PurposeCovid-19 has caused many businesses to rethink their short- and potentially long-term workforce operations. The use of lateral flow serology can provide a clinically convenient approach for the assessment of prior infection with Covid-19. However, its widespread adoption in organisations seeking to use it to test for workforce immunity is controversial and confusing. This paper aims to explore the paradoxical dilemmas and dialectics immunity workforce testing creates.Design/methodology/approachThis study involved capturing the ethnographical participation of a chief executive officer (CEO) dealing with the experience of managing the outcomes of Covid-19 workforce immunity testing. The aim was to take a snapshot in time of the CEO's empirical world, capturing their lived experiences to explore how management actions resulting from Covid-19 immunity testing can played out.FindingsProviding staff with immunity tests at first glance appears sensible, decent and a caring action to take. Nevertheless, once such knowledge is personalised by employees, they can, through dialectic dialogue, feel disadvantaged and harbour feelings of unfairness. Subsequently, this paper suggests that immunity testing may only serve to raise awareness and deepen the original management dilemma of whether testing is a worthwhile activity.Originality/valueThis paper aims to be amongst the first works to empirically explore the workforce management challenges that arise within small businesses within the service sector following the completion of Covid-19 immunity testing of their staff. It seeks to achieve this via utilising the robust theoretical framework of the paradox theory to examine Covid-19's impact upon small business workforce management thinking and practice.

Having outlined a traditional model of British public sector industrial relations, this article focuses on developments from the 1980s to 2001. It argues that there has been a reorganisation of the state through privatisation and an historical shift in employment relations, from the state as a ‘model’, administrative employer to an increasingly managerial employer. In effect, a depoliticisation of employment relations has taken place, with the withdrawal of central government from direct control over operational and organisational activity in the public services. As part of these processes, the public services in Britain have been marketised, with the creation of a public service sector, no longer defined by ownership but by the service provided. These developments are reflected in the changing patterns of industrial relations activity in the public services, with profound implications for trade unionism.