State Restructuring and Union Renewal: The Case of the National Union of Teachers

Abstract

All sections of state employment have undergone radical restructuring since the 1980s, giving rise to a debate about the actual and necessary responses of public sector unions. Much of this debate has concerned the possibility of union renewal prompted by the tendency of New Public Management to decentralize employment relations. This article combines an examination of secondary works with a case study to evaluate the extent to which the largest of the teachers’ unions, the National Union of Teachers, has been subject to this process. It concludes that while many of the conditions for renewal appear to be in place, there is no crisis of unionism and evidence points to a traditional pattern of relations between local associations of the union and LEAs being resilient.