The British National Minimum Wage was introduced in 1999 under the guidance of a Low Pay Commission constructed on a basis of ‘social partnership’. The paper analyses its conduct over its first ten years from diary data. Key challenges were for it to be independent of government, to have its...

The Low Pay Commission is the institution created in 1997 to introduce Britain’s first National Minimum Wage. The paper places the Commission in historical perspective and provides a summary assessment of the initial impact of the Minimum Wage. It describes and analyses the development of the...

Two UK business services companies are compared both to each other and to their common state-owned industry background in order to assess the implications of trade union recognition and changed bargaining structure. Union recognition had been abandoned by one company under the agenda of...

For most of the twentieth century, collective bargaining provided the terms on which labour was commonly employed in Britain. However, the quarter century since 1980 has seen the collapse of collectivism as the main way of regulating employment. Our argument is that the tacit settlement between...

A revival of trade unions was widely expected when Blair’s New Labour government took over from the Conservatives in Britain in 1997. This did not occur. Collective bargaining continued to retreat. The paper discusses the implications of the changing economic context for the government’s...