulnerable to economic globalization, with those who work part-time or on a temporary basis most vulnerable of all. The most pressing lesson drawn, for me, is the need for unions to adapt to what is going on and to consider how workers in the most precarious forms of employment can be represented. The answer would seem to start with forming strong global connections with other unions and restructuring union organization to math the adaptation of capital. To weight up these complex questions and to help to understand the new economy, this book provides an invaluable starting point.

Film Review: Made In Dagenham Tim Sandle Made In Dagenham, directed by Nigel Cole, had a significant success at the cinema when it was released in October 2010, has been released on DVD (April 2011). The film will be of interest to members of BUIRA, not only an enjoyable, if somewhat stylised, period piece but probably more so for the political, economic and cultural impact of the events surrounding the film. The film concerns a strike by female machinists at the Ford factory in Dagenham in 19681. The trigger for the action was a re-grading of occupations following a job evaluation exercise. The women machinists were incensed not because Ford valued what they did so poorly but because it upset previously established pay differentials between the role of the machinists (downgraded to Grade B) and other workers within whom that had previously had parity (Grade C). In the film the strike is led by Rita OGrady (played by Sally Hawkins who shone as the lead in Mike Leighs Happy Go Lucky). Although the evolution of the character of OGrady from shy machinist to passionate strike leader appears happen, incredulously, almost overnight, Hawkins performance is believable and the issues of the strike are clearly articulated. The character of OGrady is an invention of the film, in reality several different women were involved in leading the dispute. The film makes a number of interesting social observations, particularly concerning the sexist attitudes towards the women by the Ford bosses and many in the trade union movement; and about the interaction between the women and their families in an era where the man was invariably seen as the breadwinner. The predominance of patriarchical attitudes in most of the families portrayed is representative of the late 1960s, notwithstanding that the fiery nature of many of the working class women offers some redress and indicates that some of the social and cultural norms were slowly changing. What is most telling is the role of women in the middle classes with the repression of the wife of one of the Ford bosses (played by Rosamund Pike), a woman clearly more intelligent and socially aware than her husband, but trapped within middle class social convention. As a film the story is entertaining and the actors perform well, particularly an understated Bob Hoskins as the shop steward of the National Union of Vehicle Builders. There are a number of inaccuracies, some more important than others, put in place to allow the pace of the narrative to flow and for dramatic effect. The women, for example, were not as young as the main protagonists on screen2; the strike lasted for around three weeks3 whereas the film suggests that the time out was for far longer; Barbara Castle, nicely portrayed by Miranda Richardson, played a key role in settling the dispute over tea with the strikers (not sherry or whiskey). However, the dispute was not deftly resolved in one afternoon as the film suggests, although a settlement was reached. The dispute also led to a Court of Inquiry chaired by Sir Jack Scamp being formed, which sat after the women had returned to work. The court did not find in the women's favour4.

The actual strike began on 7th June 1968 (and it lasted until the 28th of that month), although the date is not mentioned in the film. 2 Greer, G. ' We do not hear of women rocking the corporate boat now', The Guardian, 2nd October 2010. 3 Benyon, H. 'Working for Ford', 1973, London: Allen Lane, p168 4 Report of a Court of Inquiry under Sir Jack Scamp into a dispute concerning sewing machinists employed by the Ford Motor Company Ltd. Author: Jack Scamp, published by HMSO, 1968.

Politically the film was a prelude to the establishment of the Equal Pay Act of 1970. The aim of the Act was that men and women should be paid the same wage for similar work. This was something more straightforward where men and women did the same work but less clear where clustering occurs whereby some jobs are performed predominantly by women and others by men. Indeed there are many situations today whereby men and women undertaking similar roles are paid very differently, invariably with men being paid more. At Ford the machinists, who received 85% of the unskilled wage of men prior to the strike, won an increase to 92% of the wage earned by unskilled men5. Although the strikers gained an increase in pay it was still short of the male earnings. It took another two years of the women to receive the same wage. Whilst the film rightly triumphs the formation of the Equal Pay Act and the step in the right direction towards gender equality (notwithstanding that women in 2010 still earn around 20% less than men), to me the film glosses over the issue of social class. At Ford the women machinists were categorised as unskilled labour and their issue was that they were paid less than men in other occupations classified as unskilled. Whereas the key issue was, in fact, that few, if any, of the jobs undertaken by unskilled men and women were actually unskilled. The overriding issue was in fact one of social class and the division of labour at work which carves up workers and creates artificial differences between them. Nevertheless for raising the issue of gender pay equality, coupled with some fine performances and a strong script, Made In Dagenham is a film which should be watched and enjoyed by those active in the labour movement. It serves to remind us of our radical roots and of how far there is still to go.

Hyman, R. 'Industrial Conflict and the Political Economy: Trends of the Sixties and Prospects for the Seventies', Socialist Register, Vo. 10., p138. It should be noted that some reminiscences of workers involved in the dispute put the pay of the machinists at 87% at that of the male workers. See, for example, Boland, R. 'Ford machinists strike, 1968: an inspiring demand for womens rights', Socialist Worker, Issue 2,104. 7th June 2008