PRODUCT MARKETS, LABOUR MARKETS, AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS: THE CASE OF FLOUR MILLING.

This article examines the interaction between employers' product market activities and labor market strategies in flour milling. Flour milling was an industry which in the interwar years considered itself and was held by others to have developed a particularly comprehensive and exemplary system of industrial relations. The article also provides a perspective on the rise and decline of national collective bargaining in Great Britain. The standard interpretation, as best articulated by the Donovan Royal Commission and the Oxford School of Industrial Relations, places paramount emphasis on factors endogenous to the industrial relations system and in particular on the role of the trade union. In the product market, collusive arrangements such as market sharing and price fixing had a long history in many British industries. In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, confronted by new competitive pressures and threat to profit margins, there was a growth in trade associations and collusive practices. It was learned that during the First World War, encouraged by government controls and rationing, both formal associations and informal restrictive practices increased further. The merger wave and increase in concentration which occurred in the 1920s made it possible in some industries for a smaller number of larger firms to organise collusion.