Abstract
This article analyses a campaign urging a British university to re-establish in-house cleaning services after years of outsourcing. The small independent union leading the campaign began from an extremely low level of power resources and managed to build enough associational and societal power to win the dispute on cleaners’ working conditions. The study is based on participant observation of the union’s activities, document analysis and interviews. The article argues that the strategy emerging from the study, centred around three key strategies (collectivization of individual grievances, education, and disruption of core business activities), can be articulated in a process following the main categories of Mobilization Theory: organization, mobilization and collective action. Additionally, the union managed to conciliate servicing and organizing strategies, as well as attention to class-oriented and migrant-specific issues.
Highlights
During 2016 and 2017, a campaign for improving pay and conditions of cleaners took place at a British university; it was organized by a small independent union and ended with the university bringing the workers back in-house from the previous outsourced arrangements
Union power resources are increasingly scarce, and unions struggle to organize workers and voice their concerns (Doellgast et al, 2018); this article chooses a case of extreme lack of power resources and examines how a small independent union was able to organize migrant, precarious workers, and help them win an important dispute in an unlikely scenario
This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by analysing a case in which an organizing effort starts from extremely low power resources and gets to the end of a successful campaign; in doing so, it uncovers an ordered series of strategies anchored around the three main active components of Mobilization Theory
Summary
During 2016 and 2017, a campaign for improving pay and conditions of cleaners took place at a British university; it was organized by a small independent union and ended with the university bringing the workers back in-house from the previous outsourced arrangements. After a wealth of studies looking at mixes of strategies (Tapia and Turner, 2013), this case offers the opportunity to formalize the process undertaken by the union and the workers, using the Mobilization Theory framework (Tilly, 1978); the study uncovers the most important factors in the union’s strategy, and proposes a related threestep process to explain how such a campaign went from hopeless to successful. The process emerging from the fieldwork contributes to the debate about union logic, easing the tension between servicing and organizing models (Heery et al, 2000), and between focus on universal or particularistic approaches to migrants’ representation (Alberti et al, 2013)
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