Trade Unions and the Pension Crisis: Defending Member Interests in a Neoliberal World

Introduction: This article takes as its starting point the position that neoliberalism has become the hegemonic ideology of the current era (Harvey 2005, 2010; Brownlee, 2005). It goes on to examine the extent to which trade unions have been influenced by neoliberal ideological hegemony. It does so, first, by analysing the hegemonic construction of the pension crisis and, second, by then exploring, through the use of interviews, how leading British trade union general secretaries understand the pension crisis, and how they have responded to the hegemonic construction of the UK pension crisis. In doing so it examines why the neoliberal construct of the crisis reached hegemonic status over the past 10 years (despite claims like Blake’s (2000) to the contrary), but also why trade unions (under a New Labour government) often found themselves becoming unlikely collaborators in supporting the neoliberal construct.