The ‘indie unions’ and the UK labour movement: Towards a community of practice

Introduction

Trade unionism, in terms of membership density, collective bargaining coverage and working-class power, continues to decline. Whilst the reasons for this are complex (Walker et al., 2007) and contested (Martinez Lucio, 2006), the onus is on trade unions themselves – as actors of collective representation (Dufour and Hege, 2010) – to counter this, in order to ensure workers have organisations capable of representing their collective interests. As such, there is an academic and practitioner interest in union strategy and renewal, and whilst there is some consensus, with the trope of ‘organising the unorganised’, for example, being both hegemonic and axiomatic, some scholars argue that the union renewal proposition has been ‘unduly focused on revitalising and expanding membership in existing institutions’ (Ness, 2014: 3). Instead, other scholars have highlighted the ‘growing relevance of informal bargaining and social movement strategies outside recognised trade unions’ (Alberti, 2016: 84), and new compendiums have documented these emerging globally (e.g. Fine et al., 2018; Lazar, 2017; Ness, 2014). In the UK, this has taken the form of a new wave of small, independent unions, termed (and henceforth referred to as) ‘indie unions’ (Pero, 2019): the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB), the Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union (CAIWU) and United Voices of the World (UVW).

With a membership comprising mainly migrant and precarious workers, these unions have won pay rises, secure employment status, paid sick leave, ‘insourcing’, pensions, increased annual leave, the overturning of disciplinary decisions, and a variety of other industrial victories at small, large, private and public sector employers. Whilst UK trade union membership levels overall have not yet recovered from the record low in 2016 (BEIS, 2019: 5), all the indie unions have seen growth: CAIWU increased their membership from 684 in 2016 to 1353 in 2019 (Gov.uk, 2020a), UVW from 300 to 1200 (Gov.uk, 2020b), and the IWGB from 915 to 4626 (Gov.uk, 2020c). They have secured numerous legal victories in both individual and collective landmark cases (e.g. Butler, 2018) and have branches for workers in industries outside of traditional union jurisdictions, such as sex work, video games (Woodcock, 2020) and foster care (Kirk, 2020).

The burgeoning literature on these new unions (Alberti, 2016; Alberti and Pero, 2018; Gall, 2020; Kirkpatrick, 2014; Pero, 2019; Woodcock, 2014) positions them, whether implicitly or explicitly, as something separate from, or even in opposition to existing UK labour movement institutions. This approach is certainly understandable given that members of these unions cite their previous experiences of exclusionary treatment within Trades Union Congress (TUC) unions as the primary reason for their formation (see Kirkpatrick, 2014; Moyer-Lee and Chango-Lopez, 2017). Pero suggests that the union renewal literature’s institutionalist focus overlooks these grassroots efforts, and also that ‘the large unions, on the whole, seem to resent the new actors’ arrival’ (2019: 906). If this is the case, we might wonder what its implications are for the overall union renewal project. Or can the indie unions’ existence prompt a more optimistic account of the reconfiguration of the organised working class?

Mindful of Pero’s critique, this article centralises the indie unions’ work by conceptualising the UK labour movement, in its broadest sense, as a site of communities of practice (COP). COP provides the theoretical framework by which we can understand and, most importantly, engender the social context in which diverse networks of workers, fighting for improvements in working conditions, can produce and share knowledge in a solidaristic and mutually beneficial manner. The article adds to the emerging literature on the indie unions and challenges the consensus that frames the relationship between them and existing labour movement institutions as exclusionary by providing a more sanguine account of the synergy between them, albeit at a grassroots level. Importantly, also, the article shows a dynamic which has not yet been documented, whereby the indie unions, as well as devising successful mobilising strategies against outsourced work are also – consciously and unconsciously – transmitting the knowledge of how to do this to other labour movement activists, with their influence beginning to affect micro- and macro-level change in the wider labour movement overall.

The article is structured as follows: the first section extends the concept of COP to show its applicability to trade unions and why this can be a useful framework when considering union renewal. The second and third sections detail the article’s methodological approach and the chosen case studies. The findings are then presented in the following three sections, arranged to present a holistic picture of COP: the external, internal and extra-organisational learning processes taking place. In the first of these sections I use the business practice of outsourcing, a contemporary exemplar of precarious work considered imperative to organise, to provide a contextual example of how COP permit responsiveness to changing circumstances – a quality considered crucial to union regeneration (Hyman, 2007). Next, I argue that the trade union should be seen as a pedagogical site, with examples of union practice demonstrating the heterogeneity of ways in which unions engage in learning processes. Then, in the final of the three empirical sections, I use the COP concepts of ‘masters’ and ‘novices’ to demonstrate the learning dynamics taking place extra-organisationally between the different union types. Discussion of the findings takes place within each discrete section. Finally, I conclude that knowledge being generated by the indie unions is precipitating change in the wider labour movement and consider the implications of this for trade union renewal.

Trade unions as communities of practice

This section considers how COP is a useful framework by which to consider union renewal. Across the fields of business and organisation studies more broadly it is commonly contended that to be successful organisations must acquire new knowledge (e.g. Senge, 1990), and Hyman argues that unions’ effectiveness ‘may well depend on the capacity of those within them collectively to learn appropriate responses to new challenges’ (2007: 200). If renewal is not possible without unions having this capacity to learn, it is necessary to understand in what circumstances they can do so (Lévesque and Murray, 2010). The concept of COP provides an effective framework by which to understand how this knowledge can be produced.

The concept of COP, whilst never strictly defined (Cox, 2005), is broadly considered to be ‘people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour’ (Wenger-Trayner, 2015: 1). It provides a conceptual framework by which to understand how collectives, ‘organized around a common practice’ (Tewksbury, 2013: 14), develop knowledge which informs that practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). In COP, learning is informal and situated (Lave, 1996), taking place through membership participation in the ‘joint negotiated enterprise’ (Wenger, 1998: 76). Community membership ‘implies a commitment to the domain’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991: 98), and presupposes the potential for knowledge to be generated by that membership learning from each other through observation and replication (Brooks et al., 2020) and storytelling (Bechky, 2006).

COP challenged educational paradigms, offering a ‘radical critique of cognitivist theories of learning’ (Handley et al., 2006: 641). It can be viewed as a liberatory, inclusive and active form of pedagogy, positing the idea of a collective depository of knowledge available to all for utilisation, as opposed to the ‘educator as a depositor of knowledge’ (Kilgore, 1999: 193). It has, however, mainly been employed in the business literature as a ‘managerial tool’ (Cox, 2005: 528) by which to extract unpaid labour from workers through innovation and knowledge production (Cox, 2005; Tewksbury, 2013). Lave (1996) later defended the concept in Freirean terms as an approach to learning which does not perpetuate social inequality. In COP learning is a collective endeavour, and community participants are knowledge generators, all with something to contribute: an egalitarian view befitting trade union doctrine.

It is somewhat surprising, then, that given the concept’s original telos, and the recognition of the importance of organisational learning as a prerequisite for union innovation and renewal, that these ideas have not been coalesced, perhaps due to the apolitical nature of the ‘turn to organising’ path the renewal debate took (Simms and Holgate, 2010). Literature that applies the framework of COP to trade unions is scarce, and confined to educational scholarship (Ball, 2003; Cooper, 2006; Creanor and Walker, 2005; Kopsen, 2011) rather than as a feature in the union renewal debates or in industrial relations literature more generally (although it is invoked in Martinez Lucio et al., 2009; Niforou and Hodder, 2020). There is a plethora of literature on trade union learning, with a number of studies on the relationship between union learning and union revitalisation (e.g. Mustchin, 2012; Wallis et al., 2005), but this focuses on formal pedagogical practices (such as the ‘UnionLearn’ programme) rather than the Marxist understanding of the union itself being the principal site of the political education of the working-class (Draper, 1978). As Manborde laments, a significant area of neglect in the union renewal debates ‘is a conscious appreciation of the intellectual life of activism in aiding strategy’ (2019: 96). Accordingly, this article seeks to build on and utilise the work of Cooper (2006) and Ball (2003) by following their conceptualisation of trade unions as COP: ‘the trade union may therefore be seen as a community of practice . . . where the process of participation in routine union activities . . . induct workers into their trade unionist roles and identities’ (Cooper, 2006: 36). This conceptualisation can contribute to a more inclusive understanding of the role the indie unions are playing in the broader labour movement by centralising the intellectual role of activists in it, or what Manborde calls ‘the pedagogy of activism’ (2019: 96), and argues that this results in effective trade unionism.

Organisational context and research methods

The research consists of case studies of four trade union branches: two of the indie unions – the IWGB and CAIWU, and two TUC affiliated unions – the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) and Unison. These branches were purposely sampled on the basis of having live campaigns attempting to improve conditions for outsourced workers, specifically cleaners, to allow for direct comparisons. This sector was chosen as being paradigmatic of the type of ‘unorganised’ work considered essential to reach in any account of union renewal. The research was part of a larger project looking at outsourced and precarious work and the strategies different unions were adopting in this field and whether (or how) this could contribute to union renewal. The conceptualising of trade unions as COP did not come until further along in the research process, which is detailed below.

The fieldwork was conducted over a two-year period from September 2017 to September 2019, and involved participant and non-participant observation at protests, picket lines, branch meetings, Annual General Meetings (AGMs), member drop-in sessions, and social events. Observation notes were made throughout, and a fieldwork diary was kept for reflections later. Fieldwork in industrial relations research permits the investigation of the often informal side of workers’ organising (Baccaro et al., 2019), which is important as ‘the origins of worker collectivism are typically informal, ephemeral, and with few written records’ (Brown, 2019: 158). This also, importantly for understanding COP, allowed for an appreciation of the situated nature of the community where the learning took place. Additionally, documentary analysis of secondary data was conducted, which included union reports, motions, flyers, newspaper reports, and online data from official union websites and social media channels, which as well as documenting the campaigns, can also be considered as part of the ‘storytelling’ of COP.

The research also incorporated 40 semi-structured interviews with lay members and officers of the unions. Individual participants have been anonymised, however the unions have been named and the campaigns are a matter of public record. As already stated, the initial research was concerned with how different trade unions were organising in outsourced work, and the interviews were conducted on this basis, so were not designed to capture aspects of COP behaviours. As such, the questions related to issues concerning union strategy, such as how unions reached and engaged a fragmented workforce, and what tactics they chose to deploy to further their aims.

The data, which comprised the interview transcripts, fieldwork notes and diaries, and union literature, were firstly manually ‘open coded’ (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). Through this iterative process ‘core categories’ emerged, such as: inspiration, new strategies, mutual interaction, help, and reflection. It was at this stage that the ‘grounded theory’ (Charmaz, 2004; Glaser and Strauss, 1967) of these branches as organisations that were engaged in interrelated processes of learning developed. Mattoni (2014) concludes that the grounded theory method is best placed for the study of cultural and social processes in social movements, and this approach produced the finding that these unions were learning how best to respond to changing circumstances, and, most importantly for the theoretical concept of this article, this learning was situated within the unions and from each other. After a new review of the literature on organisational learning that could account for this finding, the data were subsequently recoded using theoretical coding (Charmaz, 2006: 63) drawn from pre-existing concepts from the literature (Thornberg et al., 2013) relating to COP, such as legitimate peripheral participation (Brooks et al., 2020), and behaviours and practices that could be categorised as representative of COP specifically within trade unions, as identified by Cooper (2006), such as meetings. The final stage of the coding process was to try to ascertain the loci of the development of the knowledge being generated, which resulted in the final codes: externally, internally and extra-organisationally. The data were mapped and are presented in this article in accordance with those resultant codes, providing a holistic and dynamic picture.

Firstly, further information on each union case is provided below, which has been summarised for brevity.

The cases

Knowledge of outsourcing: Deliberating on the shared experience of exploitation and mobilising against it

All of the campaigns concerned improving conditions for workers in the outsourced cleaning sector. Outsourcing presents a challenge for unions as it disseminates responsibility for the employment contract across multiple actors (Erickson et al., 2002), making it difficult to determine on whom to exert pressure (Savage, 2006), and provides a means by which employers can circumvent collective bargaining systems (Drahokoupil, 2015). As such, the industrial relations strategy of most mainstream unions in the UK, which depends upon these collective bargaining systems, is an inapposite strategy in this context (Simms, 2011). Accordingly, this makes a pertinent choice for a context in which to consider how unions respond to change and work models, and how COP can foster the responsiveness and innovation required.

The union role in framing the target of a campaign is crucial to mobilisation (Kelly, 1998). All of the unions had an ambivalent attitude towards the client company, acknowledging that a trade dispute is required to be with the direct employer by law, yet recognising it was not that company that held the ultimate power over the contract, and thus targeted the tendering body or a figurehead of it. Unison selected the Vice Chancellor (VC) of UoB as their target for the campaign. His surname was ‘Eastwood’ and the campaign played on the name with a cowboy theme: workers wore cowboy hats on picket lines, with placards declaring ‘It’s high noon for Eastwood!’ and demanding an end to ‘cowboy management’. PCS highlighted the hypocrisy of the government department responsible for the legal enforcement of the minimum wage rate whose own workers were not receiving it; the IWGB targeted both the VC of the University and UoL as a public institution; and CAIWU the ROH, a renowned arts venue.

Some examples of the campaign actions which demonstrate the focus on the tendering body include IWGB members and supporters interrupting a graduation dinner hosted by the VC, and a letter-writing campaign to the VC calling on him to take the outsourced workers back in-house. They also called for a boycott of the university building where their members were based, and asked the academic community to refuse to hold or attend any events at the site until the aims of the campaign were met. The University and College Union (UCU), who represent mainly academic staff at British universities, voted to back the boycott at their national congress, and as of May 2019, more than 200 events had been relocated, resulting in national media coverage (Busby, 2019). Unison also adopted this tactic and called for a boycott of the UoB’s hotel and conference centre. CAIWU held noisy demonstrations outside the ROH at showtime demanding their members’ reinstatement, causing maximum disruption to the employer with no financial detriment (as opposed to strike action) to the participants.

These [indie] unions totally get where the power lies and they play to that really good. They’re not scared, they just go to it and confront it head on, here we are. They’ve obviously learnt not to arse about playing nicely with HR from the [outsourcing] company or whoever, that everyone knows is just a massive waste of time. (PCS, int. 2)

Rather than unilaterally adhere to formalised methods such as collective bargaining that unions have relied upon in their historical constituencies, the campaigns instead employed tactics Alberti has described as a ‘spectrum or dynamic interplay of formality and informality’ (2016: 98), which combined ‘traditional’ union strategies alongside these creative direct actions. The strategic choice to target the tendering body can be especially conducive when utilised against employers regarded as having CSR responsibilities and are thus vulnerable to community opinion and reputational pressure (Grimshaw et al., 2019; Wills, 2008). According to one of the participants:

Look, we’re not the miners, well, anyway, they lost I guess, but industrial action, especially nowadays when you have to give so much notice to the employer, it’s more of a showpiece . . . we always try and couple that with a big demonstration and other disruptive stuff going on . . . So it’s around publicity, the unfairness of the situation, and we’ve got a lot of press coverage and publicity as a result. (IWGB, int. 2)

An interesting observation was made at the IWGB branch AGM: a portion of the meeting was dedicated to discussing the strategy of their campaign, whereby the membership reflected on what had and had not been successful to that point. After an open debate, the room broke into small groups who worked together to conceive of new ideas for the campaign and potential steps for escalation, which were then fed back and debated amongst the attendees. These processes of reflection were recognised by participants as crucial to ensure they were acting in accordance with methods and strategies they considered would ensure optimum success. A member of CAIWU also spoke of their meetings which were held in a similar fashion, and the importance of maintaining critical dialogue:

For me it’s very important to keep talking all the time about our principles – what we will and won’t do, and to remind people of the history, the past, what we’ve been through, done good, or fucked up, etcetera. (CAIWU, int. 4)

Evaluation is common practice in formal working-class and trade union education (Walker et al., 2007), but this emphasis on strategic evaluation by the membership and continuing to reflect on union principles reflects a commitment to a participative and deliberative culture considered a strength in union organising (Connolly, 2020), as well as indicative of a commitment to the ‘joint negotiated enterprise’, where all community members’ contributions are valid. As Hyman argues: ‘Gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual” is relevant here: grass-roots activists may develop a breadth of information and analytical capacity which distinguish without distancing them from their colleagues’ (2007: 199). This is also illustrative of how conceptualising unions as COP differs to that of the usage of the concept within business literature: literature critical of the ‘managerialist conception’ warns that COP can be a form of normative control if they do not allow for challenge and disagreement (Cox, 2005), yet in this context it was actively encouraged. The meeting placed the onus on the membership to critically reflect on what they had been involved in, and thus provided an effective forum for knowledge exchange to take place, which accordingly informed their practice.

This section, by using the example of outsourcing as a union problem, has demonstrated how COP create new knowledge to be able to respond to changing circumstances. The different ways of understanding power relations, finding leverage, and critical processes the indie unions applied demonstrate a strategic ability to ‘unlearn responses which are no longer appropriate’ (Hyman, 2007: 200) – a requisite characteristic in union renewal.

Knowledge from union practice: Learning beyond the formal spaces

Having detailed external actions of the campaigns, this section turns its focus inwards to concentrate on the internal procedures and activities of the unions to argue that the union itself is a pedagogical site. Different examples of union practice will be examined which demonstrate the heterogeneity of ways in which community members engage in learning processes within the ‘shared domain’.

Within COP, ‘intra-organisational spaces where discourse take place are essential in establishing a commons of knowledge-sharing’ (Tewksbury, 2013: 16) and in unions an example of a space for constructing this knowledge ‘commons’ is union meetings, which ‘facilitate information-sharing between members and help to develop common perspectives’ (Cooper, 2006: 34), such as was demonstrated in the previous section. Community members can learn through osmosis: attendance at meetings can ensure competencies, such as how to pass motions – integral to facilitating change – are imbued throughout the membership without the requirement for formal training. Within COP, learning is ‘a ubiquitous process, often subconsciously undertaken’ (Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2003: 4) which relies on ‘informal and situated social interaction, rather than on a planned mechanistic process of cognitive transmission’ (Cox, 2005: 530). Trade union learning happens in its ‘everyday activities, taking place through demonstration, observation, and mimesis’ (Lave, 1996: 150–151) such as in representation, social events, meetings, and on picket lines. As Cooper argues: ‘worker education has long been seen as taking place not only in trade union seminars, workshops and planned education programmes, but also in a variety of events such as meetings and rallies as well as through the day-to-day actions of workers’ (2006: 32).

We learn every day new things. We meet people with all different cases, issues. There’s a lot of discrimination with pregnant women in the workplace, for example, that I didn’t know [about]. We learn and we can then imagine how the exploitation is [for them] and how the bosses treat people. It’s terrible. So I think I develop myself in some ways, I feel really good. (CAIWU, int. 5 [male])

This is indicative of the wider political education provided through union experience (Draper, 1978), or, as Cooper frames it, of being able to place experiences ‘within a broader context, enabling workers to gain a better understanding of how different elements of their experience might be connected to one another’ (2006: 35).

A CAIWU representative spoke of their aim to ensure that as well as every member being equipped with ‘basic rights at work’ information (what breaks one is entitled to, minimum wage rates, etc.), they should also hold sufficient knowledge to be able to represent any other member at any time. They drew the distinction between more traditional (formal) forms of union training and theirs, which they viewed as being more practical but also intrinsically more empowering, both in its construction and its aims:

We’ve got our own training in our own style. We don’t do employment law like as an academic, we think about tactics and how to apply in our favour, how to respond to the bosses in certain situations, how to collectively respond, and how to [do so] without coming to the union. (CAIWU, int. 2)

This approach is representative of learning which informs practice, and it also presupposes, in a way consonant with the more radical political commitments of COP theory, the belief that appropriate knowledge will exist or be generated from within the community to be able to take informed action. The sentiments expressed in the quote above are aiming at worker empowerment, with the usage of ‘the union’ meant in its institutional sense rather than its membership. In union terms, this denotes an ‘organising’ rather than ‘servicing’ approach, whereby union members in their own workplace have the confidence and knowledge to be able to undertake self-organised activity instead of being reliant on an officer class, intrinsic to the traditional union model. This concurs with Senge’s view that learning organisations dispense with the ‘leadership myth’ which is ‘based on assumptions of people’s powerlessness . . . and inability to master the forces of change’ (1990: 315).

When learning did take place in a more formal setting, there were explicit efforts made to ensure this was conducted in a non-hierarchical manner. The membership constituencies of the indie unions consist of a high proportion of migrant workers, predominantly from Latin America, who have Spanish as a first language. Free language classes are provided by the IWGB. Many mainstream unions over recent years have offered language classes to their members, often conducted by an external training provider using employer and state support (Mustchin, 2012). Some scholars argue this is an important tool of union renewal as it attracts new categories of labour to union membership (Moore, 2009), while others conclude that due to the state’s involvement unions will not be able to pursue a more radical learning agenda (McIlroy, 2008). The IWGB language classes were advertised and proffered as a language exchange, where both Spanish- and English-speaking members could attend and acquire new linguistic competencies. The deliberate framing of these events in this way exhibits a conscious effort to address the power dynamics inherent in the teacher–pupil relationship and promotes horizontal and inclusive learning methods. For union renewal, this draws on the knowledge resources of the membership in a way which relocates learning within the social dynamics of the community.

A final pedagogical space to consider is the public sphere – a place where large parts of these campaigns were conducted. Those engaged in ‘dirty work’ are thought to accept authority and relinquish autonomy (see McBride and Martinez Lucio, 2020). In this regard the unions played a multi-educational role: facilitating the process of the unlearning of these narratives amongst their membership, and the communication of this to the wider public. On noisy picket lines and disruptive demonstrations in busy city centre locations, workers brandished banners and placards declaring ‘we are not the dirt we clean’.

I was having problems with my bosses and my colleague told me to join the union so we can fight them together rather than on my own which is more powerful and that’s why I come to be involved. At first I was not very activist because I didn’t know what to do but I start to get into it and start to like it because we do all these things together. Then I learn about employment law in this country and all sorts of things and I start participating more and helping in different workplaces also which I like. I learn so, so, so much. I feel powerful now and I love [it]. (CAIWU, int. 6)

The Unison campaign occupied a large public square in the city centre on one of their strike days, with strikers performing poetry and songs written about their experiences. They distributed a leaflet consisting of an open letter from a striking worker to the VC, detailing her financial struggles and challenging him to forego his £614,000 salary and bonus package and to attempt to live on her wage for a month. They urged members of the public to contact him to take up the challenge, and the letter was also published in the local paper. The IWGB campaign, the week before Christmas, hosted a social event where members created Christmas cards to be sent to the VC detailing their Christmas wishes: ‘all we want for Christmas is to end outsourcing’. These acts of public ‘storytelling’ play an important pedagogical role in educating the wider public about working-class conditions and the role that unions can play in transforming them. Cooper argues that in activities such as this, ‘workers assume[d] the role of the “collective educator”, using mass action to communicate their experiences, their identity, their world view and their power to the world at large’ (2006: 39). The literature emphasises the importance of storytelling to learning (Ron et al., 2006; Scarbrough et al., 2004) because ‘such activities strengthen the group’s ties to one another since the nature of storytelling is communal, so knowledge gained through it is shared and collective’ (Brooks et al., 2020: 1049). In terms of union renewal, Levesque and Murray argue that union stories ‘frame understandings and union actions and inform a sense of efficacy and legitimacy’ (2010: 336) and that they are ultimately a power resource.

This section, by providing examples of standard activities which took place within the unions, including meetings, language exchanges, campaign actions and social events, has evidenced the multifariousness of ways in which unions engage in learning processes through the very nature of union practice. This illustrates that organisational learning, specifically in a trade union context, needs to be viewed in more dynamic terms. Consequently, these examples demonstrate the need for a framework of union learning which accounts for the relationship between individuals within a community and the social structure (Hodkinson and Hodkinson, 2003), which COP provides.

Knowledge from other unions – the masters and the novices

Having considered learning processes in both external and internal activities of the unions, this final section moves to consider the extra-organisational learning processes taking place between the different union types, using the concepts of ‘masters’ and ‘novices’. These categories acknowledge the different and uneven stages of membership and knowledge acquirement that community members can occupy at different times (Ball, 2003). Lave and Wagner (1991) propose the concept of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) as a socially contextual learning method whereby newcomers in COP – the ‘novices’ – gradually acquire the level of proficiency that makes them experienced members – the ‘masters’. Rather than being a hierarchal dichotomy, however, the relationship between these roles is dialectical and mutually beneficial. The novices learn by observation, but are also unencumbered by pre-existing expectations and thus often challenge preconceived norms and ways of doing things (Brooks et al., 2020). LPP is one of the intrinsic dynamic processes of COP and integral to its sociocultural renewal (Ball, 2003).

While the relationship between the indie and mainstream unions may initially appear to involve too great a degree of reservation for the fruitful and fraternal ‘master–novice’ relationships, as portrayed in Brooks et al. (2020), to hold, Cox (2005) maintains this relationship can be either harmonious or conflictual. Tensions do and will exist between those who view themselves as ‘masters’ in the community of the labour movement, and the ‘novices’, because newcomers can be considered either a threat to power and control (Ormrod et al., 2007), or competition, as has been highlighted by Gall (2020) in the case of the GMB union and the IWGB at Uber.

As such, in this section I want to suggest that this is still a useful concept that allows us to discern a way forward for the renewal debate, and one which has already become part of union practice to some degree: the indie unions’ formation was born of a willingness to improve upon (and thus learn from) the sometimes negative practices they had experienced in the established unions. These ‘shared histories of learning’ (Wenger, 1998: 86) are instructive in assessing the context-dependent nature of master/novice roles and situated learning experiences, and were taken into consideration when some of the union practice conducted by the indie unions witnessed in this research appeared part of a concerted effort not to replicate both the bureaucratisation and the industrial timidity they had experienced previously.

For example, at an IWGB meeting, a salaried officer presented the work he had been involved with in relation to the ongoing campaign. After his report, members voted on the ratification of his salary and the continuation of his employment contract. This is in contrast to standard practice within most TUC unions whose officers can be subject to performance management processes from above rather than below (Kelly and Heery, 2009). Additionally, this denotes commitment on behalf of both the officer and the branch members to the ‘joint negotiated enterprise’ (Wenger, 1998: 76) and represents a conscious act which is demonstrative of that which ‘creates mutual accountability among participants that becomes an integral part of the practice’ (Wenger, 1998: 77–78). Many respondents spoke of the minutiae of their earlier experiences in TUC unions, offering stories and examples of events and actions which still caused them frustration and anger. Conversely, though, respondents were open about how they retrospectively viewed these experiences as a learning process in itself. An IWGB member, for example, summarised:

My experience [in Unison] was, well it wasn’t uniformly negative . . . It was an opportunity to learn, to do casework and things like that, and to get an idea of what a union really is, how it functions. A training ground, if you like. All of the things that comprised being a union activist that from the outside you don’t really know what you can and can’t do and you learn. (IWGB, int. 2)

This was echoed by a CAIWU member:

When we start[ed out] I had to represent [a member] in court and I said oh fuck, what are we going to do? I had to remember the knowledge that I have back from when we’ve been in the mainstream unions. We had a lot of experiences, we know how other unions work from this. (CAIWU, int. 2)

These examples show the ‘novice’ role the indie unions assumed within the trade union movement during their development – recollecting and putting into practice the skills and knowledge they had acquired from their previous TUC union memberships, and demonstrating an initial reliance on the ‘mastery’ of the established unions’ practice. The indie unions, however, have accumulated some remarkable victories which are arguably disproportionate to their small size and resources (see Pero [2019] for an overview), and other scholars are beginning to observe the motivational power of the indie unions across the broader movement, such as Colas (2019), or Heery et al. (2019), who contend that a recent spate of Living Wage campaigns organised by TUC unions are due in part to the ‘competitive pressure exerted by indy [sic] unions’ (2019: 114). It was evident in the research the value that many TUC union activists placed on the indie unions’ experience and organising expertise:

We’re doing stuff, and people see and are convinced by us doing stuff. People think we’re big because it’s big in spirit. We can do many things that other union[s] cannot do. So people ask us for help. We have comrades from PCS ask us for help with protesting because . . . of course we’re better at it than they are [laughs] . . . We also have friends in the GMB, and the cleaners in the hospital organise[d] and run a very good campaign for the London Living Wage and they ask us for help so we went and we help[ed]. We help[ed] recruit them to the GMB. (CAIWU, int. 2)

It was observed during the research that the campaigns were displaying a degree of homogenisation, and that this was a result of the TUC unions approximating the trajectory of the indie unions’ campaigns. The aesthetics of the campaigns bore close resemblance, and the TUC unions also appeared to be becoming more adversarial. Unison’s industrial strategy, for example, typically combines collective bargaining with legal challenges (Simms, 2011), but in this campaign, the tactics they used are ascribed to a more social movement unionism style, such as the public shaming and institutional boycott of the university, appeals to the broader community, public storytelling, and periods of industrial action specifically targeted on dates that would cause the most disruption, such as university open days. These can all be viewed as replicating the IWGB’s campaign at the UoL. This does not necessarily indicate a lack of strategic imagination on the Unison branch’s part, but rather demonstrates the influential ‘mastery’ role the indie unions have assumed in terms of campaigning strategy and how COP can create benchmarks.

Pero urges researchers and practitioners to ‘foster understanding, collaborations and synergies between established and emerging labour actors that are engaged in advancing workers’ interests’ (2019: 915). The campaigns in this research show that this is already taking place at a grassroots level, with an IWGB activist summarising:

One of the unresolved things is the relationship of the existing trade union movement to the IWGB. In an ideal world you’d have even more . . . Now whether that means formal cooperation, or whether that means a revival of a rank-and-file inside the existing movement, I think that would be incredibly important, although there is already that collaboration on a rank-and-file level. (IWGB, int. 3)

Attendance at each other’s events was prevalent, with a clear overlap of supporter networks. Support was also expressed for each other by moving motions in branches, publicising events, speaking at each other’s picket lines and branch meetings, fundraising for strike funds, and releasing public statements of solidarity with each other. An example of the coordination between the unions was the ‘Clean Up Outsourcing’ event in February 2019, a national day of action called against outsourcing hosted by a coalition of unions which included members of UVW, IWGB and PCS who were taking strike action on the same day and holding a demonstration which lobbied all of the respective workplaces. This sort of activity seems likely to increase, with a PCS activist speaking of future plans for joint working with the indie unions:

What we’ve [PCS and the indie unions] agreed in London is that we’d help each other out, particularly around the mayoral election next year. So, for instance, we organise cleaners in the Met Police. They’re all outsourced, and our argument with the mayor is the Labour Party have got the policy of against outsourcing – you could bring those workers in [house] next week if you wanted to. So we’re going to campaign inside and outside the Labour Party and around the mayoral election to make it an issue. So we’re going to work together, and obviously we’re going to try and coordinate disputes. So that will be a really useful potential alliance. (PCS, int. 3)

Since the fieldwork was completed, the Assistant General Secretary of PCS, recently assigned responsibility for coordinating outsourced worker campaigns, wrote a statement confirming unequivocally that:

. . . unlike some other TUC unions, we are not hostile to UVW and IWGB. We see them as an inspiration, and allies, rather [than] a threat. They’ve done something the ‘mainstream’ labour movement should have done but hasn’t: organise precarious and outsourced workers and empower them to take direct action. We fully support their disputes, and have been promoting them to PCS members. We encourage our branches to fundraise for their strike funds and attend their picket lines . . . Whatever formal arrangement we arrive at with UVW, we will continue to work with them and their members and look to coordinate strikes. (Moloney, 2019)

The statement also provides confirmation that a PCS branch has created seats on their branch committee for the UVW’s elected stewards in the same workplace. Similarly, at their national AGM in 2019, the IWGB passed a motion which declared that the union was part of the wider labour movement, and committed it to further direct coordination with other unions, as well as developing further links with other union branches via Trades Councils (regional federal structures of the TUC). The Unison branch in this research has campaigned for outsourced workers’ rights within the national union body, submitting motions to sectoral and national conferences urging Unison for a specific recruitment strategy for outsourced workers and to make the issue a union priority in national bargaining talks. These commitments, both formal and informal, can be viewed as harbingers of a tentative process of change at a macro level which is currently taking place within both the indie and the TUC unions.

This section has demonstrated how the conceptual novice–master schema, central to COP, can inform our understanding of unions as learning organisations, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the indie unions are well-placed to adopt the mantle of ‘masters’ despite their relative inexperience and longevity (as organisations). Indie union members learned what a union ‘really is’ from their experiences in TUC unions, but ultimately, it is the established unions who have looked to the indie unions’ ‘mastery’ for union effectiveness, leadership, innovation and best practice.

Concluding remarks

The cause and effect I don’t know, but they [indie unions] have created context . . . they’ve shown that you can actually have cleaner strikes. Most mainstream unions until a few years ago would have thought, ‘what’s the point of a cleaner going on strike?’ They’ve shown it’s possible, and actually that sort of action can be quite militant. So they’ve provided a background that people now know, if you like, a template. I don’t think anybody sat down and deliberately said ‘I must do the same as them’ . . . But what I think they’ve done is almost like the zeitgeist. (PCS, int. 3)

This article started from the premise that organisational learning is a ‘critical capability’ (Lévesque and Murray, 2010) in union renewal (Hyman, 2007) and, by building on the work of Cooper (2006) and Ball (2003) by conceptualising trade unions as COP, has shown that this is a compelling framework by which to understand how this learning takes place. Additionally, the article aimed to address a feature in the literature on the indie unions which is critical of scholars in the union renewal debates who focus on ‘established unions as the sole repository of change’ (Pero, 2019: 915). By conceptualising trade unions as communities of practice – and, importantly, the indie unions as community members – this research has bridged the binary by centralising the indie unions’ work and achievements, and has demonstrated that as well as building effective, inclusive and empowering labour organisations adept at organising strategies in precarious work, they have also stimulated positive change within TUC unions, and can thus be considered as key actors in the union renewal project. The indie unions have played an important influential role in the UK labour movement in the form of producing new knowledge, which in addition to providing a practical strategic template for mobilisation against outsourced work, has also driven incentives for other unions to act. This demonstrates how COP ‘share their competence with new generations through a version of the same process by which they develop’ (Wenger, 1998: 102), which has sociocultural significance for union renewal (Ball, 2003). The indie unions have demonstrated an ‘evolutionary adaptability’ (Hyman, 1989: 319) which has enabled them to confront labour market change and union struggle in an innovative and inclusive way. Additionally, they appear to be teaching other unions this knowledge, with both types engaged in effective trade union practice. By conceptualising the indie unions as part of wider COP we can see – crucially, in terms of union renewal – it is not just that they are able to produce knowledge, it is that through their critical and organisational practices they can continue to do so, and to impart it.

Different union branches, even within the same union, will always comprise different political orientations, personalities and histories, so the findings of this research are not generalisable in the sense that the solidaristic attitudes displayed in this research towards the indie unions will necessarily be replicated elsewhere – indeed, if this was based on indie unions members’ previous experiences, they may well be the opposite. The labour movement has an ambivalent history with ‘newcomers’ and social movements, and organisations regarded as potential competitors or with shared jurisdictions have often led to tension and conflict (Heery, 2018). Unions’ capacity for change will vary depending on their individual characteristics and culture (Holgate, 2018), although these are not static. Having the humility to be able to learn from ‘competitors’ and acquiesce to change may be a complex and difficult process for established unions, but as has been shown, the effect of the indie unions has been for rank-and-file workers in other unions to advocate for more industrially militant and inclusive practices within their own organisations. What has been presented here are indicators of a cultural turn at the macro level of the organisation; the TUC unions appear to be in a liminal space, at the beginning of a process of inculturation. Any substantial change and (re)learning of best practice may require a humble revaluation by many of the major unions, but for any attempt to seriously engage in meaningful organising in this (and other) sector(s), let alone union renewal overall, it is incumbent on them to do so.

The non-sectarian rank-and-file networks that have been demonstrated in this research are vibrant but fragile, and it may be that they would flourish if nurtured and matched with organisational commitment and resources. Sharing strategies, knowledge and even resources across organisational boundaries could enhance the synergy between the union types evidenced in this article and avenues for future research could explore how this could best be facilitated. The existence of solidarity networks encompassing different facets of the labour movement, producing politicised knowledge and being able to learn from each other in complementary self-perpetuating communities of practice remains a compelling pedagogical model for ‘teaching’ new generations of union activists, regardless of their institution(s), and thus appears to be an important contribution to union renewal.