Trade unions in the community: Building broad spaces of solidarity

Abstract

This article approaches the subject of trade union community-based organising from the perspective of one union’s attempt to broaden its remit by recruiting ‘non-workers’. In 2011, Unite, the largest private sector union in the UK, announced it was to recruit retirees, students and people who were unemployed into a new section of the union. This could be a radical and potentially ground-breaking development for a UK union where the organising approach stems from an understanding that the purpose of trade unionism is to advance the interests of the working class as a whole – whether or not individuals are, indeed, working – broadening the ideology of trade unionism from its narrow economistic focus. The article reports on a six-year study of this initiative and analyses whether this can be understood as a reorientation of union purpose as a consequence of loss of power in the workplace. It further considers the potential this has for rebuilding wider spaces of solidarity.