John Hogan. International Encyclopedia of Organizational Studies. Editor: Stewart R Clegg & James R Bailey. Volume 4, Sage Publications, 2008.

Unionism refers to the practices and ideologies of trade unions. Sidney and Beatrice Webb introduced the 1920 edition of their classic work, The History of Trade Unionism, with the understanding that what trade unions do is to collectively organize wage earners in association to maintain or improve the conditions of their working lives. In the struggles to interpret, forge, further, and organize worker interests, unionism has played a major role in the historical development and functioning of modern societies and enterprises.

Conceptual Overview

The material origins of unionism are found in the development of the capitalist mode of production. Producers are separated from ownership and control over the means of subsistence and the product of their labor. Access to these resources is controlled by employers and mediated through job markets. Trade unions are the institutional collective response of workers to redress the material effects on wages of competition in the labor market for employment and the degradation of work that accompanies the authority and technological structures designed and put in place by each employer to ensure that the capacity to produce is exploited profitably. In the war of competition between rival enterprises, the organization of production and the shape and size of the labor market are constantly revolutionized. Thus, wherever the wage-labor relationship prevails, the actuality or specter of unionism comes into view.

Unionism has historically emphasized the importance of collective representation and bargaining to influence the terms and conditions of employment, to monitor and police agreements reached, to affect forms of democracy in the governance of labor processes, and to assert the interests of unions and their members in society. Unions attempt to enact these aims through insisting on, to a greater or lesser extent, the central importance of group solidarity and discipline. Mutual support and unity of voice through worker combination, as opposed to division and atomization, empowers in the face of employer and state opposition. In practical terms, this has meant that unions have often been involved in providing the following services:

• Mutual aid (such as strike relief or injury and death benefits).
• Representation in grievance and disciplinary hearings with employers.
• Legal advice and advocacy for members involved in litigation over issues such as discrimination and unfair treatment by employers.
• Control of access to a trade or profession by insisting upon and participating in the regulation of prerequisite training.
• Education and training to members and union leaders in diverse areas of practice and understanding (from trade-specific instruction through to training in the techniques of representation and beyond to the examination of labor and trade union history, political economy, and social theory).

Beyond the confines of workplace, enterprise, and industry, unions have looked to the state and society for support to provide for the legal right to establish and sustain organization and to refashion social and economic relations to the benefit of members and wider social allies. Traditionally, however, at the core of effective negotiations with employers and even the state is the willingness to threaten and apply sanctions, ultimately in the form of the strike: the collective refusal to produce.

Unionism is manifest in different organizational forms that have changed over time and differ across the globe. In Britain, the oldest trade union movement—the craft-based exclusionary form—characterized the shape of early trade union organization in the 19th century; this was challenged at the end of the century by the rise of general unions (recruiting workers across trades and industries regardless of gender) and industrial unions, which defined their membership base and bargaining agendas to be industry specific. Today, general unions dominate the U.K. scene and craft forms linger, while industrial unionism crumbles. Further change is evidenced by the presence of occupational unions with membership drawn from a specific trade or profession (such as nurses, teachers, and airline pilots), the feminization of membership, and the decline of manual industrial worker domination, while the strongholds of unionization now reside within the public service sector, with membership bases that include white-collar workers and professionals.

The picture is further complicated with unionism across the globe. In parts of Western Europe and South and North America, union development has been heavily influenced by Christian churches, producing what has been referred to as “confessional unionism.” As key components in the broader labor movement, unions throughout the world have been sponsored, shaped, and led by social democrats and Communists. In the former Soviet bloc and Russia, trade unions were organs of the state, acting as “transmission belts” in the machinery of command economies. They were challenged by independent union movements, most notably Solidarnosc in Poland, and then assumed the mantle of independence from the state following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites. In China, though state domination persists, in recent years clandestine independent union organization has emerged. Elsewhere, many of the former British colonies have retained models of organization shaped by the British trade union example, while it is also the case that there is a strong tradition of political trade unionism that is still present in parts of Africa and Asia.

As organizations that express an antagonism between employees and employers, unions are regarded with hostility within the terms of unitarist tenets of managerialism. With the assumptions that enterprises should be integrated, with a single authority and loyalty structure, in which interests and objectives are shared by all members, and where managerial decisions are driven by a rationality provided by the index of profit maximization and the legitimacy derived from property rights, opposition to management is irrational and illegitimate. Collective bargaining is seen as an antisocial mechanism founded on the premise of conflicting interests, while unions are regarded as an intrusion from outside that compete with management for the loyalty of employees.

It is thus no surprise that unions have faced a number of strategies to keep them out of the employment relationship. The proscription of trade union organization and refusal by employers to recognize and negotiate, combined with surveillance, victimization of activists, segregation, intimidation, and violence, often sanctioned and enacted by the state and its agencies, has featured prominently in the history of union development throughout the world. In the first nations to industrialize, unions spent much of the 19th century with low membership rates and precarious if not outlaw legal status. However, by the dawn of the 20th century, following on from the emergent strength of working class and socialist political forces and mass worker militancy in the seemingly ever-expanding system of capitalist factory production, unionism began to make spectacular gains, with membership rates rising dramatically, collective bargaining coverage widening, and unions in some nations promising to become established as stable and durable national organizations. However, early promise was subverted from the close of World War I. Union membership rates and organization, along with collective bargaining coverage, were challenged severely in the United Kingdom and United States in the context of concerted union-busting and against the backdrop of mass unemployment experienced during the Great Depression. In Russia, the triumph of Stalinism marked the end of independent unionism, while in Germany, Italy, and Spain the victory of fascism meant death for independent unions and very often their leaders and activists, a pattern replicated and generalized with wartime occupation.

The postwar period, through to the 1970s, proved to be a golden age for trade unions in liberal democracies. Haunted by the vision of intense industrial and social conflict in the prewar period, policymakers sought to construct a postwar settlement, with accords to establish social stability through consensus building between the main social actors and their institutions, including trade unions. This translated into the consolidation and construction of welfare states, the advocacy of Keynesian techniques of demand management to challenge unemployment, and the establishment of corporatist decision-making mechanisms at the level of the state and enterprise. In combination with the long postwar economic boom and the spread of large-scale Fordist manufacturing principles, these measures permitted trade unions to claim legitimacy, organize, and bargain more effectively. As Phelan noted in 2006, the postwar accords meant power and influence beyond the dreams of prewar trade unionists for organized labor. Trade unions became established as key players in Europe, North America, and Japan, and union density rates began a long period of growth as organized labor played a key role in economic growth and social improvement.

However, from the 1980s onwards, unionism has confronted crisis on a global scale, albeit unevenly, but with few exceptions. Membership rates have hemorrhaged, the scope and coverage of collective bargaining have been radically constrained, and effectiveness in struggles with employers has been called into question with strikes by key groups of workers going down to defeat, while overall levels of militancy have declined dramatically.

There has been a seismic shift in the political landscape. The postwar Keynesian consensus lasted through the 1970s and then collapsed beneath the weight of the fiscal crisis of the state; this and the squeeze on corporate profits opened the space for a radical change in public policy, first in the United Kingdom and United States and then throughout much of the globe. In a process accelerated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and satellites from 1989, under the banner of neoliberalism and globalization, regulation is profaned as a fetter upon efficiency, while the ideal of the free market is held sacred.

In the context of the United Kingdom, for example, unions have been held responsible for past economic failures on several fronts. Competitiveness was undermined through the ability to inflate wage rates, impose restrictive practices, and engage in disruptive industrial action. Unions subverted the democratic process as they forced the state to confer a wide range of legal immunities along with social and economic regulations that provided a shield from the disciplining force of competition, such that their sectional interests prevailed over the commonweal. The force of these claims supposedly became overwhelming from the 1960s onwards, as attempts to reform industrial relations faltered in the face of union membership growth and worker militancy and as the fault lines of the economy became dramatically exposed. Such reasoning underpinned the introduction by post-1979 conservative governments of a highly illiberal regime of statutory restrictions upon worker collectivism, the privatization of state enterprises, and the adoption of fiscal constraint. The election of union-sponsored administrations from 1997 has seen a slight moderation of this approach, but the overall tenor has been retained, while the project of deregulation throughout the territories of the European Union has been promoted.

At the level of the enterprise, unions have increasingly faced concerted attempts at union busting and derecognition. In the place of outright authoritarianism, the new discourse of human resource management has been deployed: performance-related pay, regular performance appraisals, team working, empowerment, and skill development programs are the new watchwords in a managerial vocabulary deployed to win the commitment of employees and divert attention from the independent representation offered by unionism.

Unions are also forced to confront profound changes in the structures of employment. In the global North at least, the traditional core occupational and industrial constituencies of unionism have been undercut by deindustrialization and the shift from the model of the centralized Fordist workplace to a decentralized and fragmented pattern of work organization, deregulation, and outsourcing. Organized labor is increasingly confronted by the threat of capital mobility and a global production network that is supposedly readily integrated and open to rapid rerouting through the communicative pathways opened up by the revolution in information communication technologies. Unions are secondary organizations: They organize workers who have already been organized by employers. The spaces of engagement are not of their own making, and it is clear that the costs of servicing membership bases geographically dispersed in production and residentially poses significant problems. Solidarity requires adjacency. When combined with the exponential growth of consumer culture and individualism, the language and organization of unionism could appear perilously out of kilter with the new terrain.

Critical Commentary and Future Directions

While it is clear that unionism faces severe challenges at the outset of the new millennium, it would be foolhardy to readily accept tales of its imminent demise. The wage-labor relationship has not disappeared, employees have a material interest in independent collective representation, and it is clear that unionism can lay claim to the mantle of progress in asserting regulation and adapt to the transformations in the spaces of labor organization and solidarity.

The works of Nolan and O’Donnell powerfully demonstrate the paucity of “supporting” studies used by orthodoxy to justify claims about the damaging role of unions on economic efficiency and to assert the necessity of deregulation. Gross insensitivity to the dynamics of capitalist development is exposed. Attention to the force of competition is absent. In particular, it is not explained how it is, given that unionization has never been pervasive, that unionized firms have not been eliminated by their supposedly more dynamic nonunionized competitors. The potential for trade unions to contribute to economic dynamism is ignored. Unions provide workers with a collective voice to articulate their grievances. This can be beneficial for the enterprise, as enfranchised workers supposedly display greater commitment, and costs, such as those incurred with recruitment and training, can be reduced if workers can resolve their grievances within the firm, rather than by quitting. The contribution to dynamic efficiency can also be derived from challenging the authority of capital at the point of production, and the authority of the state, to close off low-wage and labor-intensive routes to profitability and so force employers to adopt the best practices and most productive techniques. It is worth noting that the U.K. economy, which has been at the forefront of the neoliberal project, underperforms in the productivity stakes in comparison to more regulated economies such as those of France and Germany.

Information communication technologies are clearly an important part of the armory of capital. However, they are also an important set of tools for labor. The technologies available are increasingly sophisticated, with ever greater storage and processing power capable of being used for the receipt, manipulation, retention, generation, and diffusion of written, spoken, and visual information, at low and distributed cost on a global scale. Intervention into these communicative spaces enhances the visibility and auditing of the performance of individuals and institutions. The retention of memories and traditions that hitherto had so easily been broken or lost is placed within grasp as never before, while the contribution of the multitude of labor voices to such processes can be recorded in a disintermediated way in popular archives, free from institutionalized policing.

This drive to innovation can also be internalized within labor institutions by the adoption of servicing and organizing facilities that specifically address the need to operate outside of the disciplinary constraints of hostile workplaces and that recognize that the captured market of the occupationally concentrated community is no more. Through allowing for asynchronous communicative exchanges, the communication technologies can be used to alleviate time-space poverty and provide alternative points of entry into modes of deliberation and decision making, thus providing for the possibility of intervention and extended participation in collective organization and action, along with new ways of collective identity and action formation. Unionists have already demonstrated that the capacity of global reach offers opportunities to effect patterns of international solidarity.

And finally, through the release of unheard voices, a form of polyphonics may be brought to bear where the creativity of the outsider can inject flagging institutionalized labor collectives with the imagination necessary to innovate and prosper.