Labour Relations in the United Kingdom and United States of America: Separated by Much More than a Common Language?

Abstract

The UK and the USA are often said to be ‘two countries separated by a common language'. The salience of this comes into play when one considers that important reforms to union rights in the USA have never actually come into being despite being called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and the Protecting the Right to Organise (PRO) Act. By contrast, in the so-called ‘Mother of Parliaments' in the UK, a piece of what might become legislation is introduced as a Bill and, when passed through both Houses with majority support and after gaining Royal Assent, only then becomes an Act. Had EFCA and the PRO Act been passed, the situation for unions might not be as terrible as it presently is. But that is not necessarily a reason why the grass is always greener in the UK. The forthcoming Employment Rights Act 2025 covering key collective components on access rights, recognition, collective bargaining, and industrial action is a case of ‘two steps forward, one step back', highlighting the veracity of William Shakespeare's adage from Macbeth that ‘Nothing is but what is not’. It is concluded that both the UK and the USA now need a labour/labor party, which is sincerely social democratic if the fortunes of organised labour are to ever return to the promise they held out in the early post-war period.

Introduction

The United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA) are often said to be ‘two countries separated by a common language’. Although attributed to Irish playwright and political activist, George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) in 1942 in an interview, a similar aphorism has also been attributed to fellow Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). In The Canterville Ghost (1887), Wilde wrote: ‘We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language’. Some even venture that British Conservative politician, Winston Churchill (1874–1965), also made a similar statement.

The salience of this comes into play when one considers that important reforms to union rights in the USA have never actually come into being despite being called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) and the Protecting the Right to Organise (PRO) Act. By contrast, in the so-called ‘Mother of Parliaments’ in the UK, a piece of what might become legislation is introduced as a Bill and, when passed through both Houses with majority support and after gaining Royal Assent, only then becomes an Act.

Had EFCA and the PRO Act been passed, the situation for unions might not be as terrible as it presently is. Indeed, had EFCA been passed, the PRO Act might not have been created. Although only an imperfect proxy measure for overall union strength and vitality, union density is the best available one we have. In 2024, it was 9.9% having been 20.1% in 1983 (BLS 2025). That it has remained around the 10% mark for the last few years is no great consolation. Since 2001, the annual number of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certification elections have fallen from c.2,500 to c.1,500 by 2024, overshadowing the ‘win rate’ increasing from 55% to above 70% and a slight uptick in the number of workers brought under certification (see Dirnbach 2024). Of course, Acts can be repealed and rescinded by subsequent Congresses including those dominated by Republicans and supporters of Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, given that EFCA began its initial Congressional existence in 2007 and 2009, if passed, its influence may have existed for more than a decade. And, given that the PRO act began its initial Congressional existence in 2019 and 2021, if passed its influence may have existed for more than half a decade. Though the ‘Clean Slate’ proposals (Block and Sachs 2020) suggest the likes of EFCA and PRO Act would have been insufficient to fundamentally reconfigure labour relations and the balance of power between capital and labour in the workplace and economy because they seek to reform the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) 1935 rather than do away with it, it seems indisputable that the two putative Acts would have helped in some measure. EFCA would have allowed union certification via cardcheck rather than only by requiring a ballot which is more open to employer interference while the PRO Act would limit the latitude for unfair labour practices.

Two-Term Trump: Take Two

Trump's first Presidency gave more than a flavour of what the implementation of his reactionary, right-wing politics meant for unions. Unless the Constitution is changed or a coup d’etat is staged, his second Presidency will be his last. This and Trump's egotism are what help explain why this Presidency is so super-charged in terms of quickly seeking to make widespread and deep-seated changes in economy, polity and society.

Paradoxically, it may seem that the Trump presidency is in no need of repealing or even amending the already much weakened NLRA. Indeed, what it has done, early on, is to stymie the ability of the NLRB to do conduct any business by firing two of its members – both Democrats – so that the Board cannot have a quorum. But, alas, that would be to ignore the intent of the Trump presidency to be a truly transformational one in pushing further back any remaining rights workers and unions have. Consequently, the desire to institutionalise non-union forms of worker representation exists through reviving the proposals contained in the Teamwork for Employees and Managers Act – again not an Act – from the mid-1990s and the early 2020s. There is also the intent to remove unions from the public sector and prevent usage of cardcheck certification so that only ballots can be used (where the latitude for employer interference is greater). Such proposals were laid out in detail by Berry (2023:581–618) in Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Dans and Groves 2023).

It was, therefore, no surprise that no major national union backed Trump but it was that many like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), International Longshoremen's Association and the International Association of Fire Fighters did not back Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, either. Many of the IBT's members did back Trump, however. The American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) backed Harris as did the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and United Autoworkers. Harris was an original co-sponsor of the PRO Act and promised to sign it into law if elected President (albeit this would have required it passing through both Houses of Congress as a result of Democratic control). Those unions that supported Harris were able to do so because their members either supported Harris or detested Trump and were pleased by Harris’ PRO Act pledge. Presumably, the MAGA element of bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US and maintaining those remaining – through raising tariffs – played some part in influencing the like of many IBT members to support Trump ¹ as did his pledge to halt immigration. Whether MAGA will strengthen the hand of workers in the labour market remains to be seen. If Brexit in Britain is any guide here - with one of its key drivers being to reduce immigration – then there has been no notable increase in workers’ bargaining power in the labour market despite skill shortages in some sectors. This relates to the declining share of national income, in the form of wages and benefits, accruing to labour. Since the early 2000s, the share has fallen by 3.5%, representing a greater decline than at any time since 1960 (Abdih and Danninger 2017:4). About of fifth of this decline was attributed by Abdih and Danninger (2017:16) to declining unionisation. This gives some basis to American investor and philanthropist, Warren Buffett's statement: ‘There's class warfare, all right but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we’re winning’ (New York Times 26 November 2006).

The Grass is Always Greener …

The aphorism that ‘the grass is greener on the other side’ dates back to the Greek poet, Ovid: ‘The harvest is always richer in another man's field’. In the US, it is often known from a folk song written by Egan and Whiting in 1924 called ‘The Grass Is Always Greener in the Other Fellow's Yard.’ And so, for many decades, labour relations scholars in the US have often longingly looked northwards to Canada to seek to understand the whys and wherefores of a similar – being also based upon the NLRA – but seemingly superior labour relations system (or series of systems). Some, like Turner (1998), then began to look eastwards towards Europe (Germany and Sweden in particular) with its systems of codetermination which are de jure non-union but de facto unionised.

However, given the longstanding ‘The Special Relationship’ between the UK and USA, it's more appropriate to cast an eye eastward but which stops short of viewing continental Europe. ‘The Special Relationship’ is a term used to describe the close political, social, cultural, military and economic relations between the UK and the USA through its governments and their leaders. The term first came into popular circulation after its usage in a speech in 1946 former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It has been personified particularly by the relationships between Presidents and Prime Ministers of Reagan and Thatcher, on the one hand, and by Clinton and Blair, on the other. ‘The Special Relationship’ seems somewhat one-way in as much as the UK has followed the US down the road of labour market deregulation and further regulating unions’ activities, albeit from different starting points and with much difference remaining. For this and other reasons, the UK has often been disparagingly described as the ‘51^st state’ of the USA.

Despite this it may at first sight seem the UK is diverging from going further down an American avenue. The laying of the Employment Rights Bill (ERB) 2024 before Parliament on 10 October 2024 represents Labour's settled will on reforming industrial relations after its last act of employment law reform, namely, the Employment Relations Act (ERA) 1999. The ERB covers the key collective components on access rights, recognition, collective bargaining, and industrial action. But all is not quite as it seems, echoing William Shakespeare's adage that ‘Nothing is but what is not’ from Macbeth.

Union Access

The Bill contains a new provision for union access to workplaces for recruitment and organising. However, this is not a right as such but rather a mechanism for facilitating access where certain criteria are met. A union can ask employers to enter into an access agreement, and if they refuse, the union can then apply to the Central Arbitration Committee (CAC), which can effectively impose an access arrangement. As with the process for gaining recognition, applying for access will not be a quick or easy. But just as tellingly, if employer fail to observe access agreements or CAC-imposed arrangements, there are no means for compelling them to comply. A union can make another reference to the CAC to have financial penalties imposed upon recalcitrant employer, but these will be payable to the government and not unions.

Union recognition: The limitations and restrictions of the statutory union recognition procedure ERA, introduced on 6 June 2000, are well-documented (see Gall 2012). Between 6 June 2000 and 31 March 2024, only 1396 applications were made to the CAC. Just 413 resulted in statutory recognition, with a further 200 resulting in voluntary recognition. In this situation, the extent of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements has fallen from 36% in 2000 to 30% in 2023. There are several positive steps set out in the Bill. First, deleting the requirement for unions to have the support of at least 40% of all those entitled to vote in the ballot and replacing this with the requirement of a simple majority of those voting to win the ballot. Second, deleting the requirement for a union's application to demonstrate it is likely to win a ballot (by worker support via a petition or by membership density) and replacing this with the requirement the union only need to show a minimum of 10% membership for the application to be accepted and progressed to the next stage. Yet the potency of all this is undermined by palpable absence of union access rights.

Collective bargaining: Labour's earlier commitment to legislate to create a statutory underpinning for the right to sectoral bargaining has been removed except for school support staff in England (which is an act of restitution), and for adult social care workers in England and Wales. In both cases, however, the procedures for doing so will be subject to tight government control in terms of remit and budget. And, ultimately, the government may also veto any agreement it does not like and unilaterally impose terms and conditions in either sector.

Strikes and industrial action: ERB repeals the Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 and most of the obligations of the Trade Union Act 2016, so that a simple majority vote in favour of strike or industrial action is restored, ending the minimum 50% turnout requirement and the additional restriction in important public services which required the majority vote to be tantamount to at least 40% of those eligible to vote. The period of notice for action is proposed to be returned to 7 days. However, this still leaves all the other Conservative anti-unions laws of 1979 to 1997 in place. Consequently, unions will still be required to give notice of an intention to ballot, to hold a postal ballot, and to give notice of an intention to strike, a process which must be refreshed if the action continues beyond the proposed increase in the validity of the mandate from 6–12 months. This, therefore, essentially reiterates the statement by Blair in the Foreword to the 1998 ‘Fairness at Work’ White Paper which became the ERA that: ‘The days of strikes without ballots, mass picketing, closed shops and secondary action are over. Even after the changes we propose, Britain will have the most lightly regulated labour market of any leading economy in the world’.

This brief overview makes it clear the ERB is hardly a significant step forward and broadly maintains the position of the UK in the shadow of the US in these matters. That is why, despite Brexit, many labour relations scholars in Britain look to the EU, where the coverage of collective bargaining is generally much higher and where national governments have been instructed to draw up national action plans by November 2025 to raise the coverage of collective bargaining above 80%. Presently, only Austria, Italy, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France and Belgium are above the 80% threshold. Nineteen are not.

Conclusion

Alter-factually and notwithstanding the move of social democratic parties – including the British Labour Party – to embrace neo-liberalism, the historical absence of a mass party of labour is a major contributory factor to unions’ present predicament in the US. There have been numerous attempts to establish federal labour parties in the twentieth century but none lasted more than 20 years or broke out of their marginalisation. Though there have been many explanations put forward for such ‘American exceptionalism’ when compared to Europe, the influence of ‘The New Deal’ in the 1930s under Democratic President Roosevelt must rankly highly amongst them.

So, it may seem rather fantastical to suggest in 2025 that only a revival of striking of the qualitative and quantitative type of the twentieth century – especially in the late 1910s, the mid-1930s, late 1940s/early 1950s, and late 1960s/early 1970s – can provide any kind of platform for hoping that workers’ own collective agency could bring about a revival in the fortunes of unions within a reformed architecture of labour relations. This is even more so given that the uptick in strikes in the 2020s has been slight and, maybe, somewhat superficial when viewed through a longer historical lens. Nevertheless, and with such a turn to the reactionary right in the US body politic, this remains a theoretically plausible if neither practically probable contention. Indeed, if we recall one senior union official's reaction to the SEIU's return to the AFL-CIO in 2025 after its sojourn with the ‘Change to Win’ coalition ² being ‘What did they change and what did they win?’ (Morning Star 11 January 2025), this contention does not seem quite so absurd.