Organising, Militancy and Revitalisation: The Case of the RMT Union

Abstract

Given that the decline of British unions over the last two decades has barely been arrested or reversed — with recent membership growth limited and overall union density still falling slightly — serious questions have been raised about the adequacy of present union organising strategies and the need for alternative approaches (Carter 2006: 415). Yet much of the academic industrial relations debate hitherto has been somewhat simplistically reduced to a dichotomy between ‘partnership’ and ‘organising’. The partnership approach — avoiding strike action herever possible and trying to rebuild membership and influence through collaborative relationships with employers — has been subject to critique for providing managers with the opportunity to take advantage of union moderation to restructure employment at the expense of workers’ terms and conditions of employment (Fairbrother and Stewart 2005; Kelly 1996, 2001, 2004). However, the limitations of the more robust and widely-viewed more credible organising approach have also been highlighted, including the principal concern with merely short-term membership recruitment and retention, the ‘top-down’ approach to union building, and the failure to link organising to a more fundamental attempt to revitalise and renew trade unionism (Carter 2000, 2006; Gall 2005; Heery et al. 2000a).