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InUnion Voices, the result of a thirteen-year research project, three industrial relations scholars evaluate how labor unions fared in the political and institutional context created by Great Britain's New Labour government, which was in power from 1997 to 2010. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence, Melanie Simms, Jane Holgate, and Edmund Heery present a multilevel analysis of what organizing means in the UK, how it emerged, and what its impact has been. Although the supportive legislation of the New Labour government led to considerable optimism in the late 1990s about the prospects for renewal, Simms, Holgate, and Heery argue that despite considerable evidence of investment, new practices, and innovation, UK unions have largely failed to see any significant change in their membership and influence. The authors argue that this is because of the wider context within which organizing activity takes place and also reflects the fundamental tensions within these initiatives. Even without evidence of any significant growth in labor influence across UK society more broadly, organizing campaigns have given many of the participants an opportunity to grow and flourish. The book presents their experiences and uses them to show how their personal commitment to organizing and trade unionism can sometimes be undermined by the tensions and tactics used during campaigns.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. From Managing Decline to Organizing for the Future -- 2. The TUC Approach to Developing a New Organizing Culture -- 3. The Spread of Organizing Activity to Individual Unions -- 4. Union Organizers and Their Stories -- 5. Organizing Campaigns -- 6. Evaluating Organizing -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the Authors.

After many years of indifferent decline, trade union membership is now being revitalized; strategies known as ‘union organizing’ are being used to recruit and re-energize unions around the globe. This book considers exactly how trade unions are working to do this and provides a much-needed evaluation of these rebuilding strategies. By comparing historical and contemporary case studies to assess the impact of various organizing campaigns, this book assesses the progress of unions across Europe and America. It raises key debates about the organizing culture and considers the impact of recent union recognition laws on employers and the government's Fairness at Work policy. A topical and in-depth study into the experiences of trade unions across Europe and America, this is a comprehensive and thought provoking book which is essential reading for those in the industrial relations field.

This paper argues that the ‘turn to organising’ in British unions over the past decade has largely ignored the broader questions of the purpose of such activity. As a consequence, unions have mainly focused on building solidarities between workers in their individual workplaces rather than developing a wider view of workers’ interests and the objectives of that solidarity. Using Hyman’s typology of union identities (2001), it is evident that ‘class’ identity has largely been sidelined in debates about union renewal in Britain. The paper argues that this limits the scope of union renewal both in practice and in theory.

This article evaluates the phenomenon and dynamics of union organising. It neither presents a critique of variants of union organising nor a preferred version of union organising as the solution. Rather, it provides some of the intellectual resources needed to create theoretically informed practice. It examines critiques of union organising to foreground discussion of the two key hallmarks of union organising to date; namely, officer domination and externally-led organising. This opens out the argument to consider a number of under-explored areas for the more expansive and ambitious version of union organising. Thereafter, it examines cross-cutting issues between the two countries and the absence of class consideration from union organising.

There is increasing evidence of a widespread recognition within the British trade union movement of the need to change. Amongst the directions of change being considered is adoption of the ‘organising model’ borrowed from the United States. MSF was probably the first major British union to go down this path, thereby promising to transform itself from an organisation that had pioneered the conservative ‘servicing model’ to one in the forefront of promoting a radical alternative. This transformation is far from unproblematic and this article examines the tensions and difficulties encountered through a study of NHS membership organisation two regions. In the process of the examination, the article highlights the inadequacies of approaches to union decline that either regard it as an inevitable result of objective circumstances or believe that new policies to counter decline can be adopted by managerial fiat and without recourse to widespread discussion among members to build a consensus.

Draws on 2002 survey data from 742 pensioners, activists, & external respondents to examine pensioner activism in the British Public & Commercial Services Union (PCS). At issue is why retired members participate in the PCS & what are their relations with other organizations. Four models of pensioner-union relationship are identified: the consumer model, cross-subsidy model, the intergenerational model solidarity model, & self-organizing model. These are tested by analyzing the different benefits pensioners receive through union association via a multitiered perspective. Each of the models had some validity, although PCS is experienced as a problematic locus of activity in comparison to Unison. The contrast between these two unions illustrates the heterogeneity of participatory possibilities available to retirees in the British trade union movement. Tables, Figures, References. D. Edelman

Summary Trade unions in nearly all developed countries are facing major difficulties in maintaining membership levels and political influence. The U.S. labour movement has been increasingly attracted to an organizing model of trade unionism and, in turn, this response has caught the imagination of some sections of other Anglo-Saxon movements, most notably in Australia, New Zealand and Britain. Despite similarities in the problems that national union movements face, however, the histories and current experiences of trade unions in the various countries show marked differences. This article, based on extensive fieldwork in Britain and Australia, examines attempts to assess the importance of national contexts in the adoption of the organizing model through a comparative study of an Australian and a British union.

The adoption of new management strategies and flexible working practices in the manufacturing industry has caused a fragmentation of the traditional collective base of British trade unions. Such changes have led some commentators to argue that, in order to survive, manufacturing unions must reject oppositional stances and instead offer support for company objectives, work reforms and partnership relations with management at the workplace level. This article compares the responses of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU) and the Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union (MSF) to the rapid and wide-ranging restructuring of the UK's aerospace industry. The article questions current typologies of union policy and identity and associated prescriptive analysis of appropriate union strategy. We argue that such prescriptive analysis understates the complexity of union behaviour at the workplace level. Our findings suggest that the local traditions of workplace organizing far outweigh the influence of national union strategy. In the case of the MSF, the workplace unions failed to engage with the restructuring of work and were constrained by technical union traditions of sectionalism. By contrast, the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union (AEEU) workplace unions were able to adapt their historical form of organizing, based on work group representation and job control, to maintain significant constraints against managerial prerogatives.