Resisting Reform: Public Sector Workers and the British State

摘要

@@This paper seeks to illuminate the relations between workers and the capitalist state inthe UK in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It does so by discussing the particularrelationship between the Labor governments (1997-2008) and organised labor in the formof the trade unions. The assumption being that the government itself acted in the interests ofBritish capital writ large and therefore class relations are partly explained by the applicationof state power in certain arenas of civil society. In particular the ground to be covered isreform of the public services as this allows for a direct account of the government's'modernising agenda' and the ways in which different sections of the working-class haveresisted the powerful policy direction of market reforms.