Redundancy Rights – Rights for Whom?
The 1965 Redundancy Payments Act was amended by the 1975 Employment Protection Act to give substantial rights to trade unions to challenge managerial decisions on redundancies. These included advance warning of impending redundancies, the right to make representations to the employer, and to receive the employer′s reply. Cabinet ministers, introducing the legislation, felt that it would generate negotiations either to quash the redundancies or to provide alternative solutions to impending job losses. In investigating 74 incidences of redundancy, covering 10,500 workers, it was found that these rights have, for the most part, merely oiled the process of managerial decisions over redundancies, by enjoining trade unions to such decisions; decisions on which they have no real impact. Rights for trade unions, then, in practice translate to gains for employers. An important caveat to this situation occurs where an agreement on redundancies exists, generally giving workers substantial benefits, although there ar...
Comparative Policies of Legal Provisions for Plant Closure: Strike a Balance?
The article aims to explore the extent to which and how plant closure laws strike a balance between job security and managerial prerogative and assess the practical effects of legal provisions. To achieve this aim, the forms of underlying doctrines of legal provisions, and substantial and procedural requirements are deliberately examined by cross-national (i.e. UK, Germany, and Japan) comparisons. The findings reveal that the legal provisions of the selected nations do not seek to diminish management rights to close plants down. Instead, they attempt to impose more democratic control over the liberty and mobility of capital by negotiating with and compensating the affected workers.
Disclosure of information: some evidence from case studies
The practice and problems of disclosure of information are of concern not only to those who are responsible for the conduct of industrial relations, but also to other specialists. Falconer Mitchell et alia, using case studies carried out in 1978 and 1979, discuss disclosure policy from the standpoints of both industrial relations and accountancy.