Documents Gill-McLure, Whyeda 3 results

"Public service labour's distinctiveness is insufficiently understood or recognised; and in its ad hoc growth under liberal ideologies of state intervention (those of Mill and Keynes), it has been treated both as if it were and were not public service labour. This paper teases out some of the crucial links between liberal ideologies of state intervention and the social praxis of public service unionism, outlining the latter's historical struggle against this paradoxical treatment, which culminated in 1970s militancy. The paper supports this argument with a Marxist analysis of public sector labour, drawing on Polanyi's ‘double-movement' to understand the limitations of liberal ideologies of state intervention."

"This special issue uses the occasion of the centenary of the Whitley Commission Reports to illuminate the contemporary crisis in public service industrial relations from a historical perspective. In all six countries studied—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the USA—public service employment is labour intensive and quantitatively significant in the overall economy. Public services have also been major targets of neoliberal reforms, starting in the UK and the USA at the turn of the 1980s and in the other countries about a decade later. In addition, the relatively high union density and the political dimension of public services and public union strategies have been major targets of new public management and more latterly austerity. However, the regressive period has had a differential impact in different countries. In the liberal market economies of the UK and the USA, the neoliberal turn has destabilised traditional patterns of public sector industrial relations to greatest effect. While in the more coordinated market economies, traditional arrangements and values have been more resistant to austerity and neoliberal reforms. We attempt to shed light on these differential impacts through a critical analysis of the historical evolution of public sector industrial relations in each country."

"The Whitley Reports, 1917–1918 were seen by contemporaries as conservative: they reflected pre-existing voluntaristic approaches to the labour problem rather than a radical departure. Largely neglected by the well-established private sector, for whom they were intended, Whitley Councils were taken up by the newly emerging public service unions. The interwar years demonstrated Whitleyism's lack of clout. But, endorsed by governments during and after the Second World War, public sector Whitleyism came to embody the tenets of progressive public administration by providing nationally determined pay, career progression and a public service ethos. These hard-won union gains are under attack from neoliberal reforms that attempt to model public service labour relations on the private sector. The paper examines the major weaknesses and strengths of the Whitley model for managing public service industrial relations through an analysis of a century of Whitleyism."