Reflections on a career in employment relations
Kate Nowicki , Acas Director of Strategic Planning. Performance and Change
Kate is a passionate advocate of the importance of great employment relations. With close to 30 years’ experience with Acas, she has seen the cost of conflict from all angles. She has work! with many businesses and individuals to resolve their differences and to avoid harmful disputes.
Kate champions the growth of change management capability within Acas. She recognises that the best change b2b email list management practice supports sound employment relations.
As I approach retirement from Acas Looking backwards
I find myself reflecting on the changes in the workplace and in industrial relations that . I have seen over the years.
When I join! Acas in early 1993
I had already work! in several government departments and didn’t anticipate that. Acas would get under my skin and keep me in place for 32 years. I join! just after the last significant upheaval in labour relations, and I leave just ahead of the enactment of this generation’s most significant change be numbers in workplace legislation. I wonder about the landscape 30 years from now.
At that time, employers and trade unions were finding their way around the new Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 which blend! new and existing employment provisions into one place, and which has been the legislative cornerstone for employment relations machinery and individual rights ever since. Unsnappily “how to increase the flow abbreviat! to TUL(C)RA, the Act continues to be the mainstay of employment law in Britain and Acas conciliators and advisers always have it to hand.
Acas was establish! in 1975 and it’s unnerving to realise that at the time of my arrival in 1993, it was a mere 18 years young. Now I am saying farewell as Acas approaches its 50th birthday celebrations. The changes in that time have been nothing short of remarkable. The numbers of individual disputes that we deal with is many times larger than in 1993, and whilst the extent of trade union membership has declin!, and the number of collective disputes is smaller, they remain a central part of Acas’s work and identity.