New Management Practices and the Challenge for Trade Unions in the Advanced Industrial Economies

• Author: Paul Edwards
• Pages: 341-357

341

TRADE UNIONS AND WORKERS PROTECTION

New Management Practices and the

Challenge for Trade Unions in the

Advanced Industrial Economies

Castells (1996: 278) summarises a common view of the challenges

facing unions and the problems of responding to them:

Labour unions … were weakened [during the 1980s and 1990s] by their

inadaptability to representing new kinds of workers (women, youth,

immigrants), to acting in new work places (private sector offices, high-

technology industries), and to functioning in the new forms of organisation

(the network enterprise on a global scale).

One popular reading is that unions may have been appropriate to mass

production conditions but are no longer relevant under post-Fordism; some

commentators would see this as inevitable and, if not necessarily desirable, at

least as having few negative consequences. The challenges are certainly very

substantial. But there are four key questions in assessing them.

•First, how new are they? Nineteenth-century unionism was a

movement of skilled male workers in small workshops. Large-scale

mass production must have seemed a foreign territory to such unions;

yet either they adapted or new forms of unionism emerged. Unions

currently may also be able to adapt.

•Secondly, how uniform are they? The social settlements of different

countries give very different opportunities to unions, and even where

unions appear numerically weak they can have a well recognised social

role. This is true of much of Europe but not of most of the Anglo-

Saxon countries.

•Thirdly, is union decline a long-term secular trend or a cyclical

development, which can be reversed? And even more fundamentally,

is globalisation a smooth and inevitable process or one which is

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342 HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT

contested and uneven - and if the latter, how far can unions resist or

shape outcomes?

•Finally, is it the case that union decline has few costs, or are there

consequences for workers which can underpin new forms of

organisation?

This chapter considers such questions by examining the relationships of

unions with employers, states, members and potential members. It ranges

across several developed economies and concludes with some implications for

union movements in the process of devising strategies. A key lesson may be

highlighted at the outset: developments in capitalism remain variable and

contested, and there remains space for workers and unions to respond. As a

result, there is no single model of success, for unions are shaped in crucial

ways by their contexts and histories, and lessons have to be adapted to meet

individual conditions. While the issues are illustrated with reference to the

advanced industrial economies with which I am more familiar, many aspects

of the analysis are capable of providing insights into the experience of

developing economies such as those in the Caribbean.

The history of trade unions in the advanced industrial economies has

been marked by waves of growth and contraction. In Britain, to cite but two

phases, the rise of New Unionism in the 1880s was followed by the reassertion

of employer authority in the succeeding two decades; steady growth through

the 1960s and 1970s was followed during the next two decades by the longest

period of continuous decline on record. The 1980s and 1990s were periods of

decline for the union movements of most industrial countries (Western, 1997).

This history suggests two lessons: the extreme danger of making predictions

(who, for example, in 1929 would have predicted the upsurge of union

organisation which swept the United States during the 1930s?), but also the

fact that the future of union movements is not written in stone.

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The challenges facing unions are most usefully summarised in an extreme

form of neo-liberal orthodoxy, which sees unions in terminal decline. It is

then possible to explore limits to or variations on the model of decline. Relations

to states, employers and employees reflect different dimensions of decline.

In relation to states, some strong corporatist systems, notably the Swedish,

experienced increasing tensions from the early 1980s. Other systems where

labour had had a less established role, such as that of the Netherlands, also

experienced challenges of rising unemployment. The weak pluralism of the