"Third Sector" as Weapon Against Trade Unions

Publication date: Friday 28 July 2006

Many figures in the political class in Britain under Tony Blair "see the third sector as a way of curbing the power of public sector unions".

This acute observation appears in column devoted to the "big idea" of nonprofit roles in public life, in the influential magazine The Economist. It notes another acute observation by a British trade union leader that the political class's enthusiasm for the third sector is driven by an interest in moving public services into private hands, which he terms "soft privatisation."