Can Management Cope with the Non‐Union Firm?

Abstract

The issue of the non‐union firm has come to the fore in Britain principally because it has been seen as an exempler of one strand of the “New Industrial Relations” (Beardwell 1992). The decline in formal union membership and the reduction in the “coverage effect” of collective bargaining in the UK economy have been seen as significant indicators of a change in the established pattern of British industrial relations: the 1990 WIRS data (WIRS 1992) suggests that we might be seeing the emergence of “three systems” of industrial relations based upon a unionised private sector, a unionised public sector and a non‐unionised private sector — each representing about a third of the UK workforce.

Citation

Beardwell, I.J. (1993), "Can Management Cope with the Non‐Union Firm?", Management Research News, Vol. 16 No. 5/6, pp. 16-17. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb028287