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Ruth Dukes, Trade Unions and The British Industrial Relations Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Hugh Clegg, Industrial Law Journal, Volume 54, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 199–201, https://doi.org/10.1093/indlaw/dwaf001
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Extract
Scholars and practitioners of labour law may be quite familiar with the name Hugh Clegg (1920–95). A founding member of the post-war ‘Oxford School’ of industrial relations, he was also a lead author of the Donovan Report1 and a close colleague and sometime collaborator of Otto Kahn-Freund. Peter Ackers’ new book, Trade Unions and the British Industrial Relations Crisis, offers a detailed account of Clegg’s childhood, youth and married life, his career as an academic at Oxford and Warwick and his involvement for many years in the administration of industrial relations and the development of public policy. In covering Clegg’s early life in such detail, Ackers is concerned to understand Clegg’s later motivations, his approach to scholarship and political opinion: in particular, his adherence to a belief in the virtues of pluralism and voluntarism in the sphere of industrial relations. From a labour law perspective, the volume is of particular interest for the light it sheds on Clegg’s involvement in public policy formation in the 1960s and 70s—serving not only the Donovan Commission but also on the Devlin Committee of Enquiry into industrial conflict, casualisation and inefficiency in the docks (1964), the National Board of Prices and Incomes (1966–67), and the ill-fated Pay Comparability Commission (1979–80).
