Employee Relations: An International Journal

Blyton, Paul

1981 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb054974

Managerial unionism commented one writer recently consititutes an emergent industrial relations phenomenon of major significance. Long established in the public sector the movement of junior and middle managers into trade unions is indeed becoming increasingly evident throughout private industry. Rising job insecurity, dissatisfaction with salary levels and a decline in the individual treatment of managers by employers are some of the factors encouraging this development. New unions have been created and existing ones adapted to meet the demand. There are now more than a dozen unions catering exclusively for managerial and executive grades, as well as the more general whitecollar unions which recruit managers, notably Clive Jenkins' Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs.

Barrett, Brenda; James, Philip

1981 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb054975

The Robens committee on Safety and Health at Work recognised the cardinal importance of worker cooperation with management if workplaces were to be made safer places and believed that worker involvement would help overcome the apathy which it felt was the primary cause of accidents at the workplace. The Health and Safety at Work Act apparently accepted the views of the Committee and created a statutory framework for individual and collective involvement in health and safety issues at the workplace. The Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations subsequently made under the Act provided for the appointment of safety representatives by recognised trade unions possessing a variety of rights and functions. In doing so, however, they may arguably have owed more to the philosophy which conceived the Employment Protection Act's provisions for promoting the improvement of industrial relations and extension of collective bargaining than the Select Committee's desire for total workplace involvement.

Jenkins, Glenville

1981 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb054976

Previous research aimed at assessing disclosure practice has made extensive use of postal questionnaire surveys which have been far from successful, achieving relatively low response rates and paying only scant attention to the complex network of information control which is prevalent both within and outside of modern organisations. However, this research has pointed out that the weighting given to information disclosed voluntarily by management for reasons of their own against information which is only provided on request, is of central importance, for it provides a measurement of management's commitment to communicate with employees and can be viewed as an acknowledgement of the rights of employees to corporate information and their representatives' function in defending those rights.

Modiano, Philip; Dimoldenbery, Sharon

1981 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb054977

In this article it is intended to describe aspects of internal working relationships in small cooperative businesses which distinguish such firms from conventional companies. Subsequently we go on to assess the effect of such relationships on the work of an outside consultant brought in to advise the cooperative. The article is based on the work that the authors did with four small cooperatives in the London Borough of Lambeth during the first half of 1980.

Johnson, Rita; Cooke, Peter

1981 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb054978

Job evaluation is not an exact science. Yet notions of comparability and differentials seem to imply that a set of objective criteria exists which can provide the necessary and sufficient causes for ranking one job higher or lower than another. At the same time, it is commonly accepted that subjective and nonrational factors enter into the evaluation of jobs. One example of such factors of particular interest in the light of recent legislation is that of sex bias.

Beaumont, P.B.

1981 Employee Relations: An International Journal

doi: 10.1108/eb054979

The provisions of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 are, at least in general terms, likely to raise the status of health and safety as a subject area for joint discussion and decision making in the years to come. In the immediate short term the emphasis is likely to be on trying to bring about a reduction in industrial accidents, but beyond this stage attention is likely to be increasingly given to trying to cope with the effects of heretofore undetected or unknown exposure to toxic substancies at the workplace. Indeed there are already some signs of unionmanagement activity along these lines the agreement to ban toluene diisocyanate TDI at Metal Box in printing industry being a notable example in this regard.