Union Voices: Tactics and Tensions in UK Organizing by Melanie Simms, Jane Holgate, and Edmund Heery (review)

The 1990s was an optimistic period for organized labour in the United States and the United Kingdom as unions emerged from a decade long assault by Reaganism and Thatcherism. By the mid-1990s, union membership in the UK was just over seven million workers, down from thirteen million in 1979. (18) While Clinton and Blair hardly lent a helping hand to lift labour off the ground, they did perhaps remove the state’s heavy boot from union backs. The dramatic decline of union membership in the UK began to level off and union density stabilized in the US. New organizing practices were being experimented with by unions that eventually found their way into the UK.

Melanie Simms, Jane Holgate, and Edmund Heery document the “organizing turn” in Union Voices: Tactics and Tensions in UK Organizing. The book contains well over a decade of intensive research on union organizing strategy, campaigns, and activist development that is simply unparalleled. The research begins in the late 1990s when labour leaders realized that UK unions were struggling and the “partnership” model had failed. As a result the Trades Union Congress (tuc, a UK central labour body) developed the Organizing Academy (oa) based on similar projects in the US and Australia. Through original survey and interview data, the researchers not only provide an account of the oa’s development but also its impact on leadership development, union culture, and campaign success. As a result, they are able to provide an evaluation (perhaps less than optimistic) of organizing in the UK.

The book is an extremely focused piece. Building from the experience of the oa and its ripple effects across UK unions and campaigns over a decade allows for deep empirical reflection on union organizing and renewal efforts. However, the very focus on organizing and union renewal/revitalization as conceptual frameworks also presents the authors with significant theoretical challenges. The authors attempt to address many of these conceptual problems in the first chapter which enters debates on union decline and renewal. For scholars engaged in some of these debates, the chapter will seem very familiar as the problems of binary models (e.g., organizing versus servicing, business versus social unionism, bottom-up versus top-down organizing) and what actually constitutes “renewal” (i.e., increased recruitment versus democratic reform) are presented. Many these early binaries have long been discounted by scholars, including the authors themselves. For example, a major argument throughout the book is the need for some coordination or “managed activism” (31) of union campaigns rather than dependence on spontaneous workplace action. If some of the theoretical issues now read as dated, it must be kept in mind that the research project itself is a long study grounded in a theoretical framework that emerged in the late 1990s. My other minor issue with this chapter is the explanation of the rise of organizing in the US. The authors’ strong assertion that US organizing in the 1980s and 1990s can be linked to iww ideology requires more qualification. A similar claim could be made to the influence of community organizers inspired by Saul Alinsky, or anti-war organizers from the New Left that found their way into union leadership positions. The US turn to organizing is simply too overdetermined to be reduced to one group’s political influence.

Perhaps it is my own disciplinary bias, but welcomed geographical insights are found consistently throughout the book. The authors have an implicit (if not explicit) geographical sensibility, which can perhaps be credited to their exposure to the work of Jane Wills among others. The second chapter provides a useful account of how the “organizing turn” travelled to the UK (via the US and Australia). The international lineage is traced with special attention to how the UK national labour regulation regime reshaped organizing to the local context. Specifically, the practice of voluntary recognition by less hostile UK employers versus the statutory recognition (i.e., certification votes...