An Investigation into Industrial Strike Activity in Britain.

This paper has applied a model of employee-management relations to the British economy and tested its implications with aggregate and industry data since the 1950s. Though the results are generally encouraging, it is necessary to stress the following cautionary notes.
1. Theoretical formulations different from that described in the first section of this paper could specify the relationship estimated in Sections II and III. The advantage of the present approach, however, is that it replaces improvised ad hoc explanations of strike activity with a behavioural model which, unlike rival bargaining models, does yield refutable implications. Amendments and extensions of the model to take account of particular institutional arrangements should improve its performance.
2. The high coefficients of determination, especially in some of the industry regressions, tend to conceal rather than reveal explanatory behaviour. The association of strike activity with the level of demand in the labour market seems established, but the significant trend terms are not themselves explanatory variables and call for interpretation. One possibility is that they are proxies for aging institutional structures increasingly unwilling or unable to accommodate the growing post-war shift in the balance of power between management and labour without the parties having to resort to the strike weapon. Other explanations have been proposed; but many are difficult to quantify in a statistical study of this kind, and the use of other methods of analysis may prove more rewarding. Certainly, in so far as the frequency of strikes is an index of the smooth operation of Britain's system of industrial relations--and surely there are many facets other than strike activity to take into account--there is nothing in the results in this paper to suggest that the mounting criticism of its performance is unwarranted.
Notwithstanding these limitations, the findings reported in this paper suggest that... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]