The Pre-entry Closed Shop

Because the pre-entry closed shop has long existed in such industries as printing, dockworking, merchant shipping and in a host of skilled trades, it is often assumed that it represents an unassailable bastion of tradeunion power. Certainly, the pre-entry shop offers unions much greater job control than the post-entry variety. Yet this hides its essential fragility. It develops out of the vulnerability of workers to a substitute labour force. Once established, it provides the union concerned with control over entry into jobs that are often of strategic importance in the production process and in so doing increases its-potential to enforce working rules unilaterally and drive up wages. Yet the successful imposition of a pre-entry shop on a trade or industry, although it may gain employer toleration, will usually provoke a challenge in the longer term. The employers eventually tend to react to the loss of prerogative and the higher wage costs by seeking a new alternative workforce over which the existing pre-entry shop exerts no control. Such alternative workforces can be created or tapped by the introduction of new production techniques that undermine existing skills and jobs, and by ‘runaway’ to a location outside the jurisdiction of the pre-entry shop.