Suchergebnisse

'Democracy and Corruption in Europe' edited by Donatella Della Porta and Yves Meny is reviewed.

Previous examples of political unionism have focused on issues of public and private economic management and the distribution of income between capital and labour. This article examines a union that has adopted a more fundamental political mission in not only defending the welfare state against economic liberal subversion, but also in tackling the inequities of gender in work life that have so far survived comfortably with the orthodox reformist approach to pursuing gender equality in the labour market and society at large. In an integrated strategy to meet these problems, inspired by the country's resurgent women's movement, the Swedish Municipal Workers' Union-it is argued here-has imbued unionism with a new moral depth that goes to the core of current citizenship issues in Western society, and by so doing it has taken the political lead in the Swedish union movement, not least around institutionalized strategies for work life reform.

Under the aegis of one of the West's more successful and enduring social contracts of the postwar period, manufacturing unions and the peak union council in Australia have launched a comprehensive campaign, including targeted industry policy and direct intervention at enterprise level, to rescue and modernize the country's crumbling manufacturing sector. This new unionism confounds industrialrelations theorists' pessimism over the movement's ability to go beyond its craft origins to directly address managerial issues. But beyond this, the movement is demonstrating its comparative advantage over government and corporate management in making and implementing industry policy, given the traditionalism of government organs, corporate particularism, the structural and institutional fragmentation of industry, and the substantive requirements of an effective industry policy. If the union movement does represent the primary bearer of an industrial renaissance in the future, then the latter is likely to imply basic organizational change for industry and the unions themselves, including a radical shift in power to organized labour over strategic decision-making and the production process at enterprise, industry and national levels.