A Tale of Two Cities: Employer and Trade Union Responses to Local Government Retrenchment in Britain

Doing the right thing? An institutional perspective on responsible restructuring in UK local government

“…We sampled three English local authorities (LAs) in the north of England that undertook significant programmes of restructuring after 2010. While this might limit the generalisability of our findings, as large Labour (left wing)controlled authorities in urban areas with high levels of trade union membership we viewed them as 'most likely' cases for taking a responsible restructuring approach (Bach & Stroleny, 2017). To protect anonymity, we label these councils 'Local Council', 'Metropolitan City' and 'North Borough'.…”

“…Furthermore, the two‐tier framework of collective bargaining in local government provides significant lateral room for individual local authorities to set their own policies around redundancies and severance pay in line with political agendas, funding pressures and local trade union strength (Connolly, 2020; Grimshaw et al., 2017; Kessler & Purcell, 1996). More broadly, a prolonged period of austerity may call into question the legitimacy of ‘soft’ approaches to public sector HRM when others industries have suffered job cuts and downward pressure on pay and conditions (Bach & Stroleny, 2017).…”

“…In this paper, we focus on the under‐researched context of UK local government which has a historical (but not unequivocal) model employer tradition characterised by soft HRM, collective bargaining and partnership working with trade unions (Beszter et al., 2015). The challenge is that deep workforce cutbacks resulting from enforced budget cuts may disrupt and delegitimise embedded models of HRM (Bach & Stroleny, 2017; Kessler & Purcell, 1996).…”

Work, employment and engagement conditions in a female‐dominated public service occupation after restructuring/outsourcing

“…They also note that staff exposure to the outsourcing contractor prior to the formal takeover enables familiarisation and understanding between the parties (new employer and staff) (Mitchell and James, : 13). Other studies show a less positive outlook for employee engagement, but ultimately this seems to depend on factors such as company culture, established management practices in the contractors (Cooke et al ., ; Smith Institute, ) and the employer's ideology (Bach and Stroleny, ).…”