Guest Editors: Whyeda Gill-McLure and Christer Thörnqvist
Foreword by John Whitley (Grandson of J. H. Whitley)
I am delighted to welcome this special issue of Labor History as the grandson of the man who gave his name to Whitley Councils and Whitleyism. The history of Whitleyism is a subject sparsely represented in the Whitley Collection at HuddersfieldFootnote1 and also hitherto under-researched by scholars in general.
The timing of this Special Issue is doubly fitting since it not only marks a hundred years of Whitleyism but also coincides with the publication of a collection of papers covering many aspects of my grandfather’s varied career: Liberal Reform and Industrial Relations: J. H. Whitley (1866–1935) Halifax Radical and Speaker of the House of Commons (Routledge, 2017).
Those papers, arising from a conference on ‘The Life and Times of J. H. Whitley’ at Huddersfield in 2016, cover his deep family roots in Halifax, his involvement there in industry, social work and local government, as well as parts of his subsequent career as Liberal MP, government minister, Deputy Speaker and Speaker, followed by chairmanships of the Royal Commission on Labour in India and of the BBC. Industrial relations feature especially in the chapters on his Halifax roots, Joint Industrial Councils (JICs) and Labour in India; but the focus of the chapter on JICs by Greg Patmore is the inter-war period, with international comparisons mainly limited to the US, Canada and Australia.Footnote2
Now this Special Issue will complement that chapter very substantially through its timespan reaching to the present, its wider selection of international examples and above all its detailed focus on public service industrial relations. After the very limited impact of the Whitley approach in UK industry as a whole, its main claim to fame has been its adoption in the Civil Service. As Whyeda Gill-McLure puts it ‘public sector Whitleyism came to embody the tenets of progressive public administration by providing nationally determined pay, career progression and a public service ethos.’ But, with these hard-won gains now threatened, her examination of the weaknesses and strengths of the Whitley model for managing public services is most timely, inevitably raising questions about any future potential.
The emphasis on public service ethos would specially appeal to my grandfather whose whole life was guided by a sense of public service and whose aim was to ‘harness the human factor in industry by linking all the workers in a frank partnership for the common good’. The question of how far those ideals could be applied to harsh realities over the past century or even into the future remains pertinent and I warmly welcome Whyeda Gill-McLure’s expressed interest in pursuing them beyond this Special Issue which she says ‘like all social science inquiries begs as many questions as it answers’. Further work in this field will complement the growing body of research relating to my grandfather’s life and legacy prompted by Huddersfield’s Whitley Collection. One addition to this further work will be her own book Local Government Employment Relations - The Making of the Good Employer? (forthcoming, Routledge 2018).
John Whitley
Notes
1. This small but interesting collection of papers was deposited by the family in 2011 at the University of Huddersfield, which has established an annual series of J. H. Whitley Lectures and encourages research (www.heritagequay.org/archives).
2. ‘Industrial relations and joint industrial councils: the UK and beyond 1916–1939’ is drawn from a broader study of employee representation in the inter-war period, see G. Patmore, Worker Voice: Employee Representation in the Workplace in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and the US 1914–1939, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2016.