Looking backwards and moving forwards: reflections on a career in employment relations
26 March 2025
Kate Nowicki
Kate is a passionate advocate of the importance of great employment relations. With colombia phone number library to 30 years’ experience with Acas! she has seen the cost of conflict from all angles. She has worked with many businesses and individuals to resolve their differences and to avoid harmful disputes.
As I approach retirement from
Acas! I find myself reflecting on the changes in the workplace and in industrial relations that I have seen over the years.
When I joined Acas in early 1993! I had already worked in several government departments and didn’t anticipate that Acas would get under my skin and keep me in place for 32 years. I joined just after the last significant upheaval in labour relations! and I leave just ahead of the enactment of this generation’s most suggests that the fight against the spread change 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 blended new and existing employment provisions into one place! and which has been the legislative cornerstone for employment relations machinery and alb directory rights ever since. Unsnappily abbreviated 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 established 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 declined! and the number of collective disputes is smaller! they remain a central part of Acas’s work and identity.