Labour Dilemmas and Labour Futures

Abstract

In common with other social groups, workers and their organizations are facing an uncertain future as we approach the end of the twentieth century. In an era when, as Marx used to say: ‘all that is solid melts into air’, what were once articles of faith for the labour movement are now painful dilemmas. My purpose here is to carry out a broad survey of these ‘new times’ insofar as they affect the way people work or cannot work across the planet. It is necessary to examine also the various new theories, including post-modernism, which are seen to account for these changes and plot their possible direction(s). Labour itself has not been silent in this regard, and has thrown up certain alternatives to the old ways of economic and political unionism, namely a social movement type of unionism. A final section examines to what extent the ‘old bottles’ of the trade unions and other traditional labour organizations can accept the ‘new wine’ of alternative strategies. It is interesting to note, in this regard, the recent call by that once secure bastion of orthodoxy, the British TUC (Trade Union Congress) to learn from the ‘new unionism’ of the 1880s. In mid-1996, TUC leader John Monks declared that if the British unions were to break out of a seventeen-year cycle of declining membership and influence they would have to rekindle the spirit of the 1880s, the US civil rights movements, and the mythical union organizer Joe Hill ( Guardian , 19 June 1996). These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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