Arise.
Power Strategy and Union Resurgence
New book out August 2021
In Arise, Jane Holgate argues that unions must revisit their understanding of power in order to regain influence and confront capital. Drawing on two decades of research and organising experience, Holgate examines the structural inertia of today's unions from a range of perspectives: from strategic choice, leadership and union democracy to politics, tactics and the agency afforded to rank-and-file members. In the midst of a neoliberal era of economic crisis and political upheaval, the labour movement stands at a crossroads.
Union membership is on the rise, but the 'turn to organising' has largely failed to translate into meaningful gains for workers. There is considerable discussion about the lack of collectivism among workers due to casualisation, gig work and precarity, yet these conditions were standard in the UK when workers built the foundations of the 19th-century trade union movement.
Drawing on history and case studies of unions developing and using power effectively, this book offers strategies for moving beyond the pessimism that prevails in much of today's union movement. By placing power analysis back at the heart of workers' struggle, Holgate shows us that transformational change is not only possible, but within reach.
Media reviews
A must-read - by a top-class scholar, union educator and activist, and written with exceptional clarity. Readers will come away with a deeper understanding of the world and with the tools to change it'
-- John Kelly, Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations at Birkbeck College University of London
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Jane Holgate is a brilliant thinker. By centering her thesis on power, this book contributes to our understanding of what strategies and mechanisms enable workers to stand a chance at achieving justice. Her analysis, and the book's timing, is urgent.
--Jane McAlevey is an organizer, scholar and author of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age.
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'Part history text, part employment relations research; Jane Holgate's book critiques decades of union renewal strategies in the UK and questions assumptions from both the left and right over how to regain collective power rather than just recruit new members'
-- Dave Smith is a blacklisted construction worker and co-author of 'Blacklisted: The Secret War Between Big Business and Union Activists' (New Internationalist, 2016)
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'A brilliant treatise on how to think about worker power in the context of sweeping structural change. It is well past time for labour scholars to return to this fundamental question and Jane Holgate has made an indispensable contribution to the canon'
-- Janice Fine, Professor of Labour Studies and Employment Relations, Rutgers University and Director of Research and Strategy at the Centre on Innovation in Worker Organisation
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'An excellent review of the leaps forward and setbacks for workers and their unions, and an invaluable read for Jane Holgate's astute analyses. But that's not what the book is about. It is about power. Power for workers, which is the reason for organising, and which is too often forgotten in the daily struggle. We can continue on the current path to oblivion, with unions becoming little more than legacy politicians, or remember our roots and aggressively organise in new ways with workers in an evolving economy'
-- Wade Rathke, founder and Chief Organiser of ACORN International
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'In examining the problems that we have to face to rebuild the movement, this analysis of power, who has it and how to build it, is a must-read for aspiring activists. An essential book for those who are committed to the idea that trade unionism is a vehicle through which we can organise to delivering transformative change for all workers'
-- Wilf Sullivan, Race Equality Officer for the Trades Union Congress (TUC)
Research into union and community organsing
I joined the Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change CERIC and the Work and Employment Relations Division at the University of Leeds in October 2010, moving from the Working Lives Research Institute at London Metropolitan University where managed a number of research projects on work and employment, particularly looking at migrant workers.
My research interests include trade unions and the development of organising and recruitment strategies, particularly as they relate to under-represented groups in the union movement; gender and industrial relations; the labour market position of migrants and black and minority ethnic groups; new geographies of labour and the politics of intersectionality (race, class, gender, etc).
After seven years of working in the university sector in publications and multi-media I completed a part-time MA in Labour and Trade Union Studies at the University of North London (now merged into London Metropolitan University) and then went on to complete my doctoral research which was funded by the ESRC and the Trades Union Congress on Organising black and minority ethnic workers; trade union strategies for recruitment and inclusion at Queen Mary, University of London.
Following this I was awarded an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at Queen Mary, University of London. I have also held a number of positions in the trade union movement as a branch secretary, regional council delegate and secretary of Hackney Trades Union Council. I have worked closely on research projects with a number of unions including the GMB, TGWU, CWU, Bectu, Usdaw and the Trades Union Congress.
I was awarded an ESRC grant for a research project starting in 2011 entitled Broad-based community alliances: a comparative study of London and Sydney.My research interests include trade unions and the development of organising and recruitment strategies, particularly as they relate to under-represented groups in the union movement; gender and industrial relations; the labour market position of migrants and black and minority ethnic groups; new geographies of labour and the politics of intersectionality (race, class, gender, etc).
My research is fundamentally concerned with issues of inequality and vulnerability at work. I have developed three strands of research in relations to this. The first strand has considered the position of black and minority ethnic workers and migrant workers in the labour market and particularly the challenges of organised labour in organising, recruiting and including these workers within their organisations. This was the focus of my ESRC case studentship PhD and led to a number of further research projects including Nuffield funded study into the TUCs Organising Academy. A second strand of my research is around equalities and what affect this has upon different groups of workers in the labour market. In a 2-year EU funded project on black and minority ethnic workers in Londons audio-visual industries I looked at issues of equality in this sector and the ways in which minority ethnic graduates faced difficulties in gaining access to work in these industries. This was followed by a ESRC grant to look at how different minority ethnic groups dealt with problems at work. This 3 year project entitled Influences of identity, community and social networks on ethnic minority representation at work and looked at 3 minority ethnic groups in London (Kurds in Hackney, Black Caribbeans in Lambeth and south Asian workers in Ealing). A third area of research work has been around the concept of intersectionality and the way that different forms on inequality are interimbricated.
