ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the salient environmental factors (employer behaviour, employment contraction) before moving to consider the evidence of moves towards oppositionalism (industrial action, organisational representations of unionateness, membership attitudes). It investigates the forces providing the trajectory towards adversarialism and oppositionalism, the sharpest manifestations of which were found in banking where labour unionism is able to respond in a relatively robust manner to more obdurate employers because of its greater strength than that found in insurance and building societies. Human Resource Management practice has been seen to be antagonistic towards labour unionism because it often seeks to decollectivise and individualise the relationships between workers as well as the relationship between workers and employers/managers. The employers' actions, as a result of attempts to increase and or/maintain levels of profitability under changing market conditions, produced such stimuli although not universally. The chapter assesses the organisational presence of labour unionism and reduction in the scope of bargaining.
