Abstract
Reviewed by: Braham Dabscheck, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Ed Blissett has set himself the task of answering the question of how and why unions adopt specific policies (p. 9). In doing so, he has provided powerful insights into the decline of unions which occurred in Britain and Australia in the last two decades of the 20th century. Inside the Unions is significant for two major reasons. The first is its methodology. The second is for something that Blissett is possibly unaware; the contribution it makes to democratic theory. The latter is a compelling reason why this book deserves a wider audience.
Ed Blissett was a trade union member and official who had sabbaticals at different universities, where he studied industrial relations. This book constitutes the basis of his PhD, which has enabled him to become a full-time academic. In his introduction, he reports how he became a shop steward and branch secretary on his first day of work at age 19 (p. 1). He lived and breathed unionism. His experience as a union official did not accord with the scholarship he read concerning union decision making and behaviour. Curiosity piqued by this discord between practice and theory drove him to produce Inside the Unions.
He decided that the best way to approach this issue was to conduct research into ‘similar’ unions and examine how they responded to (essentially) ‘similar’ external stimuli. He chose unions that operated in printing and telecommunications in Australia and Britain. The problem was how to proceed with his research. He maintained that official records of unions had an overwhelming tendency to downplay internal divisions between factions and individuals so as not to portray ‘weaknesses’ to employers and members. Commissioned histories of unions downplayed divisions because protagonists would conceal such information from scholars. Blissett quotes a union official as saying ‘We weren’t going to pay for the truth of our internal backstabbing and infighting to be published’ (p. 18).
The only way Blissett could see of overcoming these problems was to conduct unrecorded interviews with officials (he took notes), where he guaranteed interviewees their anonymity and that he would not divulge information to other ‘protagonists’ within the respective unions’ orbits. Having established a reputation as a union official of high integrity, he was able to gain the confidence of all concerned, which is the key to the innovative insights contained in this volume. Blissett conducted interviews with over 220 officers and activists, with 46 being interviewed twice and 27 three times or more (p. 24; Appendix 1, pp. 339–340).
The last two decades of the 20th century were traumatic for the unions concerned. They had operated closed shops for the first seven or eight decades of the 20th century and had virtual 100% membership rates. They were all found out by technological change, more aggressive employers and a hostile state, especially the adoption of neo-liberal policies by a Conservative government in Britain and the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in Australia. They were unable to respond to employers moving to new locations, outsourcing, opening up new markets/products and the emergence of new firms and knowing how to organise and recruit new workers. Younger and often part-time female work forces could see little value in responding to the entreaties of a generation of older men to join unions. Blissett’s account of the inability of these unions to know how to go about recruiting new members makes for startling reading.
Membership levels declined and unions turned to poaching members from other unions, amalgamations, or in the case of Australia, fake amalgamations in response to policies ‘pushed’ by the Australian Council of Trade Unions and legislation introduced by the ALP (Dabscheck, 1995: 117–139) to arrest declines in membership. Such exercises and inter- and intra-union struggles over who should do what wasted valuable resources which could have been devoted to more worthwhile causes.
Inside the Unions contains two major empirical findings. The first is that the different unions responded to these problems in different ways. This he explains in terms of what he sees as a major finding of ‘the significant role played by micro-political factors, in particular friendships, loyalties and enmities’ (p. 338). Second, the respective unions were unable to resist the forces assailed against them. Blissett found that ‘unions, which have highly complex, multi layered, democratic structures, have great difficult in changing policy directions when their industrial or organisational circumstances radically alter’ (p. 337). This finding is consistent with Barbara Pocock’s (1998) observations concerning the ‘Institutional Sclerosis’ of Australian unions.
Blissett’s analysis of his respective unions relies on an implicit view of democracy. While he refers to Lipset et al.’s (1956) work on Union Democracy, his notion is different from their general politics model with a two party system, where competition for power occurs around an electoral cycle. It is more in tune with classic notions where power resides and/or is shared with those active within the demos. Blissett’s four unions had complex structures where members, lay officials and full-time officials struggled with and against each other in seeking solutions to problems visited upon them. This is akin to what Sartori has described as ‘direct democracy’ where ‘the citizens themselves exercise political power’. Sartori also notes that democracies ‘based on direct participation [have] turned out to be very fragile’ (Sartori, 1962, pp. 252, 253). This, in fact, is what Ed Blissett has demonstrated when Australian and British printing and telecommunication unions were confronted by a three pronged attack from technological change, increasingly aggressive employers and a hostile state in the latter part of the 20th century. Inside the Unions provides a cogent analysis, more than many other books, of the reasons why unions in Britain and Australia have experienced problems and been in decline in recent decades.