TAYLOR, Robert 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born 1943.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton St., London WC2A 2AE, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Journalist. Economist, political reporter; New Society, industrial correspondent; Observer, labor editor; Financial Times, employment editor; Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, England, research associate. Warwick University Business School, research associate; Nuffield, visiting fellow, 2001-02; Economic and Social Research Council, media fellow, 2000-03.

WRITINGS:

Labour and the Social Contract, Fabian Society (London, England), 1978.

The Fifth Estate: Britain's Unions in the Seventies, Routledge and Kegan Paul (Boston, MA), 1978, revised and published as The Fifth Estate: Britain's Unions in the Modern World, Pan (London, England), 1980.

The Crisis of American Labour, Fabian Society (London, England), 1980.

Workers and the New Depression, Macmillan (London, England), 1982.

The Trade Union Question in British Politics: Government and Unions since 1945, Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1993.

The Future of the Trade Unions, Andre Deutsch (London, England), 1994.

The TUC: From the General Strike to New Unionism, Palgrave (New York, NY), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS:

Robert Taylor's career has focused on labor and union issues, first when he was a journalist for prominent British publications, and then when he became a researcher at the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The CEP was established by the Economic and Social Research Council in 1990 and has become one of Europe's leading research groups. It studies how economic performance is determined at the company, national, and global levels by studying the links between technology, globalization, and institutions, particularly education and the labor market, and how they impact employment, productivity, and stability.

One of Taylor's earlier books is The Fifth Estate: Britain's Unions in the Seventies, written while he was labor editor at the London Observer. Taylor, who is pro-union, criticizes unions for failing to secure real wage increases for workers, for failing to help those at the lower end of the pay scale, and for failing to push for adequate safety and health standards. An Economist contributor said that Taylor "points out, rightly, that the curse of Britain's industrial relations is not that unions have too much power but that they use what power they have in a negative way."

New Statesman's R. W. Johnson wrote that The Fifth Estate "represents a rare achievement. It is a clear, clear-headed, well-written, fair and factual account of the British trade union movement which pulls together a wide range of secondary material and spices it with interviews and reportage."

Workers and the New Depression is Taylor's journalistic study of the plight of workers, particularly manual workers, during a period of economic downturn. Clarke A. Chambers wrote in History that "historians interested in understanding the ways in which economic dynamics play themselves out under presumably different economic systems—socialist, free enterprise, or mixed—will be intrigued by this analysis of flaws in the British economy as it began to falter in the 1970s." Taylor points out that manual workers are disproportionately effected by a combination of the recession and long-term changes which leave them, as a group, without representation, either by the unions or by any political party. This theme runs through his essays on training policies and practices, productivity, workplace inequalities, and the power of the trade unions.

In the sixteen years between the publication of The Fifth Estate and The Future of the Trade Unions, union membership had fallen by half. In the latter volume, published while Taylor was an editor at the Financial Times, he studies labor movement reform. He notes that the number of unions affiliated with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) have also been reduced, through mergers, by nearly half and writes of the necessity for labor unions to take into consideration the particular needs of women in the workforce.

Martin Spence wrote in Capital and Class that "the heart of Taylor's book is a consistent message, constantly hammered home, that partnership with employers is now the way forward, that this is increasingly accepted within the trade union movement, and that employers themselves are keen to cooperate.… Taylor's vision of employers sitting down in happy partnership with the unions is not meant to be a description of life as it is, but of life as the TUC would like it to be."

Taylor uses the institutions of the European Union as a model that would guarantee unions the right to recruit and to represent both union and nonunion workers in negotiations. In a Times Literary Supplement review, Robert Pinker wrote that Taylor "argues that it is time to strike a new balance between the claims of flexibility and security in the job market and the individual and collective interests of today's workers.… This is a challenging but refreshingly hopeful blueprint for the revival of a free and responsible trade union movement." An Economist contributor commented that "the book is crammed with facts and statistics."

In The TUC: From the General Strike to New Unionism, Taylor provides a history of the TUC and its leaders since the 1920s, including the most influential, and first full-time general secretary, Walter Citrine, and ends with a short chapter on the leadership of John Monks. History's Michael J. Moore wrote that Taylor "shows Citrine to have charted the ideals of the TUC—to be the unified head and voice for all trades unions and to have continuous influence on government as a state of the realm—which all subsequent leaders followed in their fashions."

Taylor provides detailed portraits of the most influential union leaders, all but one of whom headed the Transport and General Workers' Union. John Lloyd noted in the London Review of Books that "the figures Taylor describes—Citrine, Woodcock, Feather, Murray, Willis, and (now) Monks—are intelligent working-class men of necessarily even temper. They have tended to believe that unions could only increase their power and deliver higher standards of living to their members if the economy did well. This means that they have favoured, while never putting it so baldly, a successful capitalism, whose raw edges would be smoothed by the state and which would be constrained, by union power or legislation or preferably both, to negotiate with the unions."

Paul Routledge reviewed The TUC in New Statesman, noting that coverage of labor has all but disappeared or been relegated to short news stories on the business pages. "Fortunately," said Routledge, "we still have Robert Taylor, the employment editor (even the title has been changed from labour) of the Financial Times, whose dogged determination to prove that trade unions are relevant and valuable, both to their members and society at large, has survived the locust years of organised labour.…Taylor is a believer, and we need more like him."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Capital and Class, autumn, 1995, Martin Spence, review of The Future of the Trade Unions, pp. 153-155.

Economist, March 25, 1978, review of The Fifth Estate: Britain's Unions in the Seventies, p. 107; September 10, 1994, review of The Future of the Trade Unions, p. 108.

History, August, 1983, Clarke A. Chambers, review of Workers and the New Depression, p. 205; summer, 2001, Michael J. Moore, review of The TUC: From the General Strike to New Unionism, p. 159.

Industrial and Labor Relations Review, April, 1984, Derek Robinson, review of Workers and the New Depression, pp. 450-451; April, 1996, Brian Towers, review of The Future of the Trade Unions, pp. 560-561.

London Review of Books, October 19, 2000, John Lloyd, review of The TUC, pp. 31-34.

New Statesman, May 5, 1978, R. W. Johnson, review of The Fifth Estate, pp. 612-613; September 25, 2000, Paul Routledge, review of The TUC, pp. 78-79.

Times Literary Supplement, November 11, 1994, Robert Pinker, review of The Future of the Trade Unions, p. 21.*