Abstract
This paper argues that the ‘turn to organising’ in British unions over the past decade has largely ignored the broader questions of the purpose of such activity. As a consequence, unions have mainly focused on building solidarities between workers in their individual workplaces rather than developing a wider view of workers’ interests and the objectives of that solidarity. Using Hyman’s typology of union identities (2001), it is evident that ‘class’ identity has largely been sidelined in debates about union renewal in Britain. The paper argues that this limits the scope of union renewal both in practice and in theory.
Introduction
This paper explores the opportunities and barriers for British unions to ‘re-imagine solidarities’ (Hyman, 1999: 94) and their ‘identities’ or ‘strategic orientations’ (Hyman, 2001: 1) in the contemporary socio-political context. It argues that, in general, the notion of class solidarity is largely absent from debates and conceptualisations about recent efforts to revive the British union movement. The paper examines reasons for this, and argues that it poses challenges and barriers for unions in establishing solidarity both within and beyond the workplace. Conceptualising comparative differences between national union movements, Hyman (2001) uses the notion of the ‘geometry’ of unionism to argue that unions in Europe (and perhaps more widely) have three distinctive ideological and strategic orientations: as labour market regulators (market); as vehicles of raising workers’ status and promoting social justice (society); and as schools of war in class struggle (class). Whilst all unions face tensions and pressures to be active in all three directions and cannot afford to ignore any of the orientations, particular histories and social frameworks lead to different tensions emerging in different institutional contexts. Further, centrally important to Hyman’s analysis is that different unions (and sometimes union movements) in different institutional contexts have had a tendency to prioritise different identities. As a consequence, Hyman (2001: 4) develops a ‘geometry’ of unionism that locates each of the ideologically-rooted models of union identity at each of the three vertices of an ‘eternal triangle’ of competing ideas, ideologies and strategies.
Figure taken from Hyman (2001: 4)
Importantly, the three vertices represent ‘ideal types’ or stylised forms of unions which are rarely, if ever, seen in practice, which led Hyman (2001: 4) to assert, ‘Most union identities and ideologies are located within the triangle … [and] in most cases, actually existing unions have tended to incline towards an often contradictory admixture of two of the three ideal types.’ British unions, he argues, have historically been located on the market–class axis.
British unionism: The emergence of and challenge to market-class identity
Although it is impossible to capture in this brief summary the full range of influences on the development of a particular form of market–class identity of the British union movement, Hyman argues that there has been a tendency towards the market–class axis of the ‘eternal triangle’. Specifically, the centrality of free collective bargaining has been the underpinning premise of unions’ strategic orientation. This distinctive orientation of unionism emerged against a very particular socioeconomic background which is explored in detail (Hyman, 2001: 66-114), and which takes in a wide set of developments, ranging from Britain’s early industrialisation, traditions of craft unionism, the rise of Labourism in the late-19th and early 20th century, the rise and fall of constitutional insurgency (primarily in the form of the emergence of syndicalist ideas within unions in the early 20th century, but also in the form of later radical assertions of class interest that were absorbed and channelled into workplace and occupational activism), the assertion and establishment of the separation of the political and industrial activities of the labour movement, the embedding of ‘voluntarism’ and free collective bargaining as core principles of managing relations between the state and unions, and the profound attack on all aspects of unionism under the Conservative governments of the later parts of the 20th century.
The particular development of British unionism allowed an approach to employment relations to emerge which emphasised the primacy of collective bargaining as the central mechanism for negotiating conflicts of interests between labour and capital until the ideological attacks of the 1980s. Equally importantly, central to its development was the absorption of radical and revolutionary unionism (primarily, but not exclusively, in the form of communist and syndicalist demands) into workplace activism. Thus, tensions between the labour market regulation function and the class representation function were able to be reconciled, although it should be acknowledged that these tensions frequently re-emerged in particular periods of industrial action, particular cultures of unionism in specific times and places, and sometimes extremely hostile debates between workplace leaders and national union leaders. In short, the specific histories, institutions and trajectories of British unionism allowed for a ‘market–class identity’ to emerge.
Hyman concludes that the neoliberal attacks of the 1980s and 1990s, and especially the attacks on the institutions and functioning of collective bargaining, have left the contemporary British union movement in search of an identity, and he draws our attention to the contradictory strategies and ideologies of renewal efforts from the 1990s onwards. On the one hand, the ‘turn to organising’ emphasises the competing interests of labour and capital and seeks to build solidarity and collective action between workers, mainly at workplace level. On the other hand, the enthusiasm of some British unionists for ‘partnership’ initiatives rests on ideas of working from a base of shared interests between labour and capital in order to pursue agendas around, for example, the improvement of working conditions and (in theory although not in practice, in the British context) social pacts. These competing strategies demonstrate the effort British unions have invested in searching for alternative conceptualisations of how to behave and how to understand their future role – in short, their future identities.
This paper looks at a central feature of union renewal efforts since 1997: organising campaigns. It starts by accepting the analysis made by Gall and Fiorito (2011) that class is the crucial missing dimension in discussion and conceptualisation of union organising and explores further the ways in which current organising practices are limited as a result. The argument is that organising campaigns run by UK unions during this period have largely focused on building workplace level solidarity. As a consequence, they tend to have as their main objective labour market regulation primarily in the form of establishing workplace bargaining; and as a further consequence, the opportunity to build wider solidarities beyond the workplace have largely been bypassed or subordinated. Specifically, there is very little evidence that unions have made efforts to build solidarities between workers in other workplaces. This workplace focus reflects the ways in which organisers are trained and organising strategies are developed within unions.
As a result, little attention is paid to building solidarities that pursue the interests of workers as a class for itself. Specifically, workers’ interests are largely conceived as being related to the immediate conditions of work in a specific workplace. Little attention is given to pursuing broader interests beyond the immediate workplace. This lack of emphasis on unions’ building class-based solidarities means that in the British context there are considerable limitations in representing an increasingly heterogeneous workforce. The increasing heterogeneity of British workers in relation to aspects including, but not limited to, their gender, ethnic background, national origins, contractual status, and occupational positions presents unions with challenges to build a coherent structure of collective interests in post-industrial society (see Simms and Charlwood [2010] for a summary overview of this argument.)
Within this context, this paper argues that an identity that has the potential to unite this increasingly diverse set of interests is workers’ position as workers; in other words, as a working class for itself. The following sections present evidence that highlights some of the tensions within contemporary organising policy and practice. It is important to note that this should not be read as a critique of organising in principle. Rather, the intention is to highlight tensions in practice and to suggest ways in which Hyman’s analysis of union identities, combined with some of his helpful insights relating to the social construction of solidarities, allows us to see the possibility of a more coherent view of organising both in principle and in practice. It is important, therefore, that we examine the extent to which solidarities can be constructed.
Imagining solidarities
In contrast to many authors, throughout his writing Hyman (1997, 1999) explicitly acknowledges the process of social construction of ‘workers’ interests’ and ‘working class interests’ and the important role that unions have traditionally played in this. He argues that the notion of worker interests rests on ‘imagined solidarities’ (Hyman, 1999: 94). Imagined solidarities are constructs that help define and give voice to a set of interests of a class for itself. Importantly, they become self-reinforcing so that as they become embedded in the demands of unions, they help reinforce the objectives of those unions. Questions therefore emerge about whose interests are represented in these ‘imagined solidarities’.
Hyman argues that the central ‘imagined solidarities’ of unions have traditionally privileged the interests of one group of workers (skilled, white, male, full-time, manual workers) above a plethora of others (unskilled, ethnic minority, women, atypical and service workers). But because he stresses the extent to which ‘through their own internal processes of communication, discussion and debate – the “mobilization of bias” – unions can help shape workers’ own definitions of their individual and collective interests’ (1999: 96), he is relatively optimistic that unions can therefore ‘re-imagine’ interests and, importantly, notions of solidarity, so that they consolidate interests of a changing workforce and membership in response to the challenges presented to unions in post-industrial society. Specifically, he envisages an opportunity for unions to move away from the previously mechanistic solidarity construction, towards the construction of more organic solidarities that acknowledge diversity of interests and identities.
This terminology loosely develops the Durkheimian notion of organic and mechanistic societies and Hyman (1999: 97) argues that mechanistic solidarities are developed as unions reflect the existing distribution of power within the working class. Thus, in industrial society, a notion of a ‘model unionist’ or the ‘mass worker’ emerged around which unions built solidarity that was used to identify, to present, to justify and to reinforce the interests of that privileged elite of the working class. Rules, values and norms were comparatively standardised and the experiences of those privileged workers were comparatively homogenous. Central to Hyman’s analysis is an understanding that this was always problematic; it systematically excluded groups outside the norms of the ‘mass worker’. But it was a viable – and rational – approach within the social context of industrial society. Importantly, Hyman (1999: 99) argues that it is not unionism per se that is in crisis, but this model of unionism.
In response to changing social, political, economic and institutional contexts, unions across Europe (and elsewhere) have been confronted by the limitations of this model of solidarities and interests. Again drawing on Durkheim (1933), Hyman hypothesises a vision that could, if applied, conceive of solidarities and interests in a more organic way. In this model, organisational conformity is replaced with co-ordinated diversity (Heckscher, 1988). Differences of interests within and between groups of workers are explicitly recognised, and alignment of interests requires negotiation and compromise. This is a difficult and complex process, but the fact that union solidarities, interests and identities are all socially constructed makes this an act of imagination and will rather than an inevitable impossibility.
This has broader implications for industrial relations theory and practice. Developing Hyman’s analysis of class interests more generally (1978, 1992, 2001), the increasing heterogeneity of worker interests in post-industrial society presents very serious challenges to unions’ organising efforts. In his reflections on the disaggregation of the working class and its implications for unions, Hyman (1992: 165) acknowledges, ‘The notion of a working class was always an abstraction (and also a rallying cry, in some cases perhaps a self-fulfilling prophecy), never a mere sociological description or generalisation. Differentiation, division and disunity have been omnipresent features of trade-union development’. Given the inherent contestation and abstraction in this conceptualisation of ‘class’, he sees some opportunities for unions to develop new solidarities and demands reflecting the issues particular to different groups of workers, new methods of organisation and action, and new forms of internal democracy.
However, by and large, British unions have fallen into a view that narrows the focus of organising objectives (see Gall and Fiorito, 2011, for further discussion). By failing to integrate a view of common interests beyond the workplace into visions or narratives of renewal, unions are missing an important potential advantage of organising tactics; the opportunity to identify and mobilise support from new constituencies around the idea that what unites their interests with those of other workers is their position as workers. The paper therefore presents evidence to illustrate the processes involved that help explain why this narrow view of union identity has emerged, and the consequences of it. Further, it is argued that in order to develop more organic solidarities, unions would need a vision that has the potential to unite workers despite their differences. Returning to the ‘eternal triangle’ (Hyman, 2001) without an underpinning idea of a working class for itself as a way of understanding, expressing and promoting the commonality of interest in an increasingly heterogeneous workforce, unions are left with few options: either to focus on mechanisms for regulating the labour market (typically in Britain through workplace collective bargaining, occupational solidarity and promoting individual labour rights) or to attempt to develop an identity based far more on issues of social partnership in a context in which the institutional mechanisms that underpin such arrangements in other countries are not present.
A noteworthy exception to this is the development of ideas about ‘community unionism’ (Wills and Simms, 2004). Integral to ideas about community unionism is that workers’ interests and solidarities extend beyond the workplace and that the workplace is not the only location of struggle in the relationship between capital and labour (Wills, 2008; McBride and Greenwood 2009). In Britain, there are very few examples of community unionism outside the relatively small-scale union involvement in London Citizens campaigns for a living wage (Holgate and Wills, 2007) and the London-based Justice for Cleaners campaign (Wills, 2008). Even these examples have been a considerable source of tension between unions and community groups about the purpose and practice of such activity (Holgate, 2009). Thus, although community unionism presents an interesting example of a union campaign strategy that could present alternative conceptualisations about the purpose of organising activity, the focus of this paper is on the practice of organising within unions, which accounts for the vast majority of organising activity within Britain.
By examining union organising efforts, we see that the objective of much organising activity is workplace labour market regulation and rests on very narrow conceptualisations and expressions of collective solidarities. Organising tactics tend to emphasise the importance of trying to find common interest amongst the largest possible group of workers in an individual workplace and mobilising to improve working conditions in these areas. By rejecting class as an ‘imagined solidarity’ around which to collectivise and mobilise, unions have been forced to look for workplace issues that affect workers. The fundamental weakness of this approach is that the workplace issues selected may well exclude issues that affect smaller groups of workers. So in many cases, even when organising atypical and new groups of workers, unions have largely failed to develop any consistent effort to develop and express new union agendas. In Hyman’s terms (1999: 107), unions have relied largely on building mechanistic solidarities rather than explored opportunities to develop more organic solidarities. Whilst this is not inherent within organising per se, it is widely seen in the ways in which organising tactics have been applied in the British context.
Re-imagining British union identities
The facts of union decline are well established (Blanchflower, 2007; Blyton and Turnbull, 2004; Simms and Charlwood, 2010; and every other industrial relations textbook written in the past twenty years). British unions have been facing a growing crisis from the 1980s onwards. Declining members, declining density and declining recognition for collective bargaining have reinforced a vicious circle of shrinking income and a lack of opportunity to expand into the growth areas of employment through the 1980s and 1990s. Faced with this crisis, union leaders have sought alternative strategies for renewal. It is important to note the extent to which these strategies and ideas were, and to a large extent still are, contested. This can be seen both in the academic discussions around the legitimacy and utility of often competing renewal strategies such as ‘organising’, ‘servicing’, ‘partnership’, and ‘social movement unionism’, and also in lively debates about what these terms actually mean (Heery, 2003).
What is evident from those debates is that at their heart is a disagreement about the relative importance of the market, class and society identities in the contemporary social, economic and political context (Gall and Fiorito, 2011). Since the crises of the 1980s, British unions have largely avoided conceptualising or even discussing their role as being embedded within class relations. This has been echoed and reinforced by broader political changes (including, importantly, the development and election of ‘new’ Labour) and social changes (including changing living and working patterns, and increasing heterogeneity within the workforce.) At the heart of this paper is an argument that that this constrains the practice of union organising and limits its capacity as a renewal strategy.
Understanding the relationship between organising and union identities rests largely on the answer to the question, organising for what? The response is rather under-conceptualised within the union movement and amongst industrial relations scholars and commentators. Fairbrother et al. (2007: 34) rightly identify several weaknesses with much current writing about organising objectives. First, there can be a tendency to make relatively simplistic assumptions about how union activism is structured (‘top-down’ vs. ‘bottom-up’ [de Turberville, 2004]) which can lead to a focus on membership activism as an organising objective (Hickey et al., 2010) and can constrain debate about the wider objectives. Second, empirical studies have noted considerable complexity in the objectives of organising campaigns and how organising practice is adopted (Carter, 2004 and many of the case studies in the books edited by Gall, 2003, 2006 and 2009). These empirical studies often emphasise the importance of the links between unions and their wider context, but many evaluate the objectives of organising activity in the terms set by the unions themselves rather than engaging in a broader debate. Third, the complexity of the way organising policy and objectives are articulated through union structures is rarely accounted for, although Fairbrother and Hammer (2005) make a very interesting contribution in this area.
Addressing the question of what unions are organising ‘for’ could, in principle, embrace any of the three core identities: organising for more effective labour market regulation, organising for class struggle and representation, or organising for social justice. Much depends on the solidarities around which unions are organising: labour market solidarity, class solidarity, or solidarity within society more generally. In practice, it is clear that most British unions have abandoned the idea of class solidarity and societal solidarity in favour of labour market solidarity. If union interests, solidarities and identities are socially constructed, and there is scope to re-imagine them at key moments, then examining how unions are constructing them in their organising activity provides a valuable insight not only into how unions engage in this process of social construction, but perhaps more importantly the objective of such activity.
It should be noted at this point that the objective of this paper is not to reimagine union identities for them. That is a job for unions themselves. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the implicit move away from the ‘class identity’ to the almost exclusive focus on the ‘labour market identity’. It is, of course, possible that UK unions could turn towards an identity that emphasised social partnership, and there was some evidence of an effort to do this in the 1990s. However, as pointed out by many scholars who studied these developments at the time (Heery, 2002), the wider social and legal structures that would be needed to facilitate this are not evident in the British context, which makes it very difficult to embed such initiatives.
It is therefore unsurprising that UK unions have retained their focus on the market–class axis, and the paper argues that there has been a dramatic, but largely ignored, shift in the 1990s and 2000s towards the ‘market’ end of that axis. The paper argues that the way in which organising has been implemented as a renewal strategy at workplace level, together with developments such as the increasingly difficult relationship between the Labour Party and affiliated unions, closes off opportunities to consider wider class-based interests as a basis for building solidarities. This presents a number of important constraints to the wider efforts of Britain’s union movement to renew itself, specifically because it narrows the conceptualisation of workers’ interests to privilege workplace economic interests above other interests. Importantly, the argument is not that unions should necessarily incorporate class interests and identity in their renewal efforts, but rather that not doing so represents a significant narrowing of union identities in Britain and presents considerable limitations to the vision of what unions think they are organising ‘for’.
The ‘turn to organising’
Whilst there are many meanings of the term ‘organising’, ranging from establishing unions in workplaces that did not previously have them (greenfield organising) to building and strengthening organisational and representational structures in workplaces where a union is already established, central to all of these activities is the duality that unions must both be responsive to the interests of the workers they represent and seek to mobilise workers around those interests to secure and use their labour market power. This returns us to the importance of the processes involved in ‘imagining’ and building solidarities.
Mobilisation theory (Kelly, 1997, 1998) is helpful in conceptualising the processes involved in organising activity and why the process of building solidarity is of practical importance. Importantly, it has also held up under empirical examination (Badigannavar and Kelly, 2005; Gall, 2003). Mobilisation theory emphasises the importance of a group of workers sharing a perceived grievance and attributing the cause of that grievance to another group. In an industrial relations context, that ‘other group’ is likely to be managers, but may extend to, for example, government. Crucially, in order for collective action to take place, there is an (often implicit) cost–benefit analysis about whether such action is likely to show results. Only if the necessary conditions are in place and the cost–benefit analysis is positive, is collective action a possible outcome. Union organising tactics draw heavily on these ideas. Importantly, responsiveness to workers’ interests includes workers who are not union members but who work in workplaces where the union is either already established or is seeking to establish itself. Almost every national organising strategy includes some reference to membership density being a key objective at workplace, sectoral or national level, and surveys of national organising policy and practice confirm this (Heery et al., 2003a).
This attention to non-members as well as members is conceptually, as well as practically, important. Practically, it means that unions have to seek to understand the interests of potential members and present the union in a way that is attractive to them. The objective is to recruit them as active members because it is also the objective of most organising campaigns to expand membership activism. Conceptually, it means that unions need to identify and express interests and (potential) solidarities that engage the widest possible constituency within the workplace or organisation. Whilst this does not inherently mean that this excludes minority interests, as I will show, the application of organising tactics in the workplace can mean that in practice this is what happens. Thus it is relevant to examine in more detail the observed process of interest identification during organising campaigns.
Before doing this, it is important not to lose sight of the second aspect of organising. Unions need to not only represent the interests of workers, but also to mobilise to improve working conditions. With the collapse of sectoral bargaining in most sectors of Britain economy, the focus of this has been on decentralised company (organisation) level bargaining (Marginson et al., 2003). This emphasis on company-level mobilisation has reinforced an historical emphasis on workplace level organising that has long been important in British unions. Whilst this approach has many strengths – not least the focus on responding to the interests and issue of members at the level that has a considerable impact on the day-to-day organisation of work – it is, as we shall see, a very limited view of unionism.
The research
Although this paper comments generally on the trajectory of the British union movement over the 1990s and 2000s, it is deeply rooted in empirical evidence. The evidence is drawn from a large, longitudinal (1995 to present) study of organising in British unions. The research was originally undertaken by a team at Cardiff University headed by Professor Heery. Subsequently, related smaller-scale studies have been developed by members of the research team in conjunction with colleagues in other institutions (Simms and Holgate, 2010a). The datasets relevant to this paper include two national surveys of union organising policy and practice (Heery et al., 2003a); interviews with over 200 union officers, policy makers, organisers, activists and others; observation and analysis of the development and application of the strategies of individual unions (here, of particular importance to this paper are the GMB, Unite [including its constituent unions prior to the 2007 merger], PCS, RMT, Usdaw, CWU, RCN, UCU, Community, Connect, Equity, and TSSA); and lengthy engagement with the TUC and its renewal activities.
Whilst the unions listed are by no means all the British unions, they represent about 60 per cent of TUC membership and include one large non-TUC affiliated union (the RCN). Between them, they represent around 4.2 million workers in Britain’s economy, operating across public and private sectors. The unions also represent members in a good mix of traditionally ‘female’ work (nursing, retail), traditionally ‘male’ work (firefighting, postal work) and mixed occupations. Some are specialist unions representing members only in defined occupations (Connect, UCU); others are general unions (GMB, Unite). Some are large (Usdaw, GMB, Unite); others are small (Equity, TSSA). Combined with the surveys of national policy and practice, this gives a good overview of developments across the British union movement in the recent past.
Further, it should be added that the researcher is deeply ‘embedded’ within the British union movement, having spent periods of field observation (both participant and non-participant) with the TUC, GMB, Unite, Usdaw, UCU, CWU, and Community. Exact durations varied considerably and range from around three months observing TUC training (largely throughout the late-1990s, but followed up in a recent research period in 2007) to a handful of days working with organisers in Community and CWU. These periods of observation have resulted in ongoing working relationships with organisers, officers, policy makers and others, which have given access to ongoing and deeply contested debates about the future direction of the British union movement. Whilst some of these debates are formal (conferences, strategy meetings, policy conferences etc.), others are less so (social events, etc.) and taken together they lend additional insight into the thinking and debates underpinning observed practice.
Building solidarities: Interest identification during organising campaigns
Our starting point is to explain why UK unions have developed such a narrow view of solidarity and worker interests. This limitation was summarised by one very senior unionist who, although highly associated with the ‘turn to organising’, presented a very critical and reflective analysis 10 years on:
Ultimately I think there needs to be a step change in our own aspirations as a movement from our leadership at every level. Which requires a level of industrial and political education that I think all of us – I include myself – are not fully tuned into yet. Because if we had a collective sense of the priorities and best interests of the movement, nationally and internationally, I don’t think we’d be pottering along in quite the way we are, that we still are. (Interview with research team, 2009)
Starting from the position that interests, solidarities and identities are all socially constructed, it is particularly important to examine and reflect on the processes involved in that social construction. Thus, a key source of empirical data is organising practice, and training for organisers in the skills needed becomes central to our understanding of what British unions think they are trying to achieve; in other words, what they think they are organising ‘for’. When we examine the micro-politics of organising campaigns we can identify two key features that lead to unions taking a very narrow view of solidarity and strategy. First, the dominant focus of organising activity is at the workplace level, and, second, the way in which interests are identified. Each is examined in turn, and it is notable that the fact that organiser training is relatively centralised in Britain (Heery et al., 2003b; Simms and Holgate, 2010a) means that there is remarkable consistency in how these processes operate at workplace level, even between different unions. Thus, it is possible to see common trends and tensions within organising practice across very different contexts.
1. The dominance of workplace interests
As a result of failing to engage with wider questions of what unions are seeking to organise ‘for’, many organising initiatives have become about training organisers, union officers, and activists to deploy a depoliticised toolbox of practices to build collective support for workplace unionism (see Simms and Holgate, 2010, for further discussion). As a consequence, unions have generally given little attention to the interests and solidarities that could unite workers beyond their workplaces. Instead, unions have focused primarily on the tactics of building workplace solidarity in the widely discussed ‘turn to organising’ (Carter, 2000).
One organiser summed up this idea very succinctly. When asked what she thought discussions about the organising approach had tried to promote within UK unions, she expressed the following very widely held view: ‘The organising model is about pre-recruitment and about sustainable recruitment and sustainable organisation in the workplace … it’s about being systematic and there was nothing like that going on’ (interview with the author, 2008).
Nowhere in the interview with this very experienced organiser, who now works in politics outside the union movement, is there any discussion of anything other than systematising processes of organising at the workplace level. It is important to note that this was a common feature of discussions with respondents even a decade after the initial ‘turn to organising’ in the mid-1990s.
There are two main sources of quantitative data that give us an overview of the ways in which unions are organising. The first is a survey of 118 organising campaigns run from 1998 to 2003. These are not necessarily nationally representative, but capture work undertaken by organisers who self-selected notable campaigns to report (see Heery et al., 2003a, for further details of method). This survey established that the mean number of workers targeted was 526, but the target numbers varied from the smallest bargaining unit of 14 to the largest of 6000, with a median of 250 workers. Despite some methodological challenges, there is no serious reason to imagine that organisers over-reported larger or smaller campaigns, so this is a useful indicative starting point. It indicates that most campaigns are being run in relatively small bargaining units, typically covering a few hundred workers. This finding is supported by a very different quantitative data set. CAC annual reports show that the mean size of bargaining unit in cases where unions are applying for statutory recognition is around 119 (CAC, 2008). Clearly here the CAC is only reporting cases that have started along the route to claiming statutory recognition for bargaining, which is a small sub-section of all organising campaigns. Nonetheless, it supports the broad finding of the campaign survey data that the majority of campaigns seem to be taking place in small, mainly single workplace, bargaining units.
Whilst there are measurement problems with these figures and they measure slightly different phenomena, these data lend support to the observation that organising campaigns run by British unions tend to focus on relatively small groups of workers, usually within a single workplace or organisation. This is further supported by qualitative work that already appears in the academic literature (see, amongst others, Simms and Holgate, 2010b; Simms, 2007; case studies reported in Gall 2003, 2006; Carter 2000).
In part, this workplace focus emerges from the strong history of workplace bargaining within British unionism mentioned in the opening sections of this paper. However, since the 1980s, this has been reinforced by the collapse of higher levels of bargaining. The relevance of national and/or sectoral unionism has declined significantly in the British context with the collapse of sectoral agreements towards ‘disorganised decentralisation’ (Traxler, 1995) throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Taking the two together, we see a clear rationale for British unions to focus their renewal effort at the workplace level. Even in the UCU and RCN, which both operate in sectors (education and health respectively) that still have sectoral agreements on at least some terms and conditions, both organisations are still highly dependent on workplace activists to recruit, organise and represent members in individual workplaces because of a movement towards negotiating framework agreements within which the details of implementation are bargained at workplace level.
What is important here is that the processes of workplace organising mean that collective interests are, at least in the first instance, identified and expressed at that level (see Simms, 2007, for empirical evidence relating to the processes involved). What is absent from many, if not most, organising campaigns is any clear idea about how workplace interests are reflected by the union at higher levels. In other words, the articulation of interests between workplace level and higher levels of the union is generally weak, at best. This is the case even in organising campaigns taking place in workplaces where the union is well established and it emerges, in part, from the separation of specialist organising roles from the function of generalist officers (Simms and Holgate, 2010a). In interviews with organisers, many identify weaknesses in their union’s strategy because too often workplace issues are dealt with by generalist officers who have been trained to resolve workplace problems rather than using workplace issues to form the basis of a wider development of worker interests between different workplaces and organisations, thus building a wider sense of injustice and common interest (Holgate and Simms, 2008).
Whilst the dominance of workplace unionism and the separation of organising and representation work within the union are rational responses to some of the challenges of the 1980s and 1990s, they create fundamental tensions within organising strategies which can constrain the ways in which interests, solidarities and union identities are constructed. By focusing organising activity at workplace level, unions have created a context within which the solidarities between workers in different workplaces, sectors and occupations are sidelined.
It is important to note at this point that there are exceptions to this general trend. Two stand out in particular: the Unite-TGWU strategy to focus organising efforts at sectoral level, and the RMT strategies to link workplace organising activity with an explicit conceptualisation of broader class solidarities. These are particularly important exceptions because these are unions that are showing some degree of success in their organising activities. Importantly, they emerge for two slightly different reasons. The first was a clear development of organising ideas when the TGWU, as it was then, realised that workplace organising limited any attempt to secure labour-market strength across a sector. This view is itself underpinned by the TGWU’s strongly leftist history, which emphasises the idea that class interests can most effectively be pursued through labour-market strength. The RMT’s strategy is informed to a far great degree by the particular views of charismatic leaders who have a strong conceptualisation of ‘workerism’ and of class interests (Darlington, 2009, 2001).
What is important about these exceptions is that they show very clearly how organising strategies can be developed which promote and reinforce a notion of interests beyond the immediate workplace context. But these are exceptions, and the majority of organising activity in British unions is focused primarily, if not exclusively, at workplace level with little effort to promote a wider conceptualisation of interests and solidarities.
It is also important to note that the currently fractious relationship between unions and the Labour Party also helps explain why there is little evidence of articulation of interests beyond the workplace level. To some degree, it has always been the case that division of the labour movement between unions and party meant that UK unions have focused on a relatively narrow set of mainly economic workplace interests (Taylor, 1987). Historically, where that approach has been challenged within union structures it has often been by factions allied to other parties (Hyman, 2001). However, the changes in the Labour Party in the 1990s and 2000s mean that even affiliated unions have found increasingly hostile challenges to any efforts to articulate interests within the Labour Party. Several affiliated unions have either withdrawn their affiliations or reduced their funding to the Party in response to a perception that the Labour Party is an even less effective mechanism for pursuing the political interests of unions than in the past (Smith and Morton, 2006).
As a consequence of all of these developments, organising has become a largely depoliticised process. A very senior leader of organising initiatives with considerable experience as an organiser himself who now helps develop policy in this area was adamant on this point: ‘I don’t think it’s up to us to give our members political education.’ He also started to identify the limitation of training organisers and activists in the way that has become common within Britain: ‘There’s a danger that it [organising] just becomes about workplace mapping, identifying and developing activists, issue based campaigning. Well it’s all those things but they’re techniques. That’s not a coherent ideology’ (interview with research team, 2008). Similarly, one very experienced organiser summed up this challenge and differentiated between what she thought organising should be about and what her experience of it was:
I think organisers, a lot of organisers out there are organising to transform the movement and to make it into something that is genuinely active and proactive and genuinely engages all of those people within the workforce … I think the reason why a lot of people within the union bureaucracy are organising is because they want to increase their membership and their revenue basically. (Interview with research team, 2009)
When this limited focus of organising activity is combined with the second feature of organising practice – the tendency to exclude minority interests – it is clear that unions are largely failing to engage with a wider vision of union renewal.
2. The exclusion of minority interests
A second consequence of the processes of identifying and expressing interests during organising campaigns is that minority interests (i.e. interests that directly affect only a sub-section of the workers targeted) are routinely excluded (Simms, 2007). Examples observed during organising campaigns were often gendered issues such as childcare provision or safe travel to work, but the argument applies equally to any issue of relevance to only a subgroup of the target workforce – perhaps older/younger workers, workers in a particular section of the workplace, black and minority ethnic workers or any other subgroup.
It is important to note here that this exclusion of minority interests is not usually a reflection of inherently negative views of the interests of any particular subgroup of workers – indeed, in many cases observed during campaign meetings participants expressed regret that minority interests were ‘falling off the agenda’. It is far more commonly an outcome of the need to identify and express the interests of the workforce in such a way as to attract and engage with as many (potential) members as possible. So, for example, women workers are equally likely to be affected by work allocation issues as men, but there was a strong – and sometimes justified – perception that male workers were far less likely to be affected by issues relating to childcare provision than women. Thus, the former was far more likely to be chosen as a campaign issue than the latter. In short, the interests most likely to be expressed in an organising campaign are around payment systems, work allocation, and health and safety. It has been argued elsewhere (Simms, 2007; 446) that this is largely because of the judgements that organisers and officers have been trained to make in order to identify interests that are ‘winnable’, salient, and which are likely to gain widespread support in the workplace.
This admittedly simplified understanding of how interests are identified and expressed also hides important exceptions. Organisers are trained to identify workplace interests that appeal as widely as possible, but they are also often individuals who engage with their roles informed by a particular political perspective. Our surveys and interviews with specialist union organisers (Simms and Holgate, 2010a) show that many of them have strong political views prior to becoming union organisers, and interview evidence shows that some are politicised as a consequence of their training. Similar evidence has been found in relation to more generalist officers (Kelly and Heery, 1994). They clearly understand that they can exert considerable influence over the interests that are pursued in an organising campaign. There is some evidence from the surveys of organisers that, for example, women organisers are more likely to prioritise organising women workers. So there is clearly scope for a broader politicisation of ideas of interests and solidarities, but there is little robust evidence that this routinely manifests itself in organising campaign issues.
One senior policy leader in the area of organising summed up these developments very succinctly:
So whether there needs to be some sort of politicisation of the organising agenda in a way that there just hasn’t been. I don’t know whether the stuff that Unite are doing gives a little bit more expression to it in terms of looking at reaching out to vulnerable workers and people at the sharp end of the labour market. But more broadly it’s how you really engage reps and activists in this debate which I think is the missing ingredient.
What is particularly interesting about this quotation is the seniority of the interviewee. He was acutely aware of the consequences of depoliticising an organising agenda and the practice of organising, but felt unable to address it strategically.
The important point here is that, despite exceptions in which individual organisers may be informed by a particular political perspective, the default process is to identify workplace issues with as wide support as possible. This has a tendency to exclude minority interests and to assume that they will be picked up later as new members become more integrated into the union and more familiar with how to identify and pursue their interests within the representation structures. This is a deeply problematic assumption. Not only are organising campaigns the point at which unions need to explain most clearly their objectives and identities, but previous studies show clearly that this is where members learn to ‘be union’ (Markowitz, 2000). This study shows that the norms, expectations, solidarities, identities, and objectives of being involved in the union are more explicit during an organising campaign than at almost any other point of union engagement for most members. If the message being given by the union during organising activity is that a union is predominantly interested in workplace issues and in a relatively narrow set of interests, it is unsurprising that potential members may use those messages as part of their decision about whether or not they want to become involved. In this sense, the interests and locus of organising activity become reinforced and embedded.
Interests, solidarities and identities: Reasserting the relevance of class
These organising practices are not inherent within the wider idea of organising, and there are unions, officers and activists that advocate different approaches. Nonetheless, they are evident across such a wide range of unions and campaigns that it is reasonable to identify them as a broad trend. So why are these practices problematic for union renewal?
Hyman (1999: 99) argues that the widely commented upon ‘crisis’ of unionism is more accurately a crisis of a model of unionism based on the kind of mechanistic solidarities in which collective interests are determined and expressed by core groups. He goes on to suggest that unionism based on more ‘organic solidarities’ which integrate and promote a far broader set of interests than previous models will be necessary for unions to renew themselves. Whilst this is undoubtedly possible, we see little empirical evidence that British unions are doing this. Indeed, the process of identifying and expressing interests during organising campaigns, combined with the workplace focus identified above, makes this extremely challenging. By focusing at workplace level, and on issues that appeal to as broad a constituency as possible, unions have fallen back on relatively mechanistic ways of building solidarity. But is it possible to ‘re-imagine’ an approach to unionism that engages with and represents a more diverse range of interests, or is an organising approach inherently mechanistic?
Most authors – and organisers - stress that organising should not be mechanistic. In other words, if the underpinning principle of organising activity is to ensure that the union is responsive to the interests of members (and, to some degree, potential members), then unions must be flexible about which interests they represent and how they do that. However, in practice, British unions are rather ill-equipped to do this and we have seen little evidence of a broadening of interests represented by unions since the ‘turn to organising’ over a decade ago. The central point here is that by focusing on workplace solidarities and by representing a relatively narrow set of interests, British unions have missed the opportunity to emphasise the solidarity that unites different groups of workers both within and between workplaces. That is to say, their common interests as workers, or in other words, their class-based solidarities. By rejecting or ignoring this as a source of potential solidarity, unions have tended to present their objectives and purpose as being about workplace labour market regulation.
The limitation of the approach observed in practice is that it leaves little scope for solidarity with other workers who are ‘different’ either because they work in a different workplace, a different sector, or because they come from a different social group (or even a different country, although that is beyond the scope of this analysis). This narrows and constrains both the identity of British unions, but importantly it also limits the ability to mobilise labour market power. If unions are only successful at organising small(ish) groups of workers in individual workplaces or organisations, then they have little leverage across a wider group. In this way, the weaknesses of a union organising strategy focusing only on the ‘market’ identity of the ‘eternal triangle’ are revealed. Union power in regulating labour markets is considerably weakened if the union is simply a collection of workplaces which may (or may not) have strong solidarities within themselves, but which have little solidarity between them.
Concluding comments: What might a market-class identity ‘look like’?
One way around this limitation of focusing organising predominantly at the workplace level might be to return to a more historical UK union identity of using a broader notion of class solidarity as a wider context within which workplace activity takes place. One of the advantages of building union identities based on both market and class is that it allows space to emphasise the solidarities between workers in different workplaces and social groups, which allows scope to understand the commonality of interests through actions such as solidarity action, collective bargaining above the level of the individual organisation, regulation of labour markets, efforts to take wages out of competition, etc. Of course, class is not necessarily the only way to achieve this. Some professional unions emphasise the regulation of the labour market based on a professional identity. And of course, social partnership is an alternative (see Heery, 2002 for further discussion on this point). The point here is not to argue that a union identity based on class is the only or even the best route forward for Britain union movement. Rather, the objective is to highlight the limitations of a vision of a renewed union movement based only on the objective of labour market regulation. Within Hyman’s geometry of union identities (2001), the history of the British union movement as being based on the market–class axis makes class an obvious focus of our attention.
As outlined above, the 1990s forced unions to debate alternative strategies for renewal. The ‘turn to organising’ certainly allows scope for workers’ interests to be framed as potentially being in opposition to those of managers and capital more generally. But as argued above, organising practice as it is currently implemented has two key weaknesses: it is largely focused at workplace level, and can have a tendency to exclude minority interests. These are, I argue, so fundamental that they may well undermine the success of organising as a renewal strategy and they certainly help to explain why renewal has been relatively limited.
By implementing organising practice mainly as a set of tactics to increase workplace membership and activism, many British unions have focused primarily on efforts to renew themselves through attempting to re-establish labour market regulation through collective bargaining. It is important to stress that this paper is not rejecting the importance of this process: building collectivism amongst workers in an individual company, organisation or workplace is an important and necessary step towards renewal, and is undoubtedly essential in securing wider objectives. But the criticism is that if this happens in the absence of a broader notion of solidarities between workers in different organisations, social groups and workplaces, then unions’ labour market power is weakened.
Hyman (1992) stresses that the ‘rallying cry’ or ‘abstraction’ of class does not have to be used in a mechanistic way. The fact that it often has been does not exclude the possibility that it can be used in a more organic way to emphasise the point that what may unite workers beyond their immediate workplace interests and solidarities is their position as workers. This can, in fact, be a very useful ‘rallying cry’, because it offers an idea about solidarity which allows space for common interest as well as minority interest. Without a ‘rallying cry’ uniting workers beyond their immediate workplace interests, it seems probable that union renewal strategies will struggle to achieve even an increase in labour market power through collective bargaining, let alone anything wider.
This is a useful point, because it draws our attention to the importance of the rhetoric used by unions in constructing and presenting ideas about solidarity. Solidarity ‘with whom?’ and ‘for what?’ are centrally important questions in any discussion of union renewal efforts. Yet they are largely absent from both academic and practitioner debates of the past fifteen years. Of course, any invocation of class – whether as a theoretical concept, a ‘rallying cry’ or a practical means of categorisation – risks entering complex and contested territory. It is not the intention of this paper to develop an analysis of how different theoretical positions on class may be developed and applied within organising debates, although this may be a fruitful subject for future work. What is important here is that class is largely missing from current debates about union organising, and that this matters to the way in which organising is understood and practiced within unions.
In practice, it means that there is little attention paid to building solidarities between different groups of workers (whether different workplaces, different social groups, etc.). In an increasingly heterogeneous workforce, it can sometimes be difficult for unions, workers and commentators to imagine what might unite very diverse groups of workers in common union objectives. One response is surely that their (our) position in the employment relationship as workers is, at very least, a basic point of (potential) solidarity. Unions have, historically, been one group of organisations that have created, reinforced and promoted this basic idea of class solidarity. Yet they seem to have abandoned this ambition in their recent renewal efforts. As a consequence, organising activity has lacked a wider political dimension and this has, in turn, become a vicious circle whereby its practice has become further depoliticised. This is not inevitable. If we accept Hyman’s view (1999) that solidarities are constructed, the pessimism of the strategic leaders quoted in this paper seems rather misplaced. There surely remains scope to at the very least imagine solidarities beyond the level of the workplace, and possibly solidarity between workers because they are workers.