Special Webinar with Emeritus Professor Sir George Bain
Tuesday 18 Feb. 2025, 9.30am GMT via Zoom
You are invited to join the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA), Scotland, for a Webinar Conversation with Emeritus Professor Sir George Bain, a leading industrial-relations academic who has also made significant contributions to industrial relations policy and practice, including his work as a member of the Bullock Commission and chair of the Low Pay Commission. The Webinar is hosted by Professor Stewart Johnstone, Strathclyde University, and the conversation with Professor Bain will be led by Professor Greg Bamber, Monash University, Australia.
Professor Peter Turnbull (Bristol University) BUIRA President will introduce the Webinar and there will be an opportunity for questions following reflections by Professor Melanie Simms, Glasgow University. The free webinar will last for 75 minutes. For more about George Bain, see below.
Register here by 11 Feb. 2025.
GEORGE BAIN
George Bain is a Canadian-British academic born and raised in Winnipeg. After studying economics and political science at the University of Manitoba, a Commonwealth Scholarship took him to Oxford University in 1963 to obtain his doctorate in industrial relations under the supervision of Hugh Clegg and Allan Flanders.
Following a Research Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford, he became (at age thirty) the Frank Thomas Professor of Industrial Relations at Manchester University. He gave up his chair to become the Deputy Director and subsequently Director of the Industrial Relations Research Unit as well as the Pressed Steel Professor of Industrial Relations at Warwick University. He contributed much to BUIRA including serving as its secretary and organising conferences.
His research interests have been mainly concerned with white-collar employees and their organisations; the theory of union growth; public policy relating to union recognition and union security, collective bargaining, employee participation and industrial democracy; and the bibliography of industrial relations that resulted, among other things, in the creation of the Modern Records Centre at Warwick, Britain’s leading archive for union and employers’ association records.
In 1983, he began to move away from teaching and research to academic leadership. Under his leadership, the School of Industrial and Business Studies at Warwick was transformed into Warwick Business School, which became one of the leading business schools in Europe; the London Business School enhanced its reputation from being the best British business school to one of the world’s top-ten business schools; and when he was its Vice-Chancellor, Queen’s University Belfast was revitalised into a much stronger, diverse, and pluralistic institution after thirty years of “the Troubles”.
Although primarily an academic, his interests and activities have extended far beyond the academy. In addition to being a mediator and arbitrator in more than seventy industrial disputes and being a non-executive director of several companies in the UK and Canada, he has engaged extensively in public service, particularly by being a member of and chairing numerous government commissions and inquiries, including: the Bullock Committee on Industrial Democracy, which considered how employee representatives could best be placed on the boards of major British companies; the Low Pay Commission, which introduced the National Minimum Wage; the Work and Parents Taskforce, which underpinned legislation on flexible working; and the Independent Review of the Fire Service, which provided the basis for fundamental reform in this sector.
He has received numerous prizes and honours, including being made a Fellow of the British Academy of Management, the Association of Business Schools, and the Academy of Social Sciences; receiving 12 honorary doctorates; and being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. George now lives in Scotland.