The Challenge for Trade Unionism: Sectoral Change, 'Poor Work' and Organising the Unorganised

Abstract

The subject of union survival in a climate of high unemployment, casualisation, and low labour movement morale is a child of the 1980s and 1990s. The decline of manufacturing, the former mainstay of trade unionism, has brought into sharp relief the urgency of securing collective organisation in the service economy - in maintaining it where it is established and extending it to the rapidly growing numbers of the unorganised. The case of Britain from 1979 to 1995 presents a stark scenario in which neo-liberal policy has encouraged multinational capital flight and de-industrialisation; the rise of a low-wage low-skill service economy; the erosion of the state sector and introduction of market values and competition into public service; the further deregulation of an already unregulated labour market; and the disempowerment of trade unionism by a persistent stream of new legal restrictions.