© 2002 by Industrial Law Society
What shall we do with the CAC?
1 University College London
This article considers the value of the Central Arbitration Committee, in respect of the whole range of its activities over some eighty years, as an official arbitration body operating solely within the area of industrial relations. In order to do so it reviews in outline the history of industrial arbitration leading to the establishment of the Industrial Court, the work of that Court from 1919 to 1976, and of its successor, the CAC, from 1976 to 2000. The article explains, in considerably more detail, the principal present function of the CAC. In this respect the purpose is not to provide a working manual on the practice and procedure of compulsory trade union recognition. The author, indeed, feels that such an attempt would be ill-advised, and would inevitably lead to suggestions of precedent with all the effects that might have on restriction of the unique expert and informed discretion that has been exercised throughout the history of this body. It is to that expertise that the author wishes to draw attention, particularly in the light of discussion of new legislative directions in collective labour relations, with a view to making use of a valuable instrument for the resolution of labour issues, in preference to the mothballing from which the CAC suffered after 1982.