Union purpose and power: Regulating the fissured workplace

Abstract

Notwithstanding long membership decline and fresh threats in workplaces, there is evidence that unions can still exercise power even in the unlikely setting of fissured workplaces. The question is: in what particular ways do unions exercise power and for what purpose? This study of union success in a fissured supply chain argues that, to answer this question, considerations of union power must be tied more explicitly to strategic choices, union purpose, and to how conditions are regulated. In so doing, it challenges the argument in ‘power resources theory’ that power is chiefly measured between actors, and suggests that there is a necessary prior step: considering the power resources available to a specific actor. Similarly, it undermines the idea that power needs to be transformed to be effective and instead suggests that it is only through the interplay of power resources available to unions that any individual power becomes effective.