How have UK industrial relations changed over the past 100 years?

As the centenary of the General Strike, 1926 is an apt starting point for considering how the governance of UK labour markets has evolved. But 1979 was the moment when the industrial relations system of high trade union and collective bargaining coverage reached maturity before falling into decline.

For economic historians, 1926 has double significance: it was, of course, the year in which the Economic History Society was founded, but it was also the year of the General Strike.

The latter originated in a crisis of coal. The industry was characterised by declining export markets, uneven productivity and weak profitability. The colliery owners hoped to resolve the profitability issue by breaking from the sectoral agreement and imposing wage cuts and longer hours on the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC), the peak national confederation of the country’s trade union movement, entered the fray because the dispute was understood as a test case for the whole labour movement. The premise was that should the miners – as one of the strongest sections of organised labour – be forced into wage cuts, longer hours and localised bargaining, then other industries would follow.

The TUC General Council therefore authorised and coordinated a wider stoppage involving 1.7 million workers across sectors like rail, docks, printing and transport to force government intervention on the miners’ behalf.

The endeavour quickly ended. Confronted by a determined Conservative government, which cast the dispute as an attack on the state’s authority and drew on emergency powers to secure essential services, the TUC retreated. After nine days, the strike ended without obtaining concessions for the miners.

While the failure of the strike was very much a political and strategic trauma for the TUC, it was not a decisive defeat for trade unionism. Indeed, collective bargaining and union membership expanded considerably in the decades after 1926 – and while strike activity was uneven, it was not suppressed by the defeat of the General Strike.

How do industrial relations today compare with 1926?

Given the centenary, 1926 is a serviceable starting point for considering how UK industrial relations have changed over the course of 100 years. The UK had a substantial, but not yet peak, level of trade unionism in 1926, as Figure 1 shows.

Figure 1: Trade union membership levels among employees in the UK, 1892 to 2024

Source: Department for Business and Trade

In that year, union membership stood at approximately 5.2 million members, with a union density (the proportion of workers who belong to a trade union) of around 28%. Membership had peaked in the previous decade, due to the exceptional wartime expansion, but subsequently entered a period of decline after the contraction of wartime industries, the recession of 1920-21 and rising unemployment.

Collective bargaining – negotiations between employers and groups of their employees – was overwhelmingly a private sector phenomenon estimated to cover about one-third of employees through national agreements, rising to about three-fifths if statutory wage-setting machinery – the trade boards – are included.

That collective presence was heavily concentrated in manual, industrial and transport sectors: coal, rail, docks, engineering, shipbuilding, iron and steel, cotton and printing. Trade boards (or, later, wage councils), extended regulation into less union-organised, lower-paid occupations such as tailoring and food, drink and tobacco.

Contemporary trends look very different. Trade union membership today is higher in absolute terms than in 1926, at around 6.6 million, but union density is lower at 22.4%. Membership today is concentrated in the public sector.

Collective bargaining coverage, at 39.9% of jobs, is also not insignificant, although it is sustained by public sector national machinery, where coverage is 89.6%. Private sector coverage is much weaker at 19.5%, and it is organised at the firm or workplace level rather than by industry.

Wage councils were disbanded by Conservative governments in the 1980s and 1990s (although Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales retain wage-setting mechanisms in agriculture). Today, statutory wage-setting comes via the national minimum wage.

Turning to industrial conflict, the standard measure is working days lost: the total number of days not worked because employees were involved in strike action. The General Strike of 1926 contributed to 162.2 million working days lost, a figure not repeated since (the closest is 1921 at 85.8 million due to another dispute in the then strike-prone coal mining sector).

Figure 2: Labour disputes: working days lost due to strike action in the UK

Source: Office of National Statistics Time Series

It is here that there is the sharpest contrast between 1926 and recent years: only 740,000 days were lost in 2025 (at the time of writing in 2026, the figure is 241,000).

Even the recent 2022-23 strike wave, in response to an uptick in inflationary pressures, remains modest by the standards of the 1920s: the whole two-year period produced around 5.2 million working days lost.

Industrial action in the 2020s is concentrated in public services and transport infrastructure. Rail, postal services, health, education and public administration are most strike-prone, reflecting the concentration of contemporary trade union organisation in these sectors.

Why is 1979 an important point of comparison?

Comparing just 1926 and 2026 is somewhat unsatisfactory, however, because it bypasses the period in which the UK’s collective industrial relations system of high trade union and collective bargaining coverage reached maturity and then fell into decline.

The sharper comparison in that respect is between 1979 and 2026. By the late 1970s, UK industrial relations had reached the high point of a long-run collectivising trajectory that pre-dated 1926. Trade union membership in 1979 had risen to 13.2 million, union density stood at 54%, collective bargaining coverage was over 70% and almost 30 million working days were lost due to industrial disputes.

The industrial unrest that culminated in 1979 evolved from a strike wave that had developed since the late 1960s. There was also a far broader social and sectoral formation to these trends than that found in 1926 and today.

Trade unionism and collective bargaining were not only rooted in older staple industries like coal, steel, rail, docks and printing, but in the newer post-war manufacturing sectors of motor vehicles, engineering, chemicals and consumer goods, as well as in local government, health, education and other public services.

The events of 1979 therefore capture the mature collective model of UK industrial relations at the time of its greatest institutional reach; whereas 2026 captures the consequences of the subsequent process of decollectivisation that followed in the 1980s and beyond.

How did collective industrial relations reach their peak?

We might then ask, how did the UK move from the patterns described for 1926 to 1979 to 2026? That explanation rests heavily on the rise and subsequent dismantling of a collective system of labour market regulation.

The institutional landscape evident in 1926 had older roots. From the late 19^th century, major employers and some politicians saw collective bargaining as a way to stabilise fragmented, conflict-prone industries. The 1894 Royal Commission on Labour reflected this shift.

In coal, cotton, steel, engineering, shipbuilding and transport, industry-wide agreements established common standards for wages and working hours. This benefitted employers by limiting wage undercutting and containing disputes within agreed machinery.

From this emerged what industrial relations scholars would later call ‘collective laissez-faire’: the state generally avoided direct wage-setting, while creating the legal and institutional conditions in which employers and unions could themselves regulate wages and conditions collectively.

This system was extended in the post-war decades. Full employment consolidated workers’ bargaining power, while nationalisation, public service expansion and state encouragement of union recognition embedded collective bargaining more deeply across the economy.

The internal character was also changed. Industry agreements remained important, but workplace bargaining took on significance. This is especially true in the large, unionised workplaces found in engineering, motor vehicles and chemicals where shop stewards, local agreements, overtime practices and demarcation rules shaped the everyday reality of industrial relations.

But by the 1960s and 1970s, governments and employers increasingly viewed this dense web of collectivisation as difficult to manage in the context of a rising number of strikes, inflation control, productivity improvement and managerial authority. Thus, the late 1970s would serve to act as both a high-water mark of that system as well as its crisis point.

Why did collective bargaining decline – and is it now returning?

What followed was a process of decollectivisation; some of which was a product of market forces, some of which was deliberately engineered by the state. Deindustrialisation weakened large, unionised sectors in which collective bargaining and strike activity had been most deeply rooted, including coal, steel, shipbuilding, textiles and parts of engineering and motor manufacturing.

Anti-union legislation by the state restricted the legal space for industrial action, making it more difficult to organise and sustain. Employment growth increasingly occurred in parts of the labour market that were less hospitable to union organisation: private services, smaller workplaces and new occupational types with little tradition of union membership.

The result was not simply a decline in union membership, but an erosion of the institutional and economic foundations on which collective bargaining and industrial action had depended.

In the present period, the consequences of decollectivisation have become a source of renewed concern in academic and policy circles. Recent work links many of the UK’s contemporary labour market problems to the weakening of institutions. For example, the Resolution Foundation estimates that union decline accounts for around one-sixth of the rise in male wage inequality between 1983 and 2019.

The question of trade unionism and collective bargaining connects closely with not only how labour markets distribute income, but also how they enforce standards and shape workplace productivity. This helps to explain re-emerging interest in policy circles in relation to collective bargaining.

The Labour government’s recent Employment Rights Act 2025 represents a partial response to such challenges, simplifying statutory union recognition, improving union access to the workplace, altering unfavourable trade union laws around balloting, and providing for new sectoral collective bargaining in the adult social care sector and in the educational (school support staff) sector in England.

The pivot in government policy hardly marks a restoration of the old collective model. But it does signal a very cautious recognition of collective regulation as a response to those inequalities produced, in part, by its decline.

In that sense, 100 years after the General Strike, we might say that 1926 points to an enduring problem at the heart of UK industrial relations: how are labour markets to be governed, and on whose terms?