This thesis examines the arbitration function of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service [ACAS] as one form of third party intervention in British industrial relations. It provides an explanation for the apparent contradiction between the stance taken by Conservative governments post- 1979 to trade union reform on the one hand; and the survival of an agency which maintains many of the attitudes and practices associated with the past on the other. In spite of government rhetoric and changes which have occurred in the period examined, it is argued that the key attitudes and practices in relation to arbitration have not altered significantly over time. Questionnaire surveys of arbitrators and the parties to arbitration were conducted in conjunction with a study of arbitration awards over the period 1942-1985. These revealed that many of the debates relating to arbitration, including support for voluntarism and resistance to compulsion in the process, the criteria for the appointment of arbitrators with appropriate skills and experience and the factors which arbitrators should consider in making their awards, have their foundation in the early part of this century: that the main focus of criticisms of arbitration surround issues of pay and terms and conditions of employment and that they were unfounded: and that the majority of parties to arbitration were satisfied with the service they received. The practice of arbitration was located within the corporatist theory debate and it was contended that elements of corporatist and pluralist relationships and networks within ACAS had survived the election of a government openly hostile to both corporatism and quangos. Explanations for the survival of ACAS and the arbitration service as one form of third party intervention can be found within the corporatist and dualist debate and understood within the context of the role which arbitration has played in the history of British industrial relations.

This thesis examines changing relations in the defence industry. The defence industry is peculiar in important respects, not least because of the central role of the state in shaping the structure of the industry. During the Cold War excess capacity was preserved intact to meet state demands for armament technology and the defence industry was protected from more the more general decline of manufacturing in Britain. With attempts to restructure the arms complex in Britain, the disturbance of decades of structural stasis allowed a study of industrial change in concentrated form. A leading edge military electronics firm, Ferranti (now GEC-Marconi) and a naval repair yard, Rosyth dockyard (now Babcock Rosyth Defence), were studied to understand the precise forms industrial change took and its historically contingent nature. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with key sectors within the firms and primary and secondary documentary sources consulted. The first part of the thesis sets out the general field of study, considering general questions of restructuring and the nature of the defence industry. The historical pattern of defence industry in Scotland is also discussed. Traditional warshipbuilding was joined by advanced electronics capacity during the Cold War when Scotland became a strategic location for military support and production activities. Part Two contains the case study material. The historical development of each firm in its external relation to the state and internal workplace relations is set out. Experiences of restructuring are considered next, taking into account the impact of privatisation, marketisation and changing products markets. Changing contours of the workforce and worker resistance to and compliance with restructuring is discussed. Part three then interprets the case studies within a wider Marxist political economy.

No description available.

The thesis examines the existence, or otherwise, of labour market segmentation in the UK labour market. Three different hypotheses are investigated. The existence of two self-contained labour market sectors, the difference in the wage and employment mechanisms across the two sectors and the lack of employee mobility among them. The first two hypotheses are investigated using cross-sectional data from the fifth wave of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) in the context of a switching regression model with endogenous selection and known sample separation. The existence of two separate sectors and the difference in wage and employment mechanisms in the two of them are both established. Returns to education are on unemployment experience has a negative effect on the individual's sector attachment hypothesis is investigated by using the panel element of the BHPS data set. Very little mobility exists for secondary sector employees and a small probability that they would move to primary sector employment, in the short, medium or longer run. The third hypothesis is investigated by using the panel element of BHPS data set. Very would move to primary sector employment and no employment. The factors affecting an individual's entrapment in the secondary sector are examined in the framework of a bivariate model with partial observability, chosen to address the problem of endogenous selection into the individual's initial sector attachment state. Full-time employment status, firm size, trade union coverage, and male gender have a significant negative effect on the probability of employee entrapment in the secondary sector in the short, medium and longer run. However, their magnitude reduces substantially the longer the time period considered. Educational qualifications could act as springboards pushing secondary sector employees, eventually, into primary sector employment.

This thesis addresses a major omission in the history of agriculture. It is concerned with the contribution made by women to the enterprise of farming during the nineteenth century, in their varied capacities as farm servants, day labourers, bondagers, farmers' wives and daughters, and as women farmers in their own right. The three counties of Northumberland, Westmorland and Cumberland have been chosen partly because comparatively little modern research has focused on this part of the north of England. Information about farming methods and studies of particular areas or estates are, with few exceptions, located south of Lincolnshire. Choosing these more northern counties has therefore given the opportunity for original research to redress the existing Imbalance of information presently available. Additionally, the area, although mainly one of upland farming, also has the advantage of the usual east-west arable-pasture divide, showing women's versatility in day-labour work, dairy-work and stockrearing and fattening. There is also the contrast of extensive farms and smaller, family holdings, where women's unpaid labour as wife or daughter was essential to the viability of the enterprise. This diversity permits investigation into most of the agricultural tasks undertaken by women throughout the whole country. The variety of work done by women is explored in detail, and reevaluated, supported by Day Labour Records and the reports of contemporary commentators, and further interpreted by the use of specially recorded oral sources. The generally accepted decline of women's agricultural work throughout the century is challenged and evidence brought forward to support the view that it continued to be vital into the twentieth century. The marginalisation of their work is analysed and a theory advanced for their historically lower earnings and the continuing invisibility of their work in the eyes of so many agrarian historians. The major source of information on the work of women in agriculture, the two Government Enquiries in 1843 and 1867-8 is critically examined and some of the findings questioned. My argument throughout is that the contribution of women to the agrarian economy has been seriously undervalued, to the detriment of history as a record of the past.

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which people can achieve to what is to them, and may appear to others as, an unsatisfying or improved work situation. It is based on the comparative and longitudinal study of five worker groups in an engineering company located in the south of England, and a cross culture replication and comparison with two groups of car assembly workers in New Zealand. The mail and longitudinal British study was conducted within an action frame of reference so that the effects of various changes in organizational action on worker behavior could be explored. Three distinct manual groups were studied, each employing a different technology which range through from unit and small batch to large volume and process production. Two 'white collar' groups were also studied to give a comparison with the manual groups. These were selected on the basic of their technology and work organization with was highly structured. A wide range of variables was examined in order that the total situation of the group, their modes of coping with and influencing their situation and the interrelatedness of the variables influencing them could be explored. The approach taken was qualitative, supported in certain respects by qualitative evidence. The analysis is made, not in terms of motives, needs and attitudes, but in terms of psychological living space- the psychological territory which serves to mediate and protect and individual's inner world and sense of worth. Jobs themselves, and organizational action, define a permitted living space which may or may not be congruent with the individual's required living space. Adaptive actions, to adjust individual living space or to construct group living space, are exemplified, and are shown to affect people's relations with their jobs, peers, supervision, management and union. Links are also made with the psychology of change, play and creativity and the social psychology of neighborhood. The theory of worker behavior- Tolerance Theory- is developed and presented as a reductive and integrative models which is concerned with the degree of congruence that exist between permitted and requisite living space, adaptive mechanisms contrived and congruence is low and the locations of living space boundaries. Behavior is demonstrated to be predictable in terms of maintaining- or defending- the boundaries of living space.

Nowadays, every company seeks to optimize its Supply Chain (SC) in response to competitive pressures or to acquire advantage of new flexibility in the restrictions on world trade. The process systems engineering research community has been aware of this change and is playing a key role in expanding the system boundaries from chemical process systems to business process systems. The global optimization of a SC network is an extremely complex task. For this reason, SC decisions are typically divided into three decision levels: the operational (scheduling), the tactical (planning), and the strategic (design). Since most academic developments are too distant from industrial environments, the aim of this thesis is to be a step forward in narrowing the gap between planning and scheduling theory and practice by devising efficient mathematical approaches for solving real-life industrial scheduling and planning problems. An overview of production planning and scheduling, an analysis of existing approaches, methods and tools used throughout this study are first presented. The second part of this thesis is focused on the development of mathematical models for production processes with continuous parallel units. In this part, a novel mathematical programming framework is developed based on elegant modeling of the underlying problem. This work addresses challenging problems in a highly complex real-life bottling facility. The proposed framework addresses appropriately important changeover aspects such as changeover carryover and crossover, thereby leading to solutions with resulting in higher utilization of resources. The third part is focused on semicontinuous industries, which combine continuous and batch operation modes. First, a mathematical programming framework and a solution strategy are presented for the optimal production scheduling of multiproduct multistage semicontinuous process industries. A problem in an ice-cream production line has been considered; and it has been successfully solved. Second, a general mathematical programming approach is developed for the resource-constrained production planning problem in semicontinuous processes. This work has been motivated by a challenging problem in food processing industries related to yogurt production lines, where labor constitutes the limited resource constraint. Third, a novel mathematical formulation for the simultaneous optimization of production and logistics operations planning in large-scale single- or multi-site semicontinuous process industries is proposed. Alternative transportation modes are considered. Two industrial-size case studies for a real-life dairy industry have been solved. The forth part of the thesis deals with scheduling in batch processes. First, a real-life multiproduct multistage pharmaceuticals production facility is considered. A systematic two-stage iterative solution strategy, based on mathematical programming, has been developed to address this problem. Additionally, a new precedence concept have been developed in order to cope with objectives containing changeover issues. A salient feature of the proposed approach is that the scheduler can maintain the number of decisions at a reasonable level, thus reducing the solution search space. This often ensures a more stable and predictable optimization model behavior. Finally, a preliminary two-layered decomposition method to the batch process scheduling problem in multipurpose production plants is developed. The procedure is tested on several instances of a benchmark scheduling problem that considers a polymers production plant. / Hoy en día, debido a que las condiciones económicas y políticas cambian rápidamente, las empresas globales se enfrentan a un desafío continuo para reevaluar constantemente y configurar de forma óptima las operaciones de su cadena de suministro (CS) para alcanzar los índices de rendimiento clave, tales como la reducción de costes de rentabilidad y servicio al cliente. Las empresas buscan optimizar sus CSs en respuesta a presiones de la competencia o para adquirir ventaja de una mayor flexibilidad en las restricciones sobre todo en el comercio mundial. Las industrias de proceso también siguen esta tendencia. La comunidad que investiga la ingeniería de los sistemas de procesos ha sido consciente de este cambio y, hoy en día, está jugando un papel clave en la expansión de los límites de los sistemas más allá de los procesos químicos para incluir también los sistemas de negocio. La optimización global de una red CS es una tarea extremadamente compleja. Por esta razón, las decisiones CS por lo general contemplan tres niveles de decisión: operativo (programación de operaciones), táctico (planificación de la producción) y estratégico (diseño). La planificación de la producción y la programación de operaciones constituyen una parte crucial de los niveles de decisión jerarquizados de la CS completa. Las actividades de planificación y programación tratan de la asignación en el tiempo de los recursos escasos entre actividades que compiten para satisfacer de forma eficiente dichas necesidades. Más concretamente, la función de planificación tiene como objetivo optimizar el rendimiento económico de la empresa, ya que debe hacer coincidir la producción con la demanda de la mejor manera posible. El componente de programación de la producción es de vital importancia ya que es la capa que traduce los imperativos económicos del plan en una secuencia de acciones a ser ejecutadas en la planta, con el fin de ofrecer el rendimiento económico optimizado previsto por el plan de alto nivel. En general, las investigaciones recientes se dirigen a la búsqueda de soluciones que permitan un manejo eficiente y preciso de problemas de gran tamaño y de complejidad cada vez mayor. Sin embargo, queda mucho trabajo por hacer tanto en las mejoras del modelo como en las mejoras en los algoritmos de solución del problema, cuando se trata de abordar de manera rutinaria problemas relevantes para la industria, donde el software producido debe ser utilizado de manera regular por los profesionales en el campo. Además, los nuevos desarrollos académicos son en su mayoría de cierta complejidad, pero relativamente de pequeño tamaño comparados con los problemas industriales incluso de mediano tamaño. Por lo tanto, la aplicación de nuevas estrategias de producción y nuevos enfoques de programación en los estudios industriales en la vida real constituye un reto difícil. Como la mayoría de los desarrollos académicos están demasiado lejos del entorno de aplicabilidad industrial, el objetivo de esta tesis es dar un paso significativo en la reducción del salto existente entre la teoría y la práctica de la planificación y programación mediante la elaboración de enfoques eficaces de programación matemática para la solución

No description available.

This thesis provides an assessment of the factors influencing the politics of the European social dimension. In recent years the debate on European social legislation has often assumed centre stage on the transnational and national policy agendas of many member states. However, compared with the rapid implementation of the measures aimed at bringing about the creation of the internal market, there has been little progress in the creation of a floor of European social rights which Jacques Delors had called for in 1989. This research seeks to highlight the determining factors behind the slow progress of the European social dimension. As the member state, through their representation at the European Council/Council of Ministers remain the prime decision-making powers, this study focused on the factors shaping decision-making in two member states, Britain and Germany. These two countries are held to represent different welfare state regime types (Esping-Andersen, 1990), divergent industrial relations systems and different styles of policy making. All the above factors have been held to shape policy outcomes in the social state and would therefore lead us to expect different approaches to the EC social dimension. The study equally seeks to assess claims that "trade union failure" is partly to blame for the lack of progress in European social policy making. Different authors have stressed their failure to adapt their organisational structures to the challenges of European integration. Different views represented between national affiliates and structural weakness of the trade unions were also considered to be important factors. Britain and Germany represent very different positions within the European Communities and towards the social dimension in particular. This is to some extent conditioned by their industrial relations and welfare state systems, but this cannot fully explain why certain positions are adopted in the Council. In Germany the economic challenges arising form the world recession and German unification have led to substantial changes in social policy making.

The purp04e of this research was to evaluate compulsory arbitration in Australia and elsewhere against a criterion of industrial conflict; and to contribute to knowledge of industrial conflict and relations in industry. Part I outlines the origins, history and development of the Australian system. Analysis brought out:- 1. Impressive growth ot the system. 2. Regional differences in growth. 3. Preoccupation with economic and material disputes and only the legal and logical aspects of these. 4. Extreme complexity, formality, "legalism", delay and expense. 5. That prevailing tactics of parties and specialists were determining the work and influence of the ,yst_. 6. The inefficacy of laws, penalties, sanctions and compulsion either to prevent or settle strikes. 7. That conciliation had declined to become negligible. 8. That compulsion was enabling the parties to avoid responsibility to their constituents. Part II compares and analyses industrial conflict in various countries. Australia was observed to have a greater strike problem than most comparable countries. The pattern of industrial conflict in Australia and New Zealand appeared distinctive, strikes being comparitively numerous and Short. Further analysis of industrial conflict in Australia covered regional comparisons, economic influences, industrial distribution, duration, causes and results of strikes. Part III applies the foregoing investigations to the ii purposes of the research. The Australian system, judged by international and regional comparisons was found wanting; ,and compulsory arbitration seemed doubtfully appropriate for the problems of industrial conflict under any circumstances. Industrial conflict itself was considered, first to achieve comprehensive perspective and establish the generalisei "unrest" which underlies conflict; and secondly to consider its constituents namely trade unions and informal groups. A frame ot reference orientated on psychological and sociological viewpoints was established, and applied to comprehend some observations ot industrial conflict. Finally the implications tor practice were coniidered, and suggestions tor reform of the Australian compulsory arbitration system expressed.