The Future of Trade Unions in Europe Part II (original) (raw)

Trade unions in a changing political context

Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 2018

A common feature in almost all Western countries over the last 40 years has been the steady decline in trade union membership and subsequently a decline in the power and influence of unions. Moreover, in many countries trade union strength has relied upon longlasting relationships with social democratic parties or, in a minority of cases, communist parties. The trend over the last decades has been a weakening of traditional ‘working-class’ coalitions. The aim of this article is to discuss to what extent such features also exist in Sweden, a country long regarded as a stronghold of powerful social partners, the so-called Swedish Model. We will show that Sweden is also affected by the wider European trends but that there are important countervailing forces. At the moment, much hinges on the parliamentary election in 2018.

Politics: Adieu to trade unions?

Critical Quarterly, 1999

Are trade unions dying? Trade unions have been the quintessential institutions of the twentieth-century political economy. But are they Y2K compliant? Will they survive the next century? Even to pose these questions is what the thought-police of the left would call a provocation. I owe almost my entire political life and work to trade unions. I was a militant union leader in the 1970s when I organised the first ever strike at the BBC which took television, radio and World Service news off the air in 1975. I became a TUC union president before I was 30 when I led the National Union of Journalists into its first ever nationwide strike by provincial newspaper journalists in the 1978±9 Winter of Discontent. I worked overseas for trade unions in the 1980s. Firstly, with the Polish Solidarnosc. Then with the South African black trade unions who took apartheid by the economic throat in a manner that the pin-prick attacks of guerrillas could never manage. Finally, in South Korea, in 1987 when a six-week general strike and occupation of factories brought to an end the rule of South Korean generals and ushered in democracy. The activities of workers in Poland and South Africa commanded world attention. The equally historic political intervention by Korean workers was largely ignored even though it helped fatally undermine the claim to authoritarian rule by military leaders in Asia. These biographical notes are set down to underline a personal commitment to trade unionism. In my view, the moral claim and the material need that trade unions seek to formulate in an ever more unequal society remain valid. But the political claim to a place in the organisation of powerdistribution in the modern economy that unions seek to sustain is becoming less and less easy to justify. Unless trade unions reinvent themselves their role in the twenty-firstcentury political economy will get smaller and smaller. The old language of writing about unions in Britain was to describe their leaders as barons, forcing weak kings, a.k.a. prime ministers, to do their bidding. The

Next Labour? Changes in British Union-Labour Party Relations since the Election of Tony Blair

The British Labour Party's embrace of neoliberal policies through the government of Tony Blair was principally the result of a shift to a more passive approach to union–party relations on the part of organized labour. The labor movement's defensiveness created the opening through which Blair and his colleagues moved to establish a close relationship with business, bringing the Party into a " neoliberal power network, " actively contributing to the reproduction of neoliberal hegemony. This passivity continued under Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, exemplified by the unions' endorsement of the Collins Review, thus effectively block-voting for the Labour Party to " distance itself " from them. Yet Jeremy Corbyn, who defied expectations and led Labour to sweeping victories in the recent British general election, has a quite different relationship with the unions. This paper will provide details and determine if the unions' political and industrial strategies have substantially changed now that a clearly pro-labor MP leads the Labour Party. Published in the Employee Responsibilities and Rights Journal in 2019. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10672-019-09331-0

A critical review of the role and function of Trade Unions in the current economic climate (UK)- An essay as a part of my coursework at the University of Exeter (UK) (Master's in Human Resources)

The past few decades have seen a marked decline in the influence of trade unions. While membership density stood at 55.6% of the workforce in 1979, it currently stands at around 27%. The membership level has been especially poor in the private sector, with just 14% of the workers being members of unions. While, at a point there were ‘closed shop agreements’ where joining a union was a pre-condition to employment at a few workplaces, now a good number of employers don’t even recognize unions. This decline can be attributed to various economic, legal and political factors and to changes in workplace relations. The trade unions have been trying to reinvent themselves in an effort to reverse this trend or to at least arrest it. While there have been a few instances of radical unionism, there has been a general shift towards greater co-operation and partnership with employers. For trade unions to regain their lost glory, they should first try and increase membership. This will only happen if they can convince workers that there is a clear benefit in joining them. This is tricky in the current scenario as they don’t enjoy the same kind of legal and political protection they once had.

'National unionism and union democracy in crisis'

Labor History, 2013

Rebecca Gumbrell-McGormick and Richard Hyman have written a very perceptive book. In the first chapter, they provide an excellent assessment of systems of national industrial relations that is as precise as it is concise. They not only describe those who conduct labor relations and the processes involved, they also explain why national differences have occurred and how national institutions and class relations have shaped the representation of labor interests in different ways across Western Europe. For this chapter alone, the book deserves to become core reading in comparative labor relations courses. It fills an important gap formed by the absence of updated editions of analytical textbooks in European industrial relations; including those that had been co-edited years ago by Hyman himself. Nonetheless, the motivation for writing this book certainly lay elsewhere than in providing just this chapter. Trade Unions in Western Europe is not a textbook about national industrial relations systems, but a research monograph about the 'hard choices' European unions face. Gumbrell-McGormick and Hyman identify the challenges that unions face in these times of crisis and then review the responses of national unions and their leaders across Western Europe. The book also offers advice on how union democracy and a union's capacity to act strategicallytwo themes that feature throughout the book -can be 'rendered compatible and indeed complementary' (191). Finally, the authors conclude that 'union revitalization requires a new, imaginativeindeed utopiancounteroffensive: a persuasive vision of a different and better society and economy, a convicting alternative to the mantra of greed, commodification, and competitiveness … and austerity.' (204).

Trade Unionism in a Depoliticised and Fragmented State: The Case of the United Kingdom

A common feature of economic restructuring over the last two decades has been the reorganisation of the state. In the United Kingdom, from the 1980s onwards, this took the form of a major reorganisation of the public sector, resulting in the fragmentation of the state via internal reorganisation of the state apparatus and the redefinition of state boundaries via privatisation. The argument is that state sector restructuring has brought about not only widely acknowledged changes in organisation but also changes in the labour process and class relations. In the process of this restructuring, state sector unions face a set of challenges which both threaten and open up opportunities for them. The question faced by unions is how to respond to these developments. Since 1980, the British state as an employer has changed in complex and contradictory ways. In the context of increasing difficulties with private capital accumulation, growing trade union militancy in the state sector and a shif...

Labour and the Unions: After the Brighton Conference

Government and Opposition, 1994

A Discussion of Last Autumn's Debate over Candidate selection in the British Labour Party and a consideration of the party's links with the trade unions may seem inappropriately provincial in an international journal of comparative politics. However, when viewed as an example of the continued search for political relevance by socialist parties in opposition, the issues raised by Labour's struggle to modernize take on more general interest. During long periods in the wilderness parties characteristically try to revive their fortunes by reforming organizational structures, ideological platforms and electoral strategies. For Labour, this started under the leadership of Neil Kinnock and continued with John Smith. The party has moved cautiously towards the centre ground, streamlined its election machine, modernized its communication strategy, and produced a more unified and moderate image. Labour's reforms of its relationship with the union movement are clearly part of th...