The Information and Consultation of Employees (ICE) Regulations were variously hailed as a Trojan horse for trade unionism and as an end to the unions' unique selling point which endangered their very existence.
A study for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform suggests that both predictions may have been somewhat wide of the mark.
The report, titled Implementing information and consultation: early experience under the ICE Regulations (PDF, 1.3Mb) and based on 13 case studies, says that many bodies set up to meet the requirements of the Regulations have yet to move beyond "housekeeping" issues.
This will be a familiar picture for HR practitioners who have spent many a dreary hour sitting through meetings that thrash out concerns over the coffee machines and the state of the toilets. Not much change there on the old works council and staff committee model.
The research also pretty much confirms an IRS survey of 129 organisations (sbscription required) this time last year which looked at employers' response to the ICE requirements.
So at least the ICE Regulations haven't brought the world crashing down. There is even a fair degree of harmony in the companies investigated here between union reps, who usually have reserved seats on any employee forum, and directly elected non-union reps. But can anything more positive than that be said?
According to the team of researchers led by Mark Hall of the industrial relations research unit at the University of Warwick, there are some positives.
Despite the fact that many employees in the 13 case study organisations appeared unaware of an employee forum, a substantial number believed that its existence had improved their involvement with their employer.
And although most of the information provision was distinctly "top down", there were some real instances in which consultation had had some impact on management decisions, or at least on the way those decision were implemented.As the report notes, although the evidence is mixed and these are early days, employee forums aimed at meeting ICE requirements appear to perform at least as well as traditional collective bargaining systems.
To sum up, employee forums of this sort "are not trivial; they are taken seriously by management and the employee representatives; they are becoming more accepted by trade unions on the ground; and are likely to evolve over time".
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