Andy Danford, Mike Richardson and Martin Upchurch, New Unions, New Workplaces: A Study of Union Resilience in the Restructured Workplace.

Andy Danford, Mike Richardson and Martin Upchurch

New Unions, New Workplaces: A study of union resilience in the restructured workplace

Routledge, London, 2003, 194 pp.

ISBN 0-415-26061-2 (hbk) 60 [pounds sterling]

This is an interesting book about an important set of issues. It presents a broad, critical account of employer-led changes and reorganisation, including new management practices and elements of human resource management, which have been central concerns of UK industrial relations of the 1980s and 1990s. While rejecting an interpretation of these changes as a paradigm shift, the book's authors recognise that there are significant aspects of them that are new, and write in terms of restructured workplaces. The nature of this restructuring is explored within a wide range of employment in the private, privatised and public sectors, which includes aerospace, manufacturing, insurance, utilities, the nuclear industry, the health service, local government and universities. A workplace focus is adopted, and the book describes and assesses trade union responses to such restructuring. It is refreshing to see the authors argue for the continuing relevance of approaches associated with the classic industrial relations texts of the 1970s and early 1980s that provided detailed qualitative workplace studies (although their study has also underpinned the use of qualitative data with important quantitative data). They justify their argument for such rich workplace data on two counts: first, that the prospects for union renewal cannot be assessed without detailed studies of workplace change, and of how unions are dealing with related grievances and disputes; and second, that unions are not monolithic organisations, and their dynamics cannot be understood without exploring the detailed processes of workplace union activity. An important feature of the book is that the workplace focus on union response to change is also firmly placed in the wider context and, while criticising the concept of globalisation, work organisation, union responses and renewal strategies are considered in terms of political economy and labour markets.

The research data was mainly collected from workplace trade union representatives and from some full-time officials (though the authors made some minor use of primary data from managers). Just over a hundred semi-structured interviews were carried out with AEEU, MSF (now AMICUS) and GMB union activists; two questionnaire surveys covered workplace and senior workplace representatives of these unions, generating high response rates; and the research was carried out in the South West of England in 1998-2000. Both the breadth of the project, in terms of the range of employment sectors, and the particular methodology thus provide a strong basis for exploring the restructuring and union response issues in this book. Some might argue that to rely on data obtained almost exclusively from union activists is a failing. However, union activists are in a key position to provide critical workplace industrial relations data; and also, as the authors indicate, there is a strong case for the need to redress the balance in light of numerous managerially-orientated studies.

The findings suggest that widespread restructuring was taking place across the range of employment sectors included in the project, and that this was having detrimental effects in terms of job losses, increased workloads and work intensification. It is argued that employers had not been more conciliatory towards workplace unionism under New Labour than under previous Tory governments, in spite of Labour's promotion of partnership. However, unions were often more resilient than managerial studies would lead us to believe. The particular findings about the aerospace industry are interesting. These contrast the MSF response with that of the AEEU, and demonstrate how the latter--contrary to national union policy and strategy at the time--managed to engage new management practices and restructuring in ways that nurtured new patterns of workplace union organisation. This may have some interesting similarities with the postal workers' local and workplace union response to Royal Mail's restructuring in the early to mid-1990s. Clearly, in the cases of manufacturing examined in the book, workplace unions were facing very serious problems, although evidence of union resilience was reported, and two of the cases demonstrated at least some possibilities for more organised and concerted resistance.

The experience in the insurance sector was different again, in that conditions and developments within it could be expected to destroy the prospects of collectivism. But the authors argue that the changing conditions were creating a need for a collective workers' voice--which in turn posed difficult challenges for effective workplace union organisation, not least in terms of the leadership provided by activists. The local government and NHS cases, focused on the GMB and MSF, raised important questions about partnership and whether workplace representatives were engaged in it in ways that increasingly cut them off from their members. The book argues that this may open up the longer-term possibility of membership loss as a result, in spite of the success of recruitment methods by full-time officers in the case of the GMB. The findings compare this situation with that in which, in the context of partnership propaganda from management, workplace activists mobilised their memberships and were prepared to contest the management agenda. This may also raise important questions about the approach to leadership by workplace activists. However, the public utility workplaces included in the study provide a somewhat discouraging picture with regard to union membership mobilisation, and while there were indications of a resilience of collectivist approaches, the unions--GMB and AEEU--tended to trust that an essentially conciliatory attitude to management would deliver the goods.

The broad scope of the book in terms of employment sectors perhaps inevitably provides a fairly complex picture of the nature of managerially-led change and union responses. However, the authors challenge partnership as an effective union strategy, and they suggest some limits to the organising model per se. They emphasise critical engagement by workplace unionism in opposing or at least modifying workplace restructuring and new management practices, and they see this as essential for the effective mobilisation of the union membership, and for union resilience, the recollectivisation of the workplace and the possibilities of union renewal. In my view, they do not overstate the case for renewal but provide convincing evidence that workplace unionism can and often is fighting back in more effective ways than are recognised in other studies.

Reviewed by David Beale