ABSTRACT
After years of overt defeat and retreat, coupled with more recent times of underlying inertia and stasis, trade unionists and sympathetic academics and commentators would dearly wish there to be a readily identifiable form of praxis which could credibly serve as model and guide to reinvigorate and expand the trade union movements in Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA. The search for a ‘way forward’ is still being carried out. In an epoch of the continued dominance of neo-liberalism, the decomposition of social democracy, and the persisting weakness of oppositional social movements, there have been proffered many ‘solutions’ to return unions to some semblance of their former presence and influence. From the far left, there have been the calls to unionise and mobilise – the ‘get off your knees and fight!’ school of thought – where rising levels of workers’ sectional and class struggle, principally through trade unions, can be voluntarily created through the human agency of the activist and the leader. From the centreleft and centre-right, suggestions of social pact-ism of various hues, at various levels and with various partners as well as of legal minimum regulation have been put forward. Neither of the two broad schools of thought has had much success in achieving its chosen procedural-cum-substantive outcomes.
