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Assessing the impact of private equity on industrial relations in Europe
journal contribution
posted on 2016-01-08, 12:19 authored by Nick Bacon, Mike Wright, Louise ScholesLouise Scholes, Miguel MeulemanPrivate equity firms are accused by trade unions of changing industrial relations in buyouts by
demonstrating an unwillingness to recognize and work with trade unions, and by downgrading
information and consultation. To explore these important policy issues, this article reports the
first representative pan-European survey of managers’ perceptions of the impact of private equity
on industrial relations. Managers report that private equity investment does not result in changes
to union recognition, membership density or changes in management attitudes to trade union
membership. Furthermore, managers in firms recognizing unions after private equity buyouts do
not report reductions in the terms and conditions subject to joint regulation. Under private
equity ownership more firms report consultative committees, managers regard these as more
influential on their decisions, and indicate increased consultation over firm performance and
future plans. Comparing industrial relations changes in different social models in Europe, the
results suggest private equity firms adapt to national systems and traditional national industrial
relations differences persist after buyout.
Funding
The authors would like to thank EVCA for financial support for this study.
History
School
- Loughborough University London
Published in
Human RelationsVolume
63Issue
9Pages
1343 - 1370Citation
BACON, N. ... et al., 2010. Assessing the impact of private equity on industrial relations in Europe. Human Relations, 63 (9), pp. 1343 - 1370.Publisher
SAGE © The Author(s)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2010Notes
Closed accessISSN
0018-7267eISSN
1741-282XPublisher version
Language
- en