Book dossier

Union retreat and the regions

by Ron Martin

Since the beginning of the 1980s, British trade unions have experienced a dramatic retreat, marked by rapidly falling memberships and declining industrial power. The authors examine the regional dimensions of this retreat of organized labour, paying particular attention to the resilience of the unions' historical heartland areas, the impact of economic restructuring on local union traditions, the shrinking landscape of industrial militancy, the geographical decentralization of the new industrial relations, and the link between these factors and the more general debate on regional development and regional labour markets. An important synthesis of economic geography and industrial relations work, this book marks a major contribution towards the newly emerging field of labour geography.