Union recognition in Asian workplaces: springboard to further organising and recognition campaigns?

With few exceptions (e.g. Wrench and Virdee 1996; Virdee 2000), research on the union organisation of black and minority ethnic (BME) workers and migrant workers in Britain has been absent. Despite much research into union renewal and union organising methods, this absence is also marked in the US (see Milkman 1998; Mitchell 1996; Savage 1998). While this limited number of studies are welcome additions to the literature on the process of unionisation of BME and migrant workers, there is little understanding of what happens to worker organisation post-recognition, or after first contracts are signed. This chapter attempts to help bridge this gap by exploring post-recognition outcomes in five factories in west London, comprising workers from the large well-established Asian communities1 in this part of the capital. It explores the process by which collective identity developed among this group of workers, drawing on a key aspect of mobilisation theory, that of social identification (Kelly 1998). In outlining the process by which individuals move from a sense of injustice to developing a collective interest, Kelly (1998) notes that workers first need someone to blame (attribution), a sense of ‘we’ defined in opposition to ‘them’ (social identification) and, in order to combine these into collective interest, leadership. Central to each recognition campaign was the construction of identity based around an ‘Asian community’. One social theorist who has considered the use of cultural networks and resources in political formation notes that collective mobilisation through a ‘politics of identification’ is possible through commonalities of experiences, be these ‘race’, gender, class, caste or religion (Brah 1996). Although workers in this study broadly identified themselves as part of the diverse Asian community in London, their ‘politics of identification’ was clearly expressed in class terms when organising for union recognition. The fracturing of community along class lines was evident as workers made clear distinctions about their relative economic position and that of Asian managers and bosses who sought to undermine their attempts at unionisation.