‘You couldn’t have a heart and want to strike’: Mobilising workers in England’s social care sector

Abstract

This article uses John Kelly’s mobilisation framework, with its foundational concept of injustice, to explore workers’ propensity towards unionism in England’s outsourced social care sector. Drawing on 60 interviews with union organisers and officers, care workers, support workers and care company managers, this research highlights the difficulties of union organising in the sector and explores theorisations of mobilising. The research contends that for mobilisation theory to provide insight into relationships between work and unionism, varieties of injustice and collectivism need to be contextualised. Paid care provision generates both employment-related injustices and care-related injustices, which lead to divergent collective identities and attitudes towards unions. An absence of a coherent entity for workers to attach blame to – within a context where private providers frequently remain reliant on state funding levels – affects whether injustice and collectivism progress to mobilisation and unionisation.

Guilt, care, and the ideal worker: Comparing guilt among working carers and care workers

“…The former viewed their care responsibilities as less significant than other issues that unions might be focused on, while the latter were cautious of negatively affecting the care they provided through industrial actions. This perspective of care workers on unions (analyzed in relation to mobilization in Whitfield, 2022) corresponds to other research (Huget, 2020) and reflects low levels of union membership across the social care sector (Baines & Cunningham, 2015; Hayes & Moore, 2017).…”

Social movement unionism in Spain's feminized precarious service sector: Criticism, cooperation and competition

“…On another note, unions should invest more in the endeavour of ‘linking economic with social injustice and going beyond class‐based and bread‐and‐butter issues’ (Tapia et al., 2018, p. 199), especially when dealing with precarious, highly feminized and significantly migrant occupations, such as domestic work (Agarwala and Saha, 2018; Bernardino‐Costa, 2014; Cherubini et al., 2020; Fulladosa, 2015; Jiang and Korczynski, 2016), domiciliary/residential care (Whitfield, 2022) and hotel housekeeping (Andersen, 2020; Cañada, 2018b; Iannuzzi and Sacchetto, 2022), where interlocking axes of discrimination related to class, gender and migration are more blatant. Our results show that gender‐related grievances play a central role in Las Kellys’ criticism of major unions: the sexist culture within unions tends to devalue and marginalize feminized occupations (usually care jobs), thus inhibiting union involvement and reinforcing the problems of these workers.…”

“…To do so, we adopt an actor‐centred multi‐level analysis (Alberti and Però, 2018; Tapia and Alberti, 2019) that encompasses the socio‐political and industrial relations context (macro), social movement practice (meso) and precarious workers’ subjective experiences (micro). We, therefore, examine the views and practices of precarious workers within their institutional and socio‐political contexts (Atzeni, 2016, 2021; Nowak, 2021; Rizzo and Atzeni, 2020), covering the long‐term context of organizing rather than specific moments of mobilization (Holgate et al., 2018), which allows us to better understand the factors that constrain organization and unionization (Whitfield, 2022). And third, we bridge the research on industrial relations and on social movements (Diani, 2018; Tapia et al., 2018) by adopting a relational framework that looks at both union and non‐union actors as key actors for union renewal (Smith, 2022).…”

Review of periodical literature for 2022: (vi) post‐1945

“…The act reduced the probability of co‐residential informal caregiving on the extensive and intensive margins while also impacting caregivers’ labour supply decisions, especially for men. Whitfield examines why it has been difficult for unions to form in the modern outsourced social care sector. They argue that injustices such as wage stagnation, short‐term contracts, and lack of appreciation are not fully recognized as exploitative because of the altruistic nature of the work.…”