Firstly, he asserts that there is a consensus over industrial citizenship, as these rights serve the interests of employees as well as employers. This claim is problematic on several grounds. In Britain there have been considerable changes made to the rights of industrial citizenship since 1979, that have been hotly contested, and legislation regulating employees and their rights to organise have periodically been the source of considerable political conflict prior to that. Furthermore, the assumption of consensus makes it difficult to explain the dramatic changes in industrial citizenship in Britain over the past twenty years. The lack of consensus, and the perception by some that unions had ‘too much power’ over employers and others, also renders problematic Barbalet’s assumption that industrial citizenship unproblematically serves the interests of employers and employees. Many of the changes in British industrial citizenship considered in detail below involve an explicit attempt to reduce or restructure citizenship rights in favour of employers, although this is by no means an unambiguous process or outcome.
Secondly, following Marshall, Barbalet still treats industrial citizenship as being concerned with individual rights. However, it is clear on brief reflection that some industrial rights and obligations have the peculiar feature of being the rights of a collective or corporate body – the trade union – rather than the individual. This is perhaps most obviously the case where trade unions were granted immunity from civil suits for damages as a result of strike action. This applies to the union as a legal entity and not to individual members. As I shall show below in considering the recent changes to industrial rights in Britain, industrial citizenship involves both collective and individual rights, and this is one of the features that makes it distinct from the other dimensions of citizenship normally considered in the sociology of citizenship. Michael Mann has similarly recognised that some citizenship rights are collective rather than individual. However, he treats the rights of unions as purely a form of civil rights, and apparently sees no reason to treat industrial citizenship as a significant sphere.
Thirdly and finally, Barbalet, following Marshall, sees the unions as the institutions of citizenship, yet, as with Marshall he also sees unions as bearers of at least some rights of industrial citizenship. This ambiguity goes un-noticed by both theorists. Perhaps it is best to see the rights of industrial citizenship as being ultimately guaranteed by the courts – as in the rights of civil citizenship – so that employers, employees and unions are subjects endowed with certain citizenship rights in the industrial sphere. Unions cannot be both, the subjects or bearers of citizenship rights, and the institutions through which they are secured and guaranteed, and indeed they are not. To draw a parallel with political rights, it would be as if political parties in liberal democratic states also acted as constitutional courts! The key institutions of industrial citizenship have varied over the years, some being created and others very recently destroyed. Increasingly the courts, Britain’s Arbitration, Conciliation and Advisory Service (ACAS), and possibly European Courts and European Works Councils are significant as institutions of industrial citizenship.
A second attempt to re-think industrial citizenship within a wider theory of citizenship is to be found in the work of Janoski. His account is wide ranging and here I only focus upon his specific re-working of Marshall’s arguments about industrial citizenship as ‘participation rights’. Fundamentally, these participation rights are the right to act in the market or public organizations. However, what he includes under this category is conceptually chaotic. Information about jobs and job creation programmes that provide the right to work are included, but this is very like the institutions included in Marshall’s idea of social citizenship. Participation rights in firms and bureaucracies range from collective bargaining rights through German works councils and affirmative action programmes to the rights of welfare clients. Here industrial citizenship, social citizenship and civil rights are included in the category of participation. Finally there are participation rights that he refers to as capital control rights. These include German style co-determination rights in the workplace, but also extend to anti-trust laws and regional investment programmes.
This confusion arises from Janoski’s attempt to derive categories of citizenship rights from abstract logical categories such as ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘active’ and ‘passive’, so that participation rights are defined as the rights of citizens to be active in the private sphere. What Janoski overlooks in relation to industrial citizenship is that it is most fundamentally an institutionalised and juridified form of class conflict. He tends to treat the obligations of citizenship in normative terms, as prescriptions about what individuals should do in relation to others, the state or the community at large. However, when I come to consider industrial citizenship in more detail we shall see that in the British case there has been the creation of legal obligations on unions to behave in certain ways, for example to hold postal ballots before calling strikes. Consequently, when thinking about industrial citizenship at times when it is changing, what we often observe are changing balances of rights, powers, obligations and immunities between capital and labour as collective legal subjects, and between those and workers as individual legal subjects. Janoski has little time for the idea of group or collective rights, he sees corporations for instance as quasi-persons. He uses the German works councils as his ideal of industrial citizenship. Consequently in his empirical analyses Britain and the USA apparently lack any industrial citizenship rights, because they do not provide participation rights on the Germanic works’ council and co-determination model. However, when one considers the recognition procedures of the USA and those recently introduced in Britain these do form nationally distinctive clusters of liberties, powers, claims, immunities and obligations for unions, employees and employers. The recognition procedures in particular can enable unions to make legally enforceable claims against employers, although these are not unproblematic. As such they do constitute forms of industrial citizenship. Janoski’s concept of participation rights is both too broad, encompassing too diverse a range of rights, and too narrow, in only allowing for the German model of workplace democracy to count as authentic participation rights in the workplace.
In contrast these kinds analysis of citizenship, I wish to emphasise following Giddens and other later commentators the contradictory and contested character of industrial citizenship and that industrial citizenship rights are irreversible. I shall consider this issue in more detail in my consideration of the changing character of industrial citizenship in Britain. It is here where the attempts by European and American commentators on industrial relations to consider Marshall’s notion of Industrial Citizenship in relation to contemporary issues of economic restructuring, globalisation and workers’ rights are so interesting.
Gersuny makes a case for Marshall’s model to be revised, so that industrial citizenship should stand equally alongside civil, political and social rights. He further suggests that the concept of industrial citizenship should be expanded beyond the rights of trade unions to include: ‘…a right of citizens in ‘advanced’ societies to be shielded against wage competition from less developed countries’. His analysis focuses on the history of industrial citizenship in the USA during the twentieth century, centring on the landmark pieces of legislation such as the 1935 National Labour Relations Act and the Taft-Hatley Act of 1947. This legislation left industrial citizenship in terms of the rights of union organisation and strikes severely limited compared to some European countries. Building on Harrison’s suggestion that industrial citizenship is intimately linked to processes of closure and social exclusion, Gersuny argues that industrial citizenship is not only a principle of incorporation, but also of exclusion:
… if industrial citizenship is understood as an exclusionary principle with respect to strike-breakers and other competing job applicants from local and national labour markets, it must be also viewed as an exclusionary principle in relation to the world outside the nation-state.’
This line of thinking about industrial citizenship as simultaneously a principle of incorporation and exclusion, both within the geographical boundaries of a nation-state, and between the nation-state and the wider global economy is an important development in the theory of industrial citizenship. Whilst industrial citizenship acts as a principle of incorporation of workers within the workplace, the rights of industrial citizenship exclude those who are not workers within a particular workplace. Since industrial citizenship rights are largely guaranteed (or not guaranteed) by individual nation-states, they act as a principle of exclusion at the boundary of the nation-state. Gersuny sees the industrial citizenship rights as threatened by the dominant neo-liberal regime of economic globalisation through the capacity of transnational corporations to locate their activities in those economic zones with the weakest economic citizenship rights and the lowest wages. His response to this is to suggest that industrial citizenship rights should be upgraded in the places where they are currently lacking, partly to defend the established citizenship rights in ‘advanced’ countries. However, he is at pains to stress that the industrial citizenship rights of those in the advanced countries are not to be maintained at the expense of those in less developed countries.
Apart from the orientation towards the dualistic principle of industrial citizenship as simultaneously involving incorporation and exclusion, Gersuny still seems to retain the main features of Marshall’s model of industrial citizenship. It is still a conception of industrial citizenship that is liberal to the core. It is still about the rights of individual workers. Consequently his call for industrial citizenship to be made more central to citizenship theory remains unanswered in his work. It is not clear how he sees industrial citizenship being maintained or sustained in this time of neo-liberal globalisation. He seems tied to the idea of the nation-state providing the means, but it is not clear that this form of polity is up to the task, and recent European developments discussed below now further complicate his argument.
However, Gersuny does open up another line of theoretical development for industrial citizenship in relation to civil, political and social citizenship. He suggests that in conditions of weak or absent industrial citizenship, then the broader economic social conditions for adequate or currently accepted levels of social, civil and political citizenship will be undermined:
… social citizenship will also become more and more problematic, because increasingly impoverished societies will not generate the revenues needed to fund social services and benefits. Civil citizenship would also be jeopardised, particularly in those of its manifestations which restrain market forces and limit managerial prerogatives. As for political citizenship, the more polarized and impoverished the hitherto advanced societies become as they slide toward underdevelopment, the more problematic will democracy become.
What is interesting in this line of argument is that Gersuny is turning around two features of Marshall’s original discussion of citizenship. Firstly, he is presenting industrial citizenship as a prerequisite for successful enduring civil, political and social citizenship. It becomes a necessary social condition in contemporary societies for the ensuring the continuity and expansion of what we have become accustomed to in terms of civil, political and social citizenship, rather than an interesting footnote to civil citizenship as in the accounts of Marshall and others. Secondly, it also challenges what one might call Marshall’s ‘normative-evolutionary’ account of the development of citizenship. Generally, Marshall treated civil citizenship as a kind of necessary prerequisite for political, social and industrial types of citizenship. Some see Marshall as presenting these latter forms of citizenship as evolving from civil citizenship, and in some sense dependent upon it. This account is normative as Marshall tends to see citizenship as ever expanding, as difficult to reverse, and holds it up as ‘model way’ to organise societies. In contrast Gersuny’s analysis implies that now, in an era of neo-liberal globalisation, we should treat the four dimensions of citizenship as mutually reinforcing, as necessary to each other’s continuity.
Leisink and Beukema share many similarities in their definition of industrial citizenship with Janoski, in that they see it as purely concerned with legally the enforceable rights of workers to participate in workplace decision making. What is distinctive about their contribution is that they see their definition as paralleling political citizenship, and they use the Works Councils Acts of the Netherlands as their model. Whilst their approach shares many the weaknesses of Janoski’s conception of industrial citizenship as participation rights, they do recognise that Britain had a distinctive ‘voluntaristic’ form of industrial citizenship through the shop steward system. Whilst their detailed analysis highlights the limits to industrial citizenship they retain a largely individualist concept of industrial citizenship, and the collective rights of unions are largely ignored.
Muller-Jentsch’s analysis of the relationship between economic change and industrial citizenship focuses almost entirely upon the former to the neglect of the latter. It is however, in the area of the relationship between industrial citizenship and the economy that he makes an interesting contribution. He sees labour as a mediator between civil society and the sphere of production, as ‘free-labour’ has civil rights that are then extended to the political industrial and social spheres. Consequently, one can think of his approach as using Marx to revise Marshall, and Marshall to revise Marx and indeed much subsequent industrial and economic sociology. Muller-Jentsch thus reinforces the argument that Marx under-rated the significance of workers’ civil and political rights, and this leads him to emphasise the following important insight that ‘…the struggle at the point of production is conditioned not only by material wants but also by democratic values and striving for self-realisation.’
Whilst in general this claim is unremarkable, what is interesting is the attempt to think about workplace struggles as shaped and stimulated by the prevailing conditions of citizenship. Unfortunately, Muller-Jentsch tends not choose to pursue this line of thinking in any detail, concentrating instead upon the dynamics of technological and economic restructuring and their implications for trade unions, and changes in industrial citizenship are treated very briefly in comparison. His account of Marshall is fairly conventional and unremarkable, and involves no conceptual and theoretical development of Marshall’s original discussion. As a result he tends to treat industrial citizenship in Marshall’s conventional liberal fashion, as a bundle of rights attaching to individuals, that in his view underpinned worker resistance to Fordism in the early twentieth century, by enabling them to organize unions and strikes.
Like Marshall, Muller-Jentsch tends to treat industrial citizenship an established and ever-expanding feature of contemporary societies, and what is presented by him is entirely compatible with Marshall’s brief comments on industrial citizenship. Marshall perhaps goes further in seeing industrial citizenship as an achievement of trade union struggles, and from this one can build an account of trade union struggles as partly concerned with the establishment and defence of industrial citizenship. This is dimension of class struggle over the rights of industrial citizenship is largely absent from Muller-Jentsch’s account of contemporary developments.
Gersuny’s analysis is important for highlighting the significance of industrial citizenship for workers as a bulwark against neo-liberal globalisation, and in mutually reinforcing civil, political and social citizenship. In contrast Muller-Jentch emphasises the role of industrial citizenship shaping workplace struggles. However, the weakness they share with Marshall are his liberal-individualist assumptions about industrial ctizenship.
Collective Rights and Industrial Citizenship
In the previous section we saw that subsequent discussions of industrial citizenship have retained Marshall’s liberal-individualist view of industrial citizenship. In order to move forward we need to take seriously the idea of collective rights of industrial citizenship. The idea of collective or group rights is one fraught with confusion in the citizenship literature. I cannot resolve all of these difficult issues here, but merely pursue what I believe is the most productive way forward in helping re-conceptualise industrial citizenship. Some legal writings on industrial relations literature use the term ‘collective rights’. However, these conflate the rights of quite different types of legal subject. They refer to both the rights of individuals to belong to unions, for example, and the rights and immunities of unions as legal subjects in terms of collective rights. From the perspective I am developing here, I want to argue that such approaches confuse the industrial citizenship rights of individuals and collectives.
Much of the citizenship literature is profoundly individualist and liberal in its assumptions, and this has its roots in Marshall as well as earlier liberal political philosophy. Groups rights are usually thought of the rights of ethnic groups, indigenous peoples, or some other culturally defined social entity. Affirmative action programmes are seen by some as expressions of groups rights, hence they tend to be criticised for conflicting with individual rights. Janoski is one recent sociological expression of the liberal-individualist scepticism of group rights. He sees group rights as particularistic and discriminatory, as possibly being hijacked by group leaders, and even leading to groups seeking separatism and encouraging conflict. These are purely normative criticisms, as conflict for instance could be a result of the denial of legitimate group rights, and conflict is characteristic of attempts to obtain or extend citizenship.
Although much of the work on collective rights is often culturalist and postmodernist in orientation, and celebrates the ‘politics of recognition’, I think the idea is crucial for understanding the dynamics of industrial citizenship, and can help us move beyond some of the conceptual confusions in the field. Freeman’s work on the idea of collective human rights in particular is helpful. As he notes, the idea that there are collective rights for corporations and associations is not controversial, as they have legal rights and obligations. What I want to use his argument to suggest is that the collective rights of unions are a form of collective human rights. He argues that rights are derived from fundamental interests, such as collective self-determination:
Collective human rights are, however, not reducible to individual human rights. The right to collective self-determination is not reducible to any set of individual human rights, though it may be dependent on and necessary for such rights. Liberal individualism has traditionally failed to recognize its own dependence on the assumption that nation-states have collective rights.
One might add that liberal individualists, and liberal sociologists of citizenship have made similar assumptions about corporations being ‘allowed’ to have collective rights, whilst trade unions are mere aggregations of individual workers’ rights. Freeman’s argument elegantly and incisively reveals the bias of their normative assumptions. His argument applied to industrial citizenship enables us to see how unions’ rights to collective self-determination are not reducible to the individual rights of workers. Yet unions are dependent on the rights of individuals to be able to join unions, and individual workers can often better pursue their individual rights when unions have strong collective rights. Freeman further accepts that this interest conception of rights means that there will be conflicts of rights, and that there may not be ‘rational solutions’ to these conflicts that would satisfy the liberal political philosopher:
Interests certainly can conflict and the interest conception of rights entails that rights can conflict… Conflicts of rights, with their consequent indeterminacy, are, however, stubborn facts of human-rights politics.
In the context of industrial citizenship this conception of collective rights that may conflict with other collectives suits my purpose very well. The rights of labour and the rights of capital are in conflict, and under contemporary capitalism there is no rational solution to this conflict that would meet the objections of the liberal political philosopher. It meshes well with the idea that the rights of industrial citizenship are both the object and the terrain of institutionalised and juridified class struggle. Freeman’s arguments provide us with a viable philosophical underpinning for some key concepts of a critical sociology of industrial citizenship. However, what it lacks is some kind of account of how social collectives practice self-determination except as nation-states. The problem arises I think, as the typical social collectivity that collective rights are thought to apply are ethnic groups. Collective rights in this view apply to apparently passive ‘social collectivities’, and unions are something quite different, they are collective social actors. Sociologists such as Hindess have argued that methodologically individualist approaches to social analysis (and I would include much citizenship theory under this broad category of methodological individualism) are undermined when we recognise the influence on social events of ‘social actors’ other than individuals. Such ‘social actors’ include unions, political parties, corporations and organized religion. In abstract terms an actor (collective or individual) is a locus of decision making where actions are the consequences of decisions. They have ways of making decisions and ways of acting, and according to Hindess we cannot afford to ignore them:
Social actors may be subjected to controls and objectives, but in general they cannot be dispensed with. They have concerns and objectives that are not reducible to those of human individuals. For example, capitalist enterprises, trades unions, community organizations and local communities all have an interest in the economic policies of governments.
What I take from this is that unions have concerns and objectives that are not reducible to those of individual employees. Any concept of industrial citizenship should recognize this through the idea of collective rights. Certainly legislation in Britain since 1980s has recognised the significance of the means of decision-making and the means of action of unions, as these collective rights of autonomy, of self-determination of unions’ actions have been restricted by legislation. In my re-conceptualisation of industrial citizenship collective rights apply to unions as collective social actors, and not to unions as social collectivities, and that these rights are often in conflict with those of employers as social actors.
The Changing Character of Industrial Citizenship
The figure below provides a conceptual summary of the broad drift of changes in British industrial citizenship since 1980. These changes can be thought of as occurring along three dimensions, and I shall support this through an analysis of the legal changes in the next section. The discussion in this section can be treated as a conceptual framework for analysing the broader ‘logic’ of these changes in legislation as they from part of the more abstract system of industrial citizenship.
Conceptual Summary of changes to industrial citizenship in Britain, 1980-93
Collective-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Individual
Powers----------------------------------------------------------------------------Obligations
Industrial-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Civil
Overall there has been a shift from collective rights to individual rights. However, this is not a simple transfer of rights and immunities from trade unions to individuals. In general individuals have been given rights or liberties as members of unions rather than as employees since 1979. As for example in the case of the right of an individual not to be expelled from a union introduced in 1993 (See Appendix I for further details of this and the other examples mentioned in this section). Trade unions have lost certain rights to immunity, as in the case of secondary action for instance, introduced in legislation in 1980. However some individuals may be seen to have lost certain rights. For example if union officials fail to comply with their legal statutory duties, since 1993 they can be fined, imprisoned or barred from office, and in the same year legislation required that unions inform employers which individual employees will be participating in any industrial action. The main conceptual point is that the overall logic or trend in the legislation passed since 1979 is for unions to lose collective rights and for individuals to gain certain types of rights, usually against their unions.
Secondly, there has been a loss of powers for union, often expressed as a loss of autonomy of action, and they face increasing compulsion over how they conduct their internal affairs as well as how they conduct actions such as strikes. Thus there has been a shift from legal powers to legal obligations for unions. For example, national leaderships have been required since 1984 by law to be elected every five years by secret ballot, and since 1993 any industrial action must be supported by a majority of the workforce participating in a postal ballot overseen by an independent scrutineer. These constitute new sets of legally enforceable obligations upon unions. Thirdly, as industrial citizenship rights have been eroded, then unions have increasingly turned to newer forms of civil rights to pursue workplace struggles. In particular issues concerned with the enforcement of racial and sex equality in the workplace to do with pay and promotions may be becoming more important for union activity. In this sense unions may be using the newer civil rights of individual employees in compensation for their loss of collective citizenship rights. Evidence for this can be found in the way in which ACAS is increasingly used by unions to secure the rights of individual members.
Industrial Citizenship and Industrial Relations Legislation 1980-1993
In this section I shall consider in more detail the legislation passed since 1980 and 1993 as it affects industrial citizenship. This legislation falls into seven broad categories, and the details of the legislative changes are provided in Appendix I. I have deliberately restricted the analysis of the legislation to this period, as and this also predates the election of the Labour Party in 1997. Since the election of the Labour government in 1997, there has been the ERA of 1999, and the EWC directive that I shall discuss in subsequent sections. The figure below summarizes the legal changes between 1980 and 1993.
Summary of Legal Changes Between 1980 and 1993
- Restrictions on the closed shop.
- Regulation of the conduct of union democracy and internal union affairs.
- The rights of individual union members.
- The conduct of industrial action.
- Legal immunities.
- Union control over the labour market.
- The rights of strikers.
One of the traditional features of trade union power in Britain was the existence of the 'closed shop', an arrangement whereby all employees in a particular workplace were normally required to be members of a trade union. The closed shop is now almost extinct due to legislation. Millward et. al. found that ‘closed shop’ types of arrangement covered five million British workers in 1980, but only half of a million by 1990, and had fallen even further by 1998. For those familiar with this aspect of British trade union power this is a very important change. This is a loss of a collective right for British unions. Whilst early legislation in 1980 and 1982 placed restrictions on the ability of unions to organize closed shops, such as the requirement to achieve the support of 80 per cent of the workforce in a ballot. It was only legislation in 1988 and 1990 that made the organization of closed shops illegal for British unions.
The legislation concerning the conduct of internal union affairs involved a loss of autonomy for unions over how they conduct their business, as they are required to meet certain legal criteria. This legislation primarily required postal ballots for a wide range of routine union activities. For example, unions now have to elect their national leaderships by secret ballot every five years. Similarly since 1984 unions have been required to ballot their membership for permission to create a ‘political fund’. This normally means a fund for donations to the Labour Party. Needless to say it was the Conservative Government who passed this legislation. A further set of legislation also relates to the finances of unions. Since 1993 unions have been required to seek their members authority to deduct subscriptions direct from salaries every three years. Many unions now seek direct payment of subscriptions from members’ bank accounts. These kinds of legislation not only involve a loss of union autonomy, but also a loss of collective rights, and a shift in industrial citizenship rights to individual union members. However, these are rights not available to all employees, only those who are union members. Unions have lost both powers of action and liberties of self-determination through this legislation, whilst having new legal obligations placed upon them.
The development of the rights of union members against their unions, was perhaps a unique feature of the legislation since 1980. It mostly consisted of a raft of rights to participate in union postal ballots, but also rights not to be disciplined by a union, such as being expelled from membership. These rights were bolstered by the creation of a Commissioner for the Rights of Trade Union Members in 1988. This government body aided individual union members with legal action against their unions, effectively acting as an institution of industrial citizenship.
The legislation relating to the conduct of industrial action can usefully be thought of in two stages. The first stage, introduced in various pieces of legislation between 1980 and 1990, can be seen as narrowing the legal definition of a strike through making secondary action, strikes over inter-union disputes and industrial action against non-unionised companies unlawful. In the second stage of legislation dating from 1993 unions were required to obtain support for industrial action from their members by an independently organized postal ballot. Furthermore, employers must be given seven days notice of the ballot for industrial action, seven days notice of the commencement of action and its nature, as well as being informed of which employees will be participating. This arena of legislation can be thought of as not only involving unions in the loss of their collective rights, but also a loss of their legal powers with respect how they organize their members for industrial action. Yet at the same time this involved the loss of individual industrial citizenship rights by employees.
Perhaps the most frequently commented upon aspect of industrial citizenship in Britain, are the legal immunities enjoyed by trade unions. However, these immunities are now severely restricted. Immunities have been lost in the case of secondary action, which has made secondary action to all intents and purposes illegal in Britain. Furthermore, a distinction is now drawn between immunities for trade unions and immunities for individual members of unions, where unions have lost immunities from legal action in the case of illegal industrial action. This emphasises the significance of the distinction between the collective rights of unions and the rights of individuals in industrial citizenship. It seems that in the area of immunities the legislation sharpened and hardened the distinction between collective and individual rights in industrial citizenship. Immunities have also been lost unless a proper legal ballot of the membership has been held prior to industrial action taking place. This is perhaps the single most important collective industrial citizenship right lost by the unions. The legislation enabled any affected individual to take legal action for compensation against a union organizing illegal industrial action, regardless of their contractual rights. To aid individuals in asserting these rights a Commissioner for Protection Against Unlawful Industrial Action (CPUIA) was created. This was effectively an institution of civil citizenship that enabled any individual to assert claims against unions. This reflected a shift from industrial citizenship to civil citizenship in the legal obligations upon unions.
The final area where the loss of individual rights of industrial citizenship was been significant was in relation to the individual rights of those employees who go on strike. Employers became able to ‘selectively dismiss’ employees involved in either ‘official’ (that is legal strikes organized by unions) and ‘unofficial’ (that is a strike not recognized and organized by a union) strikes. This clearly opened up the path for the victimisation of those union members who most strongly support and or organized their union in the workplace. It significantly increased the risks of participating in industrial action for the individual striker. Finally, some unions in Britain traditionally had some control over the labour market, for example requiring union labour only contracts in some industries. These collective rights have also been lost with such arrangements being made illegal.
The effects of all these changes by the middle of the 1990s were essentially that: the closed shop became illegal; strikers could be sacked; unions had to use postal ballots to organise any type of collective action and carry out any significant internal activities, such as organise strikes, elect leaders, donate funds to political parties and merge with other unions; the internal running of unions is tightly regulated by law and the courts; individual union members have numerous rights and access to state resources to challenge their own unions; secondary and unofficial action are largely illegal; and the most significant legal immunities have been lost. The loss of immunities is especially important as unions could now be sued by employers for economic losses and damages, and legal action against unions has broken major strikes by some of Britain’s strongest unions.
What I hope to have shown in this section is that underlying and cutting across these different dimensions of legislation affecting industrial citizenship is the loss of unions’ collective rights, the loss of some individual union members’ rights against their employer, but the gain of union members rights against their union. Similarly, whilst prior to this legislation of the 1980s and 1990s industrial citizenship in Britain was characterised by autonomy for unions from legal regulation, it is now characterised by legal compulsion with severe penalties for failure to comply. In many respects, both before and after the legislation of the 1980s and early 1990s, the form of industrial citizenship in Britain was quite unique compared to many European countries. It moved from a type of industrial citizenship based largely upon the collective rights of unions to immunity from civil suits when they organized strikes, to a highly juridified form where both collective and individual liberties, immunities and powers of unions and workers were severely restricted. By the middle of the 1990s, however, the EU directive on EWCs had been passed, and the prospect of a European level of industrial citizenship became a real possibility.
Towards A European Industrial Citizenship?
The analysis of the decline of Industrial Citizenship in Britain would be incomplete without some consideration of the impact of European legislation on workers’ rights. In this context, what is interesting about Streeck’s work on industrial citizenship is his attempt to analyse some aspects of European Union industrial relations policy, specifically the 1994 European Works Councils Directive, in terms of Marshall’s idea of Industrial Citizenship. In one sense he is considering some of the themes of Gersuny’s analysis, but in a contemporary European context. Although he emphasises the collective exercise of industrial citizenship rights, he does not significantly re-work Marshall’s ideas in this area. Unlike Marshall he puts at the centre of his analysis the different forms of industrial citizenship in different countries, and, of course, his discussion of developments at a European level constitute using a applying Marshall’s ideas within a quite different historical context. Streeck’s account, like Janoski’s discussion of participation rights, suggests that there is a distinctively European model of industrial citizenship, where the rights of industrial citizenship:
… in most European welfare states … have come to include rights to collective participation of workforces at their place of employment, through information, consultation and co-decision-making, together with corresponding obligations of employers to respect such rights and enable their effective use. Legally, such rights and obligations are inseparably attached to socio-economic status: the former come with being employed and the latter with being an employer … industrial citizenship constitutes part of the public machinery for the social regulation of labour markets and employment, as an institution of public rather than private governance.
In this context the British situation prior to the 1980s was truly exceptional in European terms, especially when compared to Germany, which is Streeck’s model case of Industrial Citizenship in Europe. The ‘right’ of unions to collectively bargain on behalf of their employees was more of an immunity from civil law suits. Furthermore, within this German model the rights and obligations of industrial citizenship attach to individuals with specific positions or roles within the economy. One might add the further conceptual clarification that industrial citizenship is fundamentally structured by employer-employee relationship, in other words by class. This is quite an interesting departure within citizenship theory, one with wider implications that Streeck does not pursue. This idea that industrial citizenship rights and obligations under the German system of company law are attached to classes further strengthens the argument for industrial citizenship being quite distinct from political and civil citizenship. The nature of the relationship between industrial and other aspects of citizenship should prove to be an important aspect of any comparative analyses of industrial citizenship in different nation-states. From a slightly different angle it also challenges the assumption of much citizenship theory that citizenship rights accrue from being a full member of a national-societal community, or indeed some kind of transnational polity. This may be a necessary condition of any kind of citizenship, but following through the logic of Streeck’s analysis, if you are not an employee you cannot be an ‘industrial citizen’ within the German model. On these grounds, within certain nation-states, the range of your citizenship rights depends upon your economic status within that society.
A unified European industrial citizenship came on to the agenda of the EC, (subsequently the EU), during the 1970s, in the context of moves towards further European integration by both trans-national companies and European states and institutions. The process of economic and political integration also created pressures for a unified European company law, and as some aspects of German industrial citizenship such as workers’ rights to participation in company decision making were enshrined in German company law. Yet at the same time Europe was trying to maintain the integrity of its members’ national systems of law. Streeck argues that these contradictory and contested projects meant that between the 1970s and the 1990s the project of a unified European system of industrial citizenship went from attempts at harmonisation, through attempted incorporation, to finally the current approach of co-ordination. Harmonisation would have required the European wide system superseding pre-existing national systems of industrial citizenship approximating something like the German system through the construction of a European company law. Opposition from employers, unions and member governments led to the failure of harmonisation. What Streeck calls the phase of incorporation aimed to allow for national variations within a European wide system by prescribing minimum standards for providing workforces with information, and outlining alternative national models for workforce participation. However, this again foundered in the face of opposition. The co-ordination model of industrial citizenship is what resulted in the European Works Council Directive of 1994, which is rather weak compared to the earlier proposals:
All it does is create an obligation in international law that member states make it obligatory in national law for nationally based firms with significant employment in other European Union countries to negotiate, with a body representing their entire European workforce, on a European-wide workforce information agreement.
This first EWC Directive avoided industrial citizenship rights that affect civil property rights (as arguably is the case in the German system where some industrial citizenship rights are enshrined in company law), and industrial rights in companies limited to one country were not affected. Furthermore, only very limited information had to be provided to employees on an annual basis or in exceptional circumstances; and it allows for ‘contractual voluntarism’ between employers and employees, so they may agree not to have a works council, or have one with inferior rights. Paradoxically, within any one trans-national European company, the Directive has created a system of weak European industrial citizenship rights for foreigners, alongside the already existing national systems for nationals. Rather than industrial citizenship being a condition or a set of rules for the relationship between employers and employees, the extensive provisions within the directive for voluntary agreement have turned European industrial citizenship into a subject for negotiation. Finally, the directive means that the primary location for industrial citizenship remains the nation-state, but with a secondary level of industrial citizenship for some employees in some companies:
In the firms to which it applies, the Directive creates a dualism of representative bodies, by adding a European works council to existing national councils… European works councils are in reality international extensions of national systems of workplace representation… the Directive makes multinational firms include representatives of their foreign-based workforces in an extended version of their domestic representation system. Such inclusion does not, however, take place on equal terms. The inevitable dominance of home country representatives in the negotiations on the structure and status of European works councils offers them rich opportunities to protect privileged access to central management.
The directive still allows for what Streeck terms ‘regime competition’ with each nation-state still allowed to determine most of its industrial citizenship. He suggests that the Directive rather than improving industrial citizenship is in fact leading to the erosion of those stronger national systems of industrial citizenship such as in Germany. Whilst those with weak forms of industrial citizenship such as Britain there is no improvement for many employees, and very limited improvement for those employed in European trans-national companies.
What Streeck’s analysis suggests is that first and foremost the core of industrial citizenship concerned with trade union and bargaining rights remain determined in almost their entirety at the level of the nation-state. This has been largely the result of opposition to the Europeanisation of industrial citizenship by employers. Unlike some other aspects of citizenship, industrial citizenship remains exempt from the upgrading of citizenship rights that might be accruing from the global reach of some citizenship polities. This is because of employers desire to support a fundamentally neo-liberal regime of global competition, which also reinforces the fundamentally class related character of industrial citizenship. When considering industrial citizenship within a particular nation-state such as Britain from Streeck’s perspective, the EU is to all intents and purposes irrelevant as a significant factor actively shaping the character of industrial citizenship rights. Secondly, Streeck’s account emphasises the importance of political struggles affecting the specific forms of industrial citizenship at important points at which it is restructured. Thirdly, following through the logic of Streeck’s analysis we can see that an individual’s industrial citizenship rights are conditional upon an individual’s economic status. Fourthly, the contrast between industrial citizenship in Britain and Germany highlights the importance of the relationship between industrial citizenship and civil citizenship. This is both as a point of comparison of industrial citizenship between nation-states, and as an aspect to examine in the development of industrial citizenship over time within any single nation-state.
The EU is quite unlike a nation-state as its powers are largely regulatory, it has limited capacity to tax and spend, it does not directly provide welfare services to its citizens and it does not have monopoly over the means of violence within its territory. Most fundamentally, if we can speak of the EU as state at all, it only as a regulatory state, and this is often overlooked by those more optimistic commentators on the political potential of the EU. What does this mean practically for the development of industrial citizenship at the European level? Firstly, the EU has quite specific spheres of competence for its laws, and industrial citizenship has been largely excluded from this until recently. Secondly, the doctrine of subsidiarity means that individual nation-states are left with considerable autonomy in implementing EU policies, such as social policies and labour law. Legally, this means that EU interventions often take the form of ‘reflexive harmonisation’. The goal of this is to combine external regulation by the EU with self regulation by organised interest groups such as unions and employers. So rather than prescribing particular outcomes, the EU encourages ‘social learning’ and ‘secondary consequences’ through collective actors negotiating their own local agreements to meet the aims of EU directives. Barnard and Deakin cite the European Works Councils Directive as one such example of reflexive harmonisation. The achilles heel of reflexive harmonisation is of course the presumption that the collective actors involved are able and willing to participate in a social dialogue. With the EWC directive initially employers were able to largely avoid its provisions. They could implement their own employee consultation procedures, and avoid the directive. As well as the initial directive having very limited scope. Where the EWC directive exemplifies reflexive harmonisation as a legislative strategy is that it encourages member states and employers to develop their own solutions to problems of information and consultation in trans-national companies. Consequently the form and outcomes at the national level of any putative European industrial citizenship is difficult to predict
Not surprisingly then, the outcomes of the EWC directive are a subject of intense debate among European researchers. Hanke argues that EWCs in the motor industry are being used by unions in pursuit of sectional national interests. Consequently they are being used for labour regime competition rather than co-operation. The view of EWCs representing labour’s interests may in his view be quite wrong, as unions may not be using them to pursue workers’ interests at the trans-national level. In contrast they may be of benefit to capital’s interests, as they can use EWCs to legitimate trans-national strategies. Unions see EWCs as extensions of local and national levels of representation, but managements are able to use them for trans-national restructuring as it is the management that sets the agenda and provides the information for EWCs. As a result any ‘Europeanisation’ of industrial citizenship is taking place on management’s terms. Unions seem to be unable to develop a trans-national repertoire of action adapted to the political opportunities offered by EWCs. In contrast Whittall considers that the case of the BMW works council shows that it is possible for unions to use EWCs to the mutual benefit of workers in different countries. However, this was dependent on the largely contingent factors of the strategies and resources of the unions involved, in this case the German unions.
Wills’ study also highlights these issues with participants in EWCs complaining of the lack of adequate information and consultation from management, and lack of training and support from national unions. There was little trans-national solidarity in the EWCs she studied, as national interests often shaped representatives approach to the EWC. Whilst those national unions, such as the French and the Germans, that provided their representatives with expert advice were able to make more effective use of EWCs, the EWCs still remained principally a forum for employers to present their strategy to employee representatives to give them a veneer of legitimacy. However, she goes further when she suggests that EWCs might even erode strong national rights as employers might use EWCs to circumvent and even exclude autonomous trade unions. In practice she notes that unions fight globalisation at the local level within national structures. The European level of union activity, such as the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), encouraged by these nascent forms of European Industrial Citizenship and the EU more generally, are bureaucratic constructs of union leaders disconnected from the daily practices of union members, a point also echoed by David Sadler.
The ETUC is quite limited in its political influence and organizational strength. National unions remain fixed in their memberships, organization and principal political allies at the level of the nation-state, such as the British unions and the British Labour Party. Despite advocating European Monetrary Union (EMU), the ETUC failed to influence policy on growth and employment targets in favour of workers. More interventionist legislation advocating basic industrial citizenship rights, most centrally those enabling trans-national industrial action supported by the ETUC, is currently blocked. Further, different national union federations favour different strategies according to their national traditions, e.g. Southern European unions favouring legislation and the Northern Europeans tend to favour an extension of their national traditions of social dialogue to the European level. In addition the absence of employers organizations willing to enter into a social dialogue at either European or sectoral levels has also acted as a break on the aspirations of the ETUC. From the grassroots level the absence of a widespread sense of European worker solidarity means that it is difficult for unions to organize trans-national industrial action from the bottom up in all but the most exceptional circumstances. All of this emphasises the continuing practical significance for workers and unions within the EU of the nation-state is a guarantor of industrial citizenship.
Beyond the formal requirements of EU directives, there are also the imperatives of economic integration, recently highlighted by European Monetary Union (EMU), and their consequences for industrial citizenship. Crouch argues that although the advent of EMU might be thought to be a major pressure for European wide bargaining, and by implication a pan-European pattern of industrial citizenship, in practice bargaining rarely happens on a European level. Indeed he argues that EMU may lead to a strengthening of national level bargaining structures. Although Crouch’s argument is not about industrial citizenship per se, such bargaining structures are strongly conditioned by the nationally specific systems of industrial citizenship. Both governments and employers have good reasons to avoid prolonged and economically and politically damaging conflicts with organised labour that could result from pursuing an unambiguously neo-liberal EMU strategy. In each country that would require a radical transformation of industrial citizenship comparable to that which took place in Britain during the 1980s and early 1990s. Crouch makes further suggestions as to why the EMU project might have limited implications for institutionalised class conflict. Firstly, the memberships and organizational resources of unions are still nation-state specific. Similarly, national governments have to satisfy electorates whose lives, day to day experiences and aspirations are still largely within the confines of the nation-state. If a neo-liberal EMU strategy can no longer protect national economies, their labour markets and their workforces, then national level industrial citizenship is likely to be jealously protected. Crouch sees Britain as the most neo-liberal of European nation-states, and Labour governments since 1997 have continued in this vein.
In conclusion there are a number of reasons to suppose that industrial citizenship will be rather weak at the European level, and that within the EU the nation-state will remain the most important polity for industrial citizenship. Firstly, as Steeck’s analysis shows the EWC directive took almost twenty years to deliver, and then in a form that had seen organized labour’s interests eroded in favour of employers. Secondly, the regulative character of the EU as a polity with its delivery of ‘reflexive legislation’ means that individual nation-states retain a central role in shaping the impact of any EU initiatives in the arena of industrial citizenship. Thirdly, the actual outcomes of the EWC directive have shown that nationally specific worker and union interests have predominated so far. Finally, even with EMU national interests still predominate. European-wide bargaining and worker solidarity is the rare exception, and competitive pressures suggest that EMU is a specific European variant of neo-liberal globalisation. A European system of industrial citizenship oarganized at the level of the EU is more of a dream than a practical reality.
A Third Way to Industrial Citizenship?
In this section I want to consider some of the reforms to the system of industrial citizenship introduced by the Labour government of 1997. Whilst some of these are specifically British responses to the EU directives discussed in the previous section, others are based upon aspects of US legislation, especially the new legal procedures for trade union recognition in the Employment Relations Act of 1999. Consequently, since 1997 we can now observe a new trajectory in the development of Industrial Citizenship in Britain, one that seeks meet EU directives in a minimal way, whilst introducing elements of the US model. Whilst this continues to marginalize the independent organisation of workers through the legal regulation of trade union activities, it provides new protections for unorganised workers through the introduction of minimum wage legislation.
The independence of trade unions remains tightly constrained by the legislation outlawing the closed shop, secondary action, unofficial action and limits on picketing. Financial reporting requirements and related sanctions on trade unions, requirements for ballots for and formal notices of industrial action are still required by law. Elections of trade union officials are still subject to rigorous legal regulation, whilst individuals still retain rights to ‘choose’ a union to join and the right not to be disciplined by their union. Much of this legislation dating from the 1980s and early 1990s that I discussed in an earlier section contravenes ILO conventions on workers’ rights, and the Labour government shows no signs of repealing it.
Much has been made of the new rights to trade union recognition and representation. However, various exclusions, successfully lobbied for employers’ organizations, mean that almost one third of the work force is not covered by this legislation. This hardly constitutes a universal right of industrial citizenship. The only strongly protected right is the individual’s right to be a member of a trade union. The ERA also allows for the de-recognition of unions, which also contravenes international standards. However, employer-sponsored ‘unions’ that often allow for worker consultation, but rarely engage in collective bargaining are protected by a series of detailed rules and procedures from de-recognition. This effectively prevents independent unions from attempting to organise such workforces and puts severe legal constraints on their access to them. Furthermore, the union recognition procedures provide employers with many opportunities for union exclusion. This is a further legal erosion of trade unions’ collective rights of industrial citizenship.
On balance, the ERA provides further individualisation of workers’ Industrial Citizenship rights. Some of these are positive for unions, such as the right to be a trade union member, and the limited right to individual representation in cases of discipline by or grievances against an employer. However, the legislation also allows individual workers to negotiate terms and conditions outside of any collective agreements made by trade unions in the workplace. CROTUM and CPUIA have been abolished by the legislation. These used to regulate the internal governance of unions largely by affording individuals the right and opportunity to challenge unlawful industrial action. Overall, within the ‘third way’ model of industrial citizenship unions are still seen as special types of ‘voluntary association’ to be tightly regulated both in terms of their internal governance and their public actions.
Conclusions and Consequences
The decline in union membership in Britain has been typically linked to the decline of those industries and occupations that typically had high levels of union density. However, the loss of collective and individual industrial citizenship rights is likely to have played a part as well, although this is difficult to quantify. The legislation against the closed shop is the most obvious factor here, but the restrictions on the ability of unions to achieve collective gains for their members through traditional forms of industrial action may have made unions appear less relevant to some potential members. In parallel with the decline in union membership, there has been a decline in strike activity. There were fewer and shorter strikes with lower levels of participation in the late 1990s in Britain than at any point since the statistical series began. Again whilst some of this is clearly linked to the loss of jobs in those industries that were previously well organized by unions, such as coal mining, construction and manufacturing. The new regime of industrial citizenship in Britain has directly affected the kinds of strike that unions now attempt to organize. Rare now are those ‘wildcat’ strikes or ‘unofficial’ action, and indefinite strikes, more typical are selective one-day strikes.
The decline in industrial citizenship means that employees and unions may increasingly have to turn to taking advantage of individual employees’ civil citizenship rights. Especially as these have proliferated with respect to status group rights connected to guaranteeing equal treatment in terms of sex, race and disability in the labour market and the workplace. Connected with this is a resort to those institutions that can guarantee the exercise of those rights such as Employment Tribunals and ACAS.
Finally, these changes in British industrial citizenship rights raise more fundamental questions about the theory of citizenship more generally. Clearly industrial citizenship rights are both collective and individual, and arguably the collective rights are the most important. Marshall’s original discussion of citizenship suggested that citizenship rights were progressively gained, consolidated and irreversible. There was no consideration of whether or not they could be lost, and under what conditions. I hope to have shown that some citizenship rights, both individual and collective, can be eroded to a significant degree. The collective and individual rights of individual citizenship are inter-dependent. We need to pay detailed attention to workers, and what they mean in practice. The rights of individual workers are meaningless without the collective rights to defend them. The collective rights of industrial citizenship constitute the armour of that protects the increasingly vulnerable soft flesh of individual rights in the workplace.
Appendix I: Selected Aspects of Industrial Relations Legislation: 1980 onwards.
Closed shop:
Restricted, requiring 80% support of the workforce (1980).
Additional restrictions on closed shop (1982).
Abolition of legal protection for the post-entry closed shop (1988).
Abolition of legal protection for the pre-entry closed shop (1990).
Conduct of union democracy and internal union affairs:
Public funds made available for union ballots (1980).
National union leaderships have to be elected by secret ballot every five years (1984).
Unions political funds must be supported by a members ballot every 10 years (1984).
Members have authorise every three years the automatic deduction of union subscriptions from pay packets (1993).
Postal ballots must be used for referenda on mergers and political funds. (1993)
Public funds for union ballots to be phased out by 1996 (1993).
The Certification Officer can investigate any unions finances whether or not a member has submitted a complaint (1993).
If union officers fail to comply with their legal statutory duties they can be fined, imprisoned or barred from office (1993).
Rights of individual union members:
Compensation for workers dismissed from closed shops between 1974 and 1980 (1982).
Union members have right not to be disciplined for refusing to participate in industrial action or crossing a picket-line (1988).
Union members have right not to be called out on strike without a secret ballot (1988).
Union member have right to a postal vote in union elections and ballots (1988).
Commissioner of rights of trade union members established for aiding individual union members with legal action against their unions (1988).
Individuals have a right not to be expelled from a union (1993).
Individuals may joint any union they wish as long it organises similar employees (this over-rides the TUCs own 'Bridlington rules' that prevent unions poaching members from each other) (1993).
Conduct of industrial action:
Secondary picketing made unlawful (1980).
Legal definition of a trade dispute changed to excluded inter- union disputes (1982).
Industrial action against non-unionised companies made illegal (1984).
Unions must repudiate or adopt unofficial strikes (1990).
Industrial action must be supported by a majority of the workforce in a postal ballot overseen by an independent scrutineer (1993).
Employers must be given seven days notice of the ballot for industrial action, and seven days notice of the commencement of action and its nature (1993).
Employers must be informed which employees will be involved in industrial action (1993).
Legal immunities:
Removed immunity in majority of cases of secondary action (1980).
Removed immunity from trade unions as distinct from trade unionists (1982).
No immunity unless secret ballot is conducted before strike action (1984).
Removed immunity for official organised action in support of those selectively dismissed for taking part in unofficial action (1990).
Remaining immunity for secondary action removed (1990).
Unlawful Industrial Action made actionable by any affected individual regardless of their contractual rights, and this is supported by a new Commissioner for Protection Against Unlawful Industrial Action (1993).
Unions control over labour market:
Union recruitment tactics using coercive tactics against employers 'blacking' is made illegal (1980).
Union labour only contracts and tenders made illegal (1982).
Employers allowed to distinguish between individual and collective contract for pay (1993).
Rights of strikers:
Selective dismissal of strikers facilitated (1982).
Selective dismissal of unofficial strikers facilitated (1990).
For a recent overview of these issues see Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward “Power Repertoires and Globalization”, Politics and Society Vol. 28, No. 3 (2000): 413-430; Kim Moody, Workers In A Lean World: unions in the International Economy (London, Verso: 1997).
Thomas, H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (London, Pluto Press, 1992). Originally published in 1950.
See Marshall Citizenship, 40-3.
Morris Janowitz, “Observations on the Sociology of Citizenship: Obligations and Rights”, Social Forces, Vol. 59, No. 1 (1980): 1-24; Jack, M. Barbalet, Citizenship (Milton Keynes: Open University Press,1988), 22-7; Carl Gersuny, “Industrial Rights: A Neglected Facet of Citizenship Theory”, Economic and Industrial Democracy, Vol. 15, No. 2 (1994): 211-26; Walther Muller-Jentsch, “Productive Forces and Industrial Citizenship: An Evolutionary Perspective on Labour Relations”, Economic and Industrial Democracy, Vol. 12, No. 4 (1991): 439-467; Wolfgang Streeck, “Industrial citizenship under regime competition: the case of European works councils”, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 4, 4 (1997): 643-64; Anthony Woodiwiss, “Behind Governmentality: Sociological Theory, Pacific Capitalism and Industrial Citizenship”, Citizenship Studies, Vol. 1, 1 (1997): 87-114; Thomas Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society: A Framework of Rights and Obligations in Liberal, Traditional and Social Democratic Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
See for example Bryan S.Turner, Citizenship and Capitalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); David Held “Citizenship and Autonomy” in David Held Political Theory and the Modern State Martin (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989); Bulmer and Anthony M. Rees, eds., Citizenship Today (London: UCL Press, 1996); Ruth Lister, Citizenship: feminist perspectives (London: Macmillan, 1997); Nira Yuval-Davis, “Women, Citizenship and Difference” Feminist Review, No. 57, Autumn (1997): 4-27; M Waite, 1999 “The Age of Consent and Sexual Citizenship in the United Kingdom” in Julie Seymour and Paul Bagguley eds., Relating Intimacies (London: Macmillan, 1999); Engin F. Isin and Patricia K. Wood Citizenship and Identity (London: Sage, 1999); Kate Nash Contemporary Political Sociology: Globalization, Politics, and Power (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Christine Sypnowich “The Culture of Citizenship” Politics and Society, Vol 28, 4 (2000): 531-555; Nick Stevenson ed., Culture and Citizenship (London: Sage, 2001).
See for example Bryan S.Turner, ed., Citizenship and Social Theory (London: Sage, 1993); Gerard Delanty, Citizenship in a global age: Society, culture, politics (London: Open University Press, 2000); Evelyn Glenn, “Citizenship and Inequality: Historical and Global Perspectives”, Social Problems (2000), Vol. 47, No. 1: 1-20; John Urry Sociology Beyond Societies: mobilities for the twenty-first century (London: Routledge, 2000).
See Maurice Roche, Rethinking Citizenship (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); Maurice Roche. and Rik Van Berkel. eds., European Citizenship and Social Exclusion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997).
Mark Cully and Simon Woodland, “Trade union membership and recognition”, Labour Market Trends (1997): 231-40; Stephen Hicks, “Trade union membership 1998-99: an analysis of data from the Certification Officer and Labour Force Survey”, Labour Market Trends (2000): 329-40.
Kevin Sweeney, “Labour disputes in 1996”, Labour Market Trends (1997): 217-29; Jackie Davies, “Labour disputes in 1999”, Labour Market Trends (2000): 259-72.
Marshall, Citizenship, 8.
Marshall, Citizenship, 26.
Marshall, Citizenship, 14.
Marshall, Citizenship, 40.
Marshall, Citizenship, 41. Janowitz also emphasises this aspect of Marshall’s analysis of industrial citizenship, see Janowitz “Observations on the Sociology of Citizenship”, 7.
Marshall, Citizenship, 41.
See Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society, 42-45 for a discussion of this useful distinction between rights as powers, liberties, immunities and claims.
Reinhard Bendix, Nation building and Citizenship (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1964); Janowitz, “Observations on the Sociology of Citizenship”.
Anthony Giddens, “Class Division, Class Conflict and Citizenship Rights” in Anthony Giddens, Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1982).
See for example Paul Teague Economic Citizenship in the European Union: Employment relations in the new Europe (London: Routledge, 1999).
Barbalet, Citizenship, 27.
For a useful summary of these changes over the course of 200 or more years and the conflicts around them see John McIlroy Trade Unions in Britain Today (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. II, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
In Britain the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) was created in 1974. It is charged with providing conciliation services in disputes between unions and employers, as well as guaranteeing individual workers’ rights through the Employment Tribunals system. Most recently it has been given a role in seeking voluntary recognition agreements between employers and unions under Britain’s new statutory union recognition procedure. In Marshall’s terminology it is an institution of citizenship in that it is available as a means through which people can seek to guarantee their citizenship rights. An overview of ACAS’ development and its current functions can be found in Brian Towers and William Brown eds., Employment Relations In Britain: 25 years of the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000).
See for example Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society, 34, table 2.3; 196-7, table 7.4; 210-11, table 7.8.
See the debate on the new British recognition procedures compared to the USA between Brian Towers “Editorial: ‘…the most lightly regulated labour market…’ The UK’s third statutory recognition procedure” Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 30, no. 2 (1999): 82-95 and Roy J. Adams “Why statutory union recognition is bad labour policy: the North American experience” Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 30, no. 2 (1999): 96-100.
Gersuny, “Industrial Rights”; Muller-Jentsch, “Productive Forces and Industrial Citizenship”; Streeck, “Industrial Citizenship”.
Gersuny, “Industrial Rights”, 212.
Malcolm L. Harrison, “Citizenship, Consumption and Rights: a comment on B.S. Turner’s theory of citizenship”, Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1991): 209-13.
Gersuny, “Industrial Rights”, 215.
Gersuny, “Industrial Rights”, 223.
Giddens, “Class Division, Class Conflict and Citizenship Rights”, and Muller-Jentsch, “Productive Forces and Industrial Citizenship”.
Peter Leisink and Leni Beukema “Participation and Autonomy at Work: a Segmented Privilege” in Harry Coenen and Peter Leisink, eds., Work and Citizenship in the New Europe (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1993).
Muller-Jentsch, “Productive Forces and Industrial Citizenship”, 445.
Muller-Jentsch, “Productive Forces and Industrial Citizenship”, 445.
Muller-Jentsch, “Productive Forces and Industrial Citizenship”, 456.
Useful discussions include Michael Freeman, ‘Are there collective Human Rights?’, Political Studies, XLIII: 25-40and Sypnowich “The Culture of Citizenship”.
See for example, Charles Barrow et. al. Blackstone’s Guide to the Employment Relations Act 1999 (London: The Blackstone Press, 2001).
Delanty, Citizenship in a Global Age 78-9.
Janoski, Citizenship and Civil Society, 48-50.
For a useful critique of the politics of recognition see Sylvia Walby “From Community to Coalition: the politics of recognition as the handmaiden of the politics of equality in an era of globalisation”, Theory, Culture and Society in press.
Freeman, ‘Are there collective Human Rights?’.
Barry Hindess “Actors and Social Relations” in Mark L. Wardell and Stephen P. Turner, eds., Sociological Theory in Transition (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), 113-26.
Hindess, “Actors and Social Relations”, 124.
See Linda Dickens “Doing more with less: ACAS and individual conciliation” in Brian Towers and William Brown eds., Employment Relations In Britain: 93-122.
See David Marsh, The Politics of Industrial Relations, (London: Macmillan, 1992) for the legislation of the 1980s, and Smith and Morton, 1994 for the legislation of the early 1990s.
See Neil Millward et. al. Workplace Industrial Relations in Transition: The ED/ESRC/PSI/ACAS Surveys (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company,1992); Neil Millward, Alex Bryson and John Forth All Change At Work? British employment relations 1980-1998, as portrayed by the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey series (London: Routledge, 2000).
CROTUM was abolished under the 1999 Employment Relations Act, see Graeme Lockwood “An epitaph to CROTUM and CPAUI”, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 31, no. 5 (2000): 471-481.
For a discussion of the nature and origins of these immunities see McIlroy Trade Unions in Britain Today, 227-8.
Like CROTUM, the CPAUI was abolished under the 1999 Employment Relations Act, see Lockwood “An epitaph to CROTUM and CPAUI”.
For a discussion some examples see McIlroy Trade Unions in Britain Today, 253-62.
Although Streeck refers to the European model in this context it is potentially confusing given the diversity within Europe. It is apparent that he has the German model as an ideal here, so from here on I shall refer to the German model in this context.
Streeck, “Industrial Citizenship”, 644.
Streeck, “Industrial Citizenship”, 651.
Streeck, “Industrial Citizenship”, 654.
Sylvia Walby “The new regulatory state: the social powers of the European Union” British Journal of Sociology Vol. 50, no. 1 (1999) 118-140.
See Catherine Barnard and Simon Deakin “In search of coherence: social policy, the single market and fundamental rights” Industrial Relations Journal Vol. 31, No. 4 (2000): 331-345.
Bob Hanke “European Works Councils and Industrial Restructuring in the European Motor Industry”, European Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 6, no. 1 (2000): 35-59.
Michael Whittall “The BMW European Works Council; A Cause for European Industrial Relations Optimism”, European Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 6, no. 1 (2000): 61-83.
Jane Wills “Great Expectations; Three Years in the Life of a European Works Council” European Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 6, no. 1 (2000): 85-107; David Sadler “Organizing European labour: governance, production, trade unions and the question of scale” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 25 (2000): 135-52.
See Sadler “Organizing European labour”; Jeremy Waddington “Towards a reform agenda? European trade unions in transition”, Industrial Relations Journal Vol. 31, no. 4 (2000): 317-330.
Colin Crouch, “National wage Determination and European Monetary Union”, in colin Crouch, ed. After The Euro: Shaping Institutions of Governance in the Wake of European Monetary Union, (Oxford: Oxford University Press) 2000.
Paul Smith and Gary Morton, “New Labour’s Reform of Britain’s employment Law: The Devil is not only in the Detail but in the Values and Policy Too”, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2001): 119-138.
Cully and Woodland, “Trade union membership and recognition”.
Sweeney “Labour disputes in 1996”.
Adapted from David Marsh The New Politics of British Trade Unionism (Ithaca, New York: ILR Press) 1992: 76-7, and Paul Smith and Gary Morton, ‘Union Exclusion next steps’, Industrial Relations Journal, Vol. 25, no. 1 (1994): 4-6.
