Maite Tapia

Organising migrants as workers or as migrant workers? Intersectionality, trade unions and precarious work

This paper considers precarious work from the point of view of trade union practice in the area of equality and diversity, exploring the way in which unions organise and recruit low-paid, vulnerable migrant workers. A theoretical approach is developed in order to understand the particular vulnerability and diversity of migrant workers in the labour market. Insights from the literature on intersectionality are applied to the study of employment, industrial relations and human resource management practice. Drawing from four case studies, the strategies of three UK trade unions towards organising low-paid migrants are compared. It is concluded that trade unions tend to consider migrants primarily as workers (taking on a so-called ‘universalistic’ approach), rather than as migrant workers with particular and overlapping forms of oppression (a ‘particularistic’ approach). As a result, unions tend to construct a dichotomy between workplace and migration issues, impeding the effective involvement of diverse and marginalised workers into unions. Based on these findings, we argue that integrating universalistic and particularistic approaches to union organising and recruitment strategies is critical to promote the successful involvement of vulnerable migrants into trade unions.

Trade union revitalisation: Where are we now? Where to next?:

In this article, we review and assess research on the role of trade unions in labour markets and society, the current decline of unions and union revitalisation. The review shows three main trends. First, trade unions are converging into similar strategies of revitalisation. The ‘organising model’ has spread far beyond the Anglo-Saxon countries and is now commonplace for unions as a way to reach new worker constituencies. Thus, even in ‘institutionally secure’ countries like Germany and the Nordic countries, unions are employing organising strategies while at the same time trying to defend their traditional strongholds of collective bargaining and corporatist policy-making. Second, research has shown that used strategies are not a panacea for success for unions in countries that spearheaded revitalisation. This finding points to the importance of supportive institutional frameworks if unions are to regain power. Third, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, unions are building external coalitions with other social movements, including across borders, to compensate for the loss of power resources that were tied to national collective bargaining and policy-making. Research has shown that unions, even in adverse institutional contexts, can be effective when they reinvent their repertoires of contention, through political action or campaigning along global value chains.

Supra-union and intersectional organizing: An examination of two prominent cases in the low-wage US restaurant industry

In this article, we examine strategic approaches by the Restaurant Opportunities Center and the Fight for 15 campaign to organizing low-wage workers in the US restaurant industry. Existing industrial relations literature explains that traditional trade unions have had little success in organizing these workers – a growing number of whom identify as racial minorities, women, and immigrant workers – due in part to structural challenges to unionization. However, despite existing institutional and legal obstacles, in recent years two ‘supra-union’ cases of low-wage worker organizing have spread across the nation, resulting in unanticipated economic, legal, and political gains for this diverse group of workers. To better understand the recent success of these alternative forms of worker organizing, we bring the literature on intersectionality, under-utilized in the examination of labor movement organizing, into the industrial relations context. We argue that the Restaurant Opportunities Center and Fight for 15 campaign’s success is due in part to strategic approaches to organizing that have intentionally focused on workers’ interests not solely as a class, but as workers holding multiple identities in an increasingly diverse workforce. More broadly, this article has implications for the future of worker representation and cross-movement solidarity building in the United States.

Unpacking the Category of Migrant Workers in Trade Union Research: A Multi-Level Approach to Migrant Intersectionalities:

This article reflects on the theoretical and empirical challenges that arise when researching trade union strategies towards migrant workers. By bringing together the debates on migration and intersectionality in Employment Relations, the authors highlight the problems of conflating different experiences of migrants under a homogenous view of the ‘migrant worker’ and rather suggest to (1) take account of ‘migrant intersectionalities’ – including the category of migration status among other categorical differences in the workforce, and (2) to do so at different levels of the analysis (micro, meso and macro). This multi-level, intersectional approach we argue leads to a more nuanced understanding of the realities of migration at a time of major societal challenges for organized labour.

Renewed activism for the labor movement: the urgency of young worker engagement

In this article, the authors consider the findings of a multi-year, case study-based research project on young workers and the labor movement in four countries: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The authors examine the conditions under which young workers actively engage in contemporary labor movements. Although the industrial relations context matters, the authors find the most persuasive explanations to be agency-based. Especially important are the relative openness and active encouragement of unions to the leadership development of young workers, and the persistence and creativity of groups of young workers in promoting their own engagement. Embodying labor’s potential for movement building and resistance to authoritarianism and right-wing populism, young workers offer hope for the future if unions can bring them aboard.