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'Jane Holgate is a brilliant thinker' - Jane McAlevey In Arise, Jane Holgate argues that unions must revisit their understanding of power in order to regain influence and confront capital. Drawing on two decades of research and organising experience, Holgate examines the structural inertia of today’s unions from a range of perspectives: from strategic choice, leadership and union democracy to politics, tactics and the agency afforded to rank-and-file members. In the midst of a neoliberal era of economic crisis and political upheaval, the labour movement stands at a crossroads. Union membership is on the rise, but the ‘turn to organising’ has largely failed to translate into meaningful gains for workers. There is considerable discussion about the lack of collectivism among workers due to casualisation, gig work and precarity, yet these conditions were standard in the UK when workers built the foundations of the 19th-century trade union movement. Drawing on history and case studies of unions developing and using power effectively, this book offers strategies for moving beyond the pessimism that prevails in much of today’s union movement. By placing power analysis back at the heart of workers' struggle, Holgate shows us that transformational change is not only possible, but within reach.

InUnion Voices, the result of a thirteen-year research project, three industrial relations scholars evaluate how labor unions fared in the political and institutional context created by Great Britain's New Labour government, which was in power from 1997 to 2010. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence, Melanie Simms, Jane Holgate, and Edmund Heery present a multilevel analysis of what organizing means in the UK, how it emerged, and what its impact has been. Although the supportive legislation of the New Labour government led to considerable optimism in the late 1990s about the prospects for renewal, Simms, Holgate, and Heery argue that despite considerable evidence of investment, new practices, and innovation, UK unions have largely failed to see any significant change in their membership and influence. The authors argue that this is because of the wider context within which organizing activity takes place and also reflects the fundamental tensions within these initiatives. Even without evidence of any significant growth in labor influence across UK society more broadly, organizing campaigns have given many of the participants an opportunity to grow and flourish. The book presents their experiences and uses them to show how their personal commitment to organizing and trade unionism can sometimes be undermined by the tensions and tactics used during campaigns.

Intersectional analysis has been developing since its emergence from critical race feminism in the 1980s when it was used to conceptualize the inter-relationship of race and gender and, particularly, the experiences of discrimination and marginalization of black women in employment. While its contribution has been much debated within sociological and gender specific journals, its use still remains relatively limited within studies of work and employment relations. It is argued here that this field of study would benefit from greater engagement with and understanding of an intersectional approach to both the design and interpretation of research. Two lines of reasoning are put forward for this contention: firstly, that the intersectional approach contains an important caution against over-generalization that has been obscured; secondly, that separating the challenge for all academics to be more intersectionally sensitive from the methodological challenges of taking an intersectional approach brings the significance of intersectionality into sharper relief.

Many unions that have adopted ‘new’ organising approaches have tended to see organising as a ‘toolbox’ of practices rather than as having an underpinning political philosophy or objective. Adopting such an approach has left out the fundamental question of what are we1 organising ‘for’? Academics studying these developments have tended to evaluate organising outcomes against whatever objectives unions have set themselves and have not dealt with the question of what organising is and what it is for. It is important to examine the politics and processes underpinning organising activity and to keep in mind these fundamental questions. We (re)examine the political dynamics of organising and argue that there is a need for a more robust notion of power and the centrality of worker self-organisation in organising objectives.

The structural position of black and minority ethnic workers (BME) and migrant workers in the UK labour market is relatively well known. Many workers in these groups find themselves in low-paid, low-skilled jobs primarily because of their ethnicity and regardless of their skills. This racialization of the labour market has been well documented — particularly since the 'large-scale' BME immigration in the postwar period. What is less well known is what it is like to work in these increasingly segmented sections of the economy where white workers have abandoned jobs in favour of (slightly) more lucrative work. Adopting a case-study approach, this article follows a trade union's attempt to organize a sandwich factory of 500 workers, where most of the workforce was made up of BME migrant workers.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to reflect on how the UK’s Trade Union Congress, in the 150th year of its formation, has been responding to the significant changes in the labour market, working practices and union decline. The paper considers Trades Union Congress (TUC) initiatives to recruit and organise new groups of workers as it struggles to adapt to the new world of work many workers are experiencing. Although the paper reviews progress in this regard it also considers current and future challenges all of which are becoming increasingly urgent as the current cohort of union membership is aging and presents a demographic time bomb unless new strategies and tactics are adopted to bring in new groups of workers – particularly younger workers.Design/methodology/approachThis is a review paper so it mainly draws on writings (both academic and practitioner) on trade union strategy and tactics in relations to organising approaches and in particularly the TUC’s initiatives from the period of “New Unionism” onwards.FindingsThe authors note that while unions have managed to retain a presence in workplaces and industries where they membership and recognition, there has, despite a “turn to organising” been less success than was perhaps hoped for when new organising initiatives were introduced in 1998. In order to expand the bases of organisation into new workplaces and in new constituencies there needs to be a move away from the “institutional sclerosis” that has prevented unions adapting to the changing nature of employment and the labour market restructuring. The paper concludes that in order to effect transformative change requires leaders to develop strategic capacity and innovation among staff and the wider union membership. This may require unions to rethink the way that they operate and be open to doing thing radically different.Originality/valueThe paper’s value is that it provides a comprehensive overview of the TUC’s role in attempting to inject an organising culture with the UK union movement by drawing out some of the key debates on this topic from both scholarly and practitioner writings over the last few decades.

Understanding the power dynamics within unions is as important as understanding the way power is navigated in the employment relationship. Unions are, in many ways, complex organisations. They are civil society bodies whose purpose is to maintain or improve the conditions of the lives of their members.¹ They are democratic membership organisations where decisions to set direction, policy and practice are made through the collective voices of those who participate. Yet, as democratic membership organisations, leaders within unions – if they want to retain their positions and power – are dependent on securing the support of at least a majority

These are the words of labour historian Eric Hobsbawm in an influential (and controversial) article called ‘The forward march of labour halted?’, drawing from a speech he gave in 1978 in which he discussed the changing structure of British capitalism in the post-Second World War period and the detrimental effect it was having upon workers. The same words could have been written today, except current labour movement analysts would more likely talk in terms of global capitalism and the widespread neoliberal hegemony that has curtailed the power of the working class. Similar words, however, could also have been written in

This chapter considers the response of the UK’s trade union movement to decline and its progressive loss of power from the mid-1970s onwards. Over half of all employees were union members in 1979 when the Conservative government was elected, and by the time Labour entered government in 1997, that figure was down to only one third – a loss of approximately 5.5 million members (Department for Business Innovation and Skills 2014). What was the response from unions to this ongoing decline? In particular, what were their approaches to defending the terms and conditions of many of their members at a

The purpose of the chapter is to consider the growth and power of unions in the UK in the late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries, when work was almost universally casual and workers had no employment rights. How did workers succeed in collectivising despite the difficult economic and political circumstances of the time, and when there was no labour law to protect workers from the considerable exploitation and threats they faced? There isn’t the space in a short chapter such as this to explore the whole development of trade unionism – that history can be found elsewhere (Clegg 1985; Pelling 1963),