Using Acker's conceptual framework of inequality regimes, this article explores the experiences of Bangladeshi, Caribbean and Pakistani women working in three parts of the public sector: health, local government and higher education. Our concern is to investigate how inequality regimes are sustained, despite the existence in the public sector of more sophisticated policy development and stronger legal duties than in the private sector. Drawing on interviews with managers and with women employees, the study demonstrates the complexity and unevenness in the way inequality regimes are produced, reproduced and rationalized. Utilising what Crenshaw calls an 'intersectional sensibility' helps reveal the persistence of intersectional inequalities in organizations explicitly committed to challenging inequality regimes

This article seeks to add discussion of the intersection of gender and ethnicity to the debates on individualism and collectivism. In doing so, it challenges the prevailing view, in these debates, of the rise of individualism and the decline in collectivism. Through a study of black and minority ethnic women trade unionists, it shows how a differentiated workforce, rather than leading to individualism at work, may contribute to union renewal and inspire more creative forms of collectivism.The distinction between individualism and collectivism has come to form one of the key axes along which debates on industrial relations have been conducted and discussion on their balance has been wide-ranging and contested (Kessler and Purcell, 2003). Trade unions have long been seen as a main site for the development of collective values and a rise in individualism has often been linked to a decline in trade union membership and social power (Pakulski and Waters, 1996;Willis, 1990). It has been argued that trade unions themselves have responded to socioeconomic changes by changing their policies and style to focus more on individual members in response to the individualisation of the employment relationship.The debates in industrial relations are set against sociological theses asserting broad sweeps of individualisation as part of the development of modernist and capitalist societies (Beck, 1992;Giddens, 1990;Valkenburg, 1995). Against this contested backdrop, the article aims to illuminate the complex nature of individualism and collectivism by exploring the intersection of gender and ethnicity in trade unions and thereby challenge thinking on individualism and collectivism that is framed in a dichotomous, unidirectional and imprecise way.The article will revisit the debates on individualism and collectivism, with particular emphasis on the differentiation of the workforce. After discussing our fieldwork, we shall focus on three issues, which show how the intersection of gender and ethnicity can illuminate debates on collectivism. We discuss solidaristic collectivism (exploring the routes to and the experience of solidarism); instrumental collectivism; and the limits to collectivism. Whilst we distinguish analytically between these two types of collectivism, in practice they overlap and interrelate.

This paper addresses the under-explored relationship between women's structures and union democracy and argues that women's structural progress is mediated by an enduring gendered oligarchy and an associated struggle to access power resources. It provides, first, an analysis over time of women's structures in UK unions, and second, a case-study analysis of the Manufacturing, Science and Finance (MSF) trade union. The analysis over time demonstrates women's progress in achieving positional power, but conceals the complexity of the way different resources are used to constrain and enable women trade unionists. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd/London School of Economics 2000.

The article investigates the nature of the increasing involvement of women in the decision-making structures of the fifth largest UK union through a study of senior women union officials. It is argued that senior union women, operating within a feminist paradigm, balance both transformational and status quo objectives in working towards union survival and renewal.It is uncontested that union survival depends on widening trade unions' traditional recruitment areas to include the service sector generally and specifically to increase the proportion of women in trade unions. At the same time, trade unions have recognised that women are under-represented in union structures and steps have been taken to redress this imbalance through for example, reserved seats and proportionality. Notwithstanding such potentially transformative changes, union culture has been characterised as enduringly patriarchal. It is therefore timely to reflect on the impact of senior trade union women and the part they play in union survival and revival. In particular this article explores how union women operate within a feminist paradigm juggling both transformative and status-quo objectives. 1 Transformative 2 objectives are taken to be wide-ranging strategies to build a 'woman friendly' union. Status quo objectives are those which focus on the numerical strength and survival of the union in an essentially unchanged form. It draws on a qualitative study of the roles and activities of senior union women in the trade union, Manufac-. 2 The article uses the term transformative to mean being capable of altering the character and nature of the union. To transform or transforming relates to the process of character change and does not imply revolutionary change nor should it be confused with the process of union renewal which may or may not be the outcome of transformation.Transforming union women 31 turing, Science and Finance (MSF). The relevance of the study lies in the importance of women to union renewal in the context of their increasing share of the labour market and indeed of union membership.Recruitment is now an urgent and major priority for all trade unions. Overall union membership in the UK has steeply declined since 1979 from a peak of around 13 million members to seven, so that unions now represent only a third of employees (Labour Research: 16, 1996). The 1980s saw major economic and labour market restructuring with the heavily unionised, male dominated, manufacturing industries severely contracting and the low unionised, female dominated service sector rapidly expanding. Trade unions appear to have been at a loss to keep abreast with these economic and social changes and have thus far failed to recruit new members in sufficient numbers in expanding sectors to offset the losses in contracting sectors. This article is predicated on the assumption that unions are in a position to positively redress at least some of the decline in union membership via the extended recruitment and retention of women and explores how women union officia...