Imagined Solidarities: Can Trade Unions Resist Globalization? Richard Hyman

Imagined Solidarities: Can Trade Unions Resist Globalization? Richard Hyman http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/hyman2.html

"mythic solidarity (‘solidarity forever’) may historically have provided inspiration and perhaps helped generate a reality approximating to the ideal, but probably can no longer do so; and that collectivism, particularly of an encompassing character, is therefore a project demanding new forms of strategic imagination."

"Trade unions, in other words, are agencies whose role in the aggregation of interests may also involve the (re-)distribution of gains and losses: not only between workers and employers but also among workers themselves. Typically the definition of union-relevant interests has reflected systematically the existing distribution of power within the working class."

"What are often presented as expressions of the general interests of the class have traditionally been in large measure representations of the particular interests of relatively protected sections."

craft workers > coal workers > mass worker constituted model trade unionists

this is mechenical solidarity

"what is normally conceived as a crisis of trade unionism as such may be better understood as a crisis of a particular model of trade unionism"


His three thesis for decline:

"1. increased internal differentiation within the working population (linked to diagnoses of ‘individualism’) (Zoll, 1993);

2. intensified competition, restructuring and ‘deregulation’ (often conceptualised within a ‘globalisation’ perspective) turning intra-class bargaining increasingly into a zero- (or negative-) sum game (Golden and Pontusson, 1992) and encouraging micro-level ‘solutions’ to macro-problems;

3. the erosion of egalitarian commitments within labour movements (Swenson, 1989), reflected both in increased internal differentiation among trade unions; and in the eclipse of the communist political model and the exhaustion of the social-democratic."

AN EMERGING AGENDA FOR TRADE UNIONS? Richard Hyman University of Warwick http://www.labournet.de/diskussion/gewerkschaft/hyman.html