Abstract
What can unions in continental European countries learn from the experiences of unions in Britain given the diverse traditions of union behaviour and the different institutional set-ups that exist across either side of the English Channel? Britain is increasingly becoming a full-blown liberal market economy while many western European countries remain more as coordinated market economies. But do common threads exist over and above any of these differences and which consequently put them into a subordinate role? Despite any differences, are not employment relations characterized by inequalities in power, ideology and material interests between labour and capital?
This would presumably be the most obvious perspective that many readers of Transfer would take to a study of the attempt by unions in Britain to renew and revitalize themselves through the application of the approach and tactics of ‘union organizing’. By any definition, ‘union organizing’ is quintessentially about the grass-roots members becoming more involved in the agenda setting of their workplace union and pursuit of that agenda by various collective means. It should, thus, be about more than membership recruitment, whether on green or brownfields, or retention because it is concerned with increasing union effectiveness and union democracy.
Union Voices, the result of a 13-year research project (from 1996) undertaken in different stages by first Heery and Simms and then by Holgate and Simms, seeks to evaluate how unions have fared in interpreting and implementing the turn to ‘union organizing’. It comes at a time when ‘union organizing’ has had a good run of time and resources. The authors found considerable weaknesses in the intentions, processes and outcomes of ‘union organizing’. The book does amply tell the story of the union organizers involved (as was the stated intention), the authors almost go ‘native’ in places by identifying very heavily with the organizers against their employing unions. Nonetheless, the authors demonstrate that recruitment was prioritized above other goals, that the goal of the almost self-sustaining workplace unionism was seldom achieved, and that various counter-productive and dysfunctional tensions existed, inter alia, between ‘generalist’ union officers and specialist ‘organizing’ officers and the latter and more senior union officers. The training for the union organizers was based upon practical skills outside of a motivational framework and worldview of something like social democracy. The questions should then become: was this as a result of flaws in ‘union organizing’, the version(s) implemented or the way it was implemented or something different altogether? Here the book is on much weaker ground, for the attempt to create a revolution ‘from above’ at the grass-roots level and more often than not from the classroom (contra the Freirean pedagogical belief) comes with a series of innate dynamics and characteristics, especially in nominally democratic, participative activist-based organizations such as unions. As it was, reliance was made by the authors upon the influence of labour markets to explain inter-union variation in outcomes without considering the influence of the path dependency of internal union political cultures or available resources.
Part of the limitations may stem from the authors’ empirical base of focusing upon the TUC ‘Organising Academy’ to answer these questions. This is a particular type of initiative from a peak body, in which a least controversial-cum-lowest common denominator line of operation was taken. Yet although a substantial initiative with 240 graduates since 1998, it is not synonymous with ‘union organizing’ for not all unions participated in it and, for those that did, not all did so in equal measure. Therefore, the yardstick was partial and so were some of the criteria adopted for the purpose of evaluation. For example, in the economic arena did (and if so when, where and how) ‘union organizing’ raise the value of workers’ terms and conditions of employment? Moreover, the tone of the text is very much with the ‘young Turks’ against the ‘old guard’ without due consideration that the former have sectional and vested interests as much as the latter. The variable of measuring and analysing the degree of leadership and institutional support was rather absent.
However, the source of the book’s limitations is more critically found elsewhere. There is far more assertion and comment than hard-headed and in-depth analysis. For example, there have been a multitude of previous studies examining unions as organizations (for example, on leadership, bureaucracy and polyarchy) as well as their internal processes (for example, on factionalism and activist cadre). Equally true is that there have been a multitude of previous studies examining unions as organizations of collective mobilization. Yet none of the fruits of these previous endeavours has been brought to bear upon understanding and explaining the internal support and resistance encountered or the varying degrees of external leverage created. Certainly, the politics of ‘union organizing’ received sparse and inadequate treatment in this work despite the professed intention. Elsewhere, central issues of union effectiveness, power and leverage are not examined, much less with the aid of previous literatures. A keen sense of the limitations of what was and is possible with ‘union organizing’ in its historical temporal (for example, a period of downswing) and spatial (for example, a decentralized system of bargaining) terms is absent (even though this is raised by other writers on ‘union organizing’).
So to return to the question posed earlier of what usefully emerges for the predominant readership of Transfer, there is the confirmation of a well-known and disappointing outcome for ‘union organizing’ in Britain, which is not dissimilar to that which has occurred in the United States. Although beyond the scope of Union Voices, it would be worthwhile speculating whether the chances of ‘union organizing’ are any greater if implemented in coordinated market economies. That would make the useful subject of a further book.