An OUR Walmart demonstration in 2011 outside the Walmart Home Office in Bentonville, Ark. Marc F. Henning/OUR Walmart/Flickr. CC (by-nc)
Across Europe trade union strength is diminishing. In many countries union membership is falling. Even where membership and collective bargaining appear robust this is mainly due to legal supports rather than unions’ retaining structural power. Sectoral agreements are being hollowed out and the problem for unions is structural. Union power in Western Europe was at its height in the 1960s – a period marked by large-scale industrial production and Keynesian economic policy. Since the 1970s new information, communication and transportation technologies have enabled networked forms of production, distribution and finance to develop in which product markets, corporate ownership and labour process are internationalised. In combination, these processes seriously undermine the possibility for effective formal collective bargaining in many sectors.
If unions in the twenty-first century are to remain relevant, they must embrace what is an ever more connected and networked world. The Fight for 15 movement in the United States provides an illuminating example of some ways in which the internet can benefit organised labour. Below I discuss three lessons which UK trade unions should take from the early stages of the low-wage worker movement which shaped the ‘Fight for $15 an hour’. This mobilisation can be traced to the founding of the Organisation United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart). OUR Walmart was founded as an independent worker association in 2011 by the United Food and Commercial Workers’ (UFCW) union, a union with a broad membership of more than 1.3 million across the retail, food processing and meat packing industries. This article draws on six weeks spent participating in the campaign in California and 43 interviews with workers and union officials (for a more academic account of this work see ‘Networks of injustice and worker mobilisation at Walmart’ in Industrial Relations Journal).
