Chapter 4: Union Learning Representatives in the United Kingdom: Between Rhetoric and Reality and Denial

This chapter reviews the development and impact of ULRs in the UK, an innovative form of specialist representation that was part of wider union engagement with learning, training and skills issues as a facet of union ‘renewal’ within the workplace and beyond. The chapter explores notions of mutual gains and contestation in relation to learning, the development of the ULR role within unionised workplaces, and the strategic but contested orientations of unions towards learning and ULRs. During the 1997–2010 Labour governments, this dimension of industrial relations was seen as a way of forging mutual gains between workers and management, engaging more marginalised workers in learning and their unions and contributing to a narrative of union renewal following two decades of union decline. However, the fragmented nature of the UK learning and skills system, the limits of ‘partnership’ approaches and a lack of institutional embeddedness for unions in terms of negotiating and bargaining over skills and training placed limits on their effectiveness even when government was broadly supportive of this work. Since 2010, austerity-driven retrenchment and marketisation of adult learning provision has created major challenges for the ULR role, including the contradictions of attempting to raise demand for increasingly difficult-to-access educational services, and the seeming marginalisation of the role due to wider pressures on union representative facility time from employers and in some cases a lack of support from unions themselves.