Relationship between Government and Public Sector Unions - Coursework Example

RUNNING HEAD: GOVERNMENT AND PUBLIC SECTOR UNIONS Relationship between Government and Public Sector Unions [Name of the Writer] [Name of the Institution] Relationship between Government and Public Sector Unions Introduction The changing context of local government employment relations Trade unions and the process of collective bargaining constitute central elements of the system of employment regulation within British local government. Union recognition for bargaining purposes, for example, is universal and membership density remains high: in 2005 the ‘public administration’ category of employment – of which local government employment contributes a significant proportion of the total – recorded an average density of 57.1 per cent, the highest density for all major employment categories in the UK (Grainger, 2006: 21). In addition, unions’ institutional centrality is further demonstrated by the fact that local level management-union relationships take place within a framework of national bargaining arrangements incorporating not only administrative, professional, technical and clerical (APT&C) staff, but also their manual counterparts, police officers and staff, school teachers, and fire service personnel. Under these frameworks, negotiations take place between the Employers’ Organization for Local Government, the umbrella body representing local government employers, and the relevant recognized unions. The most important of these, in terms of the number of workers covered, is the National Joint Council (NJC) for local government services, which came into being in 1997 because of the merger of the two previously separate NJCs for manual and APT&C staff. This merged NJC now constitutes the largest NJC of any kind in the UK (Local Government Pay Commission, 2003). On the union side, contributions come from those unions most representative of the sector; UNISON, which holds 31 places on the NJC, followed by the GMB (16) and the Transport and General Workers Union (11). Inevitably, given the extent to which local government services are centrally funded, government policies and related philosophies have always formed an important backcloth to (and influence on) employer-union relations, at both the local and national levels (Terry, 2000). One important such influence has been the way in which the post- 1945 period has seen marked shifts in governmental perspectives regarding the desired nature of these relationships. In essence, these paradigmatic shifts have arguably entailed a move from an acceptance of a ‘model employer’ perspective–formulated around the professional autonomy of the local government officer, institutionalized through collective bargaining, to a ‘market state’ orientation – based on the imposition of external competition, outsourcing and micro-management solutions to issues of performance; and finally to the adoption of what may be termed a hybridized regime, whereby micro-management and market-based solutions continue to be pursued, but are now being tempered by protections to the baseline terms and conditions determined at the governmental level. The model employer era The basis of local government employment relations practice from the end of the Second World War up to the 1970s has commonly been seen as having been centred on the notion of the ‘model employer’. Whilst this notion has been legitimately challenged as overly simplistic (Thornley, 1995; Thornley et al., 2000), as a heuristic it nevertheless remains useful as a comparator of the changing ethos of what constitutes ‘good’ employment practice in the sector. The foundations of this approach can be traced to the Whitley structures for employer union interaction brought into local government in 1940 (Thomson and Beaumont, 1978) that were based on the principles of consultation (rather than bargaining), consensus and of national, rather than local level exchange; structures which acted to prompt the trade unions involved in local government to place an emphasis on centralized decision making arrangements and the servicing of members by full-time officials. Over time, national level management-union relationships came to encompass collective bargaining, as well as joint consultation, though the assumptions of consensus that underpinned this system became increasingly anachronistic as bargaining became more confrontational in the 1970s against the background of local government budgetary constraints (Fairbrother, 1996). This rise in adversarialism, in turn, contributed to a breakup of the party political ‘post war consensus’ on employment in public services occurred, most notably through the 1979 ‘winter of discontent’, which was disproportionately located within local government. This break up came to fruition with the coming into power of a Conservative government in 1979 and the imposition of a ‘market state’ approach to public sector employment relations. The Market State Era The market state approach towards employment in local government comprehensively rejected the notion of the ‘model employer’ on the neo-classical, Public Choice premise (Niskanen, 1971) that workers, through their unions, will always seek to insulate themselves from the need to adapt their working practices to improve productivity. In turn, this was seen to be compounded by a style of management – the now maligned, ‘public administration’ approach (Pollitt, 1993) – that neither had the threat nor the incentive of the competitive market to confront such behaviour. The introduction of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) sought to deal with these problems by creating ‘contestable markets’ under which public services were opened up to competition. This involved in-house, direct service organizations (DSOs) being compelled to compete for existing work with private contractors on the basis that: . . . the terms and conditions of employment by contractors of their workers or the composition of, the arrangements for the promotion, transfer or training of or the other opportunities afforded to, their workforces. (HMSO, 1988) Since local government services are essentially labour intensive, competition for local services inevitably became focused upon labour costs (Ganley and Grahl, 1988; Cutler and Waine, 1998; Escott and Whitfield, 1995; Walsh, 1995). In addition, the need under CCT to hold budgets at the individual service level provided managements with a direct incentive to devolve personnel decision-making toward the operational level and thus, an encouragement to decentralize collective bargaining in line with prescribed HRM best practice of the time (Legge, 2005). As a result, this led to the importance of national terms and conditions declining and a corresponding rise occurring in the importance of local level bargaining (Beaumont, 1992; Gill, 1994). This rise created profound difficulties for trade unions whose internal structures were shaped to mirror the national level Whitley ones (Colling, 1995) and raised the issue of whether unions could effectively adapt their organizational structures and activities to support an effective process of joint regulation at this level. For some analysts, unions could potentially adapt, but only under certain circumstances. For example, Fosh (1993), has argued that trade union viability could be greatly enhanced in situations where local leadership offered a collectivist outlook with a participative leadership style which took due cognisance of the fact that that member attachment can reflect both individualistic and collectivist outlooks and hence be shaped by both ideological and instrumentalist assumptions about collectivism. In a similar vein, Fairbrother (1994, 1996, 2000) has argued, more generally, that the changes which have been acting to undermine union bargaining power within the state sector offers the possibility of creating conditions for establishing a new active and participatory form of unionism, while also noting that the effective exploitation of this possibility represents a major challenge. The Evolution of a Hybridized Employment System The employment relations system that has emerged in local government since 1997 can be seen as a hybridized version of the previous market state approach. This hybrid approach is in line with New Labour’s broad approach to employment regulation which emphasizes individual employment rights over collective ones (Pollert, 2005; Smith and Morton, 2001) and embodies an enthusiasm for market based solutions to public service reform which, although differing in significant ways to that of CCT, retain some of the regime’s key attributes. As a result, while New Labour did support the conclusion in 1997 of a union-friendly, if ‘uniquely complex’, single-status harmonization agreement (Local Government Pay Commission, 2003: 23), the general direction of its public service reform agenda has contributed to a deterioration in national level union government relationships (Waddington, 2003). When Labour replaced the Conservatives in government in 1997, it proclaimed that CCT would be scrapped in favour of a policy of ‘Best Value’ (BV). However this did not signal a return to the idealized ‘model employer’ approach because New Labour, informed by ‘third way’ prescriptions of reform (Giddens, 1998), mistrusted publicsector professionals, seeing them as representing ‘producer interests’ which were likely to act as a block to the reforms deemed necessary under a more consumerist oriented reform agenda (Driver and Martell, 1998). The early impression given was that it did not matter how local authorities pursued BV provided that they delivered it in keeping with New Labour principles of avoiding ideological concerns about ownership (DETR, 1997). Unlike CCT, BV consequently promised to open up the range of management tools available to local government managements, albeit within the confines of the need to review the services they provided in accordance with the ‘four Cs’ of BV: a requirement that obliged them to ‘challenge’ whether a service should continue to be provided; to ‘consult’ users over its current and future shape and performance; to ‘compare’ the service’s current performance with that of similar services elsewhere; and to subject the service to ‘competition’. The replacement of CCT with BV has consequently not involved a clear rejection of the ‘public choice’ assumptions that informed the former. Thus, not only does ‘competition’ remain but, in addition, the role that it plays within BV provides for forms of partial outsourcing to be utilized that go beyond the ‘binary’ options of either complete in-house or complete externalization decisions that were provided for within CCT. The BV review process, therefore, represents a continuation of the ‘enabling’ model of the local authority under which, while services are secured by local authorities, they are not necessarily provided by them directly. The role of BV in promoting potentially greater external involvement, moreover, does not end with the prescriptive management tools to be used by management within the BV review process. Characteristic of the New Labour approach to public service reform is a lack of trust that, at the local level, reforms will be administered in line with the spirit, as well as the letter, of what is prescribed. As a result, local authority compliance with the ‘4Cs’ of BV is the subject of external audit and inspection and the penalties for ‘failing’ an inspection can not only be very severe, but can themselves involve the externalization of service provision. As a result, service outsourcing effectively acts as a ‘default’ mechanism in the event that a local authority fails to embrace fully the objectives and methods of BV. The introduction of BV has therefore increased the number of avenues through which the private sector can be involved in the delivery of public services and the range of situations in which staff can be transferred from public to private sector employment. Indeed BV can be argued to pose a greater threat to workers who wish to remain council employees than was the case under CCT. An argument which receives support from evidence showing that, at the level of ‘partial transfer’, it has enabled more externalization than CCT (Roper et al., 2005) and raises the likelihood that that the regime is leading to the types of negative effects on work intensification and job insecurity previously associated with CCT (Richardson et al., 2005). However, some context is required. The environment within which BV operates is not directly comparable to CCT, in that it cannot straightforwardly be seen to provide a route for directly driving down workers’ terms and conditions of employment through direct transfer to low-pay oriented contractors. Thus, while Labour have been criticized for their lack of enthusiasm in promoting collective (union) rights (Smith and Morton, 2001), they have introduced a range of measures aimed at enhancing the rights and conditions of individual workers. In the context of the local government employment relations system, this operates at three levels. The first level has been the introduction of universal rights, including the national minimum wage, equalizing rights for part-time and temporary workers and enhancing maternity, childcare and dependency rights. At the second level, in the face of pressure from the unions, the government has concluded national agreements that enhance the rights of staff transferred from the public sector. This has included measures addressing the so-called ‘two-tier workforce’, and, on projects affected by the Public Finance Initiatives (PFI), the concluding of the so-called ‘Warwick Agreement’ between Labour and the unions prior to the 2005 general election. The final level of protection has involved sectoral-level actions, which have affected national agreements specifically relating to local government. These actions have included the commitments to pursue ‘best practice’ initiatives on equal pay, single status and on a ‘mainstreaming equalities’ agenda (Ruberry et al., 2005) – often specifically tied to BV (Local Government Pay Commission, 2003; EO, 2001). These contextual developments, when taken together, suggest that while BV, like CCT before it, does embody a continued emphasis on the externalization of external services, it does so in an environment that serves to place limits on the extent to which the terms and conditions of those employed by external providers can be lower than those set for directly employed local authority staff through local government collective bargaining machinery. It is for this reason that the issue of how the actions of the regulatory body responsible for overseeing the operation of the BV regime impact on the collective bargaining agenda of local government trade unions seems to be one that merits an investigation of the type undertaken below. For a clear potential exists for these actions to either support or undermine (a) the content of bargaining agendas that the unions wish to pursue; and (b) the role that they may play in pursuance of these, or other, bargaining agendas. Since the introduction of BV in 1999, Labour’s reform of local government has moved on at a rapid pace and in 2002, the tangential policy of comprehensive performance assessment (CPA) was introduced. This more recent policy initiative involves auditors and inspectors assessing local authorities’ entire performance rather than, as in BV, the performance of individual services or packages of services (Andrews, 2004). In pursuit of service quality, the AC’s work can clearly be seen to have the potential to impact on the bargaining agendas of unions. A clear demonstration of this is the way in which its work formed an important backcloth to the 2002/3 dispute in the British fire service and its aftermath. Thus, while assessments of this dispute, or its antecedents, do not identify the AC as the key protagonist, the AC’s initial recommendations for reform (Audit Commission, 1995b) have been identified as an important catalyst to the dispute. Its subsequent policing of ‘modernization’ following the dispute’s resolution has been seen as playing a role in shaping the ongoing contested situation in the service (Burchill, 2004; Fitzgerald, 2005). Likewise, the role that AC inspectors are playing in terms of shaping local government employment relations, furthermore, receives support from the content of a briefing document that the AC has produced on managing people in local government (Audit Commission, 2003). Thus, while this provides guidance on six factors that are seen as critical to successful people management: empowering leadership; people management strategies; managing performance; capacity building; workforce diversity; and recruitment and retention, it is remarkably silent as to the role of unions and union management relations, beyond the making of a few passing references to these issues in two of the illustrative case studies provided in the document. Hence, this does little to encourage local government employers to work closely with unions. In the context of reforming local government, then, it is being suggested here that the role of the AC, in its role as regulator of services influenced by Public Choice assumptions, could have a negative impact on the bargaining agendas of unions across two dimensions. The first dimension is of influencing the content of the bargaining agenda either by promoting issues detrimental to union interests (e.g. outsourcing) or by deeming certain issues off-limits (e.g. retaining in-house provision); in both cases justified by the need to demonstrate ‘competitiveness’. The second dimension is through influencing the process of collective bargaining. Here the influence would be by encouraging forms of consultation and communication outside established collective bargaining mechanisms or by discouraging union-management dialogue. Conclusion Thus, notwithstanding that both related to situations in which union based industrial action had taken place and there had been a marked absence of union involvement in decisions as to the nature of future service provision and the reform of working practices, in neither case did inspectors voice criticisms of management for this lack of involvement, nor did it comment on what could be done to avoid such action in the future. Indeed, in the Northern authority case, there were indications of AC officials being suspicious of an attempt by the authority and the main trade union to conclude a joint agreement on future policy towards the procurement of services because of fears that it would act to limit the potential for service externalization. Overall, then, the findings obtained indicate that AC inspectors are acting, both directly and indirectly, to influence the nature and direction of employment relations in British local government. In doing so, they, more specifically, suggest that, in terms of the content of bargaining agendas, inspectors are adopting a series of positions which variously support or oppose union agendas, while at the same time adopting a relatively agnostic position with regard to the process of union-management engagement. They also further suggest that an important consequence of this last position is that where there is a clash between union objectives and desired moves to externalization, inspectors will accord priority to the latter, even where there is a clear risk that it will endanger the establishment and maintenance of harmonious collective relationships. As to the reasons why the AC is acting philosophically to encourage such an approach, no definitive answer can be given on the basis of the findings reported here. However, the authors would refer back to underlying assumptions that underpinned the establishment of the AC in the first place, Public Choice theory, which is liable to make the AC institutionally mistrustful of (1) monopoly; and (2) union management collusion. In the current climate it would be reasonable to conclude that, for the management of local government employment relations, the AC’s remit for monitoring service improvement manifests itself through exclusively managerially defined objectives; or through ideological definitions as to what constitutes the public good. Considering that employees are, using the terminology of service quality management, the ‘users’ of personnel services, the failure to promote proactive engagement with employee representatives is in marked contrast to the AC’s assessment of other services where service user engagement is an important focus for its scrutiny. 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