Description

Trade unions face challenges from every side. These include the reconfiguration of global production, neoliberal economic policies, changes to the character of work and the shift from manufacturing to services. Much trade union organisation has been based on an increasingly inappropriate male 'breadwinner mode'. Trade union membership and density have declined, and many unions have lost material resources as well as political and social influence.

In order to address these challenges, this issue of Transfer examines some ways forward for union renewal. It publishes a selection of papers presented at the International Colloquium on Union Renewal in Montreal in November 2004 (1). The various papers assess union renewal efforts at different levels (global, industry, region, and local and workplace unions) and in a variety of fields of operation (new social movements, young workers, women and immigrant workers and racial minorities). Thus, papers examine the negotiation by Global Union Federations of International Framework Agreements; international alliances between Northern and Southern unions; trade union responses to relocation and new management priorities; and the potential of regional dialogue by social partners to constitute a source of renewal for French trade unions. Articles also examine the importance for internal cohesion and membership mobilisation of developing social capital and networks, as shown by the experience of a major US union with young workers; and of embracing and reflecting the aspirations of new labour market identities, as shown by the experience of female, immigrant and racial minority workers in Canada. At a time when social and community movements at times seem more likely than the unions to spark social change, the issue also considers how unions can learn from these movements' mobilising and networking capacities and regain lost political vitality.

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(1)This Colloquium was organised by the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work ( http://www.crimt.org/) which has a dedicated interactive site on union renewal ( http://www.crimt.org/Unionrenewal.html).

 

Coordinators

Collaborators

Table of contents

Main articles

• Gregor Murray and Jeremy Waddington: Innovations for union renewal

  • Innovations pour un renouvellement syndical

  • Innovationen für die Erneuerung der Gewerkschaften

• Nikolaus Hammer: International Framework Agreements: global industrial relations between rights and bargaining

• Christian Lévesque and Mélanie Dufour-Poirier: Building North-South international union alliances: evidence from Mexico

• Sylvie Contrepois and Steve Jefferys: Trade unionism under challenge from offshoring and globalisation

• Stéphane Le Queux: New protest movements and the revival of labour politics - A critical examination

• Annette Jobert: The territorial social dialogue: challenges and prospects for the trade unions

• Nancy Brown Johnson and Paul Jarley: Unions as social capital: the impact of trade union youth programmes on young workers' political and community engagement

• Charlotte A. B. Yates: Segmented labour, united unions? How unions in Canada cope with increased diversity

News and background

• Community unionism in a global city(Dirk Kloosterboer and Piet Göbbels)
  

• Wolfensohn to Wolfowitz: What does the change at the top of the World Bank mean for labour?
  (Peter Bakvis)
  

• One market, one Social Europe
  (Ronald Janssen)
  

Book reviews

• Tony Huzzard, Denis Gregory and Regan Scott (eds.)
  Strategic Unionism and Partnership: Boxing or Dancing?
  (Kurt Vandaele)
  

• Gerda Falkner, Oliver Treib, Miriam Hartlapp and Simone Leiber
  Complying with Europe - EU Harmonisation and Soft Law in the Member States(Wiebke Warneck)
  

Three reviews of publications on the themes of ageing, policies related to ageing and welfare states by Hedva Sarfati

• Geneviève Reday-Mulvey
  Working beyond 60 - Key Policies and Practices in Europe
  (Hedva Sarfati)
  

• Tony Maltby, Bert de Vroom, Maria Luisa Mirabile and Einar Overbye (eds.)
  Ageing and the transition to retirement - A comparative analysis of European welfare states
  (Hedva Sarfati)
  

• Peter Taylor-Gooby (ed.)
  New risks, new welfare: the transformation of the European welfare state
  (Hedva Sarfati)
  

Reports

• Between growth and stability: the consequences of the reform of the European Stability and Growth Pact, London School of Economics, 9 September 2005
  (Andrew Watt)
  

Reviews

European Trade Union Institute

for Research, Education and Health and Safety (ETUI-REHS)