ABSTRACT
For two decades, British trade unions have been in decline. As we saw in the previous chapter, their membership has dropped continuously since the early 1980s and, since the mid-1980s, the number of employers recognizing them for collective bargaining has also fallen rapidly. Unions have thus generally lost influence, not only within the workplace, but also in the political domain (Smith and Morton, 1997). Within their traditional habitat-workplaces where managers accorded them recognition for collective bargaining-unions were suffering reductions in their bargaining agendas in the early 1980s (Millward and Stevens, 1986:249-53). Whilst this did not persist in the second half of the decade (Millward et al., 1992), other issues became less subject to union influence. Most notably there was a fall in union wage differentials, reductions in bargaining power translating into a reduced share of available rents going to union members (Stewart, 1995). Other survey evidence spanning the period 1986 to 1992 showed that unions were having diminishing control over ‘the pace of work, the internal deployment of labour, and recruitment’ (Gallie and Rose, 1996:47). Since then, union membership density has continued to fall where employers recognize unions, reflecting further decline in union organizational capacity (Cully and Woodland, 1998).
