Adversity and Opportunity: towards Union renewal in Manufacturing, Science and Finance?

Abstract

ONE FACILE RESPONSE to the prospect of unemployment hasbeen the advice to individuals threatened by it to regard the experi-ence as a chance to change direction, not a problem, but a challenge and an opportunity. By this measure there is no shortage of challenge and opportunity in Britain. Similarly, to say that the restructuring of employ-ment relations and, in particular, the decentralisation of bargaining, offers the unions an opportunity to reinvigorate themselves, might be open to the same criticism: it underestimates the nature and scale of the problems faced. Confronted with a plethora of employer initiatives, within a context of high levels of unemployment and government hostility, both member-ship numbers and union density have fallen. According to one account, in the six years between 1989 and 1995, trade unions lost over 18 % of their total membership, leaving them with a fewer members than anytime since 1945 (Cully and Woodland 1996). Moreover, the falls seem set to continue. 8 While there have been a number of attempts to accommodate themselves

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.