Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine contemporary sex worker labour unionism in a number of major western economies because it now faces an acute historical dilemma of being forced into acting as the antithesis of what it professes and aims to be, namely, elite pressure groups....

Purpose – This paper examines the attempts by trade unions in Britain to gain organisational rights for their members and for workers in organisations operating within the hitherto non‐unionised “new economy”. Design/methodology/approach – By using data drawn from fieldwork interviews...

Purpose – Restructuring has assumed a significant importance across Europe due to the growing pressures of internationalisation affecting transnational capital. By drawing from two case‐studies in the public health service and the manufacturing sector in Belgium, this paper aims to present...

Presents reported evidence which suggests that the overall resilience of workplace unionism to managerial challenges found in Liverpool can be found in many other Royal Mail workplaces in Britain. Analyses the various contours of union resistance, centred on strike action, to management′s...

Most analyses of strike activity in Western Europe suggest that it has declined quite dramatically since the early 1970s. The contention of this article is that this decline has been exaggerated, largely as a result of an inadequate recognition of the deficiencies of the statistical data on...

This article critically examines the proposition that industrial relations in banking in the UK are undergoing a move from paternalism to adversarialism and then to partnership. It uses these as ideal‐types totrack and explain the developments in industrial relations and argues that the...

This paper examines changes in industrial relations in a large number of provincial newspapers (existing and acquired) following expansion through acquisition by previously medium‐sized newspaper groups. It considers whether acquisition leads to forces for change or continuity, diversity or...

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to examine the processes and outcomes under which employers in the magazine industry in the UK ended the collective bargaining agreements for journalists with the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and instituted a unilateral‐based regime in the...

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to give a critique of the extant literature on union commitment and participation in order to develop remedies to identified weaknesses Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses a critical assessment of extant literature. Findings – A number of...