This thesis is a rigorous empirical investigation into the trade union response to contingent labour in the United Kingdom. It contributes to knowledge and understanding about trade union strategies and methods directed towards contingent workers and casts light on challenges and opportunities posed to trade unions by the rise of contingent labour. The thesis challenges a dual labour market theory that rests on the assumption that labour markets are structured homogeneously into primary and secondary segments populated by contingent workers and standard employees respectively. It demonstrates explicitly that at least within trade union membership dynamic converging and diverging tendencies between primary and secondary segments distort a frontier between them and thereby affect employee behaviours. This has profound implications for trade unions, as their responses to contingent labour are still predicated upon the existence of dichotomous labour markets. The thesis uncovered internal inconsistency of strategies and methods employed by trade unions such that instead of being inherently inclusive they appear to be rather pragmatic and driven by dynamic tendencies between the membership segments. In general, trade unions confronted with a diverging tendency between their primary and secondary membership segments struggled to articulate systematic responses to contingent work. This occurred because trade unions have yet to address challenges emanating from such dynamic processes, especially in relation to the differences between contingent workers’ and standard employees’ attitudes towards trade unions. Taken together, these findings suggest that cohesion and inclusiveness of trade union responses to contingent labour depend largely on the trade unions’ ability to absorb converging and diverging tendencies between their membership segments.

The relationship between trade unions and the environment is widely regarded as tense and difficult, yet in recent years the environment has become an important new campaigning issue for UK trade unions. Historically, union antagonism towards the environment has been exaggerated but the relationship was not close. UK unions have supported environmental initiatives since the 1970s, although these have been inconsistently implemented. Ideological and class-based differences between the trade union and environmental movements exist, but have been overstated, while the political opportunity structure was not conducive to cooperation between unions and environmental groups until the 1990s. Union decline followed by modernisation in the 1990s altered the labour- environmentalist relationship by changing the content and conduct of trade unionism and employee relations alike; creating new spaces within which more diverse union memberships could articulate novel bargaining and organising agendas (within a revised approach to employee relations) and enhancing unions’ porosity to social dialogue in order to facilitate their rehabilitation to the UK’s social, political and economic policymaking arenas. Union environmental policies and activism reveal the influence of both membership interests and ideology and unions’ search for practical applications for a nascent green (bargaining) agenda. Nevertheless, although the TUC has identified the environment as a strategic concern, relatively few of its members are consistently implementing a green agenda, despite evidence that it is popular with both members and activists. Unions’ contemporary environmental activism appears largely unrelated to union size, membership trend or finances and relatively immune to sectoral and employee relations specificities. Union headquarters’ support for the development of a unionised green function and pro-environmental attitudes are, however, important. Unions remain to be convinced of the agenda’s efficacy as a vehicle for recruiting new members and activists, but more optimistic regarding its ability to enhance their influence with employers. However, case study evidence suggests that a technocentric and conservative workplace greening agenda has limited use either as a recruitment tool or as a vehicle to promote collectivism and its ability to recruit new activists merely reflects extant branch capabilities. Further, although workplace greening is associated with favourable environmental policy and policymaking outcomes and processes it does not appear to generate any pro-union shift in relative bargaining power.

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This thesis explores the intersection at which UK trade union learning meets global worker solidarity, primarily through the use of in-depth interviews with learners and learning providers. It examines the extent to which trade union learning influences and activates members to respond through solidarity to address key challenges posed by neo-liberal globalisation. Mobilisation theory is drawn upon to assist in identifying the foundational elements for global active-solidarity formation whilst transformative learning theory assists in examining any possible complementarity with trade union learning methods and approaches. Research into formal learning through trade union courses and informal learning opportunities, including overseas study visits, indicates that awareness of global labour issues is growing, as is active-solidarity, supported in large part by contemporary trade union learning provision. Nonetheless, dominant global ideologies, limited member mobilisation and continuing trade union political disunities present a challenge for transformative learning and global trade union solidarities.

The thesis is a study of religion and social change seen from the perspective of Brazil's Roman Catholic Church and urban Labour Movement. The relationship between Catholicism and urban trade union struggles is explored within the specific institutional setting of the metalworkers' unions and Roman Catholic dioceses of Greater Sao Paulo during the period 1970-1986. Although the value of the study derives partly from the quantitative significance of the institutions selected (Sao Paulo' archdiocese is the world's largest and the metalworkers' union of the region is the largest in Latin America), it is their qualitative make-up that is of most interest. On the one hand, this is marked by a church firmly committed to liberation theology perspectives; and on the other hand by a deeply divided labour movement which is split into radical and conservative factions. By exploring relations between these respective groupings, the thesis highlights the contradictions and dilemmas faced by a radical church seeking to reconcile traditional catholic themes of unity with its more recent acceptance of the class-divided nature of society and the so-called "preferential option for the poor". The study also discusses in detail the profound historical realignment of relations between radical sectors of the Church and the progressive Labour Movement during the 1970's and early 1980's. It examines the pivotal role of Catholic labour militancy in this process of rapprochement, together with the institutional as well as self-imposed limits to this process.

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