UK industrial relations in retrospect: 50 years since Donovan

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12276
• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Peter Nolan
• Published date: 01 November 2019

UK industrial relations in retrospect: 50

years since Donovan

Peter Nolan

INTRODUCTION

Last year recorded the 50th anniversary of the publication of the UK Royal Commis-

sion on Trade Unions and Employers’Associations. The Donovan Commission, as it

became widely known, was established in April 1965, by the then Labour

Government, at a difficult juncture or turning point for the postwar UK economy.

Its commanding position in world markets for manufactured goods was steadily

eroding; labour productivity (output per worker hour) was advancing at a slower rate

in domestic factories, as compared with the US and the fast reconstructing economies

of Western Europe; and real wages and living standards were threatened by frequent

inflationary impulses. No longer the ‘workshop of the world’, the UK was increas-

ingly presenting acute symptoms of relative economic decline.

Industrial relations had come to be seen by many policy makers and powerful inter-

est groups as a key source of the nation’s mounting economic difficulties. Common

complaints alluded to the damage to productivity and cost competiveness by frequent

work stoppages and the uncoordinated wage rises that reflected management’s inabil-

ity to control the effort–wage bargain on the shopfloor. Trade unions, commonly pre-

sented as the villains of the piece, were said to be far too powerful. Yet, the available

evidence base was limited, virtually non-existent at factory level and certainly could

not be invoked to substantiate many of the contemporary claims, still less provide a

reliable guide to policy formation.

In the circumstances the Royal Commission initiated its own independent research

programme to gather new data and illuminate the pressing workplace industrial rela-

tions concerns of the day. Among other issues, it sought a deeper understanding of the

sources of disorder that manifest in rising numbers of unofficial and unconstitutional

strikes and the role and incidence of the shop stewards that were assuming an increas-

ingly significant role in framing bargaining relationships in engineering and other

manufacturing industries.

Whatever the limitations of the Donovan Report, there can be no question that it

succeeded in expanding the contemporary evidence base and provided a major new

impetus for the academic study of industrial relations in the UK and elsewhere. It

promoted a step change in the quantity and quality of research data available to pol-

icy makers and raised issues that would engage a new generation of researchers for

years to come. And it propelled the launch of the Industrial Relations Journal (IRJ)

in 1970.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the transformation of work and employment

relations that has ensued. The character of workplace employment relations, the

structure of the labour market and the wider economic conditions that prevailed at

❒Peter Nolan, Correspondence should be addressed to Peter Nolan, Professor of Work and Employment

Futures, School of Business, University of Leicester, Leicester LE2 1RQ, UK.

Email: pn54@leicester.ac.uk

Industrial Relations Journal

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

50:5

–6, 417

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