From Industry to Issue-Based Association: Changing Forms of Collective Action Amongst UK Employers

This paper will provide an empirical overview of change in the collective action of employers in the United Kingdom over the past thirty years. This period has been marked by a double transition. On the one hand, there has been a decline of traditional industry-based employers’ associations, the majority of which have lost what was once their primary function: collective bargaining over wages and conditions of employment with trade unions. To be sure, employers’ associations continue to operate in many UK industries but in the private sector their primary functions are now the provision of employment advice, and particularly employment law advice, and lobbying of government to forestall and limit employment regulation. In a considerable number of cases these organizations have become general business or trade associations, which no longer have a primarily employment-centred role. On the other hand, there has been a rise of issue-based employers’ organizations, which operate particularly in the fields of corporate social responsibility and equal opportunities. Examples of these new Employer Forums are Business in the Community, Opportunity Now, Race for Opportunity, Inclusive Employers, and the Business Disability Forum. The latter are all membership organizations of employers, which recruit on the basis of interest in a particular issue from across sectors, industries and amongst all size-categories of firm. An important function of forums of this kind is the creation of private voluntary regulation: they formulate codes of good practice, reinforced through licensing and award schemes, which typically are justified in terms of a ‘business case’ for progressive management. The paper will provide empirical evidence of the transition from industry associations to issue-based forums in the UK and will offer an explanation of why this transition occurred. It will also make the argument that much of the existing theoretical work on employers’ associations, which has been developed to explain their involvement in coordinated systems of wage regulation, is ill-suited to account for the change that has occurred in the UK.