Redefining Public Sector Unionism

UNISON and the Future of Trade Unions

Mike Terry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415230209
• eBook ISBN: 9781134582150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book brings together contributions from both expert academics and leading figures of UNISON in an in-depth analysis of the union's achievements to date. As the largest and most influential trade union in the public sector, UNISON is an ideal case-study for the possible future development of UK unions in the twenty first century.

1 Introduction

UNISON and public service trade unionism

Michael Terry

Arguably the year 1987 marked the post-war nadir for Britain’s trade unions. Their numbers and public prestige had been in steady decline for 8 years, the shock of the defeat 2 years earlier of the National Union of Mineworkers, totem of British trade union power, was still keenly felt, and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives had been re-elected for their third successive term. Trade union despondency, sliding into fear of complete obliteration, was both tangible and understandable.

One clear organisational response was the flurry of union merger activity around that time. Willman (1996: 332) notes that 40 per cent of all unions had been involved in merger discussions (not all successful) in the period 1986–9. Undy identifies four major public sector mergers achieved out of initiatives around that date, starting with UNISON in 1993, and points to the remarkable fact that ‘one result has been to concentrate some 30 per cent of the Trades Union Congress’ (TUC’s) total membership into just four newly-amalgamated public service sector unions by 1998’ (Undy, 1999: 447).

The impulse to create a large public service trade union, initially through the merger of the National and Local Government Officers’ Association (NALGO) and the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE), formally mooted at NALGO’s 1998 conference, was seen by its promoters as a specific response to the external political threat (Undy, 1999: 450). Superficially at least the attractions of merger in such situations are obvious: increased size and resources and the greater unity offered are comforting, even though there may be an unhappy realisation that no net growth is likely and that ‘unity’, although a fine word for conference platforms, is often harder to achieve than its rhetorical use may suggest.¹ More generally it can be argued that experience of mergers tends to show that their apparent benefits are more elusive than might at first appear. First, they rarely produce the straightforward ‘economies of scale’ either in financial terms or in the rationalisation of management and bureaucratic structures that are sometimes claimed for them. Second, far from overcoming problems of sectionalism and lack of unity, they can exacerbate them, by entrenching previous mistrust and self-interest into the organisational fabric of the new trade union (Carter, 1991; Terry, 1996). Third, by providing a great deal of internal activity – there is an enormous amount of work for union officials in a merger – they can create the illusion of dynamic and progressive change and in so doing deflect attention and resources away from more pressing but more intractable problems. Merger alone, therefore, may provide no more than temporary relief, the sort a sick person gets from turning over in bed.

This book, and the conference in May 1998 on whose proceedings it is based, were designed to explore in detail whether anything more substantial than such ‘temporary relief’ has been achieved as a consequence of the enormous time and energy that went into creating the UK’s largest trade union between 1988 and now. UNISON (the name stands for a great deal but it is not an acronym) was brought into being on 1 July 1993 on the announcement that members of the three unions² involved had voted in favour of merger. Since then it has been more studied and dissected than any other trade union; a tribute both to its generous openness to research and its belief in the value of such work and to its great significance for the future of trade unionism in this country. Its creation raised many hopes and some fears, but no one concerned with the subject is not interested in UNISON’s progress and future.

The processes involved in the creation and development of UNISON are complex and multi-layered, but at this distance three appear to stand out. First, it was specifically a merger of public service sector trade unions. This gave it a particular character and significance, not least because public service unionism now has to be seen as the bedrock of trade unionism in this country after nearly two decades of decline in its industrial heartlands. Second, it was a merger of unions with different membership profiles, governance models, and political affiliations. Third, it was a merger that promised not simply consolidation but radical developments with regard both to union governance and to union agenda and activity. These dimensions of the merger form the basis of this introduction.

A public service union merger

In the voluminous literature on British trade unions there is virtually no treatment of public service unions as a distinct set of institutions.³ In effect, they are treated as centralised, bureaucratic, traditionally rather right-wing versions of private sector unions. During the 1970s considerable importance was attached to the growing militancy of public service trade unions and to the rapid expansion of decentralised shop steward systems within them. Both were often cited as evidence that they were becoming more like private sector unions and hence, in some sense, ‘real’ trade unions. This tendency to see public and private sector unions as essentially similar social organisations may derive from the particular legal and institutional features of UK industrial relations which, unlike many other European countries, make no distinction between public and private, from the attention paid to the manufacturing sector as the focal point of industrial relations, especially after the publication of the Donovan Report in 1967, and perhaps also from Marxist analyses of the capitalist state that characterised employment relationships within the state sector as essentially similar to those found in the capitalist enterprise. Without directly engaging with these debates, however, a quite different view can be advanced concerning the distinctiveness of public sector, and in particular public service, trade unionism. This may be seen to derive from three related factors. First, and most obviously, such unions must engage with, and seek to influence, an essentially political process. This is so obvious as barely to need stating (although it rarely is), but it has profound implications for the organisation and structure of trade unions, their tactics, and the nature of the sanctions and pressure they can bring to bear. Second, public sector trade unions are, or at least were until recently, the closest we have in this country to single-industry trade unions. Unions in local government, the health service, the Post Office, and so on, had membership tightly limited to one or at most very few sectors. This gave them both an organisational preoccupation with, and detailed knowledge of, a particular sector (often also a single employer) in a way that could not be true of the big private sector trade unions. While it is obvious that, for example, the Transport and General Workers’ Union understands and is concerned with the future of the motor vehicle industry, it cannot devote its entire organisational attention to this subject in the way that, for example, COHSE could to the health service. One consequence was a union engagement with the general and specific details of sectoral policy that provided a basis for engagement with employers and government on a range of issues significantly wider than that associated with the usual pay and conditions agenda of collective bargaining. Third, and more speculatively, it can be suggested that there are differences in the nature of the employment relationship between public and private sectors and that these may be summed up in the important but ill-defined notion of public service ethos. At its most simple this notion suggests that the existence of differences between public and private sectors in employees orientations to work and in the ‘psychological contract’. In particular the concept suggests differences between public and private sector employment relationships reflecting differences between working to produce a free public good as opposed to a private commodity exchanged for cash. It is not necessary to infer from this, as some have done, a harmonistic view of the employment relationship (see Price, 1983: 158). The conflictual history of public service industrial relations over the last three decades is enough to scotch that idea. Rather we can suggest the need for analysis of public sector trade unions to be sensitive to distinctiveness in the ways members perceive their interests in work and hence in the demands they make on the representative of those interests, their union. This Introduction, and many of the contributions to this book, reflect analytical and policy interest in exploring such distinctiveness.

To argue this is not to suggest that the UNISON experience has no wider implications. First, the issues confronting UNISON are similar to those affecting many unions; the responses, if distinctive, are nevertheless relevant in other contexts. Second, more starkly, a plausible case can be made that the very future of trade unionism in the UK depends on stabilising and building on its public service base in the first instance. It would take a brave person to argue that the decline in private sector union numbers can be quickly arrested, notwithstanding the marginally more supportive political and legislative environment furnished by New Labour. Increasingly the public services sustain British unionism. A recent calculation suggests that around half of all trade union members work in the public services, although these account for only 19 per cent of total UK employment (Mathieson and Corby, 1999). Eight of the seventeen unions with more than 100,000 members were predominantly public service unions in 1996. While union membership and density in the private manufacturing sector plumetted after 1979, in the public services the picture, although serious, was less dramatic. Mathieson and Corby (1999: 208) claim that in the decade from 1979 public service union density remained roughly stable at around 80 per cent, but since then it has dropped to around 55 per cent in 1996, with notable falls in central government and in the health service.⁴ Public service employees are now at the heart of British unionism, although it could be argued that this has occurred ‘by default’, as a consequence of their having fared less badly than their private sector counterparts.

The implications for the future of trade unionism in Britain (and in several other countries where similar patterns may be observed (see Bach et al., 1999)) are mixed. Insofar as the crisis of trade unionism is first and foremost a private sector phenomenon it might seem logical to seek possible ways out by looking at strategies within that sector, as in Hyman’s influential work examining unions’ alternative strategies in this country and elsewhere (Hyman, 1996). It is of course true that even if every public service worker were unionised that would still leave a vast majority of British employees outside trade unions. However, a plausible case can be made for seeing the future of public service unionism as crucial to the survival of the wider union movement. First, there is still a managerial and employee culture in much of the public service sector more accepting and supportive of trade unionism than found in much of the private sector, especially the expanding private services. Second, the public sector trade unions may provide a more fertile test bed for innovation than the private. A combination of greater security and a more closely-focused set of preoccupations may facilitate new thinking. It is the public sector trade unions’ potential for innovation that may constitute their most significant contribution.

Governance and management of the union

The merger brought together unions with very different traditions and philosophies of governance and democracy and these differences and their resolution dominated the merger talks (Terry, 1996). While all reflected the general tendency of national public service unions to have relatively strong central leaderships and powerful national executives, reflecting the exigencies of centralised bargaining and the need to influence political decision, they did so in markedly different ways. The rival perceptions of NALGO as ‘member-led’ and of NUPE as ‘officer-led’ (see Undy et al., 1981; Fryer, this volume), while undoubtedly simplified caricatures, contained elements of a real contrast and of strongly-held differences among union activists concerning the best way to run a union. However, the merger negotiations made clear that the political context within which all were constrained meant that these were differences of degree only. NALGO stressed the importance of branch organisation and (limited) autonomy while keenly aware of the need to maintain credible central structures for policy co-ordination and to engage with government agencies, while the other two laid more emphasis on the latter, while conceding the inevitability of union decentralisation to reflect and match the decentralisation of employers’ structures. What was being sought, although the phrase was not used, was a union of ‘controlled decentralisation’, to rebalance the articulation between branch and centre to reflect new needs and pressures (see Park, 1999 for a full discussion of this notion).

Important though this balance is to union governance, and much though it influenced the merger debates, it is perhaps not the innovation for which UNISON will be most remembered. Two others emerge: ‘proportionality’ and ‘fair representation’, the philosophies and mechanisms designed to create first a union whose governance structures reflect its numerical dominance by women, and second a union which tries to ensure that the voices of all groups are recognised and heard, have already been widely commented upon and analysed. They indicate a union in explicit search of internal governance policies that match its long-standing external policy commitment to equal opportunities and minority rights. While they in turn raise new challenges (see McBride’s chapter in this volume), testifying to the dynamic exploration that is the constant feature of union democracy, they have been widely applauded for their boldness and novelty.

The second innovation has hitherto remained less public. It is an oddity that despite numerous studies of union governance over several decades, little attention has been paid to the processes of union management.⁵ Instead most work has focused on the role and interactions of national executive committees, of decentralised structures of shop stewards and branches, and on a small set of union employed officials, usually those with collective bargaining responsibility, headed by the general secretary. The significant hinterland of union employees responsible for such matters as the management of finance, training, research, publicity and a myriad of other routine responsibilities has remained unscrutinised, except insofar as it may be included within the portfolio term ‘bureaucracy’, deployed more often to denote polemical criticism than analysis. If any inference could be drawn from much academic analysis it is that the work of such people (managers) should flow unambiguously from policy set through approved democratic mechanisms (good) but that in practice they are more likely to be dancing to the tune of the general secretary (bad). Both comments are rooted in such naïve and simplified views of the government and management of complex organisations as to be laughable if they were transferred to other organisational contexts, such as the relationship between government and Civil Service.

The academic neglect of the study of trade unions’ own ‘civil service’ is mirrored in unions’ own uncertainties in thinking about how they should be managed. Many trade unionists feel uncomfortable in confronting the notion that their own organisations require management if they are to function effectively. In part no doubt this reflects unions’ role as the critics or opponents of management, leading many to see ‘management’ in essentially negative terms. More fundamentally there is a view that management, with its emphasis on expertise and ‘effective’ decision-taking, threatens the democratic basis of decision-taking and policy formulation. Unions’ longstanding preference for recruiting staff on the basis of their familiarity with and commitment to trade unions, rather than for their technical expertise (see Kelly and Heery, 1994: 53–60) reflects this view. This is changing in response to demands for more specialist technical staff to handle such areas as finance and computing, and to the need to engage with equality issues. But even this development is limited, as unions continue to see activity as shop steward or branch officer as the normal ‘apprenticeship’ for union employment, and provide limited opportunities for training and career development. The significance of these issues is neatly illustrated by Kelly and Heery’s finding that union officers appointed from outside the union, who have not gone through the traditional apprenticeship, are more likely that those appointed from the inside to pursue novel, radical policies, reflecting ‘the unease of more traditional officers with a new union agenda’ (Kelly and Heery, 1994: 91).

While several unions have made serious efforts to improve the quality of their management processes UNISON, if only by virtue of its greater size and resources, has perhaps been able to go further than many. The chapters in this book by Dempsey and Wheeler, both senior officers of the union, and by Colling and Claydon, indicate the strategic importance attached to organisational development, and the ways in which the union has sought to embed the processes involved within the union’s central policy objectives (those which in other organisations might be called its ‘mission statement’). While the language of professional management practice, of managing cultural change, and of organisational development is unfamiliar, perhaps uncomfortable, in analyses of union governance, public sector unions of the size and complexity of UNISON cannot but confront the issues involved. It can be argued, as do Kelly and Heery (1994: 204) that the external challenges to trade unions require a co-ordinated response and that this ‘entails a degree of centralization of power within individual unions if resources are to be conserved, mobilized and targeted on priority issues’. To do this requires not that processes of internal management be ignored or marginalised, but that they be integrated into the democratic structures and activities of trade unions. UNISON’s initiatives in these areas provide important ideas as to how this might be done.

Union purpose and the centrality of politics

From the start of the merger discussions it was clear that the creation of a new union was to be more than the fusion of membership and governance structures. The need to reconstruct a sense of purpo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Editor’s preface
• 1 Introduction: UNISON and public service trade unionism
• Part I: UNISON: structures and processes
• Part II: The UNISON agenda
• Index