A Final Appraisal of ‘Bridlington’? An Evaluation of TUC Disputes Committee Decisions 1974–1991
: This paper reviews decisions of TUC Disputes Committees from 1974 to 1991. It considers whether the rather different conclusions of studies of earlier periods are still valid and assesses the effectiveness of ‘Bridlington’ in resolving disputes over new issues, in particular ‘single-union deals’. It concludes that there is still a role for a voluntary disputes resolution mechanism of this kind, although recent experience has shown that it has its [imitations. TUC-affiliated unions will therefore lose a useful mechanism for promoting the efficient use of their resources if the 1993 change in the law leads to Bridlington being abandoned.
Trade Union Congress Policy towards union mergers: a statistical analysis, 1960-83
This letter extends Elgar and Simpson's (1994) analysis on the working of the Bridlington Principles to the analysis of the working of TUC voluntary policy with respect to mergers among affiliated unions over the period 1960-83. Univariate analysis is applied to microdata to investigate the effectiveness of voluntary policy on mergers with respect both to the implementation and to the achievement of the underlying objectives of the policy. The results of the tests clearly show the achievement of the implementation of the policy in terms of when and how mergers occurred and the achievement of the policy objective of rationalizing the structure of affiliated unions; the results of the tests about the achievement of the policy objective of reducing competition for membership among affiliated unions are less conclusive. The results of our analysis on mergers broadly confirm Edgar and Simpson's results about the effectiveness of TUC voluntary policies.
Conventional arbitration, final offer arbitration and the chilling effect
Abstract The chilling effect of conventional arbitration is demonstrated in a formal model and shown also to apply to final offer arbitration.