Union organising and Full‐time Officers: acquiescence and resistance

• Date: 01 November 2019
• Author: Gerry Looker
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12266
• Published date: 01 November 2019

Union organising and Full-time Officers:

acquiescence and resistance

Gerry Looker

ABSTRACT

In the mid-1990s, the TUC relaunched itself with a strategy for renewal labelled

‘new unionism’. The strategy had two strands: partnership with employers and

the promotion among affiliate unions of grassroots union organising. The latter,

heavily influenced by US and Australian experience, saw possibilities for a more

radical trade unionism in the UK. This article draws on a case study of Unison

to analyse the organising strand of new unionism. It identifies how top-down ap-

proaches to organising are distorted by union bureaucracy for the priority of re-

cruitment, not only limiting the possibility of emerging union radicalisation but

also restricting the ability of trade unions to represent their members. The article

also identifies that the position of union Full-time Officers is complex and not nec-

essarily within a uniform union bureaucracy juxtaposed to and restraining a more

radical union rank and file.

1 INTRODUCTION

The ongoing decline in UK trade union membership, from a peak of 13,289,000 in

1979 (TU Certification Officer, quoted in McIlroy, 1995) to 6.2 million by 2017

(DBEIS 2018), has seen several unsuccessful renewal strategies in response. These

have included union mergers, the promotion of individual consumer unionism and

single union deals (McIlroy, 2010). In the mid-1990, the TUC relaunched itself under

the heading ‘New Unionism’creating much academic interest over a proposed

renewal strategy with two strands: the promotion of employer partnerships and back

to basic grassroots workplace organising (Heery, 1998). The organising element of

new unionism was influenced by the apparent success in the United States of the

Service Employees International Union (Voss and Sherman, 2000, Bronfenbrenner

et al., 1998, Bronfenbrenner and Juravich, 1998, Milkman and Voss, 2004). By

adopting the ‘organising model’, in contrast with a ‘servicing model’(Russo and

Banks, 1996), unions needed to emphasise the traditional workplace union building

role of their roots as an alternative to servicing a declining membership. The promise

of a more radical form of trade unionism and the opportunity for different union con-

stituencies to find congruence behind a priority of union building was evident (Carter,

2000). However, while there was some comparability in the reasons for union decline,

not least a cold political climate, the UK context presented unions with their own

specific and significant challenges (Carter and Fairbrother, 1998a).

❒Gerry Looker, University of Leeds, Business School, Leeds, West Yorkshire UK. Correspondence

should be addressed to Dr Gerry Looker, University of Leeds, Business School, Leeds, West Yorkshire,

UK; email: 57gerrylooker@gmail.com

Industrial Relations Journal

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

50:5

–6, 517

–531