Abstract
Collective bargaining strategies have been shifting to reflect workers’ needs in an ever-changing global economy. Addressing these needs while also aiming to reduce gender inequality has led to creative breakthroughs in bargaining agendas. Using their own original surveys and research, as well as drawing from other scholars, activists, and global union campaigns, Jane Pillinger and Nora Wintour explore many of these new creative strategies in their book Collective Bargaining and Gender Equality. The book is the third published in the Gendered Economy series, edited by Sara Cantillon and Diane Elson. The primary contributions of this work include its illuminating collection of case studies on union strategizing and its holistic analysis of how collective action can be harnessed to improve the lives of women around the world.
Pillinger and Wintour begin their book by laying out seven interrelated preconditions necessary for collective bargaining to have gender equal outcomes: (1) strong social dialogue structures, (2) supportive legislation on gender equality, (3) extending the scope of bargaining agreements to cover more women workers, (4) progressive social policy and fiscal framework, (5) government willingness to address structural inequalities and women’s unpaid care work, (6) gender responsive internal policies within trade unions, and (7) women’s representation in union decision making. This framework is a fantastic and realistic contribution, as it indicates that each precondition is necessary but not sufficient in achieving gender equality through collective bargaining. For instance, women’s representation in union decision making is alone not sufficient: as bell hooks (2010: 170) has written, “patriarchy has no gender,” so the inclusion of women in leadership spaces does not necessarily mean that women leaders will lobby for gender equality. For this reason, the authors are sure to specify that these preconditions are necessary, but never claim them to be sufficient on their own, or even in their totality.
Most of the seven preconditions are explained in great depth. However, the precondition “quality public services and progressive social policy and fiscal frameworks” (20) is somewhat underdeveloped. Based on the discussion, it seems that this verbiage is meant to include provisions like free or subsidized child care, paid parental leave, quality infrastructure, social protection floors, and progressive national tax reforms. However, the authors themselves include several illustrations of unions fighting for these very things. In fact, several pages are devoted to understanding the ways in which collective bargaining has been used globally to achieve improvements in parental leave protections (54–61). Thus, including these social provisions as a precondition to achieving gender equality through collective bargaining seems a bit like a “cart before the horse” type of argument. Perhaps instead of requiring these public provisions and fiscal frameworks as a precondition, the authors might have discussed the symbiotic relationships between these policies, collective bargaining efforts, and gender equality.
On the other end of the spectrum, the third precondition is expanded upon quite extensively. The authors devote chapter 4 to expanding the scope of collective bargaining strategies to cover women in precarious or informal work. Pillinger and Wintour present data indicating growth in informal work and explain that women dominate many of these sectors. They then provide several case studies in which trade unions have extended collective bargaining to those in informal or precarious work. Many of these examples come from the Global South, despite the Eurocentric focus in other sections of the book. For instance, Ghana’s Trade Union Congress “encouraged its sector-based member unions to include informal economy workers” and to “review their constitution and structures so that they could mainstream informal economy members into their activities” (95). The authors also provide illustrative success stories of informal or domestic workers organizing themselves. For example, a home-based workers’ organization in Thailand, HomeNet, bargained for protection from occupational health risks, minimum wages, formal contracts, and equal pay for men and women (102). However, the authors are also skilled in removing their rose-colored glasses: Pillinger and Wintour always seem to level with the reader by offering a clear discussion of related nuances and challenges. In this section, the authors are keen to point out the challenges to collective bargaining presented by informal work arrangements, lamenting that in many of these sectors “it is difficult to identify an appropriate employee or employers’ organization, such as a local authority, with which to negotiate” (111). Nonetheless, the examples from this chapter are perhaps most useful, in that they speak to changes in union organizing that are necessitated by neoliberal policies as well as global competition and inequalities. Ultimately, chapter 4 nicely supplements the third precondition described in chapter 2, while focusing on geographic regions otherwise somewhat underrepresented in the rest of the book.
The authors’ arguments throughout the book are well structured. Pillinger and Wintour typically provide some poignant success stories: specific examples from several countries and sectors that provide a brief road map for improving the lives and capabilities of working women. But they always realistically explain nuances and challenges. For instance, in their discussion on closing the gender pay gap (37), the authors inform readers that “employers’ demands for cost neutral adjustments have often meant the pay gap is given less priority in bargaining for fear of wage leveling down.” Pillinger and Wintour supplement this stipulation with a creative strategy from Norway, where narrowing the pay gap was achieved by focusing on raising wages in female-dominated occupations. They provide another example from Uruguay, where trade unions negotiated a job evaluation system aimed at eliminating salary differences among genders. Throughout the book, the authors illustrate solutions forged by creative workers’ groups to help readers circumvent obstacles that get in the way of achieving gender equality through collective bargaining.
While the book is exceptionally well written and provides useful examples and evaluations, a weakness of the book is its lack of intersectional analyses, despite its intermittent claims at doing so. Pillinger and Wintour are commendably transparent about their European bias (1), and work to remedy this in some chapters. They also discuss various aspects of class, migration, and citizenship status throughout the book. The authors even provide some fruitful discussion of LGBTQI+ issues (71–72), writing about recent changes in union protocol on LGBTQI+ discrimination in Spain and the United Kingdom. However, the authors scatter the word “intersectionality” throughout the book but carefully and explicitly explain and engage with intersectional feminist theory in only one brief section (138). The term “intersectionality” was originally coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) and was intended to address the fact that “the experiences and struggles of women of color fell between the cracks of both feminist and anti-racist discourse” (Davis 2008: 68). It seems that the experiences and struggles of women of color have fallen through the cracks in Collective Bargaining and Gender Equality. This is somewhat surprising, given that Pillinger’s (2017) ILO brief provides a well-written investigation on multiple aspects of discrimination in the workplace. In this piece, Pillinger (2017: 13) writes that “there is still a low level of awareness among trade unions, as well as employers, about intersectionality and discrimination-related harassment,” which may be the reason Pillinger and Wintour did not include much discussion of intersectionality in their book. If the book is meant to mirror the current state of trade union activity, a lack of explicit and permeating discussion on aspects of oppression such as race, caste, or age might be understandable. However, if the book is meant to provide a road map to success in achieving gender equality through collective bargaining, the authors should have included deeper and more salient intersectional analyses throughout the book. One could even imagine adding some preconditions in their framework related to intersectional forms of oppression. I understand that discussing issues like race- or caste-based oppression in a book with a global scope is challenging. But invoking the term “intersectionality” without deliberately examining these aspects seems a bit haphazard.
Aside from underdeveloping the intersectional analyses and the precondition relating to progressive social policy and fiscal frameworks, the authors do a fantastic job explaining the ways in which collective bargaining can be used to improve gender relations. Pillinger and Wintour’s seven interrelated-preconditions model is a useful starting point for those thinking critically about collective bargaining strategies. Furthermore, their chapter on extending the scope of collective bargaining strategies to cover women in precarious or informal work is thought-provoking. It asks workers, activists, and policy makers to consider how shifts in the work structures necessitate shifts in collective bargaining strategy. It also challenges readers to consider the fact that collective bargaining cannot reach and improve the lives of everyone, and thus improvements in public provision, which provide sustenance without labor requirements, may be increasingly important. Pillinger and Wintour have laid a good foundation for future work related to gender equality and trade unions. Ultimately, the book is useful for those interested in new and creative collective bargaining strategies and for those looking to understand the nuanced way in which collective action, gender equality, and public policy intertwine.
