Labour Relations in the United Kingdom and United States of America: Separated by Much More than a Common Language?
Gregor Gall
What the paper says
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.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.