Industrial Relations Journal 32:3 ISSN 0019-8692 The limits of statutory trade union recognition William Brown, Simon Deakin, Maria Hudson and Cliff Pratten The paper assesses the prospects for Britain’s new statutory trade union recognition procedure in the light of empirical evi- dence concerning union derecognition practice in the 1990s. It draws on 15 cases of union derecognition across a broad spread of employment, matched with comparable cases where recognition was retained. Inter alia it was found that a move towards more cooperative workplace arrangements, associa- ted with a ‘partnership’ model of industrial relations, was common to employers in both categories. Against this back- ground, we argue that it is far from clear that the current legislative strategy, in focusing on statutory recognition, is the best way of promoting partnership at work. Introduction The statutory recognition rights provided by the Employment Relations Act 1999 appear to offer substantial new legal support for trade unions in Britain. It is, how- ever, far from clear how substantial this support will prove to be in practice, or how far it will alter the extent and conduct of collective bargaining. There have already been some broad-ranging analyses in anticipation of the legislation (McCarthy, 1999; Wood and Godard, 1999; Towers, 1999). This paper uses an analysis of recent empiri- cal evidence to examine and evaluate the legal conceptions that underpin the new procedures. Although the law increasingly acknowledges alternative forms of employee rep- resentation, the promotion of collective bargaining through a recognised trade union is ‘still the favoured means of advancing the interests of both unions and workers’ (McCarthy, 2000: 530). There are inherent difficulties in using legal sanctions to bring parties to the bargaining table; the 1999 Act, accordingly, holds the threat of statutory recognition in reserve for situations where the parties have failed to make provision ❒ William Brown is Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations, Simon Deakin is Reader in Economic Law, Maria Hudson is Research Associate and Cliff Pratten is Senior Research Fellow, University of Cambridge.  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2001, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main St., Malden, MA 02148, USA. 180 Industrial Relations Journal