ABSTRACT

The role of trade unions in local and regional development is beginning to find a place in the labour movement and the strategic development of organized labour. In the context of recent membership decline, trade union renewal may be furthered by ‘looking beyond the factory gates’ of the workplace and the employment relation to build progressive alliances and to work for economic and social justice and development with local and regional interests and institutions (Wills 2001). This new-found interest in the role of trade unions in local and regional development connects with the broader feeling that trade unions have been ‘coming in from the cold’ in the UK since the election of New Labour’s first administration in 1997 (CLES 1999; Heselden 2001; Pike et al. 2002, 2004).