ABSTRACT
Union membership and the number of labour strikes decreased across most of the economically advanced world throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Trade unions and the organised working class seemed to be in trouble because their organisations were by-passed by a high-tech age of globalisation, knowledge work, fragmentation and flexibility in work organisation. A strong wind of neo-liberal market economics has influenced all capitalist countries. For the most optimistic supporters of trade unions, the possible solution for increasing political influence seems to be increased involvement of unions in the ‘negotiated economy’ of tripartite institutions or ‘social partnership’ agreements between the institutional actors in the labour market (Moody 1997/2001).
