United Kingdom Labour Law - Workplace Participation

Workplace Participation

While an enforceable charter of employment rights guarantee a minimum of workplace decency, like a minimum wage, the most important right to achieve conditions beyond the minimum, like a living wage, is the right to participate in a firm's management. Increasingly the UK is legalising and codifying its systems of collective labour relations, with rights to information, consultation (on redundancies, business restructuring and management generally) and participation (so far, in pension management and health and safety committees) in workplace and company affairs. Trade unions, organised largely by contract, have the aim of improving their members' terms and conditions. They must follow a democratic internal structure, and members cannot be excluded without good reason or discriminated against by their employers. Although information, consultation and participation rights are not bound to a trade union, especially where none exists in the workplace, unions often organise the workforce's collective voice. Where statutory rights to participation and consultation run out, collective bargaining by unions is the most potent form of influence workers can have against their employers, as a counterweight in companies to the interests of directors and shareholders. Since 1999, unions can follow a complex statutory procedure which will eventually mandate that employers recognise and bargain with them. Collective agreements will typically set a transparent scale of pay and working hours, or terms like pensions, training and workplace facilities, with a system to update terms and conditions as the business environment changes. The ability to bargain rests on the final resort of industrial action. Just as management, typically with the objective of increasing profits, has the power to make workers redundant, so an official trade union is protected by law in its ability to call a strike. Industrial action must always be "in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute". Since the 1980s, there have also been strict requirements to ballot the workforce and warn the employer before, to not call sympathy strikes, and to take only passive action in picketing or protests.