Abstract
Cécile Guillaume’s ambitious study was originally published in French in 2018 as Syndiquées: Défendre les intérêts des femmes au travail. This version, revised and translated, is published to launch the book series Understanding Work and Employment Relations in association with the British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA). The intention of the series is to take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the employment relationship and to provide research-based texts which go beyond introductory accounts of the discipline.
The text presents what are essentially two distinct studies, although the issues which are raised in each are related. The first study is based on interviews with over 100 activists in four major unions (French unions Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT) and Solidaires, and GMB and Unison in Great Britain). The second study is a socio-historical account examining unions’ approaches to equal pay campaigning in Great Britain, with a particular focus on the opportunities and limitations of legal mobilisation and draws on evidence from interviews with 40 union activists, legal professionals and policy-makers. The main substance of the book presents these studies as two large chapters: ‘The gendered making of union careers’ and ‘Legal mobilizations to promote equal pay in Great Britain’.
By presenting evidence from these two studies the author seeks to answer a series of related research questions around women’s (under)-representation and women’s interests within trade unions. Addressing the long-standing problem of women’s under-representation within trade unions, evidence is presented to try to understand how and why this representation gap has emerged. Engaging with debates from political science around leadership and the way in which representatives make claims about who they purport to be representing, the comparative study examines women’s union careers. In doing so, the research broadens the evidence base which is usually scrutinised in union gender equality studies: namely, industrial relations systems and gender equality regimes, and pays greater attention to social constructions of gender inequalities.
By adopting the comparative career approach the study is able to move beyond some of the prior limitations of comparative industrial relations research. Using contrasting contexts within and between countries, the author seeks to identify some common issues trade unions face when representing women, but also the specific issues related to the particular institutional context (and of course these contexts may be thought of as operating at European, national and local levels).
The career approach certainly brings a different perspective to the analysis and looks at key events in the careers of union activists in the different unions. The social constructions of gender inequalities are brought to the fore and come through strongly when addressing the question of why women are under-represented in all roles, but particularly the leadership roles which are associated with (gendered) expectations around hours and mobility. Assessing how the careers of women trade unionists have been shaped by the equality policies which have been designed to promote women’s access to representative roles reveals some of the challenges which are faced given the particular framing of the policy. Contrasting liberal and radical equality policies suggests that although women’s representation may increase, it may be limited to certain roles within the union’s structure.
The career perspective certainly does give insight into how women’s union careers are shaped by the time periods, institutional contexts and social relations which are present. The author suggests in the concluding chapter that the research could also have been further contextualised by archival research. It is not immediately clear how this would provide further insight given the vast amount of biographical material already provided. The research could however have been extended by considering women’s representation in unions which were less developed in terms of equality policies. The research was carried out on unions which were more accessible to the researcher, and of course researchers can only research organisations to which they have access, but the likely outcome of this, and the author does acknowledge this, is that the unions which have been selected are more likely to be ones which have devoted greater resources to equality matters. The research could also have been extended by turning attention to why women choose to leave their union careers. Although the work does shed light on why women’s union careers may hit particular ceilings (whilst remaining within a role) the important question of why women may choose to leave representative roles is not addressed.
The longitudinal biographical case study approach is one important contribution which the book makes. The second is the argument for greater intersectionality paying attention to the heterogeneity of women’s experiences. Certainly, the study illuminates more on the relationships between class and gender than it does on the relationships between ethnicity and gender, and this comes through the biographical research where few BAME trade unionists were interviewees. The interviews were similarly unable to say anything about sexuality or disability. Some union statistics are presented to contextualise the multiple forms of identity of the women trade unionists, but often some of the key information is missing; French unions especially do not tend to record the information researchers might desire. Therefore, the analysis of multiple identities of women trade unionists is not explored as fully as it might have been. The general point though about paying greater attention to intersectionality in future research is well made.
Coming back to one of the questions raised, the first study focused more on the structures and processes by which women’s union careers are enabled or hindered. The extent to which representation by women results in better or more effective substantive representation of women’s interests is not fully discussed, although it is raised in the review of literature (Chapter 2) on gender and trade unions.
Further insight on that question is provided though by the second study in the book which looks at the socio-historical development of equal pay campaigns in Great Britain with a particular focus on how litigation can be used to achieve desired outcomes. This account notes the well-known problematic history that unions have had with equal pay and provides analysis of the different motivations of unions and individual trade unionists in advancing this cause. The chapter does not focus so much on the ways in which unions try to construct the groups they are claiming to represent or how the interests of that group are then articulated. Where the study does make an important contribution is that it expands the focus of industrial relations research, moving beyond the traditional areas of disputes and bargaining systems, developing the under-researched area of why and how unions can pursue ends through (collective) litigation.
Overall, the book contains a huge amount of data in both the chapters on women’s union careers and legal mobilisation. The various accounts are eminently readable and extremely detailed and are the product of extensive fieldwork. The final chapter stands out for its analytical content and is where the book is at its most convincing, setting out the important contributions in relation to method, namely the arguments for longitudinal comparative case study research, the need for greater attention to intersectionality and the possibilities of expanding industrial relations’ traditional areas of focus. By doing this, the author sets out a clear agenda for future research.