ABSTRACT
The picture that emerges suggests that continued reliance on current strategies for organizing, representing and servicing workers, or incremental increases in the resources devoted to these activities, will not be sufficient to achieve a substantial turnaround and resurgence in union membership and influence in society. We reached this same conclusion for US unions (Osterman et al., 2001) and for unions in other parts of the world as well (Verma et al., 2002). Yet this same body of evidence, if reconfigured somewhat, suggests a range of other options that might produce a resurgence. If the parallels noted above between Britain and the USA are accurate, the same possibilities exist in Britain. If workers today want a variety of different forms of participation and representation, then the labour movement of the future will need to supply and support these different forms. This implies continuing to promote and support collective bargaining, but also championing and supporting direct worker participation and voice in workplace affairs, as well as gaining a voice for workers in corporate affairs through vehicles such as works councils and/or representation on corporate boards. It also requires providing a sufficient array of labour
market, education and career services and benefits to retain workers as they move from job to job or in and out of the paid labour force over the course of their working lives. To recruit and retain a representative crosssection of the labour force will require going beyond the standard organizing model by providing an array of services and benefits that give individuals a positive reason for joining a union rather than relying on the existence of a threshold level of distrust or dissatisfaction among a majority of their peers at work to trigger unionization. In some respects, this would signify a return to a form of craft or occupational unionism.
