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Over the last twenty five years there has been a sharp downturn in the fortunes of the British trade union movement. Membership has fallen from a peak of 13.3 million in 1979 to around 6.7 million in 2006. Accompanying the declining membership, unions have seen their political influence drop at the heart of government. With this declining power has come a number of attempts to revitalise the fortunes of the trade union movement.

This thesis seeks to develop a theoretical understanding of the ways in which British trade unions have sought to operate internationally as a response to political and economic globallsatton. A two-staged research process is elaborated, based initially on wide-ranging exploratory interviews and then on comparative case studies conducted in the docks and maritime sector. Through this research, two distinct types of international activity are identified, termed 'managerial internationalism' and 'mobilising internationalism'. In the former case, a distinct layer of full-time officials is tasked with administering international strategies. These strategies are generally divined from membership priorities and therefore follow highly visible political, regulatory or normative concerns. In the latter case, union leaders seek to establish member-led international networks that can mobilise against multinational employers. Managerial internationalism is argued to arise where unions possess a relatively high degree of marketplace power. Mobilising internationalism, by contrast, is more likely to arise where marketplace power is under threat. In the latter case, particular 'moments of tension' may emerge- for example where a multinational employer seeks to use its mobility to whipsaw concessions from local workplaces- which union leaders can then seek to frame as demanding an international, rather than local, response. Mobilising internationalism is therefore argued to be dependent on leader agency as well as material labour market conditions. Because it is generated by such materially-conditioned 'moments of tensions', mobilising internationalism is held to be constrained by temporal and spatial limitations. It is dependent on the emergence of specific and finite grievances to galvanise member support for mobilisation. This analysis represents a dialectical understanding of international trade unionism, in that qualitative transformations in union strategy are held to reflect shifts in the underlying balance of class power between worker and employer.

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This study is an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded collaborative project between Salford University and the Working Class Movement Library (WCML). The project seeks to investigate and analyse, both diachronically and synchronically, the political cultures within major British trade unions affiliated to the Labour Party, the way in which these relate to the ideologies of working-class political movements generally, and how they are situated within wider contemporaneous debates. Typically research into trade unions has focused on the industrial side of their work, their official doctrine, and their formal and explicit policies, as expressed through conference speeches, resolutions and voting behaviour. In contrast this study focuses on the morphology of the ideology and ethos of the different unions and their membership, looking beneath the official policies and overt statements to ascertain their common-sense understandings and unconscious and unquestioned received wisdom, which may have been invisible to the participants, but is exposed with the passage of time. The relationship between the ideological understandings expressed through the journals, the dominant strands of socialist thought, and Labour Party policy, will also be investigated. The key sources for the project are in-house journals (1931-1951), written by and for trade unionists affiliated to the Labour Party, which are held at the WCML. The Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU) and the National Union of General and Municipal Workers (NUGMW) have been selected for scrutiny: the NUGMW, a general union in which ‘labourism’ dominated, and the AEU, a traditional craft union renowned for its centrist leadership and powerful communist influenced, shop steward movement. The journal of the Aircraft Shop Stewards’ National Council (ASSNC), the New Propellor, is also included, not as a co-equivalent to the official union journals, but as a representative benchmark of the ideological understandings of many engineering activists, who agitated and promoted left-wing socialist and communist interpretations.

This doctoral thesis seeks to answer the question what factors influence Trade Union representation? Using a case study design, the researcher uses documentary analysis and elite, semi-structured interviews, to evaluate the knowledge and experiences of union representatives, both nationally and workplace based, working in the MoD sector of Unite. This study of a relatively under-researched part of the public sector, demonstrates that for union representation to be effective: the union needs to be recognised for the purpose of collective bargaining; members need access to shop stewards and full time officials; clear structures need to be in place, demonstrating how the union should function; and the union needs to be able to protect and further the interests of its members. It is concluded that in the MoD sector of Unite this does not happen, meaning that representation is not effective. This research highlights a need for greater appreciation of the complexities of the super or conglomerate type unions that have emerged in response to union decline. It demonstrates, in particular, the need for the seminal work of Turner (1962) to be systematically updated and for further research to be carried out into the influence of factions on union government. The contemporary relevance of this research relates to the dramatic cuts to facility time that it analyses, alongside the government’s privatisation policies, providing empirical evidence of the difficulties that could be faced by British trade unions, if the Trade Union Reform Bill, going through parliament at the time of writing, is passed into law. The MoD Employee Relations review can be seen as a test bed for the Bill’s components on the restriction of trade union facility time in the public sector, and this thesis is, therefore, timely.

This thesis considers the role of union full time officers in union organising strategies. Two decades of promoting union organising influenced by models developed by the AFL-CIO, has failed to arrest the decline of UK trade unions let alone produce evidence of renewal. Focusing mainly on one region in the UKs largest public sector trade union, Unison, the research provides for a detailed account of how organising strategies affect union work, presenting thick and deep data from full time officers (Regional Organisers), Regional Management, Senior National Officials, other Unison staff and lay representatives. The research focuses on the previously neglected role of full time officers in union organising strategies and considers how such strategies can change both the role of the full time officer and relations with other union constituencies. The research contributes to the ongoing study of trade union attempts to renew in the cold climate of globalisation and neo-liberalism. In doing so it also considers the much ignored area of the role of union bureaucracy in union organising strategies and the potential distortion or opposition it may present. Consequently the research also synthesises literature on union organising with classical theories of trade unions. Unison embraced the TUC’s promotion of grassroots organising and, it has been claimed, has been transformed into an organising union. The research questions this judgement by revealing a disconnection between organising strategies from workplace realities, resulting in an increasing managerialism and attempts to extend control over full time officers. A key consequence of these developments is the deterioration in the ability of Unison to represent members, both collectively and individually, leading to a potential crisis in representational capacity and ability providing the prospect for further union decline.