Why Are Some Union Organizing Campaigns More Successful Than Others?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2005.00367.x |
| Published date | 01 September 2005 |
| Date | 01 September 2005 |
| Author | Vidu Badigannavar,John Kelly |
British Journal of Industrial Relations
43:3 September 2005 0007– 1080 pp. 515– 535
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UKBJIRBritish Journal of Industrial Relations0007-1080Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005September 2005433515535Articles
Union Organizing CampaignsBritish Journal of Industrial Relations
Vidu Badigannavar is at Kent Business School, University of Kent, and John Kelly is at the
School of Management, Birkbeck College, London.
Why Are Some Union Organizing
Campaigns More Successful
Than Others?
Vidu Badigannavar and John Kelly
Abstract
This paper reports a study of two union organizing campaigns in the higher
education sector. Using mobilization theory, we tried to explore why one cam-
paign was more successful than the other as measured by membership growth
and recruitment of activists. We found that in the more successful campaign,
the union was perceived as more effective in voicing workers’ concerns, generated
greater social cohesion and union identification amongst employees, was more
successful in convincing employees that the university management was to blame
for their problems and promoted amongst employees a stronger sense of union
instrumentality.
1. Introduction
This paper examines the different outcomes of two union organizing cam-
paigns in the UK higher education sector and tries to explain them using the
framework of mobilization theory. The context of these campaigns is an
increased level of organizing activity from the mid-1990s. Following a change
in leadership at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in 1994 and the promotion
of a debate around organizing activities, a growing number of unions began
to commit resources to membership recruitment and organization to reverse
their decline. The number of new recognition agreements began to climb
steeply: in 1994, there were just 27 new agreements; by 1998, the annual total
reached 119, and in 2001, there were 676 new agreements (Gall 2004: 251).
The result was that aggregate union membership in Britain began to rise in
1998 for the first time in 20 years.
On the other hand, the number of new agreements was significantly lower
in 2002 than in the previous year (372 compared to 676), and by 2003,
516
British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2005.
aggregate membership was back to the 1997 level (Certification Office 2002).
Moreover, a number of unions have suffered well-publicized defeats by deter-
mined and well-organized employers, such as Amazon and B-Sky-B, despite
having built up substantial levels of membership at each of these firms before
employee ballots (see Kelly and Badigannavar 2004; O’Grady and Nowak
2004). Exactly why some campaigns fail and others succeed is a key issue on
which there is very little research notwithstanding the growing volume of
evidence about the role of employers and the impact of the Central Arbitra-
tion Committee, the body charged with overseeing the implementation of
union recognition law (see Bryson and Gomez 2003; Gall 2003a,b; Heery
et al
. 2003a,b,c; Moore 2004).
The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the determinants of union
organizing campaign outcomes by comparing one that succeeded with one
that failed. It examines the outcomes of two well-resourced union organizing
campaigns of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) in the higher
education sector. Although most organizing research has concentrated on the
private sector (e.g. Bronfenbrenner
et al
. 1998; Gall 2003a,b; Milkman and
Voss 2004), a number of British public sector unions have embraced an
organizing agenda and committed resources to halt the slide in union density
within their job territories. The AUT is one such union, and both the cam-
paigns that we studied were aimed at recruiting contract research staff (CRS),
a poorly organized group within the university sector. Although neither cam-
paign recruited a majority of its target group into membership, one achieved
a significantly higher level of membership than the other, and we analyse the
different outcomes using the framework of mobilization theory (Kelly 1998).
In the next section, we set out the context of casualization of employment in
the UK higher education sector and the AUT’s approach to dealing with this
issue. The subsequent two sections discuss the literature on organizing pro-
fessional workers and introduce our theoretical framework. In sections five
and six, we introduce the two case studies and present our findings. The final
section explores a number of possible explanations for the differences between
the two campaigns.
2. Casualization of employment in the UK higher education sector
In line with public sector employment growth, the education sector has
also recorded growth in employment from 1,176,000 in 1994 to 1,450,000
by June 2003 (Black
et al
. 2004: 272). Education, and particularly higher
education, became a priority for the New Labour Government in its second
term in office. It set ambitious targets for growth in participation rates of
18- to 30-year-olds in university education and announced that universities
would be able to obtain additional income by levying an annual fee of up
to £3000 on students. There is also to be an increased emphasis on
research, with the Education Secretary pledging to spend an extra £1.25 bil-
lion over and above the government’s last two years’ budget on promoting
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