The defining characteristic of conventional industrial relations is that labour and management are firmly anchored in reactive methods. For trade unions, reactive protest is a matter of ideology, of conviction that to be independent of management they must be a permanent opposition. Labour has in practice not been well served by this strategy.

Reactivism gives unions the negative power to oppose management, but not the positive power to identify independently the issues that concern their members and their solution.

For management, reaction is not a matter of ideology or philosophy but simply of default, a consequence of the unimportant place industrial relations have in the overall scheme of running a business. Since labour cannot dismount from defensive and reactive strategies, the initiative to break this cycle of reaction feeding upon itself has evidently to come from management.

In strategic terms, the answer appears to lie not in collective bargaining but in what has come to be known as human resource management. By co-opting the individual worker and integrating him into the goals of the enterprise, HRM poses to trade unions the kind of challenge they have never before faced. Will trade unions ride out this storm? Will they go under? Or will they emerge fundamentally transformed in their methods and objectives?

These strategic issues are viewed in the light of events in a single factory over a period of thirty years. The study examines the course of trade unionism and management under two distinct regimes, the limitations of conventional strategies on both sides, strategic managerial options for the future, and what their implications for trade unionism might be.