No Shortcuts (2016) and a recent UCU demonstration in Manchester.

Lowering expectations: misrepresentations of McAlevey

US author and activist Jane McAlevey has become one of the most influential voices in Britain on the question of how to organise at work. Her online training events attract thousands. Many activists have been inspired and guided by her books. But sections of the union bureaucracy are now co-opting her terminology to justify inaction and anti-democratic methods. Ian Allinson looks at her work and how it is being misrepresented.

Part of the reason for Jane McAlevey’s popularity and influence is the contrast between her model and most members’ experience of trade unionism. Instead of workers being passive customers of union services, they are participants in disruptive collective action. Out go deals cut behind members’ backs, and in come negotiations involving every worker – often a hundred or more at a time. Token ‘demonstration strikes’[1] for minor gains take second place to powerful action to achieve life-changing victories. Business unionism (partnership with employers) is replaced by class struggle. Workers frustrated with weak and disorganised unions love her systematic approach to building real power.

Another factor in McAlevey’s growing influence has been her willingness to provide organising training to activists for free, alongside training she provides to unions for a fee. Indeed, rs21 hosted training events with her back in 2015. But this really took off when she started offering training online. Events run by the Democratic Socialists of America and the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Foundation) have attracted thousands around the world, with interpretation into multiple languages. Her ‘strike school’ was designed so that attendees could use the materials to replicate the training themselves.

Jane McAlevey has published four books (and much more). Raising Expectations and Raising Hell: My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement[2] from 2014 is an account of her experiences as a paid union organiser. Recounting various campaigns, it reads like a thriller and presents a vision of trade unionism with broad social goals and centred on high participation and mass collective action. In the 2016 No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age[3] she uses a series of case studies of campaigns she wasn’t directly involved in to make the case for her organising model in more detail. A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing & the Fight for Democracy[4] from 2019 makes the case for trade unionism to young workers. Her most recent work Turning the Tables: Participation and Power in Negotiations[5]is available as a free download from the publisher.

All her books make a powerful case for organising at work being indispensable for social change, without falling into the trap of counterposing workplace and community issues or action. The first two books sometimes read like impassioned pleas to union leaders to abandon failed approaches, while the third book feeling more aimed at young workers inspired by Bernie Sanders. Despite this, there is much more of value in Raising Expectations and No Shortcuts.

For an overview of McAlevey’s model, you can watch the interview with her that I did at a book launch for No Shortcuts. One of her strengths has been distilling down her model to a number of key concepts, which is great for training and helps give workers confidence. A downside to this is that it can make organising appear like strictly following a recipe, despite the fact that she herself describes it as a craft that has to be learnt through experience. The successful case studies in No Shortcuts don’t all involve people following her methods. What their leaders had in common is a faith in the potential of working-class people and a commitment to raising their self-activity.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ best way to organise, but there are approaches that reliably fail and others that often work. McAlevey’s books are a rich source of ideas and inspiration, best used alongside developing your own networks for advice and support and learning from your own experience.

Bureaucracy and rank-and-file

McAlevey’s earlier work paid little attention to the question of union democracy, an issue that she later took care to address. For example, in A Collective Bargain she argues that where democratic mechanisms exist, they should be safeguarded, and also says that

workers are building new democratic unions and also reforming do-nothing or corrupt unions and making them great again. Unions are institutions. If the best workers run them, they are great; if the best workers take a back seat and decide to let “someone else” worry about the union, well, then the union will become a lot less than it should be, and a lot less than is needed.

Fighting to make our unions as democratic as possible helps put workers in control of them, but it can’t do so fully because of the inbuilt limitations of unions and the role of their paid apparatus. Though Raising Expectations rails against obstruction from paid officers of the union she was working for and their relentless pursuit of a failed model of trade unionism, she didn’t explore any of the structural reasons for conflict between rank-and-file union members and the union apparatus. McAlevey started to think about this relationship more following the West Virginia teachers’ strike but in subsequent discussions she still saw conflict between members and the union bureaucracy as avoidable, if unions adopted approaches such as open and big bargaining (concepts she explains in in Turning the Tables).

It is not surprising that rank-and-filism would be a gap in McAlevey’s work – after all, her experience is as a paid union organiser rather than a workplace militant. And in the campaigns she has worked on, it is likely that radical workers would often find themselves on the same side as her against obstruction from more conservative elements of the bureaucracy. The union bureaucracy is not a monolith.

The fact that McAlevey has little to say about conflict between union members and their paid officers has made it easier for some paid officers and right-wing elements in unions to cherry-pick what they like from her model, often misrepresent it, and use it to provide a radical cover for inaction or side-lining troublesome activists. I have particularly heard examples of this from within the University and Colleges Union (UCU) and National Education Union (NEU).

This experience is leading some on the left to base their critiques of McAlevey on the right’s misrepresentations of her model, leading them to miss some of the value in it and making it hard to synthesise her work with a genuine rank-and-file approach. Recent examples of this include Jane Hardy’s generally excellent Nothing to Lose But Our Chains: Work and Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Britain[6] and Paul Brook’s recent article Jane McAlevey’s organising model: is it a rank and file strategy? Looking at some of McAlevey’s ideas and how they are being misrepresented not only helps activists avoid discarding babies with bathwater, but helps workers push back against paid officials and right-wingers seeking to use her credibility to justify their own misdeeds.

Brook’s article is useful because it identifies which of McAlevey’s ideas are being widely used against activists, even though it has a misleading title (who suggests her model is a rank-and-file strategy?) and amplifies rather than challenges the right’s misrepresentations of them.

Organic worker leaders

In McAlevey’s early work, including No Shortcuts, she used the term ‘organic worker leader’ to describe the most trusted and respected worker in a group. More recently, including in A Collective Bargain, she has used the term ‘natural leader’. In their book The social organisation of strikes, Eric Batstone, Ian Boraston and Stephen Frenkel[7] used the term ‘opinion leader’ for a similar concept. I prefer the term ‘influential worker’ as it doesn’t carry the same connotations of charisma or hierarchy and is more understandable.

McAlevey explains in A Collective Bargain:

natural leaders already exist among workers, long before organizers or activists get involved. These natural, or organic, leaders have no title, but they are people whom other workers trust, whom they turn to for help when they aren’t sure how to get something done

Organic leaders are the workers closest to the practical definition of a leader: ‘someone with followers’. They have the potential to be more effective at persuading workmates to take action than any activist or paid union employee, no matter how articulate or great a strategic genius those might be.

McAlevey’s model doesn’t, as Brook claims, say that ‘the selection of workplace “organic leaders” should be done by professional organising officials on the union staff’. On the contrary, she argues that anyone organising – whether paid union staff or an activist – needs to learn how to correctly identify the organic leaders in a process she calls ‘leader ID’. Brook also mischaracterises McAlevey’s view as ‘The role of workers is merely to advise on potential candidates’ almost immediately after quoting her own, rather different, explanation:

To connect to rank and file dynamics in the workplace, union organisers use a mechanism called “organic leader identification”, in which they analyse the workers’ pre-existing social groups. This is done among the workers and in conversation with them, not apart from them. Workers themselves identify their organic leaders, who become the primary focus for full-time organisers. If these leaders are successfully recruited, they are taught the organisers’ techniques, so they can recruit supporters on the shop floor, where outside organisers cannot go.

While Brook is right to point out that this is written from the point of view of a paid organiser (her own), he repeatedly makes unsubstantiated assertions such as ‘McAlevey argues that only professional organisers can undertake “organic leader identification” and recruitment’ despite the mass of evidence to the contrary. It is not, as Brook implies, anti-democratic to target particular workers and try to recruit them to take on roles. If members have elected a group of old white men as their reps, few would claim it was inappropriate to find some good female, black or young members and make extra efforts to win them over to playing a role. Many people involved in union organising have their own versions of leader ID. Labor Notes, the US-based rank-and-file network, has a training exercise on identifying and recruiting leaders. It’s no more inappropriate to find out who workers trust and respect and put extra effort into getting them on board.

Fundamentally, democracy is about power, not just formal elections (important though they are). To challenge the power of the employer we need a strong union at workplace level, and that is very hard to build without the active participation of organic leaders. Without workplace organisation that can stand up to the employer, members are left dependent on the union apparatus for support. Leader ID increases democracy by giving workers more power in relationship to both the employer and the union apparatus beyond the workplace.

It’s fairly clear where the misinterpretation of leader ID comes from. McAlevey emphasises organic leaders and contrasts this with the centrality of the activist in what she calls ‘mobilising’ models. Unsurprisingly, some have seized on this to try to side-line activists, particularly those who challenge those in authority. But this is not at all what McAlevey argues for. She’s not saying that activists have no role, she’s saying that they can be more effective by acting as organisers, including by identifying the organic leaders informally chosen by their workmates. Far from saying this is the role of paid union staff alone, she has trained tens of thousands of workers in leader ID.

Leaders, activists and positions

McAlevey also contrasts the role of organic leaders and activists/organisers with that of ‘position holders’. These occupy elected or unelected positions in unions and may control or act as gatekeepers to vital union resources irrespective of their ability or commitment. Their capabilities often have little bearing on the weight workers attach to what they say or do – at least until workers have come into conflict with them. As the saying goes, ‘those who do not move do not notice their chains.’

Some activists can also feel threatened by a focus on organic leaders if they derive status from other types of leadership. Back in the 2018 UCU strike I wrote about the different uses of the word leader in the movement. Plenty of left-wing activists are position holders. The decline of the workers’ movement has reduced competition for both elected and unelected positions in union structures. It’s unlikely that I would have been elected to the Amicus[8] and Unite Executive Committees several times, for instance, if there had been plenty of capable and less radical candidates. And let’s be honest – not all position holders with formally left-wing politics do a great job.

There are also many on the left who make claims to leadership based on their politics. As Trotsky put it, ‘to lead is to foresee’. We need as many workers with a high level of political education in our movement as we can get. But we all know that there are plenty of smart and knowledgeable people who few workers listen to. If good ideas were sufficient then politics wouldn’t be dominated by the likes of Johnson and Starmer.

Brook is right that left-right divisions within unions are less fundamental than those between rank-and-file members and the ‘bureaucracy’ of paid union officers. But left-right divisions within the bureaucracy aren’t separate from those between rank-and-file members. The factional divisions in unions nearly always involve both paid officers and rank-and-file members, whether formally or informally. A genuine rank-and-file strategy requires a recognition that the division between employers and workers is the most fundamental of all, shaping conflict between the bureaucracy and rank-and-file and left-right conflicts within unions. It requires a recognition that rank-and-file power in relation to the bureaucracy is an echo of our power in relation to our employers. Far too much of the left pursues union positions as a shortcut and a substitute for building the workplace power which is the foundation for rank-and-file independence.

The best approach for activists isn’t to reject the organic worker leader model, but to embrace the idea that we need different sorts of people in our movement and that it will be strongest if we all play the roles that align best with our strengths. Activists certainly shouldn’t be accepting any suggestion, whether based on a misrepresentation of McAlevey’s ideas or not, that we defer to paid union officers who aren’t even in the workplace.

Structure tests

‘Structure tests’ are another important feature of McAlevey’s organising model. The structure being tested is the network of organic leaders being identified and won over by the campaign. Workers maintain charts listing all the workers, grouped together based on who has most contact with each other and showing (amongst other things) the organic leaders currently identified.

Whereas many campaigns broadcast their calls to action generally and see who responds, McAlevey argues for a more systematic approach, where workers in each group – ideally the organic leader if they are on board – speak directly to their workmates to ask them to take part in the action. Each worker’s participation is recorded on the charts with coloured marks.

The charts then clearly show the workers the level of participation in each area. The strengths and weaknesses of the campaign are clearly visible and next steps can be planned to strengthen the most important weak areas.

McAlevey argues that if the organic worker leaders have really been won to the campaign, they have little difficulty persuading the workmates who trust and respect them to take action. If the charts show that there has been low participation from a particular workgroup, it either means that the campaign hasn’t correctly identified the organic leader chosen by their workmates, or that they aren’t fully on board. So each action that is organised through the structure is used to test it and identify where to prioritise further work on leader ID or winning over organic leaders.

Some elements of the union bureaucracy have seized on the idea of structure tests to justify long-established tactics to delay or prevent workers taking action. A common example of this is insisting on a ‘consultative ballot’ before the already protracted and bureaucratic process of a statutory industrial action ballot. Consultative ballots are a tactic, and there can be circumstances where they are helpful. But requiring one can often squander momentum or even delay action until the outcome the employer wanted has become a fait accompli.

Crucially, they are almost never good structure tests in the McAlevey sense. When did you hear of a consultative ballot organised through a network of organic leaders rather than by post or email? Or of workers discussing charts listing which members voted in order to plan how to strengthen their organisation?

When the right are misrepresenting McAlevey’s ideas to justify bureaucratic delays, the left should be challenging them, not reinforcing their arguments. Brook gives no evidence to support his claim that ‘McAlevey’s model prescribes a rigid series of choreographed “structure tests”’. On the contrary, she actually argues that ‘life is a structure test’ and encourages creativity in forms of collective action. Brook himself explains that ‘McAlevey’s examples of structure tests in the US run from workers signing public petitions supporting the union at an early stage of a campaign through to disruptive, lunchtime direct action protests in the lead up to a mass strike’.

Brook also misunderstands what McAlevey means by power-structure analysis (PSA), which is not mapping workplaces and structure tests. Her PSA comprises two processes. The first involves workers identifying and collectively discussing the connections they have beyond their workplace – from political links to membership of sports clubs or religious congregations. The second is to look at different organisations and people, their influence over the issue being campaigned over, and their attitudes to it. The two parts of the analysis are used to plan how to shift attitudes, increase the influence of allies and reduce that of opponents.

Supermajorities

Brook is right that McAlevey puts a heavy emphasis on supermajority (i.e. much more than 50%) participation, and that this is particularly important given the legal framework in the USA. But she also makes a more general argument for supermajority action that it is far more powerful. It is not just that you often need a supermajority to completely stop production, to exert decisive power and win big. I would add that the impact of united action on workers themselves is often qualitatively different – it makes the class division between employer and workers clear, rather than employers and the media being able to focus on divisions between workers. It enables the isolation of any scabs. Solid action makes support from the wider community far easier to secure.

Socialists understand the potential of the working class to change through struggle. As Marx put it, this is how we rid ourselves of the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. We don’t accept that a worker voting Tory or failing to join a union is a permanent state of affairs. Workers can and do change their minds through the experience of struggle, particularly when there are socialists around to help them think through the implications of their experiences. McAlevey describes winning over workers to a campaign as helping them work out that collective action is the only way to achieve outcomes that are important to them. We should not assume, as Brook’s article does, that we can’t win workers, including organic leaders, to militant action.

The principle that socialists should aim at united (i.e. supermajority) working-class action doesn’t mean we refuse to act until we can deliver it. Brook is right that action by a ‘militant minority’ can help build something bigger. But we should never be satisfied with being a minority. We should use minority action to build for bigger action. We don’t counterpose the two.

UCU General Secretary Jo Grady recently incensed activists with a message to branch officers and reps in advance of conferences that will decide next steps in the Four Fights and USS pension disputes. She argued against further industrial action until 2023 in order to have more time to build ‘the levels of member engagement and militancy we need to win over the next 12-18 months’. This is a fine example of counterposing action to systematic organising to oppose action. Rather than counterposing them and opposing systematic organising, the left should be championing both. It is through action that we build organisation and power, and we can be more successful at doing so if we are systematic about it.

Unions in Britain are often very reactive. We are often forced into defensive fights in circumstances not of our choosing. In this situation speed is often of the essence and we can often win something and build our strength, even when we can’t deliver supermajority action. But we should be aiming to get off the back foot and be more proactive. Sometimes we have more time to plan and prepare for a fight and we should take those opportunities.

Brook assumes that because McAlevey argues for a systematic approach to building power, she opposes taking action in circumstances where the opportunity to do that is denied. He gives no examples of McAlevey opposing action simply because a supermajority hasn’t been built. Indeed, he has to acknowledge her support for all the examples of explosive and less prepared action he gives. Even if there are such examples, this would be a reason to disagree with her about it, not abandon the goal of united action. My own experience of seeking her advice when fighting from a minority position was of advice on strengthening our position, never discouragement from taking action.

Whether to fight hard immediately, slowly escalate, or spend time preparing first is a tactical judgement, not a matter of principle. It is not always more radical to charge over the top at the first opportunity. In the July days of the Russian revolution in 1917, Lenin had to argue against insurrection in St Petersburg in favour of allowing the revolution to develop further across the rest of Russia to avoid isolation and defeat. To decide our tactics we have to look at the concrete situation – including the strength and organisation of each side, what is at stake, the timescales of the issues, the mood of the workers, momentum, resources, the preparations of employers and so on.

This is an example of where McAlevey’s tendency in her first two books to make an argument to union leaderships for a shift in strategy rather than to workers for what we should do has sown confusion. It’s fair enough to argue that unions should take a strategic approach to deploying resources to get the best results. But that’s quite different to arguing against action by workers who are under attack. It has been good to see her focus shift with the rise of Bernie Sanders and the growth of unionisation and strike movements in the USA often involving workers radicalised by that.

More than one way to let us down

It’s not the case that delaying action is the only way the union bureaucracy undermines workers. Health unions recently balloted members on their pitiful pay offer without any plan to win or serious campaigns – a missed opportunity which accelerates the erosion of our NHS. Sometimes unions arrange a strike ballot and back workers going out, without helping them to produce a credible plan to win or supporting them to implement it. This is at least as damaging as delays. It can lead to unnecessarily long and bitter disputes that settle for less than their potential.

All too often the same paid officers who delay action also fail to use the time to strengthen workers’ position. Rank-and-file workers shouldn’t be choosing between the devil and the deep blue sea – we need both systematic organising and prompt action when appropriate.

Spontaneity

All struggles have leaders – someone who took an initiative and persuaded others to join them. When we describe a struggle as spontaneous, we mean that we don’t know who those leaders were or what they did.

McAlevey isn’t convinced by the argument that strikes and unionisation (like other forms of revolt) come in waves. In my opinion these are partly the result of shared circumstances leading to similar responses, and partly due to the ‘demonstration effect’. The cost-of-living crisis, environmental breakdown and war make resistance of all kinds more likely, especially after decades of accumulated grievances. A high-profile win by a group of workers inspires others to follow suit. We are already seeing workers across the world, not just in the USA, inspired by the success of the Amazon Labor Union in New York.

When you are in the midst of a wave of strikes and unionisation, your efforts are cutting with the grain. I remember a pensioner in my union branch telling me about how his workplace unionised in the early 1970s. People saw prices rising and workers winning strikes in other workplaces, and wanted to join. Far from focusing on recruitment, they had to allocate activists to processing new membership forms. In such periods, the need for systematic organising is far less – it’s likely that the organic leaders will be supportive anyway and will be elected by their workmates as reps. Sadly Britain has not seen a wave of unionisation and strikes for nearly half a century. That means that those of us who want to make the next wave as likely as possible, and maximise its chances of success, need to pay attention to the craft of organising. Raising the flag and hoping people will come is just not good enough in 2022.

The role of the left

Left activists have a crucial part to play in building effective organisation and resistance at work. There will never be enough paid organisers to turn the tide, even if their efforts were not hampered by being accountable upwards through the union’s apparatus rather than to the workers they are attempting to organise. Brook highlights other useful functions that left activists can play:

The most apparent difference that left-wing shop stewards and activists make is that they carry into the workplace a distinctive view of the antagonistic nature of worker-management relations, the merits of industrial action and how to build workplace organisation. In short, they prepare workers with a different ideological worldview by injecting politics into the workplace. This is especially so if they are part of a network of workers belonging to a socialist organisation that coordinates its members’ workplace activities

…

Left-wing workers also stand for election to their local, regional and national union leaderships, with the support of rank and file networks, on a platform of militant, politicised workplace struggle. There they pursue a strategy that is commonly characterised as “radical political unionism”. This is an approach based on repeated workplace mobilisations and strikes underpinned by clear ideological opposition to employers, government and the capitalist market. This includes supporting radical polices that fundamentally challenge exploitation, oppression, inequality, nationalism and imperialism.

However, Brook is wrong to see the position of left activists as threatened by an organising model that seeks to identify organic leaders.

Most union structures are under-populated, with vacancies, individuals occupying multiple positions, and the people in them disproportionately more ‘male, pale and stale’ than the workers they represent. Many ‘position holders’ are pretty ineffective too. In one union, organisers refer to developing new activists as ‘project asteroid’ – referring to the one that killed off the dinosaurs.

There are many examples of paid organisers and officers trying to side-line established activists or coach more malleable workers to stand against them in elections. We should welcome the encouragement of more activists and candidates for union office and support the renewal of the union activist base, but oppose the interference of paid officers and organisers in union democracy.

It is a mistake to see the attacks on radical activists as inherent in McAlevey’s organising model. Workers, often from a left background, have attended her courses and used her books for reading groups to learn how to build power on their own initiative. I know workers who have used her ideas to unionise their workplaces without any involvement of paid organisers.

Alongside Brook’s misunderstanding of McAlevey’s approach to organic leaders is a misunderstanding of her view of left activists. She doesn’t argue for us to be side-lined. She argues for us to learn the skills of organising and use them in our workplaces. Getting to the bottom of this requires us to return to the question of leadership.

There is a conflict between a view of a leader as ‘someone with followers’ and as ‘someone with good ideas’. Regrettably, we know that much of the time there is little overlap between these groups. That is something we aim to change through the process of struggle, organising, campaigning and discussion. We want to see a convergence between a majority of the working class and the best ideas about how to defeat employers, the state, and the destructive and oppressive capitalist system.

There are individuals and organisations on the left who are convinced they have the best ideas, and behave as though they are the leaders of the working class, losing sight of their lack of followers. One of McAlevey’s key arguments is that while left activists often bring high levels of commitment, ideas, knowledge of history and organisational networks, those don’t automatically mean that we are the workers who have the most influence with every worker in our workplaces. What’s more, we typically lack the time and access to have detailed 1-1 discussions with every worker.

We can learn the skill of identifying the most influential workers in each group, learn how to win them over and invest time in doing so, and share our political and historical knowledge. McAlevey argues that this is far more effective than ‘shortcuts’ such as ignoring those workers who don’t agree with us, relying on broadcast messages rather than 1-1 conversations, or spending our time talking to workers randomly.

A left with a genuine commitment to a rank-and-file strategy prioritises building workers’ participation and power over holding onto positions. The over-representation of the left in union structures is a reflection of the weakness of the rank-and-file, not of our genius. We should contest positions where that helps us build resistance and rank-and-file power, but we should never oppose increased participation for the sake of holding on to office.

Conclusion

McAlevey’s work has contributed to a revived interest in organising at work on the left and inspired many to have a go. It includes many valuable insights, but has some weaknesses including an important gap in relation to the relationship between the rank-and-file and the union apparatus. This has enabled elements of the union bureaucracy and the right in unions to misuse her language and concepts to oppose action by counterposing systematic organising to action.

Rather than conceding ground to the right by accepting their narrative, the left should reclaim what is valuable in McAlevey’s model and expose its misuse. We should push for both systematic organising and action.

The left has a vital role to play in rebuilding working-class power. We do that best not by dismissing McAlevey’s ideas, but by learning the craft of organising from her and others and combining it with socialist and rank-and-file politics and organisation. We need a constructive critique of her work rather than setting up imaginary positions to knock down.

Wins by workers at Amazon and Starbucks in the USA have hit the headlines. Many of those inspired by Corbynism or drawn into action against the climate crisis are recognising the importance of organising at work for transforming a world in crisis. The left needs to rise to the challenge.

Ian Allinson is the author of Workers Can Win! A guide to organising at work, due out from Pluto Press in October 2022. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience organising at work, the book combines practical techniques with an analysis of the theory and politics of organising and unions. It offers insight into tried and tested methods for effective organising. It deals with tactics and strategies, and addresses some of the roots of conflict, common problems with unions and management resistance to worker organising.

References

[1] Richard Hyman, Strikes, 4th edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989).

[2] Jane McAlevey, Raising Expectations and Raising Hell: My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement (London: Verso, 2014).

[3] Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[4] Jane McAlevey, A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy, First edition (New York: Ecco, 2019).

[5] Jane McAlevey, Turning the Tables: Participation and Power in Negotiations (Berkeley: UC Berkeley Labor Center, 2021).

[6] Jane Hardy, Nothing to Lose But Our Chains Work and Resistance in Twenty-First-Century Britain. (London: Pluto Press, 2021).

[7] Eric Batstone, Ian Boraston, and Stephen Frenkel, The Social Organization of Strikes, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).

[8] One of the unions that merged to form Unite in 2007.