Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research

Measured by its achievements, industrial unionism represented the high point in the history of 20th century trade unions. This article analyses the defining characteristics and organizing model of industrial unions and argues that changes both in the labour market, in particular the decline of industry, and in union organizing and sectoral bargaining have led to the ‘fall’ of the industrial union. The article ends with some suggestions with regard to the spirit and agenda of the post-industrial union.

Nothing predisposed the ports, where random hiring-and-firing practices reigned supreme and anyone could turn up in the hope of a few hours’ work, to become bastions of trade union strength able to perform the astonishing feat of forging a distinction between flexible work and casual labour. Yet this is what happened in the immediate post-war period when ports and docklands entered the third age of cargo-handling services, a phase characterized for the dockworkers by guaranteed terms of employment that marked the completion of a long process of struggle for recognition and definition of their specific occupational status. Whether in relation to hiring procedures or the tasks performed, the dockworkers of 2010 have little in common with those of the 1950s or 1930s; little, that is, except for a culture that continues to form the basis of a collective identity in which trade unionism is still very much a live force. These developments have received, curiously enough, scant attention, no doubt because the highly specific features of work in the ports made it extremely difficult to export elsewhere what was a unique set of sectional corporatist gains. And yet this experience does raise questions that transcend sectional occupational considerations in the search for alternatives to contingent and precarious labour practices.

This article asks to what extent trade union culture among teaching staff reveals common elements both among teachers and within national contexts. Many elements – the development of school systems, cultural, religious and political distinctions, the differences between teachers’ professional backgrounds, and their views of themselves as professionals or as officials – make it awkward to adopt a common reading of their trade union identities and activities. For this reason, national trajectories remain solidly in place. Following the Second World War, however, mass school attendance, the rise in educational levels and the social opening-up of school systems did profoundly alter the organization and culture of teaching activity. Elements of convergence then became apparent amidst the differences between the specific corporate traditions bringing the previously association-based system closer to general trade unionism: the federal structure and potential membership of a confederation; reliance on collective bargaining and negotiations; strikes; concertation and the use of bilateral instruments to manage and reform school establishments.

This article starts by looking at the intriguing similarities between the ends of the 19th and 20th centuries as far as the relationships between work and systems or structures of production are concerned. It considers the possible options for representing non-standard (or atypical) workers that can be usefully drawn from the past. Work is termed atypical as compared to the institutionalized forms dominant in the era of Taylorist-Fordist industrial production, although atypical work today has significant precedents in the 19th century. With regard to trade union cultures and policies, the thesis is that only by changing the logic and the practice of bargaining action, drawing inspiration from the theory of the Webbs, can suitable forms of representation be found for those components of non-standard labour more distant from the well-defined, stylized figure of the worker of the industrial age. This is a perspective that can represent both extremes of workers that offer their labour on the market: the highly skilled semi-independent worker, and the contingent worker with generic skills, who is possibly a member of the working poor. This could open the way for a unionism under which few would be excluded from collective representation, even if not ‘collective’ in the way understood in the past.

How can we account for the persistence of exclusion of women from organizational power and leadership in trade unions in spite of their increasing proportion of the labour force and of trade union membership? For a while, often as part of revitalization strategies, trade unions have put in place extensive structural reforms to encourage gender equality, but in practice these do not result in gender proportionality in formal positions in unions. We have to seek for deeper explanations, and this article explores how at a more profound level cultures of exclusionary masculinity are strongly embedded especially in traditional unions and among traditional male leaderships. However, there is also increasing evidence of changing attitudes among younger and more diverse workers and trade unionists, those from different cultural and ethnic groups, migrant workers, men as well as women, as their experiences of increasingly precarious work align with patterns long established by women juggling family and part-time insecure work. An optimistic reading of these changes sees the possibilities for increasing inclusion and gender equity within trade unions.

This article is based on a recent study of attempts by a range of British trade unions to access and engage with Polish migrant workers at the community or labour market level, rather than workplace level. The findings suggest that migrant workers can indeed be recruited at this level. Doubts are expressed, however, about the sustainability of new membership gained in this way. These doubts are linked to a marked absence of clear union strategies to create a longer-term nexus of interest with those who are recruited, of the type advocated in, for example, the North American ‘new labor movement’ literature. This absence – it is argued – may be less a reflection of a lack of strategic leadership than a product of the difficulties unions face in identifying viable strategies relating to the representation and organization of workers above the workplace level.

The recent financial crisis has once again highlighted the precarious situation of trade unions: austerity measures have targeted unions’ traditional institutional ally, the welfare state, as well as their last organizational stronghold, the public sector. The purpose of this article is to examine how trade unions have responded to reductions in welfare provision, due either to reform or to state inaction, and how state retrenchment can provide a silver lining for unions via the enhancement of unions’ bargaining responsibilities. We argue that, apart from retrenchment and privatization, there is a third road to welfare reform which involves unions’ ‘collectivization’ of social risks through the take-up of marginalized policies in bargaining agreements. Presenting evidence from a most-likely (the Netherlands) and least-likely (Greece) case, we identify instances where unions have acted as pivotal political substitutes to the state in the realm of welfare provision.