ABSTRACT

In the nations that underwent industrialisation from the eighteenth century to the start of the twentieth century the right to collective representation for workers in the pursuit of negotiated pay and working conditions arose through social movement activity. In countries such as the United Kingdom the resultant Labour movement led to the formation of a political party, the Labour Party, to advance these rights through legislative programmes. Within the industrialised nations of Europe and North America, trade unions became increasingly bureaucratic organisations aligned with prevailing political opportunity structures. Union politics were dominated by exerting influence on political parties and the use of workplace sanctions such as working to rule or ultimately the withdrawal of labour. In the developed economies of America, the United Kingdom and mainland Europe, trade unions were widely recognised as securing key rights of assembly and free speech which created vital preconditions for the emergence of the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The old social movements were also seen as separate from, or even antithetical to, areas like the environment. The tensions created via the ‘old’ and ‘new’ underline the importance of the ‘long duree’ or extended timeline approach to social movement studies we advocate in our own work. The concept of social movement unionism, we believe, underpins this insight.