Introduction This chapter discusses menopause issues in UK workplaces via a lens of trade unions and employment relations. There are four main reasons why a focus on trade unions is important to considerations of menopause in workplaces. The first is the historical role that trade unions have played in the emergent literature on menopause in the workplace. One of the earliest, most comprehensive and still relevant publications ( Paul, 2003 ) was written on behalf of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC). Based on empirical data and providing comprehensive
The world of work has changed and so have trade unions with mergers, rebrandings and new unions being formed. The question is, how positioned are the unions to organize the unorganized?
With more than three quarters of UK workers unrepresented and the growth of precarious employment and the gig economy this topical new book by Bob Smale reports up-to-date research on union identities and what he terms ‘niche unionism’, while raising critical questions for the future.
Introduction In exploring the crisis of contemporary work, it is essential to examine the experiences and activities of the trade unions. There is a widespread understanding that unions, as collective organizations of workers, play a crucial part in ensuring that workers are well treated and have their interests represented effectively at work. Trade unions use their bargaining power to leverage pressure on employers to treat workers fairly, pay them appropriately and provide them with decent working conditions. During 2022–23, the popularity of Mick Lynch
Introduction In December 2018, the People’s Party presented a bill to create a registry of lobbies in Spain with the aim of increasing transparency in the policy process. 1 In the original proposal, trade unions and employer organisations were included, among many other actors, as lobbies. Political parties were, however, divided on this proposal. According to the centre-right Ciudadanos and leftist Podemos, the trade unions and employer organisations should have been included in the lobbies list, while for the socialist party PSOE, the trade unions were
bargaining became less effective as a mechanism for determining the terms and conditions of work ( Machin, 1997 ), even where it proved resilient. This has been particularly evident in low-wage sectors like retail and hospitality for a long time, and the election of the New Labour governments in the period from 1997 to 2010 marked a notable change in policies towards trade unions and labour market regulation more generally. The New Labour era: efforts at institutional reform In the 1990s, the Labour Party was deeply concerned about the potential political
261 FIFTEEN Trade union expertise in public policy Sophie Béroud and Jean-Marie Pernot The role of French trade unions in public policy has not been discussed much in the academic literature in the fields of political science or industrial relations. This lack of interest is due to several factors. First, the French labour movement is considered unusual in that it is strongly marked by ideologies and very divided. In international comparisons, it is usually described as atypical, being characterised by a remarkable ability to mobilise the population
197 Fourteen Policy analysis by trade unions and business associations in Germany wolfgang Schroeder and Samuel greef This chapter explores the policy-related activities of German trade unions and business associations. It looks at the different structural and organisational levels on which these actors themselves create policy analyses or commission studies and reviews. It also takes up the question as to how capable they are of generating the necessary knowledge to act as strategic actors. Introduction Trade unions and employers’ and trade associations1
. However, these workers are being ‘remade’ as precarious workers and are not being organised by a traditional trade union but rather by an NGO. We call this substitutionism, as it describes a scenario where unions are no longer the only actors and other organisations such as NGOs, social movements and cooperatives fill the vacuum by providing specific services. In Chapter 5 we introduced another example of substitutionism: we identified the emergence of a new type of worker in the platform economy and hybrid forms of organisation being created in that arena. In this
frustration with and the perceived exclusion from established trade unions has caused migrant, precarious and low paid workers and their supporters to organise independently through new grassroots trade unions. This Theory into Practice piece uses theoretical underpinnings of Ness as well as Cleaver and Sivanandan to explore the role of two independent trade unions that emerged in the UK in the mid 2010s, namely the Independent Workers of Great Britain (IWGB) in 2012 and the United Voices of the World (UVW) in 2014. These independent trade unions have organised in various
The situation of the trade unions in Europe is complicated. Unemployment, precarious employment, the increase in social inequalities and the rise of right-wing nationalist parties pose serious challenges for them in most countries. It is true that their possible courses of action at national level have evolved very differently in the wake of the crisis management policies adopted within the EU since 2008, so that many of them must have gained the impression that they are battling in different worlds. However, in this increasingly disjointed European trade union
