Abstract
This book is a close empirical examination of attempts by the labor movement in the United Kingdom to revitalize through organizing efforts largely stimulated by the central labor federation’s creation of the TUC Organising Academy in 1998. The research behind the book spanned more than a decade, through 2010. The authors closely observed the efforts they studied, and the high quality of the research demonstrates this. They weave extensive interviews with participants and union leaders, first hand observation, relevant documents and statistical evidence, and their own extensive background knowledge of the U.K. labor movement into a very clear and insightful analysis of what these efforts have and have not achieved.
U.K. unions have been heavily influenced by revitalization efforts in the U.S. and Australian labor movements, and the TUC Organising Academy was inspired by the U.S. Organizing Institute. The authors do a great job of briefly summarizing the U.S. debate over an “organizing model” versus a “servicing model” of unionism and observe that the dichotomy does not provide an adequate framework to analyze the British experience. (The same has been shown to be true in the United States as initial efforts matured and unions experimented with different approaches to growth and internal membership activation.)
Instead of following one “organizing model,” different U.K. unions utilized the training program in different ways and even pursued different goals, all subsumed under the term “organizing.” For U.S. readers, the authors do an excellent job of explaining a number of things: (a) institutional and cultural differences between the U.S. and U.K. labor movements and industrial relations laws and practices; (b) the multiple meanings of “organizing” in the U.K. labor movement; (c) the differences between different U.K. unions in the labor markets and employers faced, and how this impacted the different choices made by different unions in how they went about “organizing”; and (d) the lesser hostility to unions displayed by British employers (although antiunion animus is somewhat being imported from the United States), and how this difference has translated into far less reliance on external community allies and heavily resourced massive organizing drives akin to the SEIU’s “Justice for Janitors” U.S. campaigns.
A recurring question throughout the book is the relationship between organizing and union democracy. Most theorizing behind an “organizing” approach to unionism comes from a left wing political tradition, and it theorizes that massive organizing depends on an energized membership self-organizing and democratically controlling its own union as it builds a more powerful instrument for worker power in the larger society. The authors find many tensions in actual practice on this question and find that the reality does not always easily fit the theory.
Numerous other topics are thoughtfully addressed and analyzed, far too many to address in this brief review. Familiar questions relating to the tensions between resource allocation to servicing existing members versus organizing new ones, the relationship of organizers with union officers, the integration of “organizing” into the duties of all union staff versus reliance on specialized union organizers, and the like are all examined and analyzed. Different U.K. unions addressed these issues and tensions differently; they also displayed divergent organizing goals. (Some aimed only to “get the numbers,” while others measured their success or lack of it by whether union members became more energized and took on more organizing and/or other roles within the union.) On all of these questions, the book is very enlightening.
The book also does a good job of relating the union’s efforts to the broader political and societal changes in England during that period. The return of the Labour Party to power in 1997 ushered in a comparatively benign period for the unions to attempt to regroup, revitalize, and grow after the disastrous decline of the previous period under Margaret Thatcher. While “New Labour” was never a close union ally, it did undertake some legal and other measures making existence for unions easier.
While the authors find that some enormous personal transformations occurred for a number of those who went through the program and became union organizers, overall the efforts have failed to deliver the promised revitalization of the labor movement as a whole. “Organizing” that transforms the unions into “social movement unions” aimed at larger transformations in society as a whole has generally not occurred. And, while union membership has stabilized, it has still dropped as a percentage of the growing overall labor force. Membership and participation by traditionally excluded groups like minorities and women have increased slightly but not by much.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the fate of labor movements in the English speaking world. It is a real treasure.