Union Renewal, Postheroic Leadership, and Women’s Organizing

Abstract

This article examines leaders, leadership, and union renewal with a focus on women’s leadership and organizing. First, it considers the links between union renewal and women’s local and informal leadership; and second, the contribution of constituency and cross-constituency organizing to union revitalization. It scrutinizes notions of “heroic” leaders, often implicit in union discourse and practice, which undermine membership mobilization, impede the diversification of leadership demographics and the union renewal project, and contribute to the invisibility of other forms of often-gendered leadership. It explores the alternative paradigm of postheroic leadership and argues that constituency organizing is a form of postheroic practice. In so doing, this article challenges union-renewal paradigms to take more seriously women’s union leadership and constituency organizing as vehicles for revisioning unions, and offers some alternative entry points into the longstanding political debates and scholarship about women and trade union leadership.