He has been called the "apparatchiks' apparatchik", "unremmitingly dull" and his critics say that he only won the top job in the British Trades' Union Congress (TUC) because there were no other candidates. But starting from such a low expectation base may well have proved a major asset for John Monks. It has largely been onwards and upwards since his appointment in 1993.

Not only has he helped British trade unions stem the massive haemorrhage in membership of the Thatcher years, but he has resisted attempts by Tony Blair's New Labour regime to subsume the movement in its centrist strategy.

At its conference in September, the TUC reasserted its new role as the British labour movement's outrider on a range of issues. It pushed for accelerated entry into the European single currency, attacked plans by the British government to privatise air traffic control and the Post Office, and supported initiatives on social partnership.

The son of a Mancunian parks superintendent, John Monks graduated with a degree in economic history from Manchester University and went on to join Plessey as a management trainee. It was there that he joined the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staff (ASTMS), led by that sardonic visionary Clive Jenkins.

Mr Jenkins was one of the first British trade union leaders to realise that the economy was falling behind international competitors, especially in high tech knowledge-based sectors. Mr Monks therefore joined the TUC's organisation and industrial relations staff in 1969 with a better grasp of the new realities of economic life than most trade union activists.

He ran the department from 1977 until he became TUC deputy general secretary in 1987. That in itself tells a tale. During the lean Thatcher years the traditionally dominant economics department of congress became increasingly irrelevant because the British government had little interest in discussing policy with the unions, let alone allowing them to influence it. The name of the game was survival.

When Mr Monks took over from Ron Willis as TUC general secretary in 1993, trade union membership in Britain had shrunk from 12 million to seven million. He adopted a more focused and less ambitious strategy than his predecessor to stop the downward plunge.

He supported and helped co-ordinate recruitment initiatives by unions to attract new members from the non-unionised sector, rather than have them poach them from each other, and he also sought to improve services with reduced staffing levels within the TUC bureaucracy. This year, for the first time since the 1970s, the TUC recorded a rise in membership of 100,000.

The election of a Labour government was central to the TUC survival strategy. "These are much better years for British trade unionism," Mr Monks says. "We are no longer on a diet of brackish water and berries, like we were in the Thatcher years. It may not be a feast under Tony Blair but we are at least eating bread and 26 new rights are being introduced for employees."

Besides new rights to represent members in the workplace, Mr Monks points out that legislation in areas such as the Minimum Wage Act will help up to two million workers, many of them in Northern Ireland and other peripheral regions of the United Kingdom.

For many of these people, often working in essential areas as cleaners, home helps, or in childcare, it will mean a pay rise of £1 sterling (€1.56) an hour.

He explains the enthusiasm of the TUC for the single currency as much more than a question of economics. "We like the way Ireland has adjusted to the euro. It has not just done the country a lot of good economically but psychologically as well.

"British attitudes, and especially English attitudes are nothing like as clear cut. There is still a sense of having an island destiny, being the hub of the English-speaking world, which has been blurring the view of Europe and has coincided with a period of national decline since the second World War."

Of course economics does count, and so do trade union politics. The EU now accounts for the bulk of British trade, including the fastest growing sectors, Mr Monks points out. "The trade union interest is there as well. If you look around the world and see where trade unionism is strongest you don't have to look further than western Europe."

He sees the EU social model, a mix of socialist and Christian democratic traditions of social solidarity, as attractive. "The alternative is the Wall Street and City [of London] type of wild west capitalism."

He accepts that not everyone is singing from the same TUC hymn sheet. Britain's second largest union, the Transport and General Workers' Union, is the main dissident. But Mr Monks believes that attitude reflects in part the fact that the T&GWU general secretary, Bill Morris, is of Jamaican descent and very much "a Commonwealth man".

Besides praising the euro, Mr Monks was an early advocate of partnership in the workplace. It is hard for Irish trade unionists, or employers, to realise just how visionary this has been. In the 1980s the advocates of social partnership tended to come from the right-wing within the TUC and there was little common ground on which to take a stand between the stark alternatives of trade-union militancy and class collaboration.

Mr Monks sees partnership as the key to strategic success at both national and enterprise level. "We've been promoting partnership as the best way of conducting policy in the workplace. It often means the difference between working for a firm doing well rather than doing badly. I like to compare it with playing for Manchester United, as opposed to Manchester City." Although he admits that recent Manchester City performances may have undermined his metaphor.

Labour's electoral victory has not left him complacent. He warned employers earlier this year that unions had to be treated as real "partners, not poodles". At a Fabian Society conference in June he also accused Mr Blair of not only taking working class voters for granted but treating them as "embarrassing elderly relatives".

"We're getting on quite well with the prime minister at the moment," Mr Monks says, but he questions Mr Blair's commitment to the tripartite variation of social partnerships. He thinks that Mr Blair sees tripartism (the government, employers and unions working in concert) as "the trade unions calling the shots".

Mr Monks points out that the only major legislation introduced so far using the consensual tripartite model is the Minimum Wage Act.

In contrast the tough stance taken by the British government on the EU Working Time Directive has left an estimated nine million workers exposed to excessive overtime. Britain has also played a leading role in opposing the extension of European Works Councils to smaller enterprises.

The TUC leader believes this will change once Germany leaves the blocking minority group on the council of ministers. One senses that Mr Monks regrets the TUC does not have the clout of its German counterparts, the DGB, which has played a major role in forcing Chancellor Gerhard Schroder to abandon his version of Mr Blair's "third way".

Mr Monks sees social partnership as practised in the Republic as the way the British unions should go. Part of that strategy will include improving links with employers and with political parties across the spectrum, as well as with other EU trade unions.

He says he will also keep his pledge on entering the job to champion the "unemployed and all those who feel exploited, vulnerable and scared".

pyeates@irish-times.ie