Opening Pandora’s Box: The Paradox of Institutionalised Organising

In the literature on the prospects for union renewal, the approach now widely known as the ‘organising model’ (OM) has emerged as a leading contender to facilitate such renewal. By contrast, initial responses to the declines in union density produced unproductive recruitment campaigns, accompanied or supplanted by equally ineffective forms of ‘credit card unionism’ (Waddington and Whitson 1997: 516). During the 1990s, these gave way to widespread official and theoretical support for ‘partnership’ (see Heery 2002). Yet, paradoxically, only after the OM received TUC endorsement with the founding of its Organising Academy in 1998 did union membership begin to stabilise, although density continued to decline, albeit more slowly. These developments in membership and density might also be attributed to external factors such as the Labour government’s union recognition legislation (for a discussion see Gall 2004, 2007) and increases in the extent of employment and size of the labour force. The comparatively energetic, mobilising Zeitgeist of the OM would seem to be particularly compatible with notions of union renewal based on membership activism (Fairbrother 2000), suggesting that the model has had at least some influence in regenerating union membership ‘from the ground up’.