Trade Union Strategy in Contemporary Capitalism: The Microeconomic and Macroeconomic Implications of Political Unionism

Paul Boreham and Richard Hall
Additional contact information
Richard Hall: The University of Queensland

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 1994, vol. 15, issue 3, 313-353

Abstract: Trade union movements in advanced capitalist economies pursue different strategies and draw on different organizational resources at both macropolitical and micropolitical levels. While the theoretical implications of industrial and political strategies have been extensively debated, the actual outcomes of political unionism have rarely been subjected to rigorous empirical investigation. Utilizing data drawn from three different surveys of union strategies and measures of industrial and economic democracy in seven capitalist economies since the mid-1970s, this paper examines the microeconomic and macroeconomic implications of political unionism. The evidence suggests that while political unionism results in both macroeconomic and microeconomic outcomes favourable to labour, at the level of the labour process these achievements are registered in the empowerment of collective actors (unions and works councils) rather than individual actors (workers).

Date: 1994
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X94153002 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:15:y:1994:i:3:p:313-353

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X94153002

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().