Conference examines Employer Collective Action

Cardiff Business School will host the 30^th Cardiff Employment Research Unit (ERU) Conference from Thursday 15 to Friday 16 September 2016.

Dr Leon Gooberman, Dr Marco Hauptmeier and Professor Edmund Heery, from Cardiff Business School’s Management, Employment and Organisation section, are the academic hosts for the conference, which will be held in the Postgraduate Teaching Centre.

Professor Cathie Jo Martin, Professor of Political Science at Boston University, is one of the keynote speakers. Professor Martin is a former chair of the Council for European Studies and specialises in the relationship between business and social policy.

The conference will focus on employers’ collective action and organisation which is an established, but also growing, feature of business systems. In many countries employers' associations continue to set industry-wide terms and conditions through collective bargaining with trade unions. In other contexts, where industry bargaining has collapsed, long-established employers' associations continue to exist but with a different function and purpose. In these cases, training initiatives and delivery of services to member firms have grown in importance.

Other employer and business organisations lobby governments with the aim of influencing employment and labour policies while recent decades have seen the emergence of new forms of employers’ organisations. These are single issue organisations which focus on CSR and equality and diversity.

While employer organisations are well established, and the range of their activities is broad, collective action by employers is an underexplored area. The ambition of this conference is therefore to extend theoretical and empirical understanding of this significant yet neglected institutions.

Find out more about the conference.