George Bain (academic)

Professor Sir George Sayers Bain is a Canadian-British academic who has contributed to the study and practice of industrial relations, has led several academic institutions, has been a non-executive director of companies in the UK and Canada, and has engaged extensively in public service.

Professor Sir George Bain

Professor Sir George Bain
10th President and Vice-Chancellor of Queen's University Belfast
In office
1998–2004
ChancellorSir David Orr
George J. Mitchell
Preceded bySir Gordon Beveridge
Succeeded bySir Peter Gregson
1st Chair of the Low Pay Commission
In office
2008–2009 (interim)
MinisterThe Lord Mandelson
Preceded byPaul Myners
Succeeded byDavid Norgrove
In office
1997–2002
MinisterMargaret Beckett
Peter Mandelson
Stephen Byers
Patricia Hewitt
Preceded byNew office
Succeeded byAdair Turner
Principal of London Business School
In office
1989–1997
Preceded byPeter G. Moore
Succeeded byJohn Quelch
Chairman of Warwick Business School
In office
1983–1989
Preceded byThom Watson
Succeeded byRobin Wensley
President of the Manitoba New Democratic Party
In office
1962–1963
Personal details
Born
George Sayers Bain

(1939-02-24) 24 February 1939
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Citizenship
  • Canadian
  • British
Alma mater
Military service
Branch/serviceRoyal Canadian Naval Reserve
Years of service1957–1963
RankLieutenant

Early life[1]

He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on 24 February 1939, the son of George Alexander Bain, a skilled manual worker at the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Margaret Ioleen Bain (née Bamford).   

After attending state schools in Winnipeg, he entered the University of Manitoba in 1956, studying double honours economics and political science, and graduated with a BA (Hons) in 1961 and an MA in 1964.  A Commonwealth Scholarship took him to Pembroke College, Oxford in 1963 and to Nuffield College in 1964, where he studied industrial relations and obtained a DPhil in 1968.

While at the University of Manitoba, he joined the Royal Canadian Naval Reserve as an officer cadet and served in various ships and establishments over a six-year period, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant in 1963.

He was also a member of the New Democratic Party, Canada’s social-democratic party, and its predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and was President of the Manitoba NDP in 1962-63.

Personal Life[2]

He married Carol Lynne Ogden White in 1962; they divorced in 1987.  He married Frances Gwynneth Rigby (née Vickers) in 1988; he has a daughter (Katherine) and a son (David) from his first marriage.

He is a keen genealogist and family historian.  He has privately published histories of nine families from which he is descended – three in Northern Ireland and six in Scotland – generally tracing them back to the middle of the eighteenth century.[3]

Career

Academic

He was a Lecturer in economics at the University of Manitoba in 1962-63.  He was a Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford in 1966-69 and the Frank Thomas Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in 1969-70.  He gave up his chair to become the Deputy Director of the Economic & Social Research Council’s Industrial Relations Research Unit at the University of Warwick and became Director in 1974, holding the post until 1981.  The Unit was one of the first attempts in the UK to bring together a large group of social scientists to undertake full-time, team research.[4] In 1979, he was appointed to the Pressed Steel Fisher Chair of Industrial Relations at the University of Warwick.

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.  He has been the author or co-author of nine books and monographs and forty papers in learned journals.[5]

He was Chairman of Warwick Business School (1983-89),[6] Principal of the London Business School (1989-97),[7] and President and Vice Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast (1998-2004).[8]

He has also served in several academic professional associations, including being:  a member, Council, Economic & Social Research Council, 1986-91; chairman, Council of University Management Schools, 1987-90; vice president, European Foundation for Management Development, 1991-95; member, Board of Directors, American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, 1992-94; member, Board, Foundation for Canadian Studies in the UK, 1993-2001, 2004-06; chairman, Association of Commonwealth Universities, 2002-03; and trustee, Council for Advancement & Support of Education, 2004-08, and CASE Europe, 2004-07.[9]

Public Service

Under the auspices of the Advisory Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) and in a private capacity between 1972 and 1992, he conducted 71 arbitrations and mediations between unions and employers in virtually every sector of the UK economy.[10] 

He has been a member and the chairman of several commissions of inquiry, including:

  • Member, Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy (Bullock Committee), Department of Trade, 1975-76.[11]
  • Member, Senior Salaries Review Body, Department of Trade & Industry, 1993-96, which provides independent advice to the government on the pay of senior civil servants, senior officers of the armed forces, and the judiciary.[12]
  • Chairman, Commission on Public Policy and British Business, Institute for Public Policy Research, 1995-97, which investigated the competitive position of the UK economy and the role that public policy should play in improving it.[13]
  • Chairman, Low Pay Commission, Department of Trade & Industry, 1997-2002 and 2008-09, which introduced the National Minimum Wage in 1999.[14] In 2010, the Institute for Government, following a survey of the members of the Political Studies Association, named the National Minimum Wage the most successful public policy in the UK of the past thirty years. 
  • Chairman, Northern Ireland Memorial Fund, 1998-2002, an organisation offering support to victims of the “Troubles”.[15]
  • Chairman, Work and Parents Taskforce, Department of Trade & Industry, 2001, which underpinned legislation on work-life balance and flexible working.[16]
  • Chairman, Independent Review of the Fire Service, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2002, which provided the basis for fundamental reform in this service.[17]
  • Chairman, Legal Services Review Group, Department of Finance & Personnel, Northern Ireland, 2005-06, which set out a new framework for regulating solicitors and barristers.[18]
  • Chairman, Independent Strategic Review of Education, Department of Education, Northern Ireland, 2006, which put forward a new approach for the strategic planning and organisation of the schools’ estate.[19]
  • Chairman, Independent Review of Policy on the Location of Public Sector Jobs, Department of Finance & Personnel, Northern Ireland, 2013-14, which advanced proposals for relocating public jobs from Belfast to other areas within Northern Ireland.[20]
  • Chairman, Commission on Future of National Minimum Wage and Low Pay Commission, Resolution Foundation, 2013-14.  It recommended, among other things, that the government’s economic policy should include an explicit long-term goal to reduce the incidence of low pay and set out a plan to reduce the percentage of employees who earn below two-thirds of the hourly median wage,[21]  which Chancellor George Osborne accepted in his summer budget of 2015.

Company Non-Executive Director

He has been a non-executive director of several companies in the UK and Canada, including Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1990-97; The Economist Group, 1992-2001; Canada Life Assurance Company, 1996-2003; Bombardier Aerospace Shorts Brothers Plc, 1998-2007; Electra Private Equity Plc, 1998-2008; Entertainment One, 2007-10; Great-West Lifeco Inc., 2009-14; Canada Life Capital Corporation, 2003-14; and Canada Life Group (UK) Ltd, 1994-2014.[22]

Awards and Honours[23]
  • Companion, Institute of Management (1991).
  • Fellow: Royal Society of Arts (1987), British Academy of Management (1994), London Business School (1999), Academy of Social Sciences (2000); Association of Business Schools (2007). 
  • Honorary Fellow: Nuffield College, Oxford (2002). 
  • Honorary Doctor of Business Administration: De Montfort University (1994).
  • Honorary LLD: National University of Ireland (1998), University of Guelph (1999), University College of Cape Breton (1999), University of Manitoba (2003), University of Warwick (2003), Queen’s University (Canada, 2004), Queen’s University Belfast (2005), University of Winnipeg (2016). 
  • Honorary Doctor of Letters: University of Ulster (2002), University of New Brunswick (2003). 
  • Honorary Doctor of Science: Cranfield University (2005).
  • Knight Bachelor (2001).
  • Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE):  Chief Executive Leadership Award, 2003.
  • Canadian High Commissioner’s Award for outstanding contribution to the special relationship between Canada and the United Kingdom, 2003.
  • British Academy of Management:  Richard Whipp Life-time Achievement Award, 2014.

See also

His personal papers are deposited in the following archives: Library, London Business School; Library, Queen’s University Belfast; and Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, https://mrc-catalogue.warwick.ac.uk/records/BAI. His family histories and related papers are deposited in the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=PRONI, and the library of the Ulster Historical Foundation https://www.ancestryireland.com/; see also https://bainfamilyancestry.wordpress.com/ 

References
  1. Who’s Who 2023 (London: A & C Black, 2023); https://www.ukwhoswho.com/browse
  2. Who’s Who 2023. See sources in endnote 3 for details about George Alexander Bain and Margaret Ioleen Bamford
  3. See, for example, Bain Family: Scotland, Canada and the United States of America, c. 1790-c.2019 (Belfast, 2019), 459pp.; Bamford Family:  Ireland and Canada, c. 1740-c.2017 (Belfast, 2018), 168pp.  See also https://bainfamilyancestry.wordpress.com/2022/02/16/bain-family-history/; https://bainfamilyancestry.wordpress.com/2022/02/16/bamford-family-history/
  4. David Walker, “A Novel Academic Showpiece in Deepest Chrysler Country”, Times Higher Education Supplement, 23 January 1976.
  5. See, for example, The Growth of White-Collar Unionism (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1970), 233 pp; (with David Coates and Valerie Ellis), Social Stratification and Trade Unionism: A Critique (London: Heinemann, 1973), 174 pp; (with Farouk Elsheikh), Union Growth and the Business Cycle: An Econometric Analysis (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1976), 155 pp; (with Gillian B. Woolven) A Bibliography of British Industrial Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 665pp; (editor) Industrial Relations in Britain (Oxford:  Blackwell, 1983), 516 pp.
  6. Previously known as the School of Industrial and Business Studies (SIBS).  See the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick: “SIBS:  Collected Documents, 1985-1989”, 3 vols; 1500/12/D1, 1500/12D/2, and 1500/12D/3.
  7. See “Top 50 Business Schools”, Financial Times, 25 January 1999; Michel Syrett, “George’s American Revolution”, MBA Magazine (December, 1997), 53-55
  8. See Lucy Hodges, “Belfast Is Back on the Map”, Independent, 26 September 2002; Anne Byrne, “Bain in the Life of the Changing Face of the Queen’s University in Belfast”, Irish Times, 19 February 2002
  9. Who’s Who 2023
  10. The papers concerning these arbitrations and mediations are in the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, https://mrc-catalogue.warwick.ac.uk/records/BAI.  See also, for example, “Women’s Pay Plea Is Upheld”, Oxford Times, 16 November 1973; and “City Bus Dispute Ruling by Weekend”, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 19 February 1974.
  11. Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, Cmnd 6706 (London:  HMSO, 1977). See also Jim Phillips, “George Bain and Memories of the Bullock Committee on Industrial Democracy”, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, (No. 44, 2023).
  12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Salaries_Review_Body.
  13. Promoting Prosperity:  A Business Agenda for Britain (London:  Vintage, 1997).
  14. The National Minimum Wage:  First Report of the Low Pay Commission, Cm 3976 (London:  TSO, 1998).
  15. https://www.persee.fr/doc/irlan_0183-973x_2000_num_25_1_1542
  16. About Time:  Flexible Working (London, DTI, 2001).
  17. The Future of the Fire Service:  Reducing Risk, Savings Lives (London:  ODPM, 2003).
  18. Legal Services in Northern Ireland:  Complaints, Regulation, Competition (Norwich:  Stationery Office,2006).
  19. Schools for the Future: Funding, Strategy, Sharing (Belfast: DENI, 2006).
  20. Independent Review of Policy on Public Sector Jobs (Belfast:  Department of Finance, 2010)
  21. More Than a Minimum:  The Resolution Foundation Review of the Future of the National Minimum Wage (London:  Resolution Foundation, 2014
  22. Who’s Who 2023.
  23. See Who’s Who 2023 for confirmation of the information contained in this section.
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