Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 26/10/2006 06:41I remember reading various intriguing reports about the TUC combining an approach based on organising with a strategy based on partnership. There were tensions between the two, naturally, but I would have thought these were easy enough to resolve. Am I right in thinking that the whole approach has fizzled? If so, can someone tell me why? Was it frustration with Blair? Is there a new direction evolving instead?
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Paul Nowak
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 31/10/2006 02:34Hi Peter
The TUC's New Unionism project was set up in 1996 to try and get unions more focussed on organising (increasing investment in organising and recruitment, reaching out to under-represented groups of workers, employing and training skilled organisers, rebuilding strong workplace organisation)
Alongside this work the TUC was also very supportive of the whole push towards 'partnership', and the 2 strategies were seen (though not by everyone!) as complementary: basically 'partnership' without strong, effective unions is meaningless while organising is not an end in itself but essential for unions to build any sort of positive relationship with the employer and secure gains for members(you can see I'm skipping over all this very superficially here!). Ed Heery at Cardiff has written a great article re organising and partnership.
The TUC's New Unionism project was formally brought to a close just over 2 years ago - but most of the work initiated by the project (such as the TUC Organising Academy) has remained and developed. You can track some of the work the TUC is doing to support organising here:
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Stephen Funnell
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 03/11/2006 17:30I feel that there is an inescapable contradiction between unions pursuing an organising strategy and engaging in a partnership with employers. Coming from the radical perspective, I feel that a union’s primary role is to lessen the level of exploitation of labour by capital.
I appreciate that some people are uncomfortable with the seemingly emotive term ‘exploitation’, and prefer too see the employment relationship as workers ‘adding value’ to the organisation. It is not my intention here to criticise this interpretation. However, whatever terms you use, it is an inescapable fact that employers make or save money by extracting a surplus from workers.
My point is that if unions attempt to bolster the success of an organisation through partnership, they are contributing to their own exploitation. That is why so many union activists are uncomfortable with the whole concept of partnership. John Kelly once wrote something along the lines of: how can you have a partnership with something that you would rather did not exist? I appreciate that people feel that unions can be a valuable source of ‘employee voice’, but isn’t that a function of a staff forum rather than a trade union?
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Paul Nowak
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 03/11/2006 20:35Perhaps a lot of this comes down to how you define 'partnership'.
Trade unions have always reached agreements with employers. I've seen a lot of partnership agreements which are virtually indistinguishable from the standard sort of agreement that any employer and union would sign. Likewise I've seen other agreements which don't mention the word 'partnership' but which go beyond the normal collective bargaining framework. There are some pretty good and some pretty awful partnership agreements out there - what's clear is that their merits or otherwise have little to do with how they are labelled.
If the role of trade unions is to 'reduce exploitation' the question then is how is this achieved? Most workers and union members do not want their union to be in a state of perpetual conflict with their employer; for the vast majority of union members, struggle (and organising) is a means to an end rather than an end in itself.
What they do want is strong, effective unions that the employer has to bargain with meaningfully (and beyond this, that Governments have to take seriously).
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Peter HJ
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 04/11/2006 02:54Hi Thanks for these replies. The answer isn't simple, it seems. I don't think we should get hung up on the pros and cons of partnership -- the research is conclusive: workers want to find ways to engage constructively with their bosses. Would you be available for a short interview by email on this subject, Paul? Or could I phone you sometime? I'm currently based in France, where I'm communications officer with an international labour group, though that's another story...
Just as an aside, I was surprised by Andy Stern's new book - A Country That Works - and would recommend it to anybody interested in this field. The union I came from before is also growing very rapidly, and has been for a number of years now, using a variant of the organization + partnership approach.
Post edited by: PHJ, at: 2006/11/04 02:58
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Nick McCarthy
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 05/11/2006 19:50Hi there
As Paul points out partership agreements are difficult to define. However the issue is not often what a relationship is called which is important, but the power relationship between the union and the employer.
In practical terms one of the areas where there seems to me a contradiction between "organising" and "partnership" is control over communications. In classic partnership agreements communication with members is often joint (with employers) and during bargaining often includes confidentiality arrangements. In these circumstances unions are not able to mobilise members around issues of injustice, a key element of the organising approach to growth.
David Metcalf posed the challenge for unions in organising the 3.3m non-members within recogntion agreements. Understanding the effect of union / employer relationships on our ability to organise these non-members seems to me to be vital.
By the way new unionism hasn't disappeared - but to those of us who have spent 10 years working to develop coherent organsing strategies within unions maybe it isn't new anymore!
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Gary Daniels
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 05/11/2006 23:22One of the problems with this kind of discussion is how social partnership and workplace partnership get used interchangeably. As I understood the TUC’s New Unionism project it was a strategy designed to foster social partnership with government and workplace partnerships with employers while simultaneously boosting efforts at organizing the workplace. As David Coats, in Raising Lazarus noted: ‘“Organising” and “partnership” were presented by the TUC leadership as two sides of the same coin’. Ed Heery has also argued that ‘one consequence of successful union organising may be increased weight for the TUC in its role as social partner, while social partnership may yield a more favourable legal and public policy environment for organising’.
I fail to see the efficacy of such a strategy given the unenthusiastic response to trade-union policies from the New Labour’s government. Even Coats, from his own ‘right-wing’ perspective, complained that the New Labour government’s failure to support partnership in practice has ‘unwittingly undermin[ed] the modernising forces within the trade union movement…[leaving] the left …in the ascendant….[with a]…‘crude version of the “organising model”’. While I disagree with Coats about the left-right split and his interpretation of the organising model I think he is correct to note that the substance and dynamics of the TUC’s ‘New Unionism’ project was and is contested within the movement. In fact, for me, the project is best understood as a top-down attempt to reconcile political tensions among trade unionists.
For instance, when New Unionism was launched we had, on the one hand, John Monks arguing that New Unionism was ‘about improving performance, enhancing competitiveness, enriching the quality of working life. That's the new unionism, but it's also what smart managers want to do’ while, on the other hand, other have invoked the spirit of the militant upsurge of 1888-1890 and argued for a more aggressive organising culture. These two approaches do not sit together easily.
As myself and John McIlroy have argued elsewhere on this site, contemporary organising culture is increasingly handicapped by attempts to foster workplace partnership. If we study history seriously we discover that in most of the periods of union resurgence, success did not come through workplace partnership. It came sometimes against a background of state support, secured by union power and political influence. It came sometimes through employers making concessions – but there had to be a reason for making concessions and a union to make concessions to. It came always through a series of complex interactions between those in the workplace who began to appreciate the necessity of organisation; and those inside or outside the workplace who stimulated, extended, educated and organised discontent, and focused it on its source: the employer. In history and in logic the employer is the problem: an independent trade union is the solution.
This is not to suggest that in today’s climate militancy works wonders or that confrontation always pays. It doesn’t – particularly when unions are on the defensive. Activists have to work with management, cooperate with management, and compromise with management. Activists have to be sensitive to power, steer tactically and make tactical adjustments and adaptations. That is very different from embracing partnership philosophically, politically and strategically.
The kind of partnership that is minimally on offer today has never stimulated union revitalisation in the past. European-style social partnership as a response to union power, the kind of co-operation that was on offer in the 1960s and 1970s might. It is not on offer now. It will only be on offer if unions construct independent power. It is vestigial in Britain today: New Labour has no intention of significantly extending it. There always has been and always will be workplace partnership in specific workplaces and companies: to elevate its extension to the level of a national strategy, as people like Coats do, is mistaken. It intensifies tensions within the movement. It causes difficulties inside unions and it can weaken them.
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Paul Nowak
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 08/11/2006 03:55Dear all
Good to see the UIN being used for some real debate! Perhaps this would be a good issue for a future UIN seminar?
Peter - more than happ yo thave a chat. I'm out of the office now for a week, but will be around after the 15th on 020 7467 1218
best
Paul
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Peter HJ
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 09/11/2006 02:52Thanks Paul, I'll give you a call. And thanks to Gary too, for a very considered response. I guess you folk have been mulling this question over for a fair few years now! My own experience with New Unionism began in New Zealand, where the Public Service Association turned around years and years of steep decline by adopting a partnership-based approach (which they called "partnership for quality"). If I understand what happened correctly, they began in a top down kind of way, but it really kicked in at membership level when they started getting creative and imaginative about how to link this approach to organizing (and vice versa). They have seen membership growing strongly ever since... the union must have grown by almost 40% since 2001. The opposite path seems to have led to the same destination for one of the huge unions in the States (mere mention of their name can cause nosebleeds and apoplexy!). They started with a determined organizing focus, and then began to inform this with strategic decisions on how best to implement partnership. They, too, have been growing very fast. It's worth noting that both unions have also put a heavy emphasis on promoting quality services. I know... these stories are far more complex than an off the cuff summary could ever convey, but it seems to me that the key to rejuvenating the union movement is to seek creative ways of letting organizing and partnership complement and modify each other. In both cases this generated a real buzz at membership level. If you've read "What Workers Want" (Freeman and Rogers) you'll see why. It's what workers want! Whether it's a George Bush or a Helen Clarke doesn't seem to be the determining factor. I know you have seen similar successes in the UK. But I tend to agree with you, Gary -- Blair has made the UK version of New Unionism look like a very looong uphill battle! It'd be really good to hear from trade unionists in other countries on this issue.
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Paul Hardy
Re:Whatever happened to "new unionism" in the UK? - 13/11/2006 10:26Here in Ireland, we have had national agreements - popularly known as 'social partnership' - for the last 18 years.
The impact of these agreements on workplace organising is mixed. Activists very often blame the agreements for a decline in union participation - my response to this is to point north and east to Northern Ireland and Britain, which have experienced similar declines without 'social partnership'. But they may have a point, nevertheless. But what we cannot know is whether a Thatcherite 1980s style assault on the union movement, probably prevented by the partnership process, would have succeeded in Ireland as in Britain. (My guess is that it would have.) As someone with organising experience on both sides of the Irish Sea, I am fascinated by how utterly different labour and political histories in the 1980-present period have led to rather similar situations on both islands.
The real difficulty in Ireland is that social partnership has not been complemented by workplace partnership. Indeed, the commitment of the Irish government to address changes in labour law through a tripartite process (and ONLY through that process) has in effect put the reform we really need - a right to union recognition along UK or Canadian lines - out of court, since the employers' body IBEC has threatened to pull out of the process if union recognition is even put on the table. Refusal to recognise unions, once confined to US-owned multinationals, is now close to total - even the Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind, for example, refuses to recognise their employees' union.
This development has left us with an organising paradox - activists in unionised workplaces too often have a belief that workplace power and union density has no relevance to them, and would-be trade unionists in unorganised workplaces are utterly daunted by the challenge of unionisation.
So, to conclude, I am reminded of Gandhi's comment when asked what he thought of Western civilisation when I think of Irish social partnership - that it would be a good idea.
Post edited by: paulhardy, at: 13/11/2006 10:28
Post edited by: paulhardy, at: 13/11/2006 10:32
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