Ethical Socialism and the Trade Unions: Allan Flanders and British Industrial Relations Reform

ISBN-13: 9780415878487 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 246 str.

John Kelly

Opis

Allan Flanders was one of the leading British industrial relations academics and his ideas exerted a major influence on government labor policy in the 1960s and 1970s. But as well as being an Oxford academic with a strong interest in theory and labor reform, he was also a lifelong political activist. Originally trained in German revolutionary ethical socialism in the early 1930s, he was the founder and joint editor of Socialist Commentary, the leading outlet for 'revisionist' social democratic thinking in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also the leading figure in the influential 1950s 'think tank' Socialist Union and played a key part in the bitter factional struggles inside the Labour Party. The main argument of the book is that Flanders' ethical socialist ideas constituted both his strength and his weakness. Their rigor, clarity and sweep enabled him to exert a major influence over government attempts to negotiate labor reforms with the trade unions. Yet he proved unable to explain the failure of the reforms amidst rising levels of industrial conflict, as his intellectual rigor turned into ideological rigidity. The failure of negotiated reform led to Margaret Thatcher's neo-liberal assault on trade union power in the 1980s.

Underlying much of the historical analysis of the field of industrial relations is an implicit assumption that the fortunes of IR as a field of study are, and have been, intimately connected to the fortunes of the trade union movement and to their economic and political influence. Union influence was most apparent in collective bargaining, the predominant method of employment regulation in Britain during the period from 1945 until the early 1980s and its processes and outcomes occupied much of the time of union activists and preoccupied government ministers, both Labour and Conservative. Union decline and the rise of human resource management have called into question the continuing relevance of the ideas and theories associated with what we might loosely and schematically call ‘traditional industrial relations’.

The role and significance of trade union collectivism and the decline of trade unions are issues that have been of equal concern to another intellectual community, one with whom industrial relations scholars have not traditionally interacted to any significant extent. The contention of this book is that the history of the field of industrial relations and the history of social democracy are intimately connected, in particular through the events of the Cold War and at a personal level though the activities of key individuals such as Allan Flanders, one of the central figures in the creation of the field of industrial relations in Britain. As well as being an academic with a strong interest in theory and in industrial relations reform, he was throughout his life a political activist; Flanders therefore stood at the intersection of two worlds, the academic industrial relations community, based in the universities and with growing links to government, and the political world of the Labour Party and its relations with trade unions and government. By selecting a figure who occupied a unique position in the worlds of industrial relations scholarship and labour movement politics we are able to throw new light on some of the broader debates in the literature about the evolution of industrial relations and of social democracy.

Spis treści

1. Introduction: Industrial Relations and Social Democratic Politics  2. Revolutionary Ethical Socialism in Interwar Germany  3. Revolutionary Socialism in a Cold Climate 1932-1939  4. Trade Unions under Planned Capitalism 1939-1946  5. Democratic Socialism in the Cold War 1946-1951  6. The Recuperation of Ethical Socialism 1951-1959  7. Ethical Socialism and Industrial Relations Reform 1959-1973  8. The Limits and Failings of Industrial Relations Reform  9. Conclusions: Allan Flanders, Ethical Socialism and the Reform of British Industrial Relations.  Epilogue: Industrial Relations Reform and Social Democratic Politics after Flanders

O autorze

John Kelly is Professor of Industrial Relations in the School of Management, Birkbeck College, London University. His main areas of research are comparative labor relations, labor unions and industrial relations theory. Recent publications include Varieties of Unionism (co-editor, 2004), Union Organization and Activity (co-editor, 2004) and Rethinking Industrial Relations (1998).