The Early Mobilization of Women Union Leaders — A Comparative Perspective
| Date | 01 December 2013 |
| Published date | 01 December 2013 |
| Author | Gill Kirton,Geraldine Healy |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2012.00902.x |
The Early Mobilization of Women Union
Leaders — A Comparative Perspective
Geraldine Healy and Gill Kirton
Abstract
This article explores the initial reasons for union joining of women who became
union leaders in the UK and the USA by drawing on concepts from mobilization
theory and the literature on women and unions. The comparative study demon-
strates similarities and differences in early mobilization influences on UK and
US women with respect to family, ideology, instrumentality and injustice.
Informed by the women and unions literature, the article critiques mobilization
theorists for failing to problematize the term ‘injustice’ and underplaying the
importance of ideology which are shown to be gendered and racialized and
located in time and place.
1. Introduction
This article explores the early union mobilization of women who became
union leaders in the UK and the USA by examining their union joining
decisions. It draws on a pioneering cross national study of women union
leaders at different levels in ethnically diverse regions in the UK (London and
the southeast) and the USA (New York City (NYC) and New Jersey (NJ) ).
This article asks, what are the key conditions that lead to the early mobili-
zation of UK and US women union leaders? To answer this broad question,
informed by literatures on union joining and mobilization (Kelly 1998; Klan-
dermans, 1986, 2009) and on women and unions (Cobble 2007; Colgan and
Ledwith 2002; Healy et al. 2004; Kirton 2005), we consider differences
between UK and US women’s union joining decisions with respect to: (a) the
influence of family and social and political ideology; (b) the experience of
injustice; (c) instrumentalism; (d) individualism; and (e) union organization.
Geraldine Healy and Gill Kirton are at Queen Mary University of London.
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British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2012.00902.x
51:4 December 2013 0007–1080 pp. 709–732
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2012. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
2. Why compare the UK and USA?
Employment relations articles that compare and contrast findings across
countries remain relatively rare (Bryson and Frege 2010), and we aim to
redress this gap in the subfield of women and unions. We set our study in the
UK and USA as these are two major liberal industrialized countries, whose
social and economic profiles bear many similarities. In the varieties-of-
capitalism literature, the UK and USA are characterized as liberal market
economies with weakly institutionalized settings and decentralized bargain-
ing structures (Hall and Soskice 2001). In comparing varieties of unionism,
Frege and Kelly show that the UK and US unions adopt similar strategies
with respect to political action and to organizing (2004: 184). Both countries
have experienced industrial and occupational restructuring, which is not
unrelated to women’s increased employment participation. However, there
are sharp differences between (and within) the countries with respect to the
welfare model, differences which have far-reaching implications for indi-
vidual workers and unions. Most notably, the UK has universal healthcare
free at the point of delivery, whereas the USA has an insurance-based system
(which leaves some 40 million people without cover) and where unions are
central to bargaining for healthcare on behalf of their members. The UK has
greater welfare provisions than the more individualistic low state involve-
ment approach of the USA; nevertheless, both the USA and UK tend to be
low on the OECD strictness indicator of employment protection legislation.1
Further, the political and legislative conditions that operate in the UK and
the USA provide divergent conditions in which mobilization takes place. For
example, the union movement in the USA is more fragmented, and the
counter-mobilizing lobby of employers is more intense than in the UK
(Logan 2008).
From an industrial relations point of view, both countries may be charac-
terized as ‘in crisis’, with union decline taking a seemingly resilient and
relentless shape; in the case of the USA for some 50 years and in the UK for
some 30 years. In 1983, American union membership was 17.7 million, a
density of 20 per cent (from a high of 30 per cent in 1955). By 2009 density
stood at 12.4 per cent. There is a huge difference between private sector
density (7.2 per cent) and public sector (37.4). Union Review (2010) attributes
this difference to stronger labour laws in the public sector and a combination
of unemployment and anti-union retaliation by US corporations.2Moreover,
US density remains higher for men (12.6 per cent) than for women (11.1 per
cent), although the gap is narrowing (BLS 2011). Women comprise just under
half (44 per cent), but are a growing proportion of union members (Bron-
fenbrenner 2005; Kaminski and Yakura 2008), as compared to about 30 per
cent in the 1980s.
Whereas in the UK, in 1979 there were 12 million union members, an
all-time high of 55 per cent union density. By 2009, this had nearly halved to
6.7 million members and a density of 25 per cent. Like the USA, there is sharp
distinction between public sector (57 per cent) and private sector (15 per cent)
710 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© John Wiley & Sons Ltd/London School of Economics 2012.
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