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This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/03090599810204316. When citing the article, please cite: Mike Ironside, Roger Seifert, (1998), “Training and collective bargaining in European public services: a study of training-related issues in French, Finnish and UK health services”, Journal of European Industrial Training, Vol. 22 Iss: 2, pp. 66 - 72.

This paper is based on ESRC funded research conducted at the Centre for Industrial Relations at Keele University, and which broadly concerns the impact of industrial relations in schools, arising from education reforms, particularly the shift to Local Management of Schools since the early 1990s. We focus here upon school employees other than schoolteachers.

This paper discusses the development of workplace bargaining and trade union activity in schools in four English LEAs. It is based on a two year programme of research into industrial relations and the local management of schools, carried out at the Centre for Industrial Relations at Keele University. The research is funded by the ESRC.

It is frequently asserted that there is a link between the nature of training provision within an organization and its success or failure. Within this approach is an assumption that training is simply a neutral tool to be applied to the benefit of all. This article challenges this approach, arguing that training is an issue that may be the subject of disagreement and conflict. Using evidence gained from managers and trade union representatives in health care services in France, Finland and the UK, it is argued that all aspects of training provision are best handled through traditional collective bargaining procedures. This suggests that there is a need to provide training for managers and union representatives to enable them to understand both training issues and collective bargaining procedures.

While considerable research has been conducted into the reasons for union growth and decline at aggregate level, much less attention until recently has been paid to explaining differences between individuals and groups in the workplace concerning why some belong to a trade union and others do not. This research explores the attitudes to work, the company and the trade union among financial sector workers.

The paper examines the role of trade unions in the provision of continuous training. It first reviews the literature in this area and then considers evidence from a study of trade union involvement in the Spanish national training system managed by the social partners. The study finds that union involvement has led to improved training access for workers in SMEs in large part because of the union role as training provider and has contributed to social dialogue at sectoral and national level but has had a limited impact upon training in larger enterprises. The paper argues that an enterprise‐based social partnership model built around an independent union agenda for training has limited relevance for SMEs and that a more realistic approach is the development of sectoral social dialogue, “partnership at a distance”, capable of delivering outcomes which can be translated to the point of production.