British trade unions and social partnership: rhetoric, reality and strategy

Abstract

'Social partnership', and its vaguer synonym, 'stakeholding', have recently been mooted by the European Union, the TUC, and New Labour as well as sections of the business community, as an alternative to the Thatcherite trend to weaken trade unions and banish them from British soil. In contrast to earlier management fads, like Human Resource Management and Employee Involvement, the new rhetoric offers unions a central role as joint architects of partnership in the workplace and beyond. The article maps out the overlapping semantic threads of social partnership and its sister term, as they appear in the mouths of political, union and business actors and goes in search of conceptual clarity and unifying themes. It establishes a matrix of conceptual tools, drawn from Alan Fox's 'frames of reference', and uses these to make sense of high flying rhetoric, asking what opportunities it opens for trade unions in the context of contemporary political reality. In doing so, the article presents a radical interpretation of social partnership, grounded in the ideas of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, calling on unions to play back the rhetoric of employee involvement and become active agents in the workplace and wider society. By championing universal worker rights and more extensive forms of worker participation, British unions can regain their institutional presence and reclaim part of the terrain ceded since 1979. In contrast to earlier TUC strategies which advocated a reactive and passive accommodation with capital, social partnership, it is argued, offers British trade unions a strategy that is not only capable of moving with the times and accommodating new political developments, but, also allows them a hand in shaping their own destiny.