The Decentralisation of Industrial Politics? The Role of Regional Context in the Reshaping of Trade Unionism within British Engineering Available to Purchase

Since the end of the 1970s, the restructuring of the economic landscape and the drive by governments throughout Europe to deregulate markets, reduce institutional rigidities, and flexibilise the movement of capital and labour, have confronted trade unions with the most serious challenges they have faced for more than half a century. According to many commentators, a process of decollectivisation and decentralisation of industrial relations is now firmly established. For example, Baglioni (1990) describes decentralisation as one of the dominant trends in contemporary European industrial relations. In his view ‘Decentralisation, all in all, is part of the general retreat of the labour movement. It is often a manifestation of the alteration of the power balance in favour of management, and it has created complicated problems for union strategy.’