The power of union-community coalitions.
| Author | Tattersall, Amanda |
| Position | Commentary |
For decades, unions around the world have been struggling. Across advanced English-speaking countries, we have seen the rising power of capital and its increasing influence over government. By the mid-1990s, unions faced declining membership, weakening political influence, and poor collective bargaining outcomes.
This created sufficient difficulties that many national labour councils initiated internal debates that considered the need for widespread revitalisation strategies (1). These strategies sought to break with 'business' or 'arbitration' unionism to build a 'social movement unionism' in which unions rebuilt their power. Numerous unions have experimented with a broad range of strategies. One of these is building coalitions with community organisations.
This is nothing new. For a few, coalitions are familiar. For others, coalitions are a technique exhumed from long, often-neglected union traditions. The reasons to work in coalition are particularly powerful at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Unions are isolated and no longer strong enough on their own to confront the power of employers at work and in politics.
We can see the need for, and potential of, union-community coalitions currently in the United Kingdom, where the pressures of massive public sector cuts threaten union jobs as well as the social services upon which most working people rely. Unions alone do not have the power to confront these political and economic threats. Building popular support will require the development of relationships with other civil society organisations.
However, coalitions are not a magic bullet. The simple existence of union-community alliances will not guarantee victory. If coalitions can help unions confront the difficulties they face, the challenge is how to make coalitions powerful.
Too often coalitions have been just another media stunt, an opportunity to list a large number of organisations on a letterhead in support of, or against, an issue. The perceived strength of these coalitions is frequently and incorrectly equated to the number of organisations assembled. These relationships come together and fall away based on the issues at hand, and the coalitions have no greater purpose than to generate publicity for an issue. There is often tension between the organisations, but strategies are rarely developed to overcome these differences. These coalitions are merely an alignment of organisational leaders. They do not engage, let alone politicise or enhance the campaigning skills of union or community organisation members. Unsurprisingly, this kind of coalition rarely supports sustained campaigns on an issue. Sometimes letterhead coalitions deliver a veneer of success, but it is not enough to change unions' political and economic environment.
Some unions, however, have engaged in a different kind of coalition practice, involving campaigns underpinned by a long-term commitment to build relationships, managing distinct interests and creating common concern. They engage leaders and their rank and file, building enduring strategies that win on issues and promote their own social agenda.
Power in Coalition (Tattersall, 2010) draws together the literature on union-community coalitions (2) and documents the trials and successes of three long term coalitions: in Australia, the Sydney-based Public Education Coalition in New South Wales (3); in the US, the Grassroots Collaborative in Chicago (4); and in Canada, the Toronto-based Ontario Health Coalition (5). It identifies five principles that help coalitions to straddle the challenge of achieving social change goals at the same time as they attempt to strengthen the organisations that participate in them.
Principles of strong coalitions
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Less is more
Coalitions are more successful when organisational membership is restricted and there are fewer groups making decisions and sharing resources. Bigger is not always better. A narrower agenda made it easier to more deeply engage the commitment of members and leaders. A 'less is more' approach helped avoid lowest common denominator positions where coalitions risk being a 'mile wide and an inch deep' and tend to only be able to agree on what they are against rather than what they are for.
This strategy runs counter to typical coalition practice where 'letterhead coalitions' are popular. But in the case of the Ontario Health Coalition and the Chicago Grassroots Collaborative, it was only when the coalitions restricted membership that they built sufficient trust to keep organisations working together. Similarly in Sydney, a coalition of only two organisations (the teachers' union and parents' federation) built an unprecedented independent public education inquiry, staging hearings across the state, mobilising parents and teachers in dozens of local communities, and ultimately winning $250m in reforms to public education through a reduction in class sizes for young children.
Less is more requires coalition organisers to be strategic with 'the less'. There is a need to identify partners that have the right mix of power, diversity, interest and, potentially, unpredictability. With fewer people around the table, there is an incentive to do 'more' together - like building strong public relationships that understand personal and organisational interests. In Chicago, this took the form of informal breakfast meetings where people got to know each other over several years before they started campaigning together (6).
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Individuals matter
Despite coalitions being defined as an alignment of organisations, alliances live or die based on...
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