ILPC 2027

Over the past decades British governments have imposed market competition and private ownership in diverse public services. A purchaser-provider split was introduced to create competition in the National Health Service (NHS), leading to a gradual increase in private-sector provision (Bach and Givan 2010). In social security, active labour market schemes funded by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) were contracted out as part a broader push for privatization and work-first social policy (Davies 2008). In both areas, campaigning against public-service restructuring has intensified since 2010, but NHS campaigners have been more effective and more united than their counterparts in social security. In the NHS we identify a string of campaigns that effectively disrupted large-scale privatization and other restructuring initiatives. In social security campaigns, successes have been much smaller: forcing the government to release information, change contractors, or modify procedures. Moreover, the coalition dynamics are very different: while NHS campaigners share a sense of protecting a treasured national institution, social security campaigners have to contend with conflict between workers and service users. Why do NHS campaigners have greater success than campaigners around social security? Employment relations and the sociology of work lack a theory of success and failure in the defence of public services. Drawing on the comparative welfare-state literature (Titmuss 1951, Korpi and Palme 1998, Soss and Schram 2007), we point to the political consequences of changing citizen entitlements. Because the NHS has retained universal coverage, its structure and principles enjoy support across the political spectrum, and restructuring initiatives invariably generate resistance from trade unionists or other activists. Social security, by contrast, has seen its support eroded as part of a decades-long political consensus supporting targeted support at the poor and the exclusion of the ‘undeserving poor’; these policies generate local-level conflict between workers and service users. We compare two cases, which we construct from 80 qualitative interviews, online materials generated by campaigners, and statistics on spending and public opinion. The empirical contribution of this paper is to provide an update on campaigns in the UK to defend public services, with an emphasis on the role of trade unions. Its theoretical contribution is to provide an explanation for campaign processes and outcomes drawing on theory from outside of industrial relations and sociology of work.