Aldershot: Dartmouth. 1993.

The book analyzes the shifting attitudes of trade unions towards environmental issues in Germany and Sweden by considering the ecological discourse of nineteen individual trade unions from the 1970s until the 1990s. The author examines minutes of trade union congresses as well as trade union membership newspapers using quantitative content analysis. The analytical framework is based on assumptions of modern organization theory. Consequently, the author’s hypotheses regarding the extent to which trade unions are receptive to environmental issues concern trade union membership (structural approach), trade union ideology (process and cognitive approach), and trade unions’ environment (resource dependency approach).

The results show that trade unions act according to three different strategies: first, some trade unions are receptive to environmental concerns. These unions are characterized by an activist labor union ideology. Other unions, predominantly associated with an accommodationist union or „social democratic” ideology, oppose the integration of environmental positions in their programs. Finally, trade unions which are strongly influenced by the environmental discourse due to their membership structure (white collar unions) follow a non-decision making strategy. The following figure summarizes these results:

From the foreword by Claus Offe:

In this book, Detlef Jahn relates the story of how trade unions in Germany and Sweden have responded to and coped with the challenge of having to fight, as it were, at two fronts simultaneously. As the climate of opinion in these two industrial societies moved towards more openness for environmental concerns, and as the bearers of such concerns became also more numerous, as well as more vocal, within the trade unions’ constituencies and organisational domains and the policy agenda they had to address, the political, ideological, and organizational dilemmas clearly multiplied to which trade union leaders found themselves exposed. The nature of these dilemmas and the responses of the unions’ leadership bodies are both subjected to a rigorous empirical analysis in this study. Not the least of the virtues of it consists, in my view, in the simultaneous comparative perspective applied to the national industrial relations systems of the two countries and the strategies adopted by unions operating in different industrial sectors with their corresponding patterns of membership and ‘task environments’. The author also breaks new ground in the methodology of quantitative content analysis. […]

In the process, trade unions are forced to abandon much of their time-honored cognitive and ideological schematizations of reality. How this is accomplished, and what kinds of ideological blinders and organizational filters stand in the way of such accomplishment, is the fascinating process that Jahn’s fine empirical analysis elucidates with much of the methodological sophistication at the disposal of today’s social science.

Review article by Klaus Armingeon (PVS 36 (4): 792-793, 1995):

„Few studies have been conducted with regard to the relation between ‚old’ and ‚new’ types of social movements. Only a handful of these compare cases on an international level. Out of those who do compare internationally, there are very few that do so in a systematic and verifiable manner. Detlef Jahn’s doctoral thesis fully meets these criteria. […] „New Politics in Trade Unions“ is a must-read for scientists who do research on ‚old’ and ‚new’ social movements.”(own translation)