ILPC 2027

‘Non-workers’ and trade unions: why are people joining Unite Community?

In 2011, not long after Unite’s new general secretary, Len McClusky, had been elected the union announced that it was introducing community membership. Unite Community, as it is known, is aimed at encouraging people who do not currently belong to a trade union –because they are unemployed persons, retirees, and students – to become members of the ‘Unite family’.  The rationale is to provide an organising space for those members of society who, in this period of austerity and neoliberalism, do not have voice to articulate their concerns. Benefits cuts to people with disabilities and the ‘taxing’ of welfare claimants who have ‘spare’ bedrooms have seen some of the most vulnerable in society being hit hardest by austerity measures. To date, over 70 Unite community branches have been established and over 8000 ‘non-workers’[1]  members have joined the union.

This research explores the factors motivating ‘non-workers’ to join a trade union and investigates what campaigning and organising activity is taking place, as well as how the newly established Unite Community branches are functioning in different locations across the UK. The research has been designed to understand more clearly the way that collective identities are constructed among individuals who are not in employment in distinct and different ways and explores what impact this has on their ability to provide support for each other and to campaign to protect vulnerable people from the effect of austerity. 

The research is underpinned by the theoretical framework of mobilisation theory (Kelly, 1998, McAdam, 1988, Tilly, 1978), which articulates a process by which individuals acquire a collective definition of their self-interest in response to injustice. Moblisation theory takes us through a number of stages: how people come to see their interests as a common concern; how they generate a collective feeling of injustice, the extent to which these thoughts are powerful enough to move an individual reaction to a collective response; and the sense that there is a decision maker responsible for the perceived injustice.

Within this theoretical approach, the complex social relations of actors are explored and collective action explained by studying the inter-relationship of a set of analytical categories: organisation, injustice, leadership, opportunity, and organisation. While many studies of worker organisation (Darlington, 2007, Gall, 2000, 2003, Kelly and Badignannavar, 2005) have used Kelly’s mobilisation framework, only few have tested the theory empirically (see for instance Taylor and Moore, 2014), and none in relation to those outside organised labour. This research does this through a multi-method study including four complimentary strands of research, each adding different levels of depth:

·      We have undertaken comparative study of Unite Community branches in different regions of the UK to assess similarities and difference about the way branches organise. This provides an opportunity to explore a range of variables such as union history, geography, politics, opportunity and leadership – all influences on different union culture and behaviour. 

·      We have done this through in-depth biographical interviews with Unite Community members and branch officers (over 35 to date) to listen closely to each ‘story of self’ to understand in more detail where a sense of injustice came from and how the personal decision to collectivise originated. In addition we have conducted two focus groups to elicit exchange of views about the current activities and discuss the broader direction of travel of the community branch.

·      We have also interviewed senior Unite national office staff with responsibility for Unite Community and the organising staff (15 to date) employed in the regions of study.

·      As members of our local Unite Community branches we have also conducted participant observation by involving ourselves in branch activity.

In our presentation we aim to present our first findings and answer the following questions:

·      What does community-based trade union membership offer for re-thinking (or retheorising) the concept of trade unionism itself?

·      What is the rationale for organizing ‘non-workers’ into the union movement and what role do they play?

·      Given the absence of a workplace or work identity how else are collective identities constructed among non-workers?

·      How do individuals acquire an understanding of self-interest in response to injustice and how is this transformed into a collective response?

Jane Holgate, Iona Byford, Gabriella Alberti and Ian Greenwood