Union Organising and Partnership in Manufacturing, Finance and Public Services in Britain

More than ten years have now elapsed since the TUC launched its ‘New Unionism’ project in 1996. As has been well documented, in its early stages ‘New Unionism’ embodied an attempt to arrest the decline of union membership and influence at work by incorporating certain elements of an aggressive organising approach associated with the North American ‘organising model’ (Carter 2000, 2006; Heery et al. 2000c). In some quarters, early hopes for the potential of the organising model were influenced by the emergence of a distinctive ‘union renewal’ debate. In an essentially grass roots-based argument, great stress was placed upon the need to democratise union form and hierarchy by locating rank-and-file union activists as core agents in processes both of membership mobilisation at work and democratic practice within union structures and broader community activity (Fairbrother 1996, 2000). Thus, in the context of union decline in the workplace and civil society, looked at through the prism of renewal, the organising model was seen as containing the potential to reverse this decline by shifting the form of unionism to something less concerned with membership recruitment per se and more focused on unionism as process. That is, if strong workplace union organisation is to be built and sustained in the longer term, then union activity required re-constructing around principles of member participation at multiple levels.