Politics of Equality at Work

Newcastle University Business School - invited seminar, 3 May 2023

Presentation title: The space between? Being sensitive to the dialectical nature of collective representation in research and writing about trade unions

Presenters: Miguel Martinez Lucio and Holly Smith

Abstract:

There is an emerging critique about the need to widen the lens of study in relation to questions of inclusivity within labour representation, building on the work of Alberti and Pero (2018) but which reaches earlier into the question of new actors within industrial relations (Heery and Frege, 2006). The debates dovetail and overlap with the growing recognition of the importance of intersectional approaches and the need to think more broadly about identities at work (Tapia and Alberti, 2019). These are important developments, which fill in some core gaps within labour research, problematise institutionalised approaches, contribute to the rich specificities of heterogeneous worker organising, and are key to revitalising worker representation. The move to a more inclusive and less institutionalised approach brings with it the need to study the politics and meaning of solidarity and requires a greater sensitivity to organisational tensions (Aslam and Woodcock, 2020) and representative claims (Meardi, Simms and Adam, 2021).

Through our ESRC-funded project on the politics of equality, we identified what we perceive as a need to reflect constructively on the politics and agenda-forming processes of building inclusive projects within industrial relations. Drawing on a range of projects on equality, migration (Connolly, et al., 2019), and different forms of worker representation (Smith, 2022), this paper aims to build on these key developments but caution against the tendency towards the binary presentation of worker organising as “either bureaucratic or participatory,” (Cioce, Korczynski, and Pero, 2022). We make the case for “the space between” which allows for a recognition of the ambivalent nature of trade unions and argue that this can recentre agential power to migrant, precarious and other groups of workers within this contested terrain.

References:

Alberti, G. and Però, D., (2018) Migrating industrial relations: Migrant workers’ initiative within and outside trade unions. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 56(4), pp.693-715.

Aslam, Y. and Woodcock, J., 2020. A history of Uber organizing in the UK. South Atlantic Quarterly, 119(2), pp.412-421.

Cioce, G., Korczynski, M., & Pero, D. (2022). The improvised language of solidarity: Linguistic practices in the participatory labour-organizing processes of multi-ethnic migrant workers. Human Relations.

Connolly, H., Marino, S. and Lucio, M.M., 2019. The politics of social inclusion and labor representation: Immigrants and trade unions in the European context. ILR Press.

Heery, E., & Frege, C. (2006). New actors in industrial relations. British Journal of Industrial Relations, 44(4), 601-604.

Meardi, G., Simms, M. and Adam, D., 2021. Trade unions and precariat in Europe: Representative claims. European Journal of Industrial Relations, 27(1), pp.41-58.

Smith, H., 2022. The ‘indie unions’ and the UK labour movement: Towards a community of practice. Economic and Industrial Democracy, 43(3), pp.1369-1390.

Tapia, M., & Alberti, G. (2019). Unpacking the category of migrant workers in trade union research: a multi-level approach to migrant intersectionalities. Work, Employment and Society, 33(2), 314-325.