ILPC 2026

Marshall’s classic study of Labor in the South of the US, discusses the success of a strike by garment workers in the late thirties in Tennessee, affording significance to the fact the striking women workers obtained support from large numbers of members of the United Mine Workers Union in the area. He noted that: “the workers in the garment plants were mostly women from the miners’ families” (Marshall, 1967:177). This points to, as Godard has argued in his comprehensive assessment of the literature on union formation, the importance of not abstracting: the decision to unionise from the institutional environment within which it is made, including not just the structure of the employment relation in law, but also the broader system of laws and norms that frame this relationship… differences in these environments have possible implications for the ability to generalise across nations. (Godard 2008: 380) In this vein, our paper draws on ongoing research to explore the ways in which family life and history, personal circumstances beyond the work place, impact on trade union activity. Arguing that geographical variations in collective understandings of the labour movement can be illuminated by examining the role of kinship, our interest lies in the ways in which accounts of family traditions are produced by activists to demonstrate and shore up a commitment to tradition. This paper stems from ongoing research on geographical variations in collective understandings of trade unionism in the UK (see Beynon et al, 2012), which considers why people join trade unions. It demonstrated the above average strength of trade union membership in Wales compared with other parts of the United Kingdom, with a significant rate of unionisation among women (Beynon et al 2012). This work confirmed the argument proposed by previous analyses that compositional effects are not sufficient to explain the extent of the variation, and contended that the geographical manifestations of social, cultural and political factors needs to be included in an explanation. Here, the industrial heritage of Wales is seen as an important factor as it relates to historically received collective understandings of trade union activism. This paper builds on this foundation with forty biographical interviews with people active within the trade union movement in South Wales. When positioning their current commitment to trade unions the people we met and spoke with often refer to their families, acknowledging their ancestral loyalties and inherited beliefs. Drawing on this work we propose that an exploration of the ways in which biographical trajectories cohere spatially and impact upon forms of social organisation could be helpfully developed in relation to trade union organisation.