The Incorporation of Workplace Trade Unionism? Some Evidence from the Mining Industry

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Abstract
The incorporation of the workplace leadership has been a recurrent theme in recent writings on British trade unionism. Several surveys have revealed the emergence, since the 1960s, of more full-time representatives and more elaborate hierarchies on the shop floor, amounting to a `bureaucratisation' of the workplace union organisation. The newly established tier of senior shop stewards, it is said, have become distant from the shop floor workers and their concerns, and have been drawn closer to management and national union officials. The paper explores this proposition by reference to an empirical study of local trade unionism in the coal industry. The organisation of workplace representatives in coal mining exhibits many of the trends which are said to be associated with the incorporation of the shop floor. Detailed examination of local NUM branch officials' relationship with managers, their members and full-time union officers in a sample of 35 collieries, however, revealed that the workplace leadership do not behave as the theory predicts. There was no evidence that they act against their members' interests and pursue, instead, those of management or their national union leaders. The paper ends by questioning the assumptions on which the theory of incorporation is based,.