IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-52458-3_2.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Future of Trade Unions

In: Unions in the 21st Century

Author

Listed:
  • Richard Hyman

Abstract

For some 20 years now, it has been common to refer to a crisis of trade unionism; as one recent survey puts it (Martin and Ross, 1999: 368), ‘unions are under siege’. What the future holds for labour movements – or indeed, whether they still have a future – seems increasingly uncertain. To pose the issues slightly differently, should unions be viewed as the subjects or objects of history? For many critics (trade unionists them-selves as well as academic observers), unions in most countries appear as victims of external forces outside their control, and often also of their own conservative inertia. Or do they still hold the capacity to shape their own future as strategic actors? In all countries, trade unions possess powerful traditions and inherited structures; these all to frequently can constitute a straitjacket, but potentially can provide a resource for creative initiative.

Suggested Citation

  • Richard Hyman, 2004. "The Future of Trade Unions," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Anil Verma & Thomas A. Kochan (ed.), Unions in the 21st Century, chapter 2, pages 17-29, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-52458-3_2
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230524583_2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pauline Dibben, 2010. "Trade union change, development and renewal in emerging economies: the case of Mozambique," Work, Employment & Society, British Sociological Association, vol. 24(3), pages 468-486, September.
    2. Alison Barnes & Raymond Markey, 2015. "Evaluating the organising model of trade unionism: An Australian perspective," The Economic and Labour Relations Review, , vol. 26(4), pages 513-525, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-52458-3_2. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.