Economy
Spirit of the mill owners lives on
Published 25 November 2002
Observations on British management
As Britain's employers gather in Manchester for their annual conference, we can expect to hear their usual whinge about red tape, high taxes and state intrusion. The Confederation of British Industry likes nothing better than to complain about the supposed iniquities of what is by far the most employer-friendly Labour government in history.
But a report just published by the Economic and Social Research Council's Future of Work programme ought to make our chief executives a little less assertive. A survey of 2,000 human resource managers shows that most firms pay only lip-service to the business school slogan that people are a company's best assets.
It reveals that most managers do as little as they can get away with in providing rights and benefits for their workers. Firms are particularly uninterested in meeting the needs of female staff with dependent children: 88 per cent do not even offer information on the availability of local childcare facilities. Only a third provide access to an occupational pension; nearly half offer no sick pay above the bare legal minimum; only 5 per cent provide maternity pay above the minimum; and two-thirds offer no paid parental leave entitlements. The few rights that most staff enjoy derive from European Union regulations being enforced here, mostly despite employer protests.
The survey also reports growing work pressures, with 40 per cent of managers in large plants "asking" their workers to opt out of legal restrictions on working time. In addition, almost half of Britain's managers fail to tell workers anything about the business that employs them, let alone consult them on how it is run.
Yet 90 per cent of managers claim they want to keep permanent staff by ensuring their jobs are part of a career ladder and by offering training and promotion.
The workers seem to be fighting back. As many as 46 per cent of companies report an increase in unfair dismissal cases (only a handful report a fall) and half the managers interviewed said they had experienced a substantial rise in the amount of time they devote to employment issues compared with three years ago.
The positive news is that 5 per cent of companies said that, under the new legislation, they had recognised unions in the past 12 months. But on balance, the survey reveals how limited and half-hearted are worker rights in Britain's companies. It is hard not to conclude from this catalogue of meanness and myopia that the treatment of workers may help to explain why low productivity is such a serious problem in many companies. Other ESRC research suggests "a direct correlation" between effective business performance and a more humane management of staff.
Let us hope that ministers concentrate on the improvement and enforcement of social rights rather than on appeasing with tax breaks and credits a business community obsessed with its own material self-interests.
Robert Taylor is research associate with the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, and author of the ESRC report Managing Workplace Change, available free from p.j.Nolan@leeds.ac.uk
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