ABSTRACT
The Trades Union Congress estimates suggest there are 291,000 workplace representatives in Britain. This works out at about one for every sixty-five trade unionists. To a very large and growing extent, it is the shop stewards and staff representatives who are the direct union presence in the workplace. The survey discovered considerable opposition to any national incomes policy among the shopfloor negotiators, particularly those from the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers. In the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers the stewards are under the firm control of the district committee. The 1968 McCarthy/Parker survey for Donovan provided further interesting data on union differences. The best educated and qualified stewards were those belonging to the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunication and Plumbing Union, with as many as 60 per cent of that union’s stewards having had part-time further education. The existence of more than one union in a workplace no longer provokes the kind of inter-union conflict that it used to do.
