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The UK New Unionism Project in Retrospect
Prof Edmund Heery interviewed by Peter Hall-Jones in 2007  for  www.newunionism.net

DRAFT - STILL IN PRAPARATION

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Edmund Heery is a leading labour academic, and is currently Professor in Human Resource Management at Cardiff University. He was heavily involved in almost every stage of the UK union movement's innovative "New Unionism Project". The results were mixed, and there is no consensus on the results. However it was the first time in very many years that trade union membership numbers started to rise again. Those who would like more background on the project might like to read our historical evaluation of the project. You can also find out more about Ed Heery and his work here

New Unionism (NU)  What are the chances that the "industrial democracy" end of the partnership spectrum will gain support among UK unions? In other words, do you think that the partnership agenda can be transformed into a more radical union agenda involving the pursuit of industrial democracy?

  
Prof Edmund Heery (EH) This is not an easy question to answer because it begs what is meant by partnership and by industrial democracy. Academic research notes that partnership agreements are variable and a feature of work in the area has been the identification of different types of partnership – see work by William Brown and colleagues, and by John Kelly. However, the question does raise the interesting point about how should partnership agreements, of whatever stamp, be assessed?

NU That's right, there's been a lot of skepticism about "bogus" partnership agreements in the last few years, hasn't there? We've heard some shocking tales, both in the UK and elsewhere, of so-called "partnerships" being arranged without the workers even knowing about it.

  
EH To my mind the positive element in the partnership agenda has to do with extending the reach of union influence or power in organisations – in two ways. On the one hand, partnership may provide a basis to broaden the scope of union influence to embrace things like work design, quality of work and employee development; issues that matter to people at work but which have often been ignored by unions. On the other hand, it promises union influence over the strategic direction of the enterprise by participating in the development of business strategy. If a partnership is to be assessed as successful, therefore, to my mind it has to be seen to demonstrate progress on these measures.

An additional element to be considered, however, is whether or not partnership agreements achieve these things at a significant cost. The latter can also be assessed in two ways: first, is there less influence for unions over traditional issues (note that several partnership involve unions surrendering bargaining rights over pay); second do the substantive changes often associated with partnerships (job cuts, work changes) lead to a less favourable situation for union members. In other words, I’d like to see more assessment of partnerships in terms of whether they allow unions to pursue a new agenda of broadening influence - at whatever procedural and substantive cost.

NU Let's look at things in practice then. If you were to look at unions in the UK now who are pursuing the partnership agenda (be it formally or not), would you say that they are more successful or less so, in terms of membership growth and influence, than others?

  
EH I am not in a position to state whether partnership unions have been more successful than non-partnership unions. We can note that some of the recent success stories of the labour movement, e.g. USDAW, have embraced partnership, while others, e.g. PCS, have not. If the crude indicator of membership growth is used then it is likely there is no direct, immediate relationship with union strategy. Received growth (membership trends driven by employment patterns in different sectors) is the primary influence.

There are two other points I’d make. The first repeats the previous paragraph and is the basic one: we need to be clear about our criteria for assessing partnership and non-partnership policies. Policies can be assessed against the institutional interests of unions (growth, income, security, influence) and the substantive interests of workers (wages, job security, satisfaction, development), and it may be that partnership is better at delivering on some objectives than others; e.g. broadening union influence, improving the quality of jobs and promoting the institutional security of unions. Other strategies may be better for other objectives; e.g. unions put on membership (usually) when they are militant. The second is a point I’ve made before: that the UK business context, with its short-termism, hostility to surrendering prerogative, emphasis on financial reporting and financial performance etc, does not make a receptive context for partnership.

In many industries developing a long-term trustful relationship with business owners may simply not be plausible and simple; bread-and-butter adversarial unionism may be all that is available.

NU In retrospect, what lessons do you think can be learned from the way the UK New Unionism project was handled? (ie what would you do differently if you were starting all over again?)

  
EH In my view the New Unionism project – understood as the attempt to promote organising through the Academy and similar initiatives – has been one of the positive things about UK unionism in recent years.

Unions need to prioritise organising and the project put this on the agenda, introduced a new language and skills and had (and continues to have) some important positive, substantive effects. The latter include drawing in some hundreds of new organisers, many of whom have been retained in significant positions in the movement.

In my view the programme should have been bigger, and suffered from the non-involvement of large unions. And perhaps it should also have been more broadly conceived. The emphasis was on training specialist organisers (with supporting programmes for activists). The recent focus on building up the skills and priorities of paid officials seems to make sense to me. There is a lot more to be done on this issue. It is still the case that the organising message is poorly diffused across the UK union scene, and down here in Wales there have been only muted echoes of some of the developments seen elsewhere. Linking organising to other high profile union initiatives such as union-learning and equality bargaining seems to me crucial – "joined up" unionism.

NU Can you give the readers some examples of where partnership and organising have informed each other, and led to creative new approaches in the workplace? (eg like the PSA "partnership premium" idea mentioned in our article on the UK project).

EHI’m probably not the best-placed person to answer this, as my organising research work ended in 2004. One thing that stands out from our study was that unions and individual organisers didn’t seem to choose between partnership and organising as alternatives – they seemed to be pragmatic in their selection of policies, choosing whatever suited the circumstances.

In answering the question, I’d prefer to drop the partnership language and make a different point: that established relations with employers can and should be exploited more to promote recruitment and organising. Employers subsidise UK unions to a considerable degree, and there should be more of an attempt made to use this resource to encourage union joining and the spread of recognition.

USDAW at Tesco might provide a useful example here, in that a major focus of its recognition deal (whether a partnership or not) is employer support for union recruitment. Public service unions, I’m sure, could do more to exploit existing recognition with public service employers to extend unionism to the expanding private service and voluntary sector. However, it would be wrong to deny that there can be a tension between recognition and organising. One piece of research I did involved looking at the recognition deal in a large employment agency. The employer supported the union, was committed to working in partnership and helped recruitment and the development of lay organisation. The results for the union were disappointing, however. Partly this was because of the nature of the workforce – many contingent workers. But also because of the low visibility and (to be crude) relatively supine nature of the union. The union didn’t make much difference in this organisation, so recruitment was on the basis of member services and help in the event of a workplace problem. Unions need to be effective to attract members, and soft recognition (partnership) deals may prevent them from being so.

NU Thanks very much, and all the best with your current work.