Trade Unions, Management and Productivity

A key to raising productivity may be to stimulate product market competition, and this will need a complementary policy of relatively low unit labour costs — best achieved through managers developing their social skills, abilities, knowledge and understanding of how the labour market works. Change could be assessed by a small internal project team, whose task is to outline both technical implementation, and industrial relations and managerial consequences of the new methods. Any “inertia” preventing productivity being raised must be identified and defeated. Initial responsibility lies with management, this method being perhaps the best to secure workforce co‐operation to raise Britain from being a low income, low productivity nation.