By Ian Greer and Lou Jean Fleron

With inequality growing and free market fundamentalism on the march, can unions play a constructive role in solving the problems of capitalist economic development?  Should they try?  In this study of coalition building in Buffalo, New York we find that regular procedures of problem solving involving multiple coalition partners – what we call a high-road social infrastructure – have developed in the city.  We discuss the progression of union approaches to economic development, including in-plant and regional labor-management partnership, community coalitions and the creation of labor-led nonprofit organizations.  In response to long-term economic and social crisis, a group of union leaders has begun carrying out projects to help attract investment from outside the region and improve the quality of jobs in the region.  Coalition building, however, is hampered by uncertainty about the best union strategy, enmity from business and political elites, and the extent of the region’s long-term structural problems.

Why is union democracy important? For four key reasons. First, unions have always identified their role, at least in part, as instruments for a more democratic order in industry and society. But how can they act as a channel of industrial democracy if they are not themselves democratic? Second, unions; legitimacy as social actors rests in large measure on their claims to representativeness; but without internal democracy, such claims are tendentious. Third, unions are vehicles of solidarity, calling on their members and supporters to identify with broader class interests rather than merely pursuing short-term individual or parochial advantage. And fourth, unions require not just their members’ ‘willingness to pay’ but also their ‘willingness to act’ (Offe and Wiesenthal 1985), and this they are far more likely to demonstrate if they see themselves as having helped shaped the union’s programme.

Frances O'Grady and Paul Nowak

This a draft version of an article written with Frances O'Grady that was featured in 'Union Organisation and Activity (volume 2)', Edited by John Kelly and Paul Willman (2003) and Published by Routledge Publications London.

When the TUC’s New Unionism Task group was set up in 1996 it was given an ambitious remit and two years within which to fulfil it. Seven years on and the Task Group still exists – its remit just as ambitious, and only partly fulfilled. This chapter reviews the progress made by the Task Group, and more importantly the progress made by unions as a whole, toward meeting the challenge outlined by former TUC general secretary John Monks in his address to TUC Congress in 1996.