Union Workers, Union Work: A Profile of Paid Union Officers in the United Kingdom
| Author | Edmund Heery |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2006.00508.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations
44:3 September 2006 0007– 1080 pp. 445– 471
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKBJIRBritish Journal of Industrial Relations0007-1080Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006September 2006443445471Articles
Union Workers, Union WorkBritish Journal of Industrial Relations
Edmund Heery is at Cardiff Business School.
Union Workers, Union Work: A Profile of
Paid Union Officers in the United Kingdom
Edmund Heery
Abstract
Twelve years ago,
Wor king for the Union
presented an analysis of paid trade
union officers working for UK unions. This paper returns to the themes of this
earlier study using a fresh survey of union officers carried out in 2002. It
provides limited support for two of the principal findings of the earlier research:
that union work is performed differently by officers with different demographic
and attitudinal characteristics and that union management systems can be
effective in encouraging officers to respond to a new bargaining and organizing
agenda.
1. Introduction
At the core of the British trade union movement are fewer than 4,000 paid
union officers, whose job is to recruit, represent and organize nearly seven
million union members. These officers form a critical resource, directly under
the control of unions, whose support and efforts must be enlisted if the halting
recovery of British trade unionism since the election of New Labour in 1997
is to be taken further. The purpose of this paper is to profile this resource
and identify the characteristics of union officers and the work they do. It is
also concerned to identify the potential contribution of union officers to a
much-needed process of renewal. Union membership in Britain continues to
decline, albeit at a slower rate (Grainger and Holt 2005: 3), and unions must
adapt to an overwhelmingly service-based economy with a workforce divided
evenly between men and women. If unions are to thrive in this changing
context arguably their officers must become more effective at organizing and
more responsive to a diverse workforce.
In profiling union officers and assessing their potential contribution to
renewal, the paper returns to the themes of an earlier piece of research. Twelve
years ago Kelly and Heery (1994) published,
Working for the Union
, an
446
British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006.
empirical study of paid union officers in the United Kingdom based largely
on data collected in the 1980s. One purpose of this study was descriptive; it
provided an exploratory analysis of a relatively neglected but significant
industrial relations actor. Thus, the book contained an account of the pat-
terns of organization and control over trade union work and the character-
istics and values of those who performed it. It also contained a detailed
investigation of officers’ work activity in the two critical fields of organizing
and collective bargaining (see also Watson 1988).
The second purpose of the book was explanatory. It rested on a critique
of theories of union oligarchy and bureaucracy, which at the time dominated
interpretation of internal union relations and functioning. This critique had
two primary and potentially contradictory elements. On the one hand, it was
argued that union work was a high discretion activity and was actively inter-
preted by those who performed it. Union officers were not bureaucrats, it was
argued, but were analogous to professional employees. Their work priorities
and patterns of behaviour reflected aspects of their identity, ideology and
socialization. The book offered what has since been labelled an ‘agency’
account of unions, based on the exercise of strategic choice and the variable
performance of union roles by those with different characteristics and pref-
erences (Heery 2003: 290–5).
On the other hand, it was argued that, where union officers were subject
to relatively greater central control, the result was not a reinforcement of a
conservative representative agenda but the reverse. Central co-ordination of
the work of union officers was a means to diffuse a new, progressive bargain-
ing agenda, focused particularly on equality, and a stronger emphasis on
organizing. This was so because these activities relied upon cross-subsidy
within unions; the transfer of resources from male to female union members
and from the organized to unorganized workers. As such, they were unlikely
to be prioritized when officers were primarily accountable to existing groups
of well-organized members. The interests of the latter, it was suggested, lay
in maintaining the union status quo and therefore change implied loosening
the downward ties of accountability of the officer workforce and strengthen-
ing links to the union centre. The book therefore offered a ‘managerial’, as
opposed to a ‘rank and filist’, version of the ‘union renewal’ argument (Heery
2003: 285–9). As such, it formed part of a wider current of writing on British
trade unions that has emphasized the importance of ‘articulation’, of con-
necting activists and local paid officials to the wider union if interest repre-
sentation is to be effective (Heery
et al
. 2004b: 12–13).
This paper revisits these descriptive and explanatory themes using a fresh
survey of British union officers carried out in 2002. In the first place, it
considers the nature of the union officer role, the procedures in place to
manage union work and the characteristics of those who perform it. A sub-
sidiary purpose here is to consider a number of ‘rate of change’ (Kelly 1998:
16) hypotheses, based on a comparison of findings from the later and earlier
research. One issue considered is the extent to which the pattern of union
work has altered as a result of the hollowing out of collective bargaining
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