Journal
ECONOMIC AND INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY
Volume 42, Issue 2, Pages 226-247Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0143831X18763871
Keywords
Civil society; class; coalitions; community unionism; ideology; leadership; power; trade union identity; union organising; Unite the union
Categories
Funding
- Economic and Social Research Council [ES/I028072/2]
- ESRC [ES/I028072/2] Funding Source: UKRI
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This article explores a trade union's initiative to recruit 'non-workers' and broaden its organizational scope. The study examines the potential impact of this initiative on the union's ideology and its potential for rebuilding broader spaces of solidarity.
This article approaches the subject of trade union community-based organising from the perspective of one union's attempt to broaden its remit by recruiting 'non-workers'. In 2011, Unite, the largest private sector union in the UK, announced it was to recruit retirees, students and people who were unemployed into a new section of the union. This could be a radical and potentially ground-breaking development for a UK union where the organising approach stems from an understanding that the purpose of trade unionism is to advance the interests of the working class as a whole - whether or not individuals are, indeed, working - broadening the ideology of trade unionism from its narrow economistic focus. The article reports on a six-year study of this initiative and analyses whether this can be understood as a reorientation of union purpose as a consequence of loss of power in the workplace. It further considers the potential this has for rebuilding wider spaces of solidarity.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available