The Post‐Crisis Legacy Effects of Union Legitimacy in Liberal Market Economies

ABSTRACT This article uses theories of legitimacy to explain, first, why centre‐right governments in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom collaborated with trade unions to develop worker‐protective policy mechanisms during the COVID crisis and, second, variation in the post‐COVID influence of unions over the policy agendas of these governments. Drawing on an analysis of 35 elite interviews, it argues that unions in all three countries were able to achieve policy influence during COVID because their legitimacy increased in a crisis context. However, the extent to which union influence over neoliberal governments was sustained post‐COVID varied, with weak influence in the United Kingdom, moderate influence in Australia and stronger influence in Ireland. The findings highlight the importance of residual forms of legitimacy derived from previous episodes in explaining this variation and the circumstances in which actor legitimacy changes over time, thus adding a temporal dimension to industrial relations theories of legitimacy.