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This chapter is transcribed from a conversation between Vikram Dhillon and Katherine Kuzmeskas from Tamarin Health on her journey of creating a blockchain company, the challenges faced on the way, the evolving nature of consortia, and the future of her company.

Can private sector unions survive in Great Britain? How can unions respond to the challenges posted by performace-related pay, public-private partnerships and the internet? What lessons can be learned from trade unions' experience in Germany and the US? Trade Unions: Resurgence or Decline?is the third book in the innovativeTrade Unions in Britainseries. Featuring substantial and original research, this book takes a hard disciplinary approach--economics, organizational theory, history and social psychology--to offer readers a comprehensive analysis of unions' prospects in the new millenium. Case studies deal with such topical issues such as unions and the gender pay gap, the private finance initiative, performance-related pay and the unions' use of the internet. Written by many of the leading scholars on British unions, this book highlights union prospects--survival or resurgence?--and has important policy implications for all parties to industrial relations:unions, employers and government.

A century has passed since the first call for a British national minimum wage (NMW). That remarkable Fabian tract discussed wage setting, coverage, monopsony, international labour standards, inspection and compliance and the interaction between the NMW and the social security system. The NMW was finally introduced in 1999. It has raised the real and relative pay of low wage workers, narrowed the gender pay gap and now covers around 1-worker-in-10. The consequences for employment have been extensively analysed using information on individuals, areas and firms. There is little or no evidence of any employment effects. The reasons for this include: an impact on hours rather than workers; employer wage setting and labour market frictions; offsets via the tax credit system; incomplete compliance; improvements in productivity; an increase in the relative price of minimum wage-produced consumer services; and a reduction in the relative profits of firms employing low paid workers.

China has, apparently, more trade union members than the rest of the world put together. But the unions do not function in the same way as western trade unions. In particular Chinese unions are subservient to the Partystate. The theme of the paper is the gap between rhetoric and reality. Issues analysed include union structure, membership, representation, new laws (e.g. promoting collective contracts), new tripartite institutions and the interaction between unions and the Party-state. We suggest that Chinese unions inhabit an Alice in Wonderland dream world. In reality although Chinese unions do have many members (though probably not as many as the official 137 million figure) they are virtually impotent when it comes to representing workers. Because the Party-state recognises that such frailty may lead to instability it has passed new laws promoting collective contracts and established new tripartite institutions to mediate and arbitrate disputes. While such laws are welcome they are largely hollow: collective contracts are very different from collective bargaining and the incidence of cases dealt with by the tripartite institutions is tiny. Much supporting evidence is presented drawing on detailed case studies undertaken in Hainan Province (the first and largest special economic zone) in 2004 and 2005. The need for more effective representation is appreciated by some All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) officials. But reasonable reforms do seem a long way off, so unions in China will continue to echo the White Queen: “The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today” and, alas, tomorrow never comes.

The laws of economics apply equally to the Sport of Kings, argues David Metcalf.

David Metcalf charts the fortunes of the British trade union movement over the last half-century and suggests where it will have to concentrate to find its place in the new economy.