Stephen Mustchin

Unions, learning, migrant workers and union revitalization in Britain

This article focuses on strategies adopted by British trade unions to promote education to their members and their impact on attempts to organize among migrant workers. The relationship between this activity and broader debates around union revitalization is analysed, particularly in terms of how union involvement in learning intersects with broader organizing and community focused union activity. A diverse range of approaches to education provision for migrant workers can be identified from this research. The influence of internal union politics on attempts to organize migrant workers, work in conjunction with state policy and improve access to education among their members is also analysed. The study highlights a diverse range of outcomes, raising important issues regarding union organizing strategies and their relationship to union provision of education for their memberships.

Lifelong learning, partnership and modernization in the NHS

The research involves examination of trade union involvement in training and education in the NHS which is explicitly linked to skills development, career structures and underpinned by a lifelong learning framework. The data derive from case studies of seven NHS organizations in England. Previous research indicates how UNISON-employer learning partnerships provide high-quality education programmes for non-traditional learners and represent a process of institution building. This paper indicates the challenges for workplace activists to be involved in skills development in the context of workforce modernization and in the absence of formal learning partnerships.

Crowded out? The capacity of HR to change healthcare work practices

This article analyses the role of HR in changing healthcare work practices. It uses a large, mainly qualitative, empirical study of a national HR initiative in England, document review and secondary sources to indicate how HR struggles to carve out a role for itself within the crowded space of workforce modernisation. The concept of regulatory space is used to indicate how government policy placing HR at the forefront of workforce change is challenged, first, by its complexity, and second, by the reality of regulating workforce practice at local levels. The highly technical nature of work organisation in healthcare, and constraints on the capacity and capability of the HR function, meant that such changes tended to be controlled and designed by clinicians, in contrast to the broad, strategic approach to HR envisaged by policymakers.

Union Modernisation, Coalitions and Vulnerable Work in the Construction Sector in Britain

This article analyses vulnerable work in the construction sector, the impact of the recession and union responses to these problems including the development of coalitions with civil society and state organisations, and provision of new services to members and other workers faced with heightened vulnerability at work. The case study is based on qualitative interviews and internal documentation, and focuses on the construction union, Union of Construction, Allied Technicians and Trades, and its work supported by the government�?backed Union Modernisation Fund. The findings demonstrate some innovative approaches to supporting workers facing vulnerability in terms of job insecurity, health and safety and other problems, including drawing on support from other organisations with specific expertise and resources. Problems in terms of the political contingency of these links, vulnerability in terms of changing funding regimes and priorities within state agencies, and the vast scale of the problem of vulnerability at work are also highly prominent.

The bitter recent history of employee involvement at Royal Mail: an aggressive management agenda versus resilient workplace unionism

Focused on a large, diverse branch of the British postal workers’ trade union, workplace union responses to Royal Mail’s employee involvement initiatives are examined through a two-stage longitudinal case study. Royal Mail – the letters section of the British postal service – has carried out a series of managerialist experiments with employee involvement and participation in the last few decades, providing the basis for an important research literature on union and worker responses to new management initiatives, participation and HRM. Findings suggest that these management initiatives and union responses have mutated over time, with an ever-growing gap between management rhetoric associated with employee involvement and increasingly punitive management practice; and with changing but relatively resilient, oppositional workplace union responses. These developments are closely related to the entrenched, confrontational nature of Royal Mail industrial relations that has persisted since the mid-1980s.

Workplace Trade Union Engagement with European Works Councils and Transnational Agreements: The case of Volkswagen Europe

This article examines two transnational agreements signed by the Volkswagen European and Global Works Councils, considering their interlinked implementation within subsidiaries in Britain, Italy, Spain and Germany. We demonstrate differing stances and some uncertainty towards principles of co-management, social dialogue and codetermination. These agreements have improved local industrial relations and strengthened cross-national interaction between employee representatives, despite significant differences in orientation regarding how unions should engage with management. However, the emerging international framework has not led to a clear politics of incorporation, with local trade unions being well aware of the risks of co-management and a more business-oriented relationship.

Transnational Collective Agreements and the Development of New Spaces for Union Action: The Formal and Informal Uses of International and European Framework Agreements in the UK

Transnational collective agreements (TCAs) are an important development in the international dimension of industrial relations. This article compares four case studies of multinational companies in the UK covered by TCAs. Findings show that while the formal influence of TCAs was limited, they were invoked around particular disputes and could strengthen union influence in a context otherwise characterized by limited union rights. Such influence depended on the co-ordination of workplace- and firm-level industrial relations institutions, union access to management at headquarters level and union receptiveness to and outward engagement with transnational activity. The formal but also the informal dimensions of these dynamics played a significant role.

Dismissal of strikers and industrial disputes: the 1985-7 strike and mass sackings at Silentnight

The 1985–1987 dispute at Silentnight bed factories in the north of England was an exceptionally long and bitter strike, lasting for 20 months from June 1985 until February 1987. A total of 346 workers were sacked for taking part in the strike, which gained a high profile with remarkable levels of support and solidarity action, largely due to its emblematic status as an extreme example of punitive treatment of workers taking industrial action in the period immediately following the defeat of the miners in 1984/1985. Workers took lawful strike action in 1985 over the non-implementation of agreed pay rises and compulsory redundancies counter to an existing agreement between the firm and the union, with the company responding to the dispute with mass dismissals. Pickets were maintained at the two factories in question for nearly two years, with the strikers gaining wide-ranging support from across the labour movement, but the company stood firm against the dismissed strikers who were ultimately defeated. Based on archival research and interviews with participants in the strike, the article analyses in detail how the dispute was sustained for so long, the legal context and the weakness of legal protections for strikers in the period, and the widespread political mobilisation and networks of support and solidarity that arose around the strike and in opposition to the policies of the Conservative government of the day.

Creating sustainable employment opportunities for the unemployed

This article addresses challenges associated with creating sustainable employment opportunities for the unemployed and encouraging employer engagement in skills development and utilisation more generally. Survey and case study analysis of an initiative introduced by New Labour in the National Health Service England (NHS) provides evidence of employer reluctance to engage with a policy which addresses social exclusion and unemployment. Reasons are presented for this policy to implementation gap. This behaviour, in a buoyant economy, underlines a broader concern that voluntarism will be insufficient in the current economic climate to encourage employers more generally to adopt longer-term workforce development strategies. This reluctance to engage is compared with those NHS employers who were motivated to develop intermediate labour markets for the unemployed with explicit links to their internal labour markets, thereby providing opportunities for work experience and job progression. Implications are drawn from these contrasting behaviours as to how the state can encourage more employers to adopt progressive practices.

Public sector restructuring and the re‐regulation of industrial relations: the three‐decade project of privatisation, liberalisation and marketisation in Royal Mail

The British postal service, Royal Mail, was privatised in 2013, following failed attempts at divestiture in 1994 and 2009. This article analyses processes of marketisation, liberalisation and privatisation, highlighting how strong workplace-centred union presence allowed for considerable influence and bargaining gains within such highly sensitive political projects of restructuring.