ABSTRACT
In the 1970s the rapid growth of trade unionism among welfare state workers was regarded by some analysts as one of the most hopeful developments since the creation of the post-war welfare state. James O’Connor (1973), for example, recognized that there was a growing ‘fiscal crisis’ of the state and that public aspirations for social welfare spending were expanding beyond the ability of the capitalist state to finance them. The welfare state would either be restructured to provide a better fit with capitalist accumulative interests, or shift in a genuinely socialist direction through a progressive alliance between working-class users and unionized public sector workers. O’Connor’s was just one of a number of Marxian analyses of the time in which discussions of public sector trade unionism were accorded a central place (for example, see also Gough 1979).
