4/2005: Innovations for union renewal

issn

1024-2589

publisher

ETUI-REHS

pages

16 €

Description/Extract
Authors
Table of contents

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

Gregor Murray

Director of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT) and Professor in the School of Industrial Relations at the University of Montreal

CRIMT

Ecole de relations industrielles

Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, 7e etage C-7056

3150 rue Jean-Brillant, Montreal, Québec, Canada H3T 1N8

Tel. 514-343-5845
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