Martin Upchurch

New unions, new workplaces: a study of union resilience in the restructured workplace

1. Unions Facing up to Crisis 2. Union Organising in the New Workplace 3. Job Reform and Recollectivisation in the Aerospace Industry 4. Manufacturing Change in an Era of Corporate Instability 5. The Insurance Industry - Back to Basics? 6. The Paradox of Partnership in the Public Sector 7. Negotiated Privatisation in Public Utilities 8. What Future?

Workplace Partnership and Employee Voice in the UK: Comparative Case Studies of Union Strategy and Worker Experience

This article addresses the role of ‘employee voice’ in workplace partnership. Drawing on two organizational case studies from the UK’s aerospace sector, it analyses employee experiences of two key dimensions of worker participation in partnership environments: joint consultation and union representation. Specifically, it investigates what consultation and union representation actually mean for employees in the context of different union responses to employer-driven partnership agendas. The article finds predominantly negative patterns of employee experience and attributes this partly to management control strategies and the short-termist dynamic of British manufacturing capital.

‘New unionism’, organising and partnership: A comparative analysis of union renewal strategies in the public sector

The TUCs ‘New Unionism’ project contains contradictory tendencies in its promotion of both partnership relationships with employers and the adoption of more aggressive organising techniques. This paper investigates the impact of partnership-organising tensions on union activity at the workplace level in local government and the NHS. We explore these tensions by considering three dimensions of workplace union organisation: management-union relations; activist leadership style; and activist full-time officer relations. The paper rejects the argument that partnership and organising can be complementary union renewal processes. Instead, partnership relations detach senior activists from union members and restrict member participation and mobilisation.

The Realities of Partnership at Work

Partnership at Work What is Partnership The High Performance Workplace: Fact or Fiction? Gambling with Employee Voice in the Finance Sector Best Value in a Local Authority Partnership on Prescription in the NHS Goodbye Blue Sky: Partnership in the UK Aerospace Sector Whither Partnership?

Neoliberal globalization and trade unionism: Toward radical political unionism

This article revisits the question of changing forms of trade unionism within the context of neoliberal globalization. While broadly accepting the argument that globalization might encourage the development of more radical forms of unionism as survival strategies, it argues that such radicalism cannot be understood satisfactorily by the term social movement unionism (SMU). This is due to over-reliance on theories of the new social movements (NSMs), which produce a largely de-classed and de-politicized perspective. The article uses insights gained from theoretical work on protest and labour movement development to bring the state back into the analysis and applies this analysis to oppositional trade union practice in a variety of institutional contexts. It concludes by making a case for understanding contemporary forms of oppositional trade union strategy through the term radical political unionism which takes account of both its social and political determinants as well as the agency role played by political leaderships.

Wild capitalism, privatisation and employment relations in Serbia

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the phenomenom of wild capitalism under post Communist transformation. Many commentators on post Communist transformation focus their attention on dysfunctional corporate governance and the deleterious consequences of liberalisation on business ethics. Poor business ethics and bad corporate governance may be a consequence of labour exploitation for comparative advantage, and the abandonment of party authority. This allowed rapacious rent‐seeking by a minority well placed to benefit from the newly de‐regulated regime. A by‐product is a burgeoning informal economy encouraged by insider dealing of privatised state assets. State regulation, where it exists, is often ignored. Employment relations are fragmented, with state‐owned enterprises retaining some form of collective regulation, while newly privatised enterprises seek to marginalise union activity.Design/methodology/approach – The paper analyses why Serbia has diverged from the Slovenian case in the former Yugoslavia...

Trade union responses to ageing workforces in the UK and Germany

Ageing workforces are placing conflicting pressures on European trade unions in order to, on the one hand, protect pensions and early retirement routes, and, on the other, promote human resource management (HRM) policies geared towards enabling their older members to extend working life. Using interviews from German and United Kingdom (UK) trade unions, we discuss how unions are both constrained and enabled by pre-existing institutional structures in advocating approaches to age management. In Germany, some unions use their strong institutional role to affect public policy and industrial change at national and sectoral levels. UK unions have taken a more defensive approach, focused on protecting pension rights. The contrasting varieties of capitalism, welfare systems and trade unions’ own orientations are creating different pressures and mechanisms to which unions need to respond. While the German inclusive system is providing unions with mechanisms for negotiating collectively at the national level, UK unions’ activism remains localized.

The Crisis of Labour Relations in Germany

The article traces the historical development and peculiarities of (West) German capitalism and the place of consensus within the ideological superstructure. New state and employer offensives against labour are recorded and analysed and the resultant crisis of labour relations is discussed. The author argues that employers are, as yet, unwilling to launch a full frontal attack on co-determination.

A reappraisal of the rank-and-file versus bureaucracy debate

This paper celebrates some of the considerable strengths of Hyman’s 1970s/early 1980s analysis of unions in general and bureaucracy specifically, and reapplies it to more recent developments within British unions, while at the same time providing a critique of Hyman’s refutation of the ‘rank-and-file’ versus ‘union bureaucracy’ conception of intra-union relations. It argues that the wider set of implications Hyman drew from the accentuated pressures towards the bureaucratisation of workplace unionism that he identified ‘bent the stick’ too far in the opposite direction. In attempting to defend and refine the classical revolutionary Marxist analytical framework, the paper maintains that the conflict of interest that exists between full-time officials and rank-and-file members is a meaningful generalisation of a real contradiction within trade unionism, notwithstanding the variations and complexities involved. It examines the nature and social dynamics of full-time union officialdom, shop stewards and workplace unionism, and the relationship between the two. In the process, the limits and potential of both Hyman’s ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ writings are highlighted and some broader generalisations are drawn with relevance to current dilemmas for trade unionism.

The Crisis of “Social Democratic” Unionism The “Opening up” of Civil Society and the Prospects for Union Renewal in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany

This article defines and explores the crisis of social democratic trade unionism in three countries in western Europe. The authors contend that a particularized form of postwar trade union orientation was socially constructed in Britain, Germany, and France in which a party union nexus gave special privileges to unions in return for compliance with state policies in the national interest. This arrangement has broken down in recent years under the pressure of global product market competition. As a result, trade unions are being forced to adopt alternative strategic orientations, involving both a fracture in the party union nexus and a willingness to work within wider civil society.