Legislation as an appropriate medium for controlling industrial relations – a view from history.

Otto Kahn Freund, one of the greatest of labour lawyers, thought that ‘the part played by the law in the regulation of relations between employers and their organizations on the one hand and trade unions on the other is problematical everywhere.’ He also compared the voluntary system of industrial relations in Britain with the highly regulated German system and found that almost every fault that he had seen in the industrial relations of the Weimar Republic could be matched by a virtue in the British system which was based on voluntarism.