British Unions Research Articles

Book Review: Organizing Women: Gender Equality Policies in French and British Trade Unions

Book Review: Organizing Women: Gender Equality Policies in French and British Trade Unions

The impact of the cost-of-living crisis on British credit unions and community lenders

Credit unions are often hypothesised to be less vulnerable to crises than other types of businesses. This paper examines the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on the British credit union and community lender sector drawing on interviews with 25 managers and a focus group with four loan officers. This crisis is affecting businesses and households through high inflation, declining real pay, rising interest rates, and falling economic growth. The findings suggest that credit union and community lender customers are experiencing a deterioration in their finances. They save less, have more unsecured debts, are less likely to qualify for a loan, and are more likely to default on loan payments. Lenders are grappling with a tension between supporting customers affected by the crisis and preserving their own financial position. On the one hand, there is evidence of lenders providing additional support to their members, including emergency loans and hardship payments. On the other, they are mitigating the risks of deteriorating customer finances by tightening lending criteria and reducing lending to higher risk groups. The findings underline the need for future research into the long-term effects on the sector and its ability to provide finance to underserved communities.

NUJ Reporting Poverty campaign: Introducing a trade union challenge to journalistic representations of the unemployed and the working poor

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has reporting poverty guidelines for its 25k+ members to use alongside its code of conduct. These were introduced following a campaign from trade union activists and are now available to media workers in the industry including, among others, staff at the BBC, the tabloid and broadsheet press. These guidelines were created to challenge the demonizing and stereotyping of the working poor and people in receipt of benefits found in British journalism. In this article these guidelines are contextualized, within the ideology of austerity, a British media dominated by the middle and upper class and the resulting demonizing of the poor during economic crises. This article posits that the campaigning work can provide a theoretical and practical challenge to encourage and enable workers to join forces in rejecting the scapegoating of low-paid, unemployed and under-employed workers as seen in the media. In so doing, it considers that, while the guidelines may have limited influence in some sections of the media, they are nonetheless a significant tool, and position of solidarity, in challenging the depoliticizing individualizing apparent in reporting poverty, the ‘skivers versus strivers’ discourse, and in providing a critique of the journalistic use of sources. This article, written by a contributor to those guidelines and leader of the NUJ campaign, serves as an introduction to this unique British trade union approach informed and led by collaboration with people who have experienced of poverty.

Brexit, a crisis in Unionism? The Case of Northern Irish and Scottish Unionists

Prior to the Brexit referendum, which has revealed internal dissensions among Unionists parties in the different territories of the United Kingdom, Unionist politicians had striven to reshape and redefine Unionism as an ideology, especially in Northern Ireland and in Scotland. Unionist parties in these two territories showed new signs of confidence in the 2010s, despite the resurgence of sectarianism in Ulster and the landslide election of the SNP in Scotland. They adopted what has been defined as a “constructive Unionism”, based on shared projects and values. This article explores how the main conservative Unionist parties in Northern Ireland and Scotland initiated this move and how Brexit posed a serious challenge to this reshaping of British Unionism.

‘This Mighty Fabric’: Allan Ramsay, British Union, and the Body of the King

AbstractAllan Ramsay's 1760‐1761 portrait of the young King George III in his coronation robes depicted the new king as both a metaphoric and a literal embodiment of England, its constitution and its people. A member of the Edinburgh Enlightenment, Ramsay's portrait emphasised the idea of union as a moral correction to the problem of faction, echoing the rhetoric and ideas of his more famous acquaintances David Hume and William Hogarth, as well as the constitutional ideas of his most prominent patrons, King George III and his advisor, the third earl of Bute. Ramsay thus painted both a king and a new understanding of nation and empire.

The combustible mix of coalitional and discursive power: British trade unions, social media and the People's Assembly Against Austerity

AbstractThis article investigates how the British trade union movement sought to challenge the politics of austerity after the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008 by founding a union‐led coalition: the People's Assembly Against Austerity. To lay the ground for the study, it redefines the concept of discursive power as the capacity of trade unions to influence the public debate by producing and self‐mediating frames and circulating them through the mainstream media, the Internet and social media to a mass audience. Data were collected over 3 years (2013–2015) using interviews and scraping tweets from Twitter. The findings reveal how the People's Assembly created and sustained a heterogenous coalition through a policy of nonpartisanship and a consensus‐driven decentralised network of grassroots local assemblies orchestrated by a national organisation. The article contributes to the literature on trade union revitalisation by demonstrating how combining coalitional and discursive power is a combustible mix that can help revitalise the political influence of trade unions.

Trade unions challenges in organising Polish workers: A comparative case study of British and Swiss trade union strategies

This article analyses challenges in organising Polish workers by Unison (UK) and Unia (Switzerland). Using case studies of projects delivered by those unions with the aim to enhancing inclusion of Polish workers, the article argues that the internal union dynamics, such as union identity and structures are instrumental for a sustainable organisation of migrant members. Furthermore, the example of Unia demonstrates that an important factor for successful organising of Polish workers was the recognition of their collective agency and their contribution to union revitalisation. Finally, the research demonstrates that previous membership in Polish trade unions was not a significant factor influencing their involvement in British and Swiss workers’ movements.

English Landscapes

English Landscapes

Industrial Democracy in the UK: Precursors to the Bullock Report

Many of the debates in the British labour movement on how to ensure and implement »industrial democracy« through worker representatives on company boards reached their peak in 1977, when the Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy (»the Bullock Report«) recommended the appointment of worker representatives to the boards of companies for which they work. No consensus could be found on the Report’s implementation and the political and industrial turbulence that followed in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s resulted in the abandonment of the recommendations. However, debates over how much »say« workers should have in the running of their employers’ business and what form this »voice« should take have not subsided. This article uses the Bullock Report as an entry point to reconsider the feasibility of worker representation on company boards in the UK from a labour law perspective. In doing so, the article compares the Bullock Report with debates which took place between the two World Wars – an intellectually rich but often neglected period when the British trade union movement was at a critical point in its development. By using insights from labour law history and comparative law, the article reveals the points at which historical factors led to certain choices. An awareness of these historical factors and choices facilitates a reassessment of traditional narratives. Recommended citation: Zahn, Rebecca, Industrial Democracy in the UK: Precursors to the Bullock Report, in: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History Rg 30 (2022) 161-171, online: http://dx.doi.org/10.12946/rg30/161-171

‘Gamekeeper Turned Poacher’: Frank Chapple, Anti-Communism, and Soviet Human Rights Violations

The inclusion of the British trade union leader Frank Chapple on the panel of the 1985 Sakharov hearings, an event designed to hold the Soviet authorities to account for their violation of human rights, raises questions about the workings of the broader network of activists highlighting Soviet abuses. This article assesses Chapple’s support for human rights in the Soviet Union, arguing that because of his historic membership of the Communist Party and subsequent anti-communist leadership of the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) in Britain, his support for victims of Soviet persecution was multifaceted in the Cold War context.

The TUC and social democratic trade union leadership in twentieth century Britain: Bevin, Citrine and after.Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, by AndrewAdonis, Biteback, London, 2020.Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman of the Trades Union Congress, by Dr JimMoher, JGM Books, London, 2021.

Trade unions and industrial relations (IR) are central to twentieth century British History and the larger political conflicts of the Cold War. Yet, biographies of major trade union leaders are few and far between these days. Indeed, there is a danger that political historians lose the entire, now arcane industrial language of collective bargaining (shop stewards, industry bargaining, unofficial strikes and so on); without which it becomes impossible to understand an IR and political world that has largely passed. So, it is very welcome to have these two new studies. For Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine, seen together, are crucial to understanding the rise of British trade unions to national prominence, between 1918 and 1945. ‘They were the two most remarkable leaders that the British trade union movement has ever produced’, according to Hugh Clegg (1994, p. 113; see too 1985, p. 551). And they made their decisive contribution to a distinctive and pioneering British social democratic IR long before the election of the 1945 Labour Government.

The Amendment of the Wage-Fund Theory and the Legalization of British Trade Unions in 1871

Before the Trade Union Act 1871 the legal position of trade unions in the United Kingdom was at best ambiguous, as in many ways they remained outside the law. At the same time, Political Economy maintained that, given a country’s stock of capital and the population of workers, any rise in wages would undermine profits and accumulation. This provided the rationale for politicians and industrialists to argue that wages were not negotiable and that collective action was illegitimate. In reviewing William Thornton’s defence of workers’ right to claim higher wages, John Stuart Mill accepted that the denial of the positive effect of trade unions on wages ‘is deprived of its scientific foundation’. Using evidence from debates in the Royal Commission on Trade Unions, 1867-69, this article examines the extent to which Mill’s acceptance of the economic argument in favour of trade-union collective action contributed to improving the legal status and role of unions in wage bargaining and to change in industrial relations.

Digital audiences of union organising: A social media analysis

AbstractThe article offers a novel conceptualisation of unions’ digital audiences and considers how their characteristics affect the practice of organising. Data were collected from the central Twitter accounts of 33 British unions resulting in 167,658 tweets and information from their 357,687 followers. Using textual and network methods, the analysis shows how unions interact with large, diverse and unexpected audiences including members, other individuals and organisations within their stakeholder groups. The findings support Twitter’s role as a tool for organising in directions like stakeholder engagement and reaching new audiences. The article further discusses how unions can respond to the imagined characteristics of their digital audiences and develop an approach to engagement that builds on the relationship between audiences and content.

Trade Union Responses to Ageing Workplaces: Lessons from the UK

AbstractIn 2017, European-level unions and business associations agreed a framework for national and workplace level employers and union representatives to take collaborative action to design workforce responses to demographic ageing. This article discusses how unions are responding to pressures to extend working life in the UK. Drawing on industrial relations and social movement literature, it argues that unions pursue the twin strategies of working in partnership with like-minded employers to reorient workplaces towards an age friendly model while organizing and campaigning with members to secure conditions consistent with active and healthy ageing. Resisting an erosion of pension and retirement rights and extending employment protection are examples of this approach, but numerous lower profile initiatives by workplace representatives are also reflective of their having an age friendly agenda. Using qualitative data from focus group discussions with union representatives in two sectors, the article shows that union responses are rooted in both of the dominant models of British unionism—the organizing and partnership models—and argues that literature on social movements helps to understand how union representatives reconcile the competing pressures.

Legal Mobilization and Identity Formation in British Trade Unions: Bridging the Spaces In-Between?

Legal Mobilization and Identity Formation in British Trade Unions: Bridging the Spaces In-Between?

The gender representation gap: implications for workplace union effectiveness

AbstractThis article investigates how the gender of workplace representatives has implications for three dimensions of union effectiveness: (i) responsiveness to members, (ii) opportunity to influence management and (iii) ability to bring about change. Utilising original analysis of the 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study, we examine three core elements of workplace employment relations processes that cut across the three dimensions: (i) workplace representation processes and employer support for union activity; (ii) substantive areas of representative involvement and (iii) quality of relations between union representatives and management, and between union representatives and employees. Our analysis highlights significant gender differences embedded in all three processes. The conclusion considers the broader implications of these findings for the gender equality project of British trade unions, beyond the objective of merely seeking to increase the numbers of women representatives.

Keeping the Light Shining: The National Asylum Workers' Union Magazine and the Print Culture of British Trade Unionism, ca. 1912–14

Keeping the Light Shining: The National Asylum Workers' Union Magazine and the Print Culture of British Trade Unionism, ca. 1912–14

The British Gas Fire

22 | International Union Rights | 28/2 FOCUS | A CHANGING POST-PANDEMIC WORLD FOR LABOUR The winter of 2020/21 was a dark one for many, but in the middle of it a fire was lit. Rather, 10,000 small flames, which made up the individual picket lines of striking members of GMB Union employed by British Gas. This marked the largest dispute seen in the UK during COVID, & the largest to hit the gas industry since the 1970’s. The story of British Gas, serves as an example of an underlying current in the industrial trajectory of the United Kingdom. British Gas was one of the jewels in the crown of Margaret Thatcher’s privatisation agenda. Fast forward to more recent times and the top brass of Centrica (the private company that has retained the British Gas brand) have managed to turn a company previously worth billions into a billion pound loss. While the business was busy continuing to lose money and making deeper and deeper cuts you might expect the unions on the ground to be busy resisting. That was sadly not the case, and the issues that came to the fore during the gas strike of 20/21 have their roots here. In 2016 British Gas also announced it would be closing a call centre and office in Oldbury (West Midlands), with a loss of approximately 680 jobs. The unions recognised by British Gas chose not to fight the closure. Roughly the same time as the call centre staff were facing a tidal wave of cuts, the employer made a move on the pensions of the gas engineers. The GMB approached this move by the employer through attempting to negotiate a settlement, which the senior GMB reps at British Gas then recommended to the membership. The union was forced to do an aboutface when the grassroots members of the GMB not only shot down the negotiated offer the union presented to them; but began to self-organise in their anger at the union structure which had found itself so far removed from where they the members stood. In the end the GMB managed to avoid a mass exodus through the combination of a change in the top of the union bureaucracy and a quick renegotiation of the previous offer with a slight enhancement that was reluctantly voted through. Why is understanding the backdrop so important? It matters, because while the scandal of privatisation, offshoring of jobs and cuts has been the narrative of many once great companies/institutions such as British Gas; the way the union reacted, by cultivating a serving culture rather than an organising culture-where maintaining a good relationship with the employer was prioritised over ensuring a defence of the union members interests, is also the narrative behind the continued decline of British trade unionism. The pensions dispute was the canary in the mine of the GMB’s structure within British Gas. If you could pinpoint a key moment when the eventual outcome of what happened with the British Gas strike in 20/21 could have been averted, it would have been an intervention following its failings during the pensions dispute. The saga over the pensions dispute was a clear indication that the union was out of sync with the membership. Where the union failed to learn this lesson, the employer didn’t. The lesson the employer took from the pensions dispute was that the union structure was out of touch with the membership and therefore on the one hand too weak to get a negotiated offer through the membership, and on the other too weak to fight the company off. The mistake the employer did make was in thinking that they, the company, were in touch with the workforce. Fire and rehire is nothing new to the industrial landscape in the UK, however its use has become both more prevalent and more high profile in the wake of Covid as a fast-track way for scurrilous employers to strongarm their workers into submission. Fire & Rehire is the process by which an employer can legally dismiss and re-engage its workforce en mass if it can argue (against a low threshold of proof) that contractual changes...

The “most revolutionary” banner in British trade union history? Political identities and the birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth of the “red” Follonsby miners’ banner

AbstractThe history and iconography of trade union banners has been surprisingly under-explored since it was first taken seriously as a subject of study in the early 1970s. The nostalgia evident in these early accounts for an age that seemed to contemporaries then to be fleeting seems particularly incongruous given the more recent reinvigoration of the trade union demonstration. This article seeks to redress the balance by focusing on the Follonsby miners’ lodge banner. First unveiled in 1928, in a pit village on the northern edge of Durham coalfield in northeast England, the Follonsby miners’ banner was later hailed as a foremost candidate for the most revolutionary trade union banner in British history. This unsubstantiated claim is important in itself, as mass trade unionism in Britain is characterized by moderation and a reluctance to engage in radical politics; an observation that broadly stands for the influential British coal miners’ unions and, more specifically, for the miners of the Durham coalfield itself.The article's argument has both narrow and broad dimensions. Narrowly, it argues that the Follonsby banner has a strong claim to be regarded as the most revolutionary in Britain, albeit with “revolutionary” understood in certain theoretical and context-specific ways. The broader argument develops the claim that the iconography of the Follonsby banner is more significant for what the process of interrogating its “revolutionary” credentials reveals about the complexities of the political culture of the mainstream British Left in the twentieth century and after. In this broader respect, the Follonsby banner—iconography, birth, life, purgatory, and rebirth—is more important for its curious representatives rather than its individuated existence as an “extreme revolutionary” outlier.

How Do Interest Groups Influence Elections? Evidence from British Trade Unions 1900-2019

Trade unions sponsored the political campaigns of candidates running for office in many countries throughout the 20th century. Yet little is known about the electoral consequences of these sponsorship arrangements. I study how union sponsorship affected the electoral performance of parliamentary candidates in Great Britain (1900-2019). On the basis of archival material, I collect new data on universe of union-sponsored candidates, and new data on all parliamentary candidates and their electoral campaigns. Employing a series of difference-in-differences designs, I examine how sponsorship affected candidate nominations and general elections. The results show that attaining a union sponsorship increases the probability that a candidate wins the nomination in an electorally attractive constituency. Second, sponsorship causes an inflow of financial and human resources into constituencies, engendering a professionalization of political campaigns and party organizations. Third, union sponsorship approximately causes a six-percentage-point increase in the average candidate's vote share, and two-thirds of this advantage is driven by nomination in better constituencies, while campaign spending account for the remaining boost in performance. Finally, heterogeneity in the treatment effect indicates that the electoral influence of unions is strongest in time periods and in industries where substantial government interventions affected the labor market.