The Relaunch of the Trades Union Congress

British Journal of Industrial Relations36:3 September 1998 0007–1080 pp. 339–360

The Relaunch of the Trades UnionCongressEdmund Heery

Abstract

Despite the institutional bias in British industrial relations research, one of theoldest institutions, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), has been neglected byresearchers. This article seeks to rectify this deficiency through an analysis ofthe formal relaunch of the TUC since 1994 under its new General Secretary,John Monks. It reviews the internal reforms and innovations in policy thatcomprise the relaunch and identifies two competing visions of the union futurethat lie at its centre. In the first of these, the TUC’s role is to act as anauthoritative social partner in relations with government and employers,while in the second its function is to promote, co-ordinate and supportorganizing activity by its member unions. Each of these perspectives on theTUC’s role is informed by experience overseas in continental Europe in theone case and in Australia and the United States in the other. The articleconcludes that social partnership and the ‘organizing model’ are not easilyreconciled and that, despite the relaunch, the TUC has yet to make a keystrategic choice: whether to follow the European or the North American routeas it enters the twenty-first century.

1. Introduction

To the annoyance of its staff, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) is stillroutinely depicted as a cart-horse by political cartoonists. What rankles isthe double connotation that the TUC is a stolid and decidedly dull institutionand that it is increasingly passe and ill-matched to a rapidly changing society.In actual fact, the TUC has exhibited considerable dynamism in recent yearsand has sought deliberately to renew itself by instituting major changes in itsstructure, activities and mode of internal operation. Under its new GeneralSecretary, John Monks, the TUC underwent a formal relaunch in March1994 which involved a thorough overhaul of its decision-making machineryand a less tangible attempt to generate a new ethos and sense of mission

Edmund Heery is at the Cardiff Business School, University of Wales.

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340 British Journal of Industrial Relations

(TUC 1994b). In the period since, this commitment to change has beenmaintained and has found further expression in the New Unionismorganizing campaign, launched in 1996 (TUC 1996), and in the creation of anew Academy to train trade union organizers.

The purpose of this article is to tell the story of this attempt at renewal. Itseeks, initially, to characterize the relaunch of the TUC and to identify itsdistinguishing features, and it examines the internal reforms at the core ofthe initiative, the representative strategy they are designed to promote andthe accompanying changes in TUC relationships with external agencies,including political parties, employers’ organizations and a wider range ofsocial groups and institutions which have become the focus of TUCcampaigning. It also seeks to use the TUC as a ‘critical case’ (Edwards 1995)and explores two issues of a more general character.

First, the TUC has explicitly sought to develop a strategy for renewal, andthe relaunch provides an opportunity to compare the realities of trade unionstrategy with accounts in the theoretical literature. According to Kelly(1997a), a ‘strategic choice’ perspective currently dominates the latter andtends both to de-emphasize the ‘structural constraints’ on trade union actionand to assume that unions can and do develop internally consistentstrategies. Both beliefs are examined using the TUC case. Second, therelaunch of the TUC echoes developments in other national trade unioncentres in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the United States and Ireland,where similar policies have been adopted to extend unionism to new groupsof workers and to promote organizing activity. As such, it provides insightinto the changing role of union confederations and their capacity to re-establish themselves as ‘encompassing organizations’ in the context of uniondecline, political exclusion and the emergence of a more decentralizedpattern of industrial relations.

2. Defining characteristics

In the first instance, the relaunch of the TUC can be characterized as aventure in ‘managerial unionism’ (Heery and Kelly 1994), an attempt toimprove the effectiveness or ‘performance’ of trade unions through theadoption of contemporary management techniques.1 As such, it standsfour-square with wider developments in British trade unionism and withmany other voluntary or quasi-public institutions that have sought, at leastin part, to refashion themselves on the lines of the modern businessenterprise (Heery 1996; Undy et al. 1996; Thatcher 1997). The relaunch hasbeen suffused with the language of ‘new wave management’ (Wood 1989),and the themes of strategic management, reliance on performance indi-cators, flexibility, teamworking and culture change occur repeatedly in TUCdocuments and accounts of the process. Indeed, the relaunch was initiated ata meeting at Cranfield School of Management in 1993 involving senior TUCstaff and members of the General Council which analysed the ‘cultural web’

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The Relaunch of the Trades Union Congress 341

of the old TUC, set out elements of a new, desired culture and formulated astrategy for moving from one to the other.

The most visible internal changes within the relaunch comprised a reformof the TUC’s representative machinery; unlike earlier reforms (Coates andTopham 1988: 134–5), its purpose was not to facilitate a more balancedexpression of the interests of member unions but to secure a more efficientuse of TUC staff and to raise the effectiveness of TUC decision-making.Before the relaunch much of the work of the General Council of the TUCwas conducted through a series of long-standing policy committees whichoriginally shadowed the work of government departments. The relaunchproceeded on the understanding that these committees had ceased to fulfil aclear purpose and, in particular, that their development of policy positionsbased on the careful aggregation of affiliates’ views had little impact on thereal world of industrial relations beyond Congress House. In managerialterms, the existing machinery absorbed significant costs while failing togenerate significant outputs which advanced the work of the TUC.

The reform of the TUC’s representative machinery flowed directly fromthis diagnosis and corresponded closely to the notion of performancemanagement (Mabey and Salaman 1995). Thus, early in the process theGeneral Council drew up a mission statement and list of key objectives andthen set about scrapping, overhauling and replacing the component parts ofthe TUC’s decision-making machinery in order to ensure that theseobjectives were pursued (TUC 1994b). The parts that have been scrappedare the standing committees of the General Council and the TUC industrycommittees, though there is provision for some of the latter to survive in theform of more loosely constituted Industry Forums. Parts that have beenretained but overhauled include the General Council itself, which nowmeets less frequently and has delegated aspects of its business to a 26-personExecutive Committee, and the joint committees of the General Council,such as the Women’s and Race Committees and their associated con-ferences, which have been required to set clear aims and objectives andreview their use of resources. The key new component has been a series ofTask Groups, composed of General Council members, other represen-tatives from affiliates and TUC staff, which are intended to work towardsclearly defined and achievable objectives, report to the Annual Congress viathe General Council and then disband. Task Groups have been created todevelop policy and campaigns on a range of issues including stakeholding,full employment, representation at work, human resource management,part-time workers and union organizing; they represent an attempt both tofocus the work of the TUC on key priorities and to emphasize concreteachievement in TUC decision-making rather than consensus-building orprocedural rectitude.

Running alongside this reform of representative machinery has been areform of management practice within the TUC itself. The TUC office wasoriginally modelled on the traditional civil service and conformed closely tothe precepts of classical bureaucracy. It comprised strictly demarcated



functional departments, a centralization of authority in the hands ofdepartment heads, an internal labour market which allowed long-termprogression through a hierarchy of bureaucratic offices, and the formalanonymity and deference to representatives of affiliates of TUC officials.Each of these elements has been subject to deliberate reform as part of therelaunch. Reflecting the creation of Task Groups, there has been a newemphasis on project work across department boundaries; posts have beenredesigned and redesignated and their incumbents encouraged to act withgreater autonomy; there has been a deliberate attempt to renew theorganization through external appointments; and TUC staff have beengranted formal membership of Task Groups, alongside representatives fromaffiliates, and encouraged to participate openly in decision-making. Thesedevelopments, in turn, have been supported by greater investment in staffdevelopment, including a successful attempt to secure the Investors inPeople standard.2 The changes as a whole represent an attempt to alter theethos and style of working of the TUC office and to create a more informal,flexible and entrepreneurial work-force.

The second characteristic of the relaunch has been a shift in therepresentative strategy of the TUC and an attempt to re-establish the TUCas a body that speaks on behalf of a broadly conceived labour interest. Thishas been symbolized among its staff by an attempt to identify and accordpriority to what they describe as ‘world of work’ issues. By this they meanquestions of employment policy which impinge on the broad mass ofworking people and are of relevance to the majority of workers who are notmembers of trade unions. There has been a deliberate attempt to positionthe TUC not just as the representative organ of trade unions, but as anauthoritative voice on behalf of a broadly conceived employee interest in theway that Shelter or other campaigning charities speak on behalf of their‘constituency’. ‘No one represents Indian restaurant workers’, was how oneTUC official expressed this intention, ‘but the TUC likes to speak on theirbehalf.’ Examples of ‘world of work’ issues that have been accorded priorityin recent TUC campaigns include the rights of part-time workers, minimumemployment standards and the national minimum wage (TUC 1995; 1996).

Several of these campaigns have focused on the interests of particulargroups and minorities within the labour force, and the TUC’s representativestrategy has sought to combine a broadening of its constituency with arecognition of its diversity. This combination has led to attempts to pushhitherto marginal concerns for trade unions to the mainstream of themovement. One of the first and most active of the new Task Groups, forinstance, was that established to campaign for equal rights and improvedunion representation for part-time workers (Heery 1998), while theincreased priority attached to anti-racism was seen in the organization of theRespect Festivals in London’s Finsbury and Victoria Parks, which attractedthousands to union-sponsored celebrations of cultural diversity. There havealso been initiatives targeted at young workers, gays and homeworkers.Engagement with the interests of minorities has long been a feature of the



TUC’s role, but since the relaunch there has been a broadening of theinterests considered and a deliberate attempt to reclassify this as part of thecore work of the TUC.

The final element of the new representative strategy has been a focus onunion organizing, which has found expression in the New Unionismcampaign. The latter was launched in 1996 at a special TUC conference, wasa main theme of the 1996 and 1997 Annual Congresses and has been pursuedthrough a New Unionism Task Group. In 1998, the TUC’s OrganizingAcademy was opened to train specialist officers in recruitment andorganizing techniques and to allocate them to priority recruitmentcampaigns identified jointly by the TUC and member-unions. If the TUC isto maintain a plausible position as an authoritative representative ofworking people, it is believed, it must reverse the two-decade decline inunion membership; and this, in turn, will require a reorientation of unionactivity towards new categories of worker in new sectors of employment.The themes of extending and encompassing diverse interests in therepresentative role of the TUC, therefore, are seen to come together in anew commitment to union organizing and an intention to establish the TUCas the co-ordinator of a much-expanded recruitment effort by its affiliates.

While much of the relaunch has involved changes internal to the TUC, thepurpose of these reforms has been to turn the organization outwards andmake it a more effective operator in the external world of industrial relationsand public policy. The mission statement adopted as part of the processdeclares that ‘the TUC will be a high profile organisation which campaignsfor trade union aims and values . . .’ (TUC 1995), and there has been adeliberate attempt to renew and extend the TUC’s relationships withinstitutions beyond the labour movement. With regard to the politicalparties and the immediate process of government, two main changes havebeen apparent, both of which have been bolstered by the appointment of aWestminster Liaison Officer, the first specialist lobbyist to be employed bythe TUC.

The first change, which has attracted considerable media attention, hasbeen increased contact between the TUC and political parties other thanLabour (cf. Leopold 1997). Regular meetings continued with the leadershipof the Labour Party and assumed greater importance as the probability ofLabour’s General Election victory became apparent; since the election theTUC leadership has held meetings with Tony Blair and established a keynexus with pro-union ministers in the Department of Transport andIndustry. However, the TUC also tried to develop contacts at ministeriallevel with the last Conservative government and has moved much closer tothe Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru. Since the relaunch, it has had apresence at the annual conferences of all the main political parties. Thesecond change has been a greater emphasis on lobbying members ofParliament in both Houses of Parliament and seeking to identify cross-partysupport for TUC policy. Lobbying of this kind had previously beenneglected by the TUC, which by tradition sought political influence in



government ministries rather than Westminster (Martin 1980) and has beensupported by the creation of a data base of members’ policy interests, theissuing of parliamentary briefings on key policies and a regular column fromJohn Monks in The House Magazine.3 The new style of political work wasepitomized by a series of ten-minute rule bills, backed by an all-party groupof MPs, which were used to generate parliamentary support for thecampaign for part-time workers (TUC 1996).4

The broadening of TUC contacts within the political process has beenmatched by a similar broadening of contacts beyond. With regard toemployers, the TUC has sought to strengthen its links with the Confedera-tion of British Industry (CBI), for example by reciprocal invitations toaddress annual conferences, and to establish new contacts with a widerrange of employer and management organizations. Since the relaunchdiscussions have been held, and in some cases joint initiatives launched, withthe Association of British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of SmallBusinesses, the Institute of Directors, the Institute of Management, theInstitute of Personnel and Development and the Employers’ Forum on Age(TUC 1996). Several of these bodies previously had very little formalcontact with the trade union movement. The motive for much of this newcontact with employers’ organizations is similar to that for greater contactwith cross-party backbench MPs, in that it is directed at the creation ofpolicy alliances that can exert pressure on the political process.

Developing broader and more intense contacts with employers, however,has also been viewed as an alternative to the exercise of political influenceand a means of advancing union interests in a period of diminished politicalaccess. The TUC has attempted to influence employer behaviour directly,and since the relaunch the terms of a broad exchange that it would like tomake with employers has become apparent. One aspect of this exchange,elaborated in the report of the Task Group on Human Resource Manage-ment, has been an offer of ‘social partnership’, understood in terms of unionco-operation with the modernization of British industry on the basis offlexible working and investment in skills (TUC 1994a). Another has been anattempt to secure employer support for ‘minimum standards’ at work.Discussions with employers’ organizations have focused on ‘how to tacklethe problem of undercutting by the bad employers’ (TUC 1996: 15) and haveconsidered issues such as representation at work, minimum wages, equaltreatment and access to education and training. They have also consideredmeans of implementation, and the TUC has made clear its preference forsome kind of inter-sectoral framework agreement on basic employmentstandards, similar to those that exist in several European economies andwhich the European Commission favours as the means for implementingEuropean social policy (TUC 1997: 21).

The appetite for alliance-building and networking has also led the TUC inanother direction: towards closer contact with the voluntary sector, single-issue campaigning organizations, churches, professional bodies and publicagencies like Training and Enterprise Councils. In the past, contact of this



kind was viewed with suspicion because it compromised trade unionindependence, and when it took place it did so on the assumption that theTUC was the dominant partner in the relationship. Since the relaunch,however, there has been a deliberate attempt to identify shared concernsand objectives with other agencies and to act in genuine concert with them.Central to the campaign for part-time workers, for example, was joint workwith the National Association of Citizen’s Advice Bureaux, which involvedthe publication of a joint report, Time for Change, and the use of Citizen’sAdvice Bureaux to distribute leaflets and advice (TUC 1996). TUCcampaigns on occupational pensions provide another example; these haveinvolved contact and, where possible, co-operation with a diverse mix oforganizations including the Consumer’s Association, the Confederation ofOccupational Pensioners’ Associations, Age Concern, Help the Aged, thePolice Federation, Stonewall, the National Association of Pension Funds,the Society of Pension Consultants and the Association of Pension Lawyers(TUC 1995; 1996). The purpose of these alliances, once again, has been tointervene more effectively in the public policy arena by establishingcommon ground, sharing resources and enabling the TUC to draw on thedistinctive competence or attributes of other organizations, which mightinclude the possession of expert knowledge and authority, access to keyconstituencies, or popular legitimacy and political influence.

Running alongside the use of these campaign alliances has been a greaterprofessionalism in methods of campaigning, for which a new Campaigns andCommunications Department is largely responsible. Working in tandemwith TUC policy departments, the latter has attempted deliberately toengage a non-traditional union audience through non-traditional media.Thus, ‘world of work’ issues have been selected as the focus because theyhave wide appeal and can be presented as non-sectional and addressing theneeds of employees rather than the institutional interests of trade unions.The volume and quality of TUC public relations output has also increasedand a greater proportion has been directed at parts of the media that werepreviously ignored, including the personal finance and women’s pages ofnewspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express, women’s magazines andlocal press and radio. In addition, the TUC has established its own web-siteand launched TUTV, a series of short programmes ‘on concerns in the worldof work’, transmitted on the BBC’s night-time service. Perhaps the mostnovel initiatives to date, however, have been the Respect music festivals,which were promoted as a more effective means of communicating an anti-racism message to a young, largely non-union audience than a conventionaldemonstration, and the use in a number of campaigns of telephone hot-lines. The latter have been advertised in local and national newspapers andinvite union and non-union members alike to air grievances and seek advice,while their cases can then be used to generate further stories in the media orgathered together in reports in an attempt to sustain discussion of low pay,part-time working, poor working conditions and other issues.5 The purposeof this kind of campaigning has been to focus the attention of the media and



politicians on particular TUC policies, but also to create a climate of publicopinion that is favourable to trade unions and their members and that canconstrain the actions of government and employers. By highlightinginjustice at work, moreover, and suggesting means through which it can betackled, new campaign methods can promote union organizing.

In summary, the relaunch of the TUC can be viewed as an attempt both tochange trade union methods and to promote a substantive shift in tradeunion strategy. The changes in methods fall into two broad categories. First,there has been the attempt to promote ‘strategic’ action by the TUC in whichkey goals and attainable objectives are identified and a plan is set in train fortheir realization. The manifestation of this shift has been the transposition ofthe TUC’s work into a series of campaigns, each conducted through itsdedicated Task Group. Second, there has been an emphasis on ‘partnership’and the building of supporting coalitions for each campaign, which has beenseen in the changed orientation to political parties, employers and third-sector organizations. The TUC has become a networking organization, andin certain respects the relaunch amounts less to the renewal of the labourmovement and more to its submersion in a diffuse network of progressivealliances and campaigns. The key substantive change echoes these themes ofpartnership and coalition, in its concern to develop an encompassing tradeunion movement based on recognizing and responding to diversity withinthe work-force. Since the relaunch, the question of union organizing hasmoved to the forefront of TUC policy and has found expression in a dualconcern to promote sustained recruitment by member unions and to draw anincreasing proportion of women, young, contingent and service-sectorworkers into trade union membership.

3. Strategy

Two decades ago, the object of trade union theory was union behaviour, andtheoretical development was concerned with identifying the structures thatcaused trade unions to behave as they did (Clegg 1976). Today the primaryobject is union strategy, and work seeks to differentiate, analyse andevaluate the effects of strategic choices taken at the level of either thenational trade union movement or the individual union (Kelly 1997a). As aconsequence, the literature now abounds with typologies of union strategywhich differentiate responses to human resource management (Bacon andStorey 1993; Martinez-Lucio and Weston 1992), approaches to memberservicing (Heery and Kelly 1994), use of internal and external powerresources (Kelly 1996) and reactions to legislation (Undy et al. 1996). Inperhaps the most authoritative of these formulations, Hyman (1996) hasdifferentiated union strategies in terms of their underlying definition ofemployee interests and has identified five primary ‘union identities’: (1) theexclusive guild, which protects the interests of an occupational elite; (2) thefriendly society, which provides consumer services to individual members;



(3) the company union, which develops a ‘productivity coalition’ withmanagement; (4) the social partner, which seeks political exchange withgovernment; and (5) the social movement, which attracts mass supportthrough populist campaigning.

This literature is relevant to the TUC’s case because the relaunch is adeliberate attempt to act strategically. It has been framed in the language ofstrategic management and has been embodied in a mission statement,strategic goals and plans and a set of Task Groups responsible forimplementation. What is striking about the TUC’s case, however, is itscomplexity and stubborn refusal to conform neatly to any of the typesidentified in theory. It presents a rather post-modern bricolage in whichelements drawn from the various ideal types of strategy are pasted together.If Hyman’s five types are taken as the point of comparison, then there is noresonance with the first, as the relaunch has been inclusive in its approach tothe representation of worker interests; but elements of each of the other fourare readily identifiable (cf. Kelly 1997b: 403).

With regard to the friendly society model, for instance, the TUC haswithdrawn somewhat from its earlier advocacy of individual memberservices as means of union recruitment (TUC 1989), but the underlyingconception of union members as differentiated and reactive consumerswhose needs must be researched and met through an appropriate servicingpackage remains influential. With regard to company unionism, clearly theTUC is not an advocate of the further fragmentation of British industrialrelations; but at the national level it is keen to develop its own productivitycoalition with employers based around stakeholding, minimum employ-ment standards and investment in work-force skills and development. Withregard to social partnership, a fundamental purpose of the relaunch was tore-establish the political influence of the TUC at a domestic as well as aEuropean level; and with Labour back in power the TUC’s presentation ofitself as a social partner has intensified to the extent of offering co-operationto ensure ‘that growth, including of incomes, is in line with what the countrycan afford’ (TUC 1997: 11). Finally, the relaunch has also intensified theTUC’s campaigning effort, and key initiatives within it, such as the part-timeworkers’ and New Unionism campaigns, are directed at mobilizing supportfor and extending collective organization to disadvantaged groups on themargins of the labour market.

That real strategy is less coherent and much messier than ‘stylized’accounts (Hyman 1996: 54) is scarcely surprising and does not invalidate thiskind of theorizing, which can facilitate analysis of the overlapping dimen-sions of union strategy. The non-correspondence of the relaunch with anysingle theoretical model is nevertheless instructive for two reasons. First, itsuggests that union strategy may assume a hybrid form (cf. Heery and Kelly1994) in which seemingly opposed definitions of worker interests andmethods for their advance may be combined and reinforce one another.Attempts to position the TUC as the representative of women, minority andnon-standard workers, for instance, have been based in part on market



research designed to allow union policies to be matched to the needs ofhitherto marginal ‘consumers’ of trade unionism. They have also, however,been directed at strengthening institutional mechanisms for these groups toparticipate collectively in the government of the TUC, and it is notable thatthe Women’s and Race Committees escaped demise during the relaunchprecisely because they allow the TUC access to valued constituencies.Another method, which featured prominently in the campaign for part-timeworkers, has been the sponsorship of legal cases to test and extend the lawbut also to provide a focus for campaigning and mobilization; for instance,through the mass submission of cases to industrial tribunals. Individual andcollective, passive and active understandings of members and their interests,therefore, have been melded together.

However, the non-correspondence also arises from contradictions withinthe relaunch. The central tension which exists is that between an aggressivecampaigning unionism and attempts to develop social partnership inrelations with the government and with employers’ organizations. Theformer approach is based on a reading of labour market change whichemphasizes insecurity and the deterioration of working conditions for manyemployees, stresses the need for the union movement to rebuild its strengththrough organizing the new, marginal work-force, and looks to ‘in your face’and often highly adversarial American organizing for inspiration. The otherapproach looks to Europe, identifies a shared interest with employers indeveloping a secure, committed and highly skilled work-force, and isoriented towards alliance and exchange with institutions beyond the tradeunion movement. The extent of the contradiction should not be exagger-ated, and one consequence of successful union organizing may be increasedweight for the TUC in its role as social partner, while social partnership mayyield a more favourable legal and public policy environment for organizing.The contradiction is nevertheless present and is identified by at least someinvolved in the relaunch. A member of the General Council, for instance,identified a ‘tension between the portrayal of the TUC as an authoritativesocial partner and as a standard bearer in the campaign against bademployers’, and remarked that: ‘The debate over the appropriate levelof the minimum wage, the arguments about zero hours contracts, andthe campaign for employment rights from day one, will make it difficult forthe TUC to maintain a balance between both roles.’ It is likely that con-flict between the campaigning and partnership themes within the re-launched TUC will become more apparent in the course of the LabourGovernment.

Kelly (1997a: 375) notes that work in the strategic choice tradition is toooften ‘not grounded in an analysis of the structural constraints on unionaction’, and that what is striking about the TUC’s experience since therelaunch is how tightly constrained has been the organization’s scope foreffective action. Despite improved leadership, more effective communica-tions, the development of interlocking and authoritative policies onemployment relations and a general increase in the vim and vigour of the



TUC, the impact of the relaunch on the system of job regulation remainslimited. The pursuit of new relations with employers, for instance, hasresulted in joint submissions to government, joint research and moreextensive contact; but the kind of framework agreements providing for thevoluntary regulation of the labour market, which the TUC would like toconclude, remain unsigned. Two constraints that face the TUC in this regardare (1) the ‘disorganization’ of British employers and the fact that the CBIand other employers’ organizations have only limited authority (Brown1996) and (2) the decline in employer toleration of trade unionism, whichhas been manifest in growing derecognition, marginalization and avoidanceof unions (Claydon 1996; Edwards et al. 1996; Heery 1997; Kelly 1996) andwhich diminishes the scope for any voluntary agreement on central aspectsof employment regulation. Most of the main policies promoted by the TUCin recent years, including the minimum wage, union recognition andrepresentation at work and acceptance of the Social Chapter, have beenopposed by employers’ organizations, and progress towards voluntaryagreement (e.g. on European Works Councils) has been dependent oneither European or domestic legislative intervention by the state. Despitethe TUC’s best efforts, partnership with employers appears incapable ofself-generation, and the counterweight of law seems necessary to bringemployers to the negotiating table.6

Recognition of this fact lies behind the attempts to rebuild the TUC’spolitical influence, though again success to date has been limited. Despitethe restoration of contact with ministers, the TUC remained bereft of thepower to deflect or initiate legislation under the Conservative Government,and the main success recorded in the relaunch period was a relatively minoramendment to pensions legislation to extend the same level of employmentprotection provided for trade union and health and safety representatives tomember-trustees of pension funds (TUC 1995). Even when the law changedunder the Tories, as with the equalizing of qualifying periods for full-timeand part-time workers, this occurred as a result of legal judgments and notTUC pressure. Political exclusion remained the fate of the TUC to the bitterend of the Conservative years, and the relaunch was not sufficient tooverturn this state of affairs.

Under Labour, the prospects for greater influence are brighter and thenew Blair Government has taken or pledged action broadly in line with TUCpolicy with respect to Europe, minimum wages, employment protection andunion recognition. The first few months of the new administration, however,have exposed considerable tension in the relation between Labour and theunions, and it is not apparent that the TUC will assume its desired role as anaccepted and influential social partner. The constraint faced by the TUC inthis case is the New Labour project initiated by Tony Blair.7 The economicstrategy of the new government looks as much back to the Conservatives orto Clinton’s USA as it does to social partnership in Europe, and there is acommitment to preserving the flexibility of the UK labour market which hasresulted in a guarded response to TUC calls for minimum standards and new



collective rights. The Government’s political strategy is equally unfavour-able with its concern to build new bases of support among business and theprivate-sector middle class and implies a progressive distancing of the partyfrom its traditional base in the trade unions.

The asymmetry in TUC and New Labour objectives, moreover, iscompounded by the fact that the Government is not critically dependent onunion co-operation, either to regulate industrial conflict or to moderatewage inflation. The emergence of social partnership has been seen to lie ininstitutional ties between trade unions and left-wing governments, inideological affinities between the two wings of the labour movement and inthe need of governments for union co-operation in economic management(Goldthorpe 1984). Each of these conditions is only weakly present ordiminishing in the present context, and as a consequence the TUC’s bid forsocial-partner status is constrained.

The relaunch of the TUC provides an illuminating case of trade unionstrategy at a point when typologies of strategic choice are prominent inindustrial relations theory. Rather like management strategy, however,strategic action by trade unions appears to be more complex and lesscoherent than available theoretical models suggest. The relaunch hascombined different conceptions of workers’ interests and different methodsfor their advance in ways that are reinforcing but that also embodycontradictions — most notably between the search for co-operative relationswith government and employers while seeking to campaign more vigorouslyagainst injustice at work. The TUC’s case also demonstrates unequivocallythe constraints on strategy that operate in the current context and the factthat, regardless of internal reform, trade unions face a situation in whichgovernment and employers are neither markedly inclined to seek nordependent upon their co-operation. The continuing development of Euro-pean social policy may provide a counter to this situation, but the externalcontext facing trade unions is not immediately favourable to renewal (cf.Hyman 1997).

4. Encompassing unionism

Political cartoonists have not been alone in consigning the TUC to thehistorical past. As Britain’s experiment with bargained corporatism fellapart at the end of the 1970s, so academic interest in the TUC waned andsubsequent references to it have emphasized its marginal position inindustrial relations, its weakness and its limited capacity to co-ordinate theactivities of its member unions (Kelly 1988; Kessler and Bayliss 1995; Martin1992). At the heart of this diagnosis is a perception that the TUC, unlikemore successful confederations, has failed to act as an ‘encompassing’organization within the labour market (Visser 1988). The latter role, whichis identified most strongly with Scandinavian labour confederations but alsowith those in Austria, Australia and Ireland, is comprised of three elements



(Heery and Fosh 1990). First, there is the pursuit of broad and inclusivegoals, such as full employment, non-inflationary growth and social welfare,which benefit the broad mass of working people and are often redistributivein intent. Second is the reliance on political exchange, with government asthe primary means through which such goals are realized. And third, there isthe co-ordination and control of affiliated unions as part of such an exchangeand to ensure that bargaining power is pooled and not deployed for narrowlysectional ends. The question posed by the relaunch is whether the TUC caneffectively redeem its own role as an encompassing organization throughaction along each of these dimensions, and thereby compel a reversal ofconventional academic judgement.

It is certainly the case that the purpose of the relaunch has been torediscover an encompassing role for the TUC, though along two distinctpaths. Along the first, the TUC has attempted to position itself as anauthoritative social partner engaged in the co-operative management of theeconomy with government and employers and pursuing full employment,minimum standards and a favourable framework of employment law inreturn for wage restraint and union co-operation with economic moderniza-tion (TUC 1997). In partial recognition of the constraints on this path,however, the TUC has also tried to develop a new encompassing role foritself as the co-ordinator of trade union recruitment campaigns. Along thissecond path, the key inclusive goal is the extension of trade unionmembership to new or hitherto marginal groups of workers; the primarymethod is the establishment of the Organizing Academy and otherinitiatives to promote recruitment activity by affiliates; and the internal taskof co-ordination requires the transfer of union resources from servicing toorganizing and the regulation of member-unions’ recruitment to minimizecompetition. Whereas along the first path there is a risk of conflict withaffiliates over threats to their bargaining autonomy, along the second therisk lies in a threat to organizing autonomy and attempts by the TUC to shiftthe balance of resources within unions between existing and potential unionmembers.

Movement along this second path has not been confined to the TUC inrecent years but is also a characteristic of union confederations in othercountries; indeed, the development of the TUC’s organizing function hasbeen heavily influenced by Australian and US experience. In the UnitedStates, the AFL–CIO has undergone its own relaunch under its newpresident, John Sweeney. It increased its organizing budget to 30 per cent ofavailable resources, established new Organizing and Women’s Depart-ments, and in 1996 initiated a Union Summer organizing drive which used1,000 student activists working alongside rank-and-file union members(Cobble 1997; Towers 1997; Voos 1997; Wever 1996). It has also launched a‘Union Cities’ campaign which is directed at building ties with communitygroups in order to mobilize against anti-union employers and provide newchannels for union recruitment (Eisencher 1997).

In Australia, the ACTU has established a management company,



Organizing Works, to provide for the recruitment and training of youngunion organizers in order to attract non-traditional workers into trade unionmembership and reverse a decline which originated in a period of seeminglyfavourable ‘political exchange’ with a pro-union Labor government(Turnbull 1997). Like the US initiative, it has been based on the principle of‘like recruits like’, and trainees have deliberately been recruited to reflectthe gender, age and ethnic background of employees targeted for recruit-ment.

Other countries that have seen similar developments include the Nether-lands, where the FNV has co-ordinated a successful initiative to recruitwomen workers (TUC 1996), Ireland, New Zealand and Japan, whereRengo has adopted the objective of increasing membership by 1.1 million by1999 through the recruitment of service sector and ‘non-regular’ workers.Even where industrial relations are decentralized and opportunities foreffective political exchange are absent or uncertain, therefore, trade unionconfederations may still be able to exercise an encompassing role bystimulating and co-ordinating organizing campaigns for their memberunions. Indeed, at least in the Anglo-Saxon economies, it is in thepromotion of organizing that the distinctive competence of union peakconfederations may come increasingly to reside.

Attempts to revive the encompassing role of the TUC necessarily raise thequestion of the internal government of the organization and its effectivecapacity to co-ordinate the activities of its member-unions. The weakness ofthe TUC in the past has been identified as a failure of internal authority, andit has been suggested that the absence of such authority is an importantbarrier to the successful transfer to Britain of organizing tactics developedoverseas (Towers 1997: 251; Turnbull 1997: 26). The relaunch, however,has resulted in an effective centralization of the organization, as the newExecutive has assumed many of the functions of the General Council, andhas also been characterized by a greater preparedness on the part of theTUC to shake off the constraints of ‘pseudo-democratic structures’ (TUCinterview) and adopt a more active stance towards its affiliates. The NewUnionism and part-time workers’ campaigns, for instance, which have beencentral to the TUC’s new encompassing role, originated within CongressHouse among TUC officers (Heery 1998), and there has also been greaterreliance on market research to legitimize initiatives of this kind, bydemonstrating that they meet a real need among workers whose interestsmay not be expressed through union delegations at Congress and who inmany cases will not be members of affiliated unions. In certain respects,therefore, developments in the government of the TUC echo those in manyof its member-unions, where national leaders have strengthened theirposition through individual balloting at the expense of intermediaterepresentative bodies (Undy et al. 1996).

It remains the case, though, that the TUC has only the most modestformal control over its member-unions, and that it must develop andimplement policy with their co-operation. In seeking to secure such co-



operation and win affiliates’ commitment to its representative strategy, ithas relied on two principal methods. The first has been the use of its moresophisticated arsenal of communication techniques to campaign internallyamong member-unions. An indication of this is the changing format ofannual Congress, which now makes greater use of outside speakers andvideo presentations in order to mobilize delegates behind TUC policy. The1996 Congress included a presentation by Peter Kellner, the politicaljournalist, of results from a large NOP poll which demonstrated the latentdemand for union membership among non-union workers and a stirringaccount of organizing in the United States by Richard Trumka, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL–CIO, which was backed up by a video on the work ofthe AFL–CIO’s Organizing Institute. Beyond Congress, the TUC haspromoted the New Unionism campaign through its own video, regionalworkshops and rallies, research reports, an advisory booklet, trainingsessions and a regular bulletin which celebrates organizing success.

The second method relies on the notion of ‘partnership’ and consists ofattempts to develop joint initiatives with member-unions which give effectto policy. Repeatedly in presentations, TUC officers have acknowledgedthat involvement in organizing represents a widening of the TUC’s sphere ofactivity but that it is seeking to work jointly with unions rather than to director displace them. The formation of Task Groups, including the NewUnionism group, is one means through which partnership can be effected bydrawing senior representatives from affiliates into the development of TUCcampaigns. The TUC has also invited member-unions to contribute to thedevelopment of new training programmes on organizing for lay and full-timeofficials. The clearest manifestation of partnership, however, can be seen inthe new Organizing Academy, whose trainees will be jointly employed bythe TUC and a sponsoring union and who will work on an agreedprogramme of organizing supported by a mentoring officer provided by thesponsor. A similar arrangement operates in Australia (Turnbull 1997), andhas probably influenced TUC practice, but it is striking how the theme ofpartnership, present in relations with external agencies, has been appliedwithin the TUC to relations with member-unions.

How effective have these measures been in eliciting union co-operationwith the TUC’s strategy? It is certainly the case that member unions haveresponded positively to the relaunch itself; indeed, when the formalproposal to relaunch was put to a Special Meeting of the General Council inthe autumn of 1993, TUC officers were taken aback by the breadth anddepth of support. There has been an undercurrent of criticism since thatsmaller affiliates have less chance to participate in the work of a moremanagerial and centralized TUC, and concern to protect the organization’s‘representative rationality’ (Child et al. 1973) has led to the rejection ofproposals to further reform Congress by replacing formal debates with‘policy workshops’ and a dominant conference theme. Even amongtraditionalists, however, there has been support for change and acceptancethat the TUC should restructure itself and assume a more active and



campaigning role. There has also been a positive response to the NewUnionism campaign and a widespread acceptance of the TUC’s involvementin organizing which was not apparent, for instance, at the time of the SpecialReview Body in the late 1980s. The TUC’s consultation exercise on thesetting up of the Organizing Academy registered almost universal supportfrom affiliates, and the Academy has opened with a total of 36 trainees,twice the number initially anticipated, sponsored by 16 unions.

Acceptance and support of TUC initiatives by affiliates is one thing, butthe alteration of internal union policy to give real effect to these initiatives isanother. The declared aim of the TUC is to promote a ‘culture of organizing’among UK unions, such that the recruitment and organization of newmembers becomes a defining purpose and financial and human resources arereallocated towards this end. The evidence in this regard is much moremixed, and privately TUC officers remain critical of the commitment toorganizing among affiliated unions. It is also the case that it can be difficult toidentify a hard residue in terms of new policy and action within member-unions produced by positively received TUC campaigns, and to date no newarrangements have been put in place to allow the TUC to regulate inter-union competition. Nevertheless, there has been a revival of organizingactivity across the trade union movement since the relaunch which can beseen in the development of national organizing plans, targeted recruitmentcampaigns and the appointment of specialist organizers. Many of theseinitiatives have been developed independently of the TUC and haveprompted as much as reflected the New Unionism campaign, but it isundoubtedly the case that the TUC has stimulated interest, diffusedinformation and expertise and provided support. Compared with thedisastrous ‘Union Yes’ recruitment campaigns in Trafford Park, Docklandsand Milton Keynes in the early 1990s (Towers 1997: 114), the NewUnionism Task Group and the Organizing Academy represent a moresignificant and effective TUC intervention into the activities of its members.The outcome of these initiatives awaits evaluation, but they suggest that theTUC can develop a new encompassing role and that a less dismissiveacademic judgement on its effectiveness is warranted.

5. Conclusion

At its most superficial, the relaunch has provided the TUC with a newmission statement, logo and style. More substantially, however, it hasfurnished a new machinery for collective decision-making by memberunions, a new organizational structure for the TUC office and a new andmore deliberate approach to managing the TUC’s own work-force. Theresult, according to those involved, has been a ‘very different TUC’, whichseeks to focus on key priorities, invests heavily in campaigning andcommunications, and is less inward looking and more oriented towardsexternal influence over affiliates, government and employers. Asked to



summarize the change, a member of the new Campaigns and Communica-tions Department answered simply, ‘less minutes, more press releases’.Since the relaunch, the TUC has increased its policy output with detailedand research-based proposals in the field of employment growth, corporategovernance, human resource management, representation at work andpart-time working, and has elaborated not one but two distinct visions of theunion future, as a social partner in a revived social democracy and as amobilizing and campaigning force among the marginal and insecure. Therelaunch, in short, has re-invigorated the TUC, and perhaps the clearestindication of this is that it has once again begun to attract unions intomembership, with a total of 12 organizations joining in 1995–7.8

As well as being a significant event in the history of the TUC, the relaunchhas a wider significance, and its defining themes are representative ofgeneral trends within British trade unionism. The formulation of explicitstrategy and investment in management skills and techniques have becomecommonplace among TUC affiliates and have been associated with aconception of union members as reactive consumers whose needs must bediscovered through ballots, polls and market research (Heery 1996;Thatcher 1996; Undy et al. 1996; Williams 1997). There has also been arevival of trade union organizing activity and attachment to the kind ofrepresentative strategy espoused by the TUC in which new or previouslyneglected groups of workers are attracted into trade union membership byrecognizing and accommodating their diversity (Ledwith and Colgan 1996;Terry 1996; Walby 1997: 40).

Finally, the relaunch of the TUC’s political career has been echoed inindividual unions, which have adopted a more distant relationship to theLabour Party, engaged more frequently in single-issue campaigns and, in atleast some cases, attempted to construct alliances with voluntary andconsumer groups to exert pressure on the political process (Leopold 1997;Ogden 1991).

Beyond Britain, the relaunch resonates with developments in other tradeunion centres. The most significant feature in this case is the attempt toreverse trade union decline by promoting organizing activity amongaffiliated unions. Initiatives of this kind are under way in several othercountries at present, and in this regard the relaunch of the TUC points to anew encompassing role for trade union confederations in which theextension of union membership is the defining inclusive goal and the co-ordination of union recruitment the defining activity. In the United States,Australia, Ireland and New Zealand, as well as Britain, union centres areassuming new functions and seeking to promote the reallocation of unionresources to organizing, providing training for organizing specialists andformulating organizing partnerships with individual unions. They are alsoseeking to learn from one another, and a striking feature of the relaunch hasbeen the extent of TUC contact with other union centres and its readiness tolearn lessons from overseas. This is perhaps indicative of the inter-nationalization of the trade union movement, not in the sense of the creation



of supra-national institutions, but in the emergence of internationalnetworks which can provide for the diffusion of strategy, techniques andorganizational forms (cf. Martinez-Lucio and Weston 1995).

The final significance of the relaunch rests in its provision of a critical testof theories of trade union strategy. Although self-consciously strategic, therelaunch does not fit easily into available typologies of union strategy and ismore complex and contradictory than schematic accounts allow. In certainrespects, the relaunch consists in the combination of seemingly opposingunion ‘identities’ in ways that are reinforcing. At its heart, however, is acontradiction between attachment to social partnership and a commitmentto campaigning and organizing trade unionism which is necessarily opposi-tional in its stance towards employers. This contradiction is yet to beresolved, and is likely to shape debate and conflict within the TUC for sometime to come. Despite the relaunch, the TUC remains faced with a strategicchoice: whether Europe or America will provide the model for British tradeunionism as it enters the new millennium.

Final version accepted 16 January 1998.

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was funded by a grant from the NuffieldFoundation Social Science Small Grant Scheme and covered a review of theextensive published material on the relaunch, a review of internal TUCdocumentation, observation of meetings and a series of interviews withTUC staff, members of the General Council, industrial correspondents andacademics who acted as consultants to the TUC during the relaunch process.I would like to thank everyone who assisted with the research project,though the usual disclaimer about errors and opinions applies. I would alsolike to thank Brendan Barber, Chris Brewster, Michael Dempsey, JohnEdmonds, John Kelly, Huw Morris, Frances O’Grady, John Salmon, DaveSimpson, Mike Smith and two anonymous referees for helpful comments onan earlier draft, though the opinions expressed and any errors remain myown.

Notes

1. For criticism of the concept of ‘managerial unionism’ see Ackers (1995) and Smith(1995).

2. Investors in People is a government-backed standard which can be awarded toemploying organizations that meet set criteria for the training and developmentof their staff. The scheme is state-funded and administered by local Training andEnterprise Councils under a procedure monitored by Investors in People UK, anon-departmental government body which is licensed by the Department of



Education and Employment to maintain and promote the standard (Alberga et al.1997).

3. The House Magazine is a specialist publication for members of Parliament and themost widely read magazine at Westminster.

4. The TUC has also become more concerned to influence policy developments atEuropean level, though its formal commitment to an expanded role as aEuropean lobbyist pre-dated the relaunch. The TUC’s Brussels office wasestablished before 1994, though was made permanent only subsequently, and thepolicy of strong commitment to European integration and the social dimensionwas apparent before John Monks’s appointment as general secretary. TUC staff,however, described European policy as associated with the relaunch, and the highpriority attached to European work was demonstrated by the placing of theEuropean Unit in the General Secretary’s office during the process of organiza-tional change.

5. An example was the ‘Shop a Scrooge Boss’ line which operated in the North Westin December 1995 and which was used to highlight the campaign for a nationalminimum wage. This was described with relish by an official as ‘taking the TUCdown-market’ and used ‘tabloid techniques’ to generate popular and emotionalnews stories which dramatized the TUC case.

6. In late 1997 the TUC made a joint submission with the CBI to the newgovernment on the issue of statutory trade union recognition which may form thebasis of future legislation. The CBI, however, has not dropped its opposition tothe principle of compulsory recognition although it accepts that ‘a law is coming’and wants ‘to ensure it can be shaped to bring the least disruption to businesses’(Financial Times, 1 December 1997). The statement, moreover, indicates that aconsiderable gap remains between the employers’ proposals and those of theTUC, and the government has been placed under severe pressure from majoremployers to water down any future recognition law (The Observer, 14 December1997).

7. This interpretation rests heavily on an analysis of Labour’s strategy presented byTaylor (1997; see also Hay 1994; McKibbin 1996). At the annual TUC conferencein September 1997, Tony Blair reiterated his policy of ‘fairness not favours’towards trade unions in what was regarded widely as an extremely tough speech.He warned the delegates he would be ‘watching’ them and made it clear that hedid not envisage a wide-ranging revision of employment law to accommodate thetrade union movement.

8. New affiliates to the TUC in this period are as follows: Association of MagisterialOfficers; Professional Footballers’ Association; Undeb Cenedlaethol AthrawonCymru; Community and Youth Workers’ Association; Managerial and Profes-sional Officers; Community and District Nursing Association; UNIFI; BritishOrthoptic Society; Independent Union of Halifax Staff; Society of Chiropodistsand Podiatrists; British Dietetic Association; Association of Flight Attendants —Heathrow Local.

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Documents

The Relaunch of the Trades Union Congress