Trade Unions and Extra-national IndustRal Policies: A Case Study of the Response of the Brtish NUM and ISTC to Membership of the European Coal and Steel Community

Three different frameworks -Europeanization, opportunistic European, and nationalistic -are developed to help explain the response of the British coal and steel unions to European Community industrial policies for these sectors. As the responses of the trade unions were highly uneven and at times inconsistent, it is argued they cannot be accommodated in any of the frameworks which assume a high degree of coherency in respect to trade union behaviour. The paper suggests that the responses lacked coherency largely because the trade unions adopted a ‘naive Keynesian policy vision’ which limits in-depth strategic thinking on international economic issues. The paper concludes that trade unions need to address this weakness, for the economic pressures that they are now experiencing are only going to get more intense.