Creative destructor / destructive creator: agency workers as threatening moles undermining unionism or welcome agents of change in Irish and Norwegian unions?

Ann Cecilie Bergene, Arbeidsforskningsinstituttet/Work Research Institute, Oslo

Draft, please do not cite Introduction According to Müller-Jentsch (ref. Hyman 1992) unions faced three crises during the 1980s, one of interest aggregation, one of employee loyalty and one of representativeness. Although it can be argued that labour, as a political discourse as well as a movement, has been pushed on the defensive after the crisis of Fordism, unions are still important actors in the regulation of the labour markets. Unions may thus be regarded as a formative institutional presence, along with employers, their associations, and governments.

The Fordist model of socio-economic development rested on the articulation of productivity and wage increases, which meant that national-level negotiations between unions, employers’ associations and government were a key regulatory mechanism. As such a regulatory mechanism, unions were also pivotal in the generalisation of the so-called standard employment relationship (SER), and also the construction of welfare states. This legacy may act both as token of relevance and strength on the one hand, and, as we shall see in this paper, as an exclusionary practice on the other.

Union policies and strategies are not formulated in a vacuum, rather they must be analysed in relation to the socio-political context, and maybe most importantly in relation to the policies and strategies of the employers’ associations and the state. This is particularly important when drawing international comparisons, as this paper will do through analysing union strategies toward temporary agency work in Norway and Ireland.

The effect of precarious work in general on trade unionism is often seen as unequivocally destructive, and temporary agency work in particular is held partly responsible for the recent decline in trade union membership (Croucher and Brewster 1998). Among others, the presence of this new group of workers is regarded as undermining traditional forms of bargaining power (Doellgast et al. 2009). Furthermore, particularly young workers in precarious jobs can present major difficulties for unions, because their jobs are often found in highly competitive labour markets with high labour turnover and union opposition (Simms and Dean, 2014).

As argued by Kalleberg (2009), the emergence of precarious work warrants new strategies on the part of unions, lest their role be called into question. In particular, union strategies relying on sectoral organisation and premised on the SER, i.e. full-time permanent employment, might well prove insufficient in face of recent trends pointing towards increased labour market flexibility.

Standing (2011:1) argues that unions have responded to precarious work with an attempt to resurrect so-called “labourism”, or what Barchiesi (2011) refers to as “working class melancholy”. Both are conservative reflexes and the latter is defined as a struggle for “more stable jobs with long- term employment security and the benefit trappings that went with that”. However, according to Standing (2011), young demonstrators have shown no desire for returning to this model. Kalleberg (2009) similarly urges unions to become more aware of and appreciate new models of organising and mobilising workers, which could be more effective in representing precarious workers. This also forms an important background for this paper, and the choice of cases in this study. While unions in

1 Ireland have actively sought revitalisation and pursued organising strategies, Norwegian unions have not and still rely on the traditional “servicing model”.

The paper rests on research conducted as part of a four-year project financed by the Research Council of Norway entitled “The impact of temporary work agencies on the politics of work”. As part of the project we have conducted qualitative interviews with union officials and shops stewards in all three countries, and partaken as observers in public debates on precarious jobs, temporary work agencies and the European directive on temporary work agencies. The following analysis and discussion will seek to elicit answers to the following research questions:

• What structural differences across countries influence union strategies and union effectiveness at protecting and representing agency workers? • What are the internal and external facilitators and inhibitors of successful union strategies? • To what extent is the insider-outsider model reflected in union policies? Theoretical framework Gumbrell-McCormick (2011) shares the view that ’atypical’ and precarious employment, including temporary agency work, constitutes a major challenge to unions. Not only are ’atypical’ and precarious workers growing in numbers, and arguably increasingly becoming ’typical’, the understanding is that they are ”painfully difficult to unionize, if indeed unions have even made the attempt” (Hyman 2002:13). This is the point of departure for this paper.

According to Gumbrell-McCormick (2011:293), unions have made greater progress in addressing the concerns of atypical and precarious workers than really organising them, arguing that “they will have to make substantial changes to their structures, thinking and way of operating in order to be fully able to respond to the challenge of this growing form of work”.

When drawing comparisons, an important perspective in this regard is the institutional framework employed by Bengtsson (2013). This realisation necessitates an acknowledgement of how industrial relations are formed in specific historical and spatial contexts and that union strategies are not formulated in a vacuum. Unions enter into relations and conduct actions that define what they are (Scheuer 1986). External relations to employers and governments are defining through constituting unions as counterparts with certain expectations and obligations as such. A strong focus on building institutional power will entail nourishing such external relations in an effort to gain institutional recognition (Offe og Wiesenthal 1980, Scheuer 1986, Bergene 2010). What Dølvik (1997) terms ”logic of influence” means that unions will strive to have “as many as possible of its bargaining positions […] institutionalized and sanctioned by legal statutes”, while such positions were formerly secured by the members’ willingness to act (Offe & Wiesenthal 1980:107). This means that unions may develop into bureaucratized and professionalized organisations more or less independent of the will and activity of the members, implying what Offe and Wiesental (1980) term “juridification” of industrial relations. Such juridification entails that the unions themselves define the interests of those they represent in a process of legally constituted interest intermediation, whereby a conflict based on organization is gradually giving way to a conflict based on legal entitlements to participation in tripartite bodies. For unions, this means “the dissociation of representation and struggle”, which has profound consequences for internal union democracy, to which we shall return below.

However, it is equally important to bear in mind that unions are not sole products of their external environment either, an understanding that would be overtly deterministic. Unions may, in other words, conduct unilateral actions, independently the actions and decisions of external counterparts

2 (Scheuer 1986), such as industrial action. Such unilateral actions will be defining in another sense, through building the image and confidence of the union as an organisation and constituting it as an independent agent.

In other words, while there are several external factors that influence the strength and effectiveness of union strategies, among them conditions in the labour market, the political environment, governmental policies, the state of the economy, technological development and the strategies of employers (Clark 2009). Common to all of them is that they are outside the direct purview of unions, and unions rely on their institutional power if they are to effectively change these conditions. There is, according to Clark (2009), one factor that also to a large extent influences the strength and effectiveness of union strategies which stands out; the union-related behaviour and participation of members. In other words, the strength and effectiveness of union strategies also rely on building organisational power, over which unions themselves have substantial influence. Thus, Clark (2009:ix) argues that strategies for building stronger and more viable unions depend on “an increasingly active, involved, informed, and engaged union membership”. In an effort to theorise the strengthening of organisational power, Clark (2009) emphasises two key factors influencing member behaviour: the personal characteristics of members and the union environment. Chief among the personal characteristics for union participation is attitudes towards unions, while the union culture can be more or less bent on encouraging member participation (Clark 2009). Hence, the attitudes towards and understanding of unions among members will influence the extent to which they would want to get actively involved.

However, as recognised by Offe and Wiesenthal (1980) building institutional and organisational power might come into conflict, as they rely on two separate logics of collective action. Building organisational power depends on forging collective identities and cultivating mobilisation. However, a dilemma arises as building institutional power entails preventing members from prematurely or uncontrolled actualising their organisational power. In other words, while strengthening organisational power is about recruiting and mobilising, that is, building up an ability to exercise power, strengthening institutional power is about ensuring strategic success in bilateral and external relations, requiring unions to minimize the risk of militant and “irresponsible” militant behavior. Ultimately, organisational power might become weakened to the point where it threatens the reproduction of the institutional power of being “inside the tent” where decisions are made.

As pointed out by Doellgast et al. (2009), unions with some degree of institutional power have fewer incentives to adopt new organising drives or campaigns targeting young precarious workers, and they will rather focus on extending collective agreements and or/ opt for political pressures or employing legal means of combating precarity (Bengtsson 2013). Bengtsson (2013:174) thus argues that “unions with stronger institutional positions, defined as their influence on public policy and extent of collective bargaining coverage, have tended to be less interested in organising migrant workers than unions with weaker institutional positions”. The latter is part of the administrative or servicing approach, and, according to Bengtsson (2013), an exclusionary strategy which does not involve precarious or migrant workers themselves. An organising strategy, on the other hand, is regarded as an inclusionary strategy, involving, as it does, organising and mobilising precarious workers themselves (Bengtsson 2013). In other words, these insights call for a context-sensitive comparative approach, in which actions taken at various geographical scales and in different historical contexts are taken into account when analysing union strategies and responses (Bergene 2010).

3 Four main types of union strategies There has been some research on local and national union attempts at organising and representing agency workers (e.g. Pulignano & Doerflinger 2013, Bergström & Styhre 2010, Heery 2004). At the most basic level, unions have been struggling with the question of whether they ought to include agency workers as part of their constituency or not, a dilemma arising out of a concern that accepting agency workers in their constituency implies accepting temporary work agencies as having a legitimate presence in the labour market (Heery 2004). This dilemma, and attempts at resolving it, affects the strategies adopted. Heery (2004) identifies four main types of responses: exclusion, replacement, regulation and engagement, forming the following nexus:

Temporary work agencies

Rejection Acceptance

Exclusion Regulation Exclusion

Replacement Engagement Agency workers Agency Inclusion

According to Heery (2004), exclusion entails a rejection of the legitimacy of both temporary work agencies and agency workers, and the ultimate goal of an exclusionary strategy is to drive temporary work agencies out of the labour market. An extreme example of this strategy is seeking abolition through prohibition. When it comes to agency workers, they might simultaneously pose a threat to core workers’ terms and conditions and function as a buffer in times of economic recessions, thus providing greater job security for the core (Heery 2004). As pointed out by Heery (2004) both of these functions may dissuade unions from organising and representing agency workers, leading to the exclusionary strategies of outright rejection or seeking regulation. Regulation is set apart from exclusion since regulation of agencies implies conferring some legitimacy to temporary work agencies and agency work.

Through fighting for regulations, unions may address the situation of agency workers although without necessarily making any attempts at organising and representing them as such. Such strategies might draw on discourses of agency work as involuntary, the workers as an unwanted presence and as victims, and often without any collective consciousness and/or agency. In other words, they are discursively and organisationally excluded from the union movement.

As mentioned, unions additionally face the choice of whether to deal with temporary work agencies as legitimate employers or not, for instance through engaging in collective bargaining or other concerted efforts (Heery 2004). Important in this regard, is the point of departure of the research project to which this article belongs: the extent to which agencies as such “pose a threat to the established system of collective bargaining” (Heery 2004:435).

4 At the opposite end of exclusion is engagement, which entails granting legitimacy to both temporary work agencies and agency workers. A strategy of engagement would thus mean organising agency workers and representing them in negotiations with agencies as legitimate employers. Engagement is, in other words, sought with temporary work agencies in an effort to regulate the terms and conditions of agency work in the same manner unions have acted with other kinds of employers throughout history.

Finally, replacement entails including agency workers in the union constituency, while rejecting the legitimacy of temporary work agencies, seeking to drive them out of the labour market (Heery 2004). This could, for instance, be done through seeking full-time permanent employment for organised agency workers, which entails relinquishing their status as agency workers and convincing any voluntary agency workers of the importance of not acting on this preference for the “greater good”.

Heery and Abbott (2000) operate with a similar classification, discerning five union responses to insecure workers: exclusion, servicing, partnership, dialogue and mobilisation. Similarly, union responses to migrant workers have been conceptualised as opposing immigration, organising migrant workers and including migrant workers in the union structure (Bengtsson 2013). We shall now see how the extent to which particular groups of workers are represented in informal and formal union structures, have a voice and can place their concerns on union agendas, can potentially affect other union responses to those groups (Healy and Kirton, 2000; Vandaele, 2012). Insiders and outsiders: cultures of exclusion While external structural factors can affect unionisation, unions also have strategic choices over whom they represent and the issues they will address (Heery and Abbott, 2000; Hyman, 1994). This can potentially have knock-on effects in regard to the formulation of union policies and strategies and the extent to which these incorporate the interests of agency workers i.e. whether policies favour traditional insiders.

The growth and institutionalization of temporary employment may lead to a generalisation of insecurity, and union strategies might thus be devised out of fear (Kalleberg 2009). Because precarity is closely associated with such fear and feelings of becoming increasingly insecure, it may come as no surprise that the term ‘precarity’ is associated with Europe, where a large share of the workforce were, for a few exceptional decades, in the very secure standard employment relationship. The standard employment relationship is here defined as a permanent full-time position with one employer, where the employee conducts work at the employer’s site and under his/her management and supervision (Vosko 2008). It is also often associated with high union density, and welfare entitlements (Vosko 2008).

Hence, in the face of an increasing share of non-standard employment relationships and shrinking welfare systems “European workers became increasingly vulnerable to the labor market and began to organize around the concept of precarity as they faced living and working without stability or a safety net” (Kalleberg 2009). According to Barchiesi (2012:102) this feeling of insecurity is in large part a male discomfort in relation to the hegemonic discourse of “breadwinning respectability” which is “deeply implicated in hierarchies and subjugations along gender, age and racial lines”, and thus exclusionary.

Ledwith (2012) argues that unions struggle with a tradition of cultures of exclusionary masculinity. As such traditional unions were characterised by “practices of and responses to exclusion and demarcation” (Ledwith 2012:187). Consequently, for many contemporary workers “unions come

5 across as exclusive, inflexible, unfathomable strongholds of maleness and masculinity, and increasingly among younger workers, irrelevant” (Ledwith 2012:189). “Masculinity” here refers to the wider homosocial identity of male workers as permanently employed in full-time positions (Ledwith 2012), that is relying heavily on the SER as institution and identity, although several unions in Europe initially also directly excluded women from their constituency (Ledwith 2012). As emphasised by Barchiesi (2012) the very identity of “the worker” drawn upon by many unions may in practice disable “political possibilities by creating new hierarchies and divisions between permanent and contingent, non-union employees”. Important in our regard is that some unions are currently responding to agency work in the same manner, as we have seen above, by arguing that organising and representing agency workers entails legitimising this form of employment, which they will not do (Heery 2004). Devising strategies targeting precarious work in general, including agency work, may just as well be done by unions characterised by such cultures of exclusion, where the aim is to prevent or limit the existence of agency work, and thus arguably also agency workers. Consequently, a number of unions, where Spanish unions are presented as one example, have primarily sought to protect core workers, who also form the core of their membership, from this threatening outside (Doellgast et al. 2009).

However, there is a potential for moving beyond the understanding of precarity as a threat, rather realising its mobilising, or even, in Barhciesi’s (2012) view, emancipatory potential. As mentioned, it is well documented that unions in many countries have experienced density declines and therefore that it would be in unions’ interest to organise groups which have tended to have lower unionisation rates, such as young workers, migrants and agency workers. The recruitment and organising of these workers by unions should be advantageous to both groups; the workers could experience a less vulnerable position in the labour market through union membership and activism, while, for unions, this insecurity may present opportunities for unions who could fill a demand for representation (Heery and Abbott, 2000). In Ledwith’s (2012) view, this all means that unions no longer “mainly represent the exclusive elite of the ‘pale (white), male […]’ who nonetheless continue to lead unions” and that they can potentially encompass the new, diverse workforces.

It has, in other words, been argued that unions need to become more responsive to the interests of particularly young workers (Ebbinghaus et al., 2009; Fievez, 2009), and that union renewal and revitalisation is dependent on their recruitment (Waddington, 2002, Byford 2009). This will, however, necessitate recognising and representing young, precarious workers on their own terms (Ledwith 2012), that is, including them. Part of the new strategies will thus be to unsettle and destabilise the discourses and practices of traditional unions, establishing inclusive democracies and systems of social justice which acknowledge social differentiation without exclusion (Ledwith 2012). When these combine with the central material interests of unions in organising new workforces into membership as a means of renewal, the combination is persuasive and powerful.

As Ledwith (2012) stresses, this is significant in the context of union decline and efforts and revival and renewal, also because it entails an opportunity for a cultural and structural change in the direction of more inclusive systems of “diversity democracy”. Furthermore, Byford (2009:228) argues that organising and mobilising these workers is more likely to occur where an organising approach is being followed, as it entails empowering members to define and pursue their own interests in a way that fosters “participative structures that contain ‘new autonomies’ and less paternalistic behaviour”. Citing the work of Kahmann, Byford (2009:230) states that the disaffection among young workers is a result of alienation from traditional political discourse, and that there are “no signs that a lost generation may be succeeded by an upsurge in membership without substantial organisational and political changes”. There is no strong body of evidence to suggest that young

6 workers have more negative attitudes to unions than older workers, with numerous studies actually indicating the opposite (Freeman & Diamond 2003; Booth et al. 2010, Oliver 2010; D’Art & Turner 2008). Yet young workers’ unionisation rates are declining faster than that of older workers (Vandaele 2012). Similar issues arise in relation to migrant workers who have low unionisation rates, are over-represented in precarious jobs and often do not have a representative voice within union structures.

This leads us to the question of identity and representation. According to Gramsci (1933), bureaucratic centralism, which he is highly critical of, presupposes that the individual and the collective can be identified with one another, where the union in a clear-cut manner represents the interests of the members. However, in Gramsci’s (1933) view, organisations need to be democratic in the fullest sense of the term, meaning that members have to actively take part in policy discussion and implementation. In line with this, Crosby (2005) states that an empowered member will not be told what to think. Rethinking organising Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2015) argue that the diversification of the employment relationship, what they term “fragmentation”, poses an obstacle to political efforts to coordinate, mobilise and build solidarity between workers. But as diverse and more precarious forms of employment are becoming commonplace, despite union protests, labour movements are trying to formulate more sophisticated responses.

A point of departure for us is thus that unions are learning organisations (see for instance Meyer & Fuchs 2010), and several unions have recently completely restructured their organisations and changed their way of operating in line with the so-called ”organising model”. As mentioned, this is also why we included a comparative study of how unions relate to agency workers.

Recent literature on union renewal has often relied on the conceptualisation of two models or ideal types of unionism: the servicing model and the organising model. As ideal types, we should expect that any given union will display aspects of both model, and that where the weight is placed could be understood as the “soul” of the union (Budd cited in Fiorito & Jarley 2008).

The servicing model is characterised by unions providing services for members or addressing their concerns through a more or less external relation. The servicing model is often held to resemble a business transaction; members pay their dues and, based on a logic of economic exchange, expect grievances to be handled by union officials. There is, in other words, little need for active involvement (Gall & Fiorito 2012; Johnson & Jarley 2004; Peetz et al. 2002). This model prevailed and proved efficacious in the western world in the period of stable economic growth, union-friendly employers and the generalisation of the SER, often referred to as Fordism (Voss & Sherman 2000).

Changing conditions, often labelled post-Fordism, have, however, led to calls for a different approach, often labelled the organising model, or organizing unionism (Crosby 2005; Fiorito & Jarley 2008; Gall & Fiorito 2012). The organising model entails a redirection of resources from providing services to recruitment and organising activities (Oesch 2012), and it has been regarded as a “return to […] self-help roots”, seeking to activate members so that they can themselves pursue union goals (Fiorito & Jarley 2008; 196-7). A major aim of the organising model is thus to “increase member identity with and participation in the union” (Johnson & Jarley 2004; 544), and it is defined as bent on “organizing non-union workers through deployment of union resources and employed and lay personnel, and activating existing members in furtherance of union objectives” (Gall & Fiorito 2012:190).

7 As mentioned, unions have strategic choice over whom they represent and the issues they will address (Heery & Abbott 2000; Hyman 1994), and this relates to union structures and democracy, which may be more or less bent on inclusion. This has been studied when it comes to gender, and Holter and Sørensen (1984:252), for instance, have shown how lack of participation, above and beyond affiliation, has led to a situation in which women, despite constituting a growing share of the union membership, have so far «not presented the unions with any strong demands in return». This means that «[m]ale workers’ problems are at the core also of […] informal collectivities in most workplaces as bases for union activity» (Holter & Sørensen 1984:252). In other words, women, as one traditional “outsider group”, have «experienced the standard organisational processes as repressive rather than as an encouragement to participation» (Cook 1984:30). While this might to some extent be explained by male resistance to women’s participation in the union movement, it has also been pointed out that «women’s relation to the political process has been very different from that of men […] [and] generally understood in terms of deviations from a male norm of political behavior» (McCormack quoted in Cook 1984:31). Male domination in the union movement is thus a matter of more than percentages of men in leading positions, it also has structural aspects, such as pronounced centralisation which circumscribes spaces for rank-and-file participation and the involvement of diverse groups of workers not trained in or comfortable with centralised, specialised and professionalised bureaucracies demanding “mastery of bargaining issues and tactics” (Holter & Sørensen 1984:249, Offe & Wiesenthal 1980). Similarly, as mentioned unions were pivotal in the generalisation of the SER, and the servicing model was developed and proved efficacious in the period where the SER prevailed, at least among male workers. This meant that «marginal workers», were regarded as «a threat to traditional worker solidarity» (Holter & Sørensen 1984:248). According to Holter and Sørensen (1984), women workers have throughout history often not shared the same sense of job security as men, and have traditionally developed different and more varied kinds of collectivities. Gall and Fiorito (2012:194) argue that if unions are to renew themselves, sustaining and expanding organising, they need to pursue inclusion in decision-making, effective communication with members, cultivation of a collective orientation, and mobilisation.

There is, according to Ledwith (2012) increasing evidence that more diverse workers and unionists represent a change of attitudes in the union movement away from the abovementioned cultures of exclusionary masculinity, in part because of their experience of precarious work as it aligns “with patterns long established by women juggling family and part-time insecure work” (Ledwith 2012:185). However, union strategies will vary in time and space, that is, between countries and industrial sectors through influences deriving at these levels on the strategic choices of unions. Context As a former British colony, the Republic of Ireland has inherited the voluntarist system of industrial relations. However, the independent republic has developed a strong ideology of national economic development, and the voluntarist system soon became articulated with corporatist elements in an effort to ensure concerted efforts, dismissing notions of class conflict as foreign distortions of a natural and harmonious national development (Allen 1997). However, there is no union recognition legislation in Ireland (Bergene 2010).

The process of developing corporatism, through attempts at building ”Social Partnership”, was largely government-initiated and saw little influence from the union movement. The First National Wage Agreement was reached in 1970, and it marks the beginning of a period of considerable government involvement in pay determination and of union involvement in policy making. Cooperation was intensified during the long recession during the 1980s. The Programme for National Recovery, also termed the first Social Partnership, was agreed in 1987, despite some discontent

8 among the rank and file to the wage moderation involved. New social partnership agreements were entered into in 1990, 1994, 1997, 2000 and 2003. Including union leaders in policy making ensured their consent around basic social and economic goals, while ensuring industrial peace (Allen 1997, O’Toole 2009). However, the new millennium challenged Social Partnership, and it took severe beatings in major disputes in 2006 in which employers paid little heed to its principles. The financial crisis constituted its deathblow as the government and employers pulled out in 2009.

Industrial relations in Norway are corporatist, and the so-called Norwegian model of industrial relations is regarded as a class compromise resulting from social conflicts throughout the twentieth century (Mjøset 1987; Moene 2007). The orientation towards compromise and cooperation is often held in contradistinction to the more confrontational orientation in countries like the UK (Hudson 2001; Thelen 2001; Wrench 2004). The Norwegian model of consensus-based industrial relations is still deemed successful at a national level, although significant segments of the Norwegian labour market are on the periphery of this ideal-type (Bergene et al. 2015). However, so far, the need for a fundamental strategic renewal has not been clearly expressed, despite agency work and agency workers challenging the Norwegian model with low unionization rates and low levels of, if any, codetermination rights. We will thus argue, in line with Bergene et al. (2015), that union strength at the national level does not necessarily translate into neither the strength of union locals nor an ability of workers to influence decisions in the workplace or the wider labour market. We shall in what follows thus see that even though the contexts differ in many ways, the contrast between the strategies might not differ accordingly.

In Norway, sector-wide bargaining at the national level prevails, while this is rare in Ireland. Instead, there is a national statutory minimum wage set by Parliament in Ireland. Norway has no such minimum wage, but in low-wage sectors with proven cases of social dumping, collective agreements may be generalized. In Ireland there has also been negotiated Employment Regulation Orders (EROs). Analysis As mentioned introductorily, Müller-Jentsch (ref. Hyman 1992) argued that unions faced a three-fold crisis from the 1980s onwards; interest aggregation, employee loyalty and representativeness, while Kalleberg (2009) has called for new strategies in light of the emergence of precarious work. In particular, SER-centric strategies and also strategies relying on sectoral organisation might well prove insufficient in face of recent trends pointing towards increased labour market flexibility.

Despite being pushed on the defensive, unions are still important actors in the regulation of the labour markets. However, as pointed out by Gumbrell-McCormick (2011:293), they have been more successful at addressing the concerns of workers in a non-standard relationship than actually organising them, arguing that the latter demands restructuring the organisations and developing a new mind-set.

We will start our analysis with what unions have achieved by way of what we will term institutional power before we move on to consider how unions, in face of temporary agency work, seek to renew themselves.

Oscillating between seeking replacement and regulation As mentioned in the theoretical framework, Heery (2004) identifies four main types of union responses to agency work: exclusion, replacement, regulation and engagement. Although some of our informants expressed exclusion, in the sense of prohibition, would be ideal, neither of them saw this as a strategy worthwhile pursuing. For some this was due to the low chances of success, for

9 others it was based on an acceptance of the argument that temporary work agencies have a role to play in bringing about needed labour market flexibility. We thus found that, in general, the hegemonic union strategies oscillate between seeking replacement and regulation, while some attempts have been made, particularly where the union (officials) are inspired by the ideas deriving from the organising model, at including and engaging agency workers.

As we have seen, Heery (2004) argues that unions are reluctant to grant temporary work agencies legitimacy as employers, a concern which renders the organising of agency workers a dilemma. We will start by considering the union responses which to the least extent grants such legitimacy, before gradually moving towards full inclusion.

The prevailing models of industrial relations and unionism have, as a ageneral rule, their roots in the period of stable economic growth and union-friendly employers, often referred to as Fordism), a period of unprecedented union power and in which these models proved efficacious (Voss & Sherman 2000). Union power was, in this model, to a large extent, through institutional recognition, and institutional power, resting on the organisational power of previous eras (Offe & Wiesenthal 1980). As part of the institutionalisation, unions strive to get “as many as possible of its bargaining positions […] institutionalized and sanctioned by legal statutes”, which may be regarded as a ”juridification” of industrial relations (Offe & Wiesenthal 1980:107). By extension, this often implies unions defining the interests of those whom they represent, in a process of legally constituted interest intermediation. In this process, the unions often become bureaucratised, professionalised and specialised, since this allows them to accumulate power. This occurs at the behest of excersing and building organisational power, since conflict based on organisation is gradually giving way to a conflict based on legal entitlements to participation in tripartite bodies and maintaining the established institutional set-up at all organisational levels. Alternative union responses to agency work is thus often put within this perspective:

Well, I think basically they are either legislative or industrial relations, or both […] [O]ne way is to try to limit it, or ban it at least in certain circumstances. Another way is to try and control it through bargaining, or a combination of the two. But those are the main areas. (Jim Baker, Global Unions)

As we can see, this informant draws on the two main responses identified by Heery (2004) which deal with the agencies themselves, and not the agency workers – exlusion or ban and regulation – and he recognises that these can be achieved either politically by way of legislative means or as resulting from industrial relations by means of barganing. According to Vosko (2008), labour market regulation has up until now been SER-centric in the sense that the regulations presupposes the standard employment relationship as the norm. The regulations thereby entail addressing deviations from this norm precisely as such, i.e. deviations, particularly in the direction of limitations. The strategies of replacement and regulation need to be understood as an expression of such SER- centrism. While the former seeks to turn non-standard into standard employment relations the moment it is not longer an acceptable deviation, the latter often concerns regulating the terms and conditions of, i.e. limiting agency work.

The same informant from Global Unions quoted above acknowledged that ”times have changed a lot”, where the problem is that the established institutional set-up ”doesn’t always fit, because […] it doesn’t fit into the normal sort of parameters of what happened in the past”. Furthermore, there is recognition that the established institutional set-up can partly explain what has happened, since it has changed “either because you’ve allowed it in your legislation or because you have done nothing to prevent it. And it just happens. And all of a sudden you discover you have abuses that you never

10 planned for”. The threat of agency work undermining the established institutional make-up, and by extension the institutional power of unions, was explicitly stated by a union delegate at a public discussion on precarious work in Oslo, arguing that this calls for restrictions or regulations:

It means that you have to regulate or restrict the temporary staffing industry. Otherwise, in four years, we will be further downhill, because this system of hiring is hopeless (Boye Ullmann, Fellesforbundet, LO).

The prevailing model of industrial relations during Fordism rested on national-level negotiations between unions, employers’ associations and governments, where these negotiations constituted a key regulatory mechanism. As a corollary, unions were themselves pivotal in the generalisation of the SER. As part of such a hegemonic social bloc, union policies and strategies were to an even lesser degree formulated in a vacuum, but was tailored to the socio-political context, most importantly the policies and strategies of the employers’ associations and the state. As argued above, through entering into bi- or multilateral relations with external agents, unions are (re)defined and (re)constituted (Scheuer 1986). The model implies seeking consent and concerted effort among the “partners”. This understanding of an overarching unity surfaced at the abovementioned public debate on precarious work in Norway, where a local union official stated that “Luckily, the employers like what we are saying, even though they think this is a bit enticing as well. But […] we are so to speak present at each others’ internal meetings” (Boye Ullmann, Fellesforbundet, LO).

Even without unions and employers’ associations attending each others’ meetings, union strategies seeking replacement or regulation rest on at least a minimum degree of cooperation. The strategies pursued differ, however, on to what extent they seek to involve the client company or the agency, granting it status as legitimate employer, in dialogue and negotiation. It seems, in general, that while unions in Ireland seek cooperation from the client company, either through multi-employer site collective agreements on terms and conditions or agreements limiting the scope and scale of agency work, unions in Norway to a larger extent seek to enter into dialogue with the agencies themselves, as legitimate employers.

Cooperation with the client company as the “real” employer Several ways of seeking the cooperation from client companies or holding them accountable for agency workers were mentioned. One such strategy, taking the production site of a particular company as point of departure, was multi-employer collective agreements, which would include all employers at the specific site:

There has been one or two [collective agreements covering agencies] that would supply some of the bigger employments […] [W]e would have some big employments in Ireland, and where there is already collective agreements […] they would have had […] that the agency would have to have a collective agreement with a trade union […] [A]nd there is a collective agreement there for anybody who comes in there, whether they work in the distribution part, […] or they were cleaning there, or work security there […] So we do have collective agreements with some agencies that would operate there. But the agencies would have only those collective agreements for the workers on that site […] It is a model we all aspire to, it is something I aspire to, but the difficulty is getting agencies to buy up to it. It can often depend on the employer on site. If there isn’t a pressure from the main employer himself putting pressure on the agency that they have to have this then it can be very difficult to do it. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU)

11 As we can see, the union official regards this as a model to which Irish unions should aspire, although it is recognised that they are difficult to attain, particularly given the reluctance from temporary work agencies to enter into such agreements. Hence, the union is dependent upon the “main employer”, i.e. the client company, putting pressure on the agency. In other words, the strategies hinge on cooperation, or even alliance, between client companies and the unions.

When it comes to negotiating collective agreements with client companies trying to set the terms and conditions for agency workers has been tried in Norway, but without success for instance in the construction industry in Oslo:

There have been several strategies we have tried to pursue. What we have tried doing as a union, is getting our union locals in client companies, that is, client companies covered by collective agreements, to put pressure on their employer to not hire workers who do not have permanent employment with the temporary work agency, meaning that we have tried to get the local unions to demand […] that agency workers should be permanently employed. Permanently employed in reality. We have not been able to achieve this. (Kjell Skjærvø, Fellesforbundet, LO).

This quote points us toward an important difference between Irish and Norwegian understandings of temporary work agencies and by extension their strategies. As we can see, the union demand would, in Norway, be permanent employment with the agency. In other words, while the pressure is put on the client company, the permanent employment relation is sought with the agency, as a legitimate employer. In Ireland, on the other hand, this was not mentioned as a possibility, where our informants consistently reserved the term “employer” for the client company, speaking of temporary work agencies only as “agents”, that is as simply intermediaries.

The quote from an Irish union official below is a clear expression of such an understanding. Furthermore, as we can see, organising agency workers as such, that is as employed in agencies, is regarded as next to impossible given the nature of agency work, again requiring the assistance of client companies and their employees:

It’s difficult for a number of reasons. The first thing is – and this is just my experience, I’m not saying it’s everybody’s experience – but I have failed to organise agency workers outside of the jobs that they are working in, because the agency is a name and an office in some place with six or seven hundred people on their books. You never have those people in one place. You know, it’s very difficult to find out who they are. So, the only way that I can identify them is when I know that they are working in a particular employment. We’ve had some success recently where they organised into the union through some of the workers that were already in the plant. We organised them, and we negotiated successfully wage increases for them with the employer that they were working for, and the employer then passed that increase back to the agent, so the agent had to pay those people a higher rate of pay than the minimum wage (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

A strategy pursued particularly in Ireland is entering into collective agreements with the client company limiting the scope and scale of agency work. Although the strategy is still being pursued, as the following quote points out, it has been favoured for quite a while, and we would argue that it is SER-centric in that agency work is regarded as an acceptable deviation from the norm up to a certain quantitatively defined point:

I’d say SIPTU has had a long, long campaign. It has been part of an organising campaign for many years – we are actually just looking at a distribution center collective agreement. It

12 would be a distribution centre for a big multinational supermarket, and at the end of 2002 there was an issue about agency workers, and part of this distribution agreement there was a maximum of the percentage of agency workers that could work on site, which was 15 per cent of the permanent workforce. And there was also a limit on how long they could work, and that they should be part of some of the terms and conditions that were there. This is […] about 13-14 years ago. I would say since early 2000 onwards, […] there was a push at organising agency workers, there has been a campaign ongoing in SIPTU since 2000 for organising agency workers.

According to Vosko (2008), labour market regulation has so far been SER-centric in the sense that the regulations presupposes the standard employment relationship as the norm. The regulations thereby entail addressing deviations from this norm precisely as such, i.e. deviations, particularly in the direction of limitations. We have seen examples of strategies seeking regulatory limits both to the temporality of agency work through clauses stating for how long a client company may hire an agency worker before this worker should become directly and permanently employed, that is, avoiding so-called “permatemps”, and its extent, that is, avoiding that agency workers become the majority and thus the norm. The following quote illustrates SER-centrism in the very understanding of the phenomenon of agency work in the union movement, an understanding which also makes the same phenomenon acceptable:

Agency work has its place. There is absolutely no doubt about that. So, you know, we’re not gonna be, for want of a better term ethnically cleansing people from the system […] There is a place for this type of work, but it can not be like a third or a quarter of the workforce. That would be an absolute disaster for the service, for employment rights, and for trade union activity. (Paul Bell, SIPTU)

We can see that this union official regards agency work as acceptable, and even necessary, when it is understood as a delimited deviation from the standard, and not as rule. In other words, agency work has been “normalised” as an acceptable deviation, or even, variant of the norm (Vosko 2008). Unions taking the SER as the point of departure is exclusionary in itself, since agency workers might then regard organising as irrelevant, thereby further weakening their position in the labour market (Fuller & Vosko 2008, Vosko 2008).

The same understanding and SER-centrism may also lead unions to regard safeguarding the workers’ rights as the responsibility of the government and not the unions. As we can see, the argument in the following quote, that workers’ rights are so fundamental that they are over and above the responsibility of unions, is premised on the normative, SER-centric statement that ”any form of employment” is not OK:

I don’t think you can just say “Any form of employment is OK, you just have to go out and organize them”. It’s not the job of workers to ensure that workers’ rights are protected. It’s a job of the government to make sure that workers’ rights are protected. To the extent you can use your force, either legislatively or through collective bargaining, to do that, that’s good, but to just simply say “Workers with no rights, that’s no problem – the problem is the unions. If the unions went out there to organize them, and they’re out there being exploited under conditions where they have no employment relationship and the rest of it, that’s just the fault of the unions because they don’t bother to organize” – unfortunately there is some of that mentality. But for me the right to organize is a right of workers. It’s not an obligation of unions, it’s a right of workers. Whether they form this union or that union, or whatever. I mean, they’re free to do it. But it’s their right. And we look at things that deprive workers of

13 effecting those rights. Either deprive them totally or effectively deprive them, because you cannot image a way that they can exercise those rights. (Jim Baker, Global Unions).

This quote is also an expression of how industrial relations are “juridified”, since the informant invokes the responsibility of governments to advance and protect workers’ rights, rendering it a legislative question and not part of the class struggle.

Temporary work agencies as legitimate employers and bargaining partners As mentioned, there are also examples of union strategies, in our case primarily from Norway, not presupposing all three pillars of the SER to the same extent. In Norway, although the union strategies are of the traditional kind, unions have accepted the existence of triangular employment relationships, and collective agreements and permanent employment is sought with the agencies as legitimate employers. As the following quote shows, unions have been able to sign collective agreements and establish local unions in temporary work agencies, although they are fragile constructions given the nature of this type of work and its dissonance with the established system of industrial relations, relying again on the client companies:

In 2006 we signed a collective agreement with Adecco, which was the result of several years of systematic organising. Not only in Oslo, but in Trondheim, and Bergen and Stavanger, and other places, as well. Consequently, as a matter of fact, Adecco was at some point in time the largest company in Fellesforbundet [covered by the collective agreement in the construction industry]. So, we have collective agreements with three temporary work agencies serving the construction industry in Oslo. When it comes to shop stewards, we have for several years had locals and union delegates in Adecco. And we still do. In JobZone we were able to establish a union local that was moderately active a couple of years, but has the last couple of years been inactive. The reason for this was that the leader of this union local, who was Polish, became relegated to the barrack – given no more assignments […] It was then elected a new shop steward, who was German. He faced the same. And then people saw the point: you cannot be shop steward, because then you are not given assignments. So, for quite some time now we have not been able to establish a union local in JobZone, for this very reason. Then, recently, right before Christmas, we managed to. So, this summer we contacted the [client] companies and asked them to help us with this. We asked them to set up meetings for all employees, which would start with the company saying some words and then exiting, leaving the meeting to us. The meeting was held in December, and it was a success. We were able to elect a union committee. We have had a union committee in Workshop since the summer, June, of 2012. We have an operative union committee there, one which has recently been able to negotiate a local wage agreement. (Kjell Skjærvø, Fellesforbundet, LO).

This type of union strategy was regarded as impossible by one of our informants in the Irish union movement. As the following quote shows, he regards agency workers as any other worker and argues in favour of organising them as such, but sees it as no option organising them “at the level of their own employer”, that is the temporary work agency:

The best strategy for organising any worker, really, is the belief that if they organise into a group that they can improve the terms and conditions. At the moment, my belief is that the best way, and the only way, in my experience, to do something for them, is to organise them at the place of employment using the existing workers to pressurise management to do something for them. I do not believe it’s possible, certainly at this point in time, to organise them at the level of their own employer. Because their employer is an agent who doesn’t have a place of work for them, who doesn’t have them under the one roof at a particular

14 point in time, who simply picks a number, of 10 or 15 or 20, from his file and says “A particular company needs 10 people tomorrow. You are one of the ten. Away you go”. (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

The consequence of such an understanding is, however, that agency workers are not union members on equal terms. They do not, as part of the union, enter into a direct relation with their employer, but need fellow union members in the client company to put pressure on the management of the client company to provide better terms and conditions for them. They are, in other words, dependent on others “fixing” their problems and are consequently disempowered.

Agency workers: victims, “sole traders” or a worker “like every worker”? Temporary agency work, as precarious work in general, has been regarded as a destructive challenge to unions, partly because of its effect on union membership (Croucher & Brewster 1998) and bargaining power (Doellgast et al. 2009). Kalleberg (2009) argues that the emergence of precarious work warrants new strategies on the part of unions. However, unions have responded to precarious work with an attempt to resurrect so-called “labourism” (Standing 2011:1) based on “working class melancholy” (Barchiesi 2011). Both are conservative reflexes and as such they may lead unions to regard agency workers as a threat, be they regarded as victims to the strategies of capital or as themselves harbouring certain personal traits not compatible with developing collective consciousness and joining the union movement.

That agency workers are regarded as a threat to the union movement is captured well in the following statement made by a Norwegian unionist at a public debate:

The point is that there is next to absolutely no chance in hell of organising the people at those workplaces. (Boye Ullmann, Fellesforbundet, LO).

However, the explanations for why these workers are “impossible” to organise vary. Some explanations are largely structural, focussing on how the phenomenon of labour hire, introducing a third party in a triangular relationship complicates organising for both the union and the workers. A union official in Norway explained declining membership in the following manner:

When it comes to membership, it has been declining sharply in Adecco. And the same goes for JobZone […] And in Workshop it has been quite stable. But we have low density in all three. And the reason for that is – […] in our opinion, maybe we are wrong – but our understanding is that we have been completely unable to do something about what matters most to these workers, which is their employment type, that they are employed, take on assignments, but do not have neither rights nor duties to actually work. They have no working hours […], they are permanently employed, but they do not have any security for gaining neither work nor any income (Kjell Skjærvø, Fellesforbundet, LO).

Another structural explanation relates to the nature of labour hire, that workers are in a triangular employment relationship and how it pulverises responsibility:

[W]hen you introduce then the third party, the agent, what happens is the employer, when we go to speak to them, unless we have the sufficient pressure to convince them to talk to us, they would simply say “That person comes in here to work, they are under contract for service, we have nothing to do with them” or “You may go and talk to the agent about these people. I don’t know them. I don’t care who they are. I don’t know their names. I don’t want to know them”. That’s a much more difficult scenario, because not alone is an issue of us having the existing workers on the site disposed to looking after those people, we can’t do

15 anything for them to the agent, because in 90 per cent of the time, the agent won’t have any discussion with us. (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

While client companies may “abdicate any semblance of responsibility” for agency workers, another side to agency work which complicate organising agency workers is that the agencies themselves are often hostile to unionisation and may strategically utilise the nature of labour hire to obstruct it:

In many cases it’s difficult [to organise agency workers] – I’ve had the experience of where we had actually written to the agent, seeking discussions with the agent, and very soon after that you see some people who are working in a particular employment are no longer working there. They’re moved to a different employment. So the agents have absolutely no interest in discussing with us. (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

In other words union strategies relying on sectoral organisation and premised on the SER, i.e. direct and permanent employment, might well prove insufficient in flexible labour markets. Fear deriving from normative SER-centrism also surfaced hostility towards workers who refuse to take permanent jobs when they are offered such:

We’re not hostile to the [agency] workers per se. I mean, agency work, by its nature, was always meant to be flexible. It was meant to be covering shortfalls – it was not meant to be covering the imposition of an artificial staff moratorium or blockade. So, we don’t have a massive issue about that, but […] when they’re offered permanent jobs, refusing to take them, we do say that the union’s policy is that people should work full-time […] on a steady contract, you should work directly for the employer, and not for the agency. So, sometimes that becomes a bit of an issue for those people, but that’s the […] position that we have. (Paul Bell, Health Division, SIPTU).

In between such structural explanations and purely individual ones are explanations which presume a link between objective situations and the logic and understanding of individuals of their interests. A Norwegian unionist expressed such a view in a public debate, arguing that labour hire, as a phenomenon, obstructs unionisation because it affects the propensity to join a union on the part of agency workers:

It means that you have to regulate or restrict the temporary staffing industry. Otherwise, in four years, we will be further downhill, because this system of hiring is hopeless. And it has nothing to do with whether you are red, yellow, black or white, whether you are Polish or Eastern European, or whatever else, it is the phenomenon that you live in a country, reside in another country, you are only there short-term, you have no idea for how long you are going to stay there, you are in a temporary work agency […] this phenomenon causes you to not want to join a union, because then you are fired. (Boye Ullmann, Fellesforbundet, LO).

As we can see, the difficulty of organising agency workers means that these workers are disregarded as potential members, at least members capable of exercising power in their own right, leading the union official to argue in favour of regulating and restricting the industry above and beyond them. This is, in other words, a case of unions themselves defining the interests and objectives of those they represent, independent of the will and activity of members, let alone workers in general.

It is, however, not uncommon to go further in ascribing personal traits to agency workers. First of all, the nature of labour hire is presumed to affect the mentality of agency workers in the direction of irresponsibility, individualism and opportunism:

16 The situation where you are in another country and do not have the perspective of staying there permanently, it affects your mentality […] And then you don’t have the same sense of responsibility that it takes 40 to 60 to 80 years to build locals and union experience with continuity, elections, locals and you argue with management et cetera, and where you can intervene […] This is terribly complicated! It is so demanding when it comes to resources, because we are overloaded. Even when we do get into contact with [agency workers] we have to tell them “Remember that we are not the social services”, because many of them, when they have received the money they claim, they won’t bother to pay. You know? So, yes, this is a challenge, I’d say […] We have lost over 600 members in Fellesforbundet in Adecco the last four or five years. And that is because they do not want to become members either, a lot of them now, because there are cultural issues here as well; ”Why should I be part of the union and pay loads and loads of money without receiving any assistance?” (Boye Ullman, Fellesforbundet, LO).

Similarly, one of our informants in the Irish union movement pointed out how short-term agency work is not fertile grounds for long-term union demands, which entail making investments in future improvements:

And direct employed, when people are there, when they have some kind of permanency and continuity of employment, means they have a lot more to invest in to try and improve their terms and conditions. And some of the difficulty we have with agency workers, they would say “I am only going to be here for a couple of weeks, why would I make an effort to organise myself, when I could be somewhere else in a week’s time?” […] If they have a permanency, they see the collectiveness, for some agency workers, they don’t have that collective bond […] because some of them might be there today and the agency could put them somewhere else the next day. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU).

The same understanding, that agency workers have a short-term perspective and are not willing to pay respect to long-established union structures nor to invest in demanding workplace improvements has caused mistrust also at the workplace level between directly and permanently employed workers and agency workers, providing incentives for pursuing replacement as a union strategy:

I think it’s, regardless of your nationality, there is a mistrust on agency workers that for a lot of permanent employees they say “Look I’m here 10 years, 15 years and you’re in here a week, you are doing work that we have agreements on how that work is to be carried out, but agency workers seem to do it in whatever way they are told”. You know, there is a natural, I think, suspicion sometimes of agency workers of trying to work with them because they will be here for a while and then they’re gone. We do find that a lot of permanent employees was try and work for the agency workers to try and push and ensure that they get some permanent employment. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU).

Furthermore, the very presence of agency workers is often regarded as undermining traditional forms of bargaining power (Doellgast et al. 2009), also leading to strategies of seeking replacement. Some of these strategies take an unfortunate and difficult situation for agency workers, portrayed as victims, as their point of departure, while others actually ascribe agency workers certain characteristics which inhibit collective consciousness and organisation.

17 To start with the former attempts, replacement may be sought through collective agreements delimiting the use of agency work through transition clauses stating when agency workers should enter into a standard employment relationship:

Primarily […] we’ve had a campaign for many years about agency workers […] we would ensure that all new workers are directly employed and not exploited as agency workers […] [W]e may have agreements, you know, in collective agreements that people can be employed for a certain period of time as temporary workers, and if there is still a requirement for employing them, they should be direct employees. You know, in some places it might, there are some very strong collective agreements that say after 13 weeks or 20 weeks, if there is still a position that person is filling then they should be a direct employee. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU).

Another union official mentioned the same strategy, but had so far not seen success in converting agency work into standard employment relations:

What we failed to do, I am still working on it, is to actually get to a stage where we can convert those agency workers to direct labour within the employment. We haven’t got to that stage yet. So, to come back to the point: the only, at the moment, the only success that we’ve had is where we can form a relationship between the agency worker in the actual job that they’re working in, especially if they’re there for some period of time. (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

As we saw in one of the quotes above, SER-centrism led to fissures between agency workers and the union when the former refused to take on direct, permanent positions when being offered such. According to Standing (2011) the recent demonstrations have born witness to a new group of workers not necessarily showing any “working class melancholy” or desire for returning to “labourism” or the SER. We could see traces of contempt for such attitudes in our interviews, where particularly quite powerful groups of workers, such as professionals, are regarded as self-interested individualists understanding themselves as “sole traders”:

Interestingly, by the way, a lot of agency workers, especially skilled ones, almost see themselves as sole traders, individuals in themselves, not as part of any other group. They don’t see themselves as […] part of a collective group, they just work for themselves and that’s what they do. Because the agency will say “You’re not an employee of the agency” and the hospital, or the health service provider, is saying “And you’re not an employee here either. The agency is only facilitating you entering here to work for a period of time. (Paul Bell, Health Division, SIPTU).

The same informant thus stressed that the union had had little success in the nursing profession when it comes to achieving their main goal as a union, namely to convert agency workers into directly and permanently employed workers, and that this has affected the way the union approach to organising agency nurses:

In the health division, in my opinion, the nursing profession has been limited […] I would say this to you, to be very honest with you, we have not deliberately adopted campaigns to organise those workers […] Unless, unless they have come collectively together seeking to get permanency or permanent jobs in the health service. In other words, we will go to the employer and say “These people who are working with you for so long as agency workers, they want a permanent job and we want to negotiate how you can bring those people in”. We’ve done a bit of that, you know? (Paul Bell, Health Division, SIPTU).

18 As we can see organising nurses has here become subsumed an overriding goal of maintaining and defending the standard employment relationship to the point that the union will not actively and deliberately organise unless the workers share this overriding goal.

We have seen how the presence of this new group of workers is regarded as undermining unions and traditional forms of bargaining power (Doellgast et al. 2009), and also how the workers themselves are regarded as a threat to unions, either because their jobs are found in highly competitive labour markets with high turnover and employers hostile to unions (Simms & Dean 2014) or because they have a different mentality. However, as pointed out by Barchiesi (2011) there may be emancipatory potential in this different mentality, and Kalleberg (2009) similarly urges unions to become more aware of and appreciate new models of organising and mobilising workers, which could be more effective in representing precarious workers. We have, in other words, come to the topic of how temporary agency work may, or even should, affect unions.

We have so far been concerned with more traditional union responses and strategies, that is, strategies which would be reconcilable with the prevailing model of unionism, there being no need for unions to change their structures or modus operandi. As we have already seen, there have been calls for union renewal in face of increasing labour market flexibility, new employment forms and new groups of workers (Kalleberg 2009, Ledwith 2012). Kalleberg (2009) thus urges unions to become more aware of and appreciate new models of organising and mobilising workers, becoming more effective in representing precarious workers and not resorting to the conservative reflexes we have seen the contours of above. Before moving on to the difference the so-called “organising model” could make, we will first pay some attention to institutional context since this differs between the two cases and between industries within Ireland and Norway respectively. Institutional power as false security? As mentioned, unions have, by means of their accumulated institutional power, been more able to address the concerns of agency workers than building organisation power among them through organising and representing them and their interests (Gumbrell-McCormick 2011). However, unions are part of specific historical and spatial contexts which impact upon their institutional power over time, in specific industries and across countries.

Institutional power will possibly entail seeking improvements through putting pressure on external agents such as client companies, employers or the government. As such it is often associated with processes of legally constituted interest intermediation and invoking legal entitlements to participation in tripartite bodies. In Norway this can be seen in the struggle for generalising collective agreements where the union see little hope of organising (migrant) workers against cases of “social dumping”. In these processes the accumulated institutional power of the union movement at large is used to make the collective agreements in industries with low union density and coverage of collective agreements generalised thus setting statutory minimum wage rates. This may be regarded as an alternative to organising and representing the (migrant) workers. That institutional power might at the same time displace and necessitate building organisational power was recognised by a union official in a public debate on precarious work:

Generalisation of collective agreements has its pitfalls. I’m not saying that it is wrong to generalise – very often it may be the right thing to do, but it depends […] Because […] it is not like we feared that it makes unions irrelevant – because it is really the opposite, it makes us as unions all the more important […] [I]f you don’t really care about legislation and regulation, and you do whatever you can to evade them, then it becomes irrelevant what kind of legislation and regulation you create. Then there are other things you need to do. And

19 the only thing I have managed to come up with, and I am probably not the sharpest tool in any shed, but it is good old unionism: you have to go out and meet these people where they are and talk to them […] I think that is the only useful approach. And, of course, in good old fashion establish collective agreements, and, for that matter, legislation – but legislation is a dangerous path these days, because we see how fast it can be eliminated – and the union movement has been doing this for quite a while. So we are really pretty good at it, but I think we sort of have distanced ourselves from precisely this thought. I can see, in my indstury, which is contract cleaning, the more we rely on tripartite cooperation, which is grand, the more we call for the Labour Inspectorate […] the more we place ourselves as a union on the sidelines […] we dispose of the ownership of these matters, which is a dangerous thing to do. We must not forget to be a union! (Brede Edvardsen, Norsk Arbeidsmandsforbund, LO)

As recognised by Offe and Wiesenthal (1980), building institutional and organisational power might come into conflict, as they rely on two separate logics of collective action. We may also add that having accumulated institutional power overshadows or clouds the need for continuously building organisational power. As Bengtsson (2013) points out, unions with strong institutional positions, through political influence and extensive collective bargaining coverage, often have fewer incentives in organising workers, particularly when their organisation into unions is a demanding task.

Offe and Wiesenthal (1980) argue that while strengthening organisational power entails recruiting and mobilising, strengthening institutional power is about ensuring strategic success in bilateral and external relations, requiring unions to minimize the risk of militant and “irresponsible” behaviour. Furthermore, building organisational power might come into conflict with institutional power because it might force change in the structure and approach of the unions themselves.

As pointed out by Doellgast et al. (2009), unions with some degree of institutional power have fewer incentives to adopt new organising drives or campaigns targeting new groups of workers, such as agency workers, and will rather seek improvements through generalising collective agreements and or/ opt for political pressures or going to court (Bengtsson 2013). One of our informants in Ireland even argued that the institutional power derived from union density and collective agreements was able to prevent the phenomenon of labour hire to gain foot in certain industrial sectors:

[W]here we would not come across [agency workers] at all would be in the manufacturing industries where we are highly organised, where we have the ability to maintain our current terms and conditions and rates of pay. OK? Because there is no benefit to the employer in attempting to get agency workers into these employments, because we insist that any worker who comes in there must be 1) employed as direct labour, and 2) must have the same terms and conditions of the people in those employments. So, in those areas, we don’t see agency workers at all. We may see them […] cleaning in the canteen, or doing security work on the site, but not in the main, core activities within the organisation. (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

It is also important to notice, bearing in mind the framework and analysis above, the exclusionary nature of these responses. First of all, agency work as such is excluded by the union demanding that “any worker who comes in there must be […] employed as direct labour”. Secondly, there is an empirically observable, and thereby arguably accepted, segmentation of labour where the cleaners and security workers are agency workers, while the workers “in the main, core activities within the organisation” are not. Again it is implied that while it is not acceptable that core workers are not in a standard employment relationship, more peripheral workers may be acceptable deviations from the norm.

20 Since institutional power varies, union strategies will have to vary accordingly, as the following quote points out:

[I]t can often very much depend on the employment in the sector you’re going in. If you have a very highly unionised industry or even an employment you can be far more successful in encouraging people to join a union or protecting agency workers. When we have low density in some sectors or some industries or some employments it can be a lot harder, so you have to judge the strategy or the approach differently. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU).

It also seemed that in industrial sectors in which unions had greater institutional power, replacement came forward as an attractive and attainable strategy. This pertained particularly to the health sector. Interestingly, the view of agency workers is influenced also by the marketplace bargaining power (Olin Wright 2000) or mobility bargaining power (Silver 2003) of the workers themselves. Again nurses, some of which are voluntary agency workers in an industrial sector where the unions have relatively high institutional power, are, at best, considered an enigma or, worse, scorned, while other workers are “victims” as they are agency workers “through no fault of their own”:

[W]hat we’ve been doing lately, […] we have a campaign running to convert agency workers into permanent employees of the national health service. In the health care assistant area, that is making great progress. In the nursing area, it’s more difficult, because of the shortage of nurses. But in fairness to the national health provider, they are trying to recruit directly agency […] Now, there are probably two or three reasons, why that’s not working out. One is – if nurses work for agencies, they have more flexible arrangements. They can work as they like, they don’t have to work if they don’t like. They can pick certain shifts because of the shortage, and they get paid exactly the same as you’re working permanent […] In the health service, for instance, a lot of nurses and professional people, and doctors by the way, […] are paid higher than if they were working directly for the health service. And that has been a massive issue. They’re choosing not to work for the […] health service provider. Nurses, in the main, they volunteer to work for agencies. But people who are in support service areas, they are more involuntary, because there may be no other way of getting a position to do this. Now, again, some groups are voluntarily getting involved, other groups are involuntarily […] In relation to people who work permanently in the health service here, we try to encourage them to understand that, and communicate with agency workers who are long serving, you know, in their hospital or in their service, […] that these people are in those contracts through no fault of their own. It’s just the circumstance that they’re in. And we try and communicate to them what they are entitled to receive and we communicate that they will fight for them where those agency workers are occupying permanent posts to convert them. That’s the dialogue that’s been going on. Now, most people in that situation will want a permanent job, not them all. (Paul Bell, Health Division, SIPTU).

As I have argued elsewhere, unions need to address the issues of agency work, particularly as it intersects with gender and professionalism, more actively and innovatively (Bergene & Egeland forthcoming). Bergene and Egeland (forthcoming) have pointed out the value of realising the subversive, mobilising potential of agency, arguing that challenging the standard employment relationship through critical intervention could produce emancipatory effects. As stated, the strength and effectiveness of union strategies rely on building organisational power, over which unions themselves have substantial influence.

21 As mentioned, unions have strategic choice over whom they represent and the issues they will address (Heery and Abbott, 2000; Hyman, 1994), and this relates to union structures and democracy affecting, in return, the formulation of union policies and strategies and the extent to which these incorporate the interests of agency workers i.e. whether policies favour traditional insiders. We have, for instance, seen Ledwith (2012) argue that unions struggle with a tradition of cultures of exclusionary masculinity, relying heavily on the SER as institution and identity. The quote above bears close witness to this culture.

Unions were, as already stated, pivotal in the generalisation of the SER, and the servicing model was developed and proved efficacious in the period where the SER prevailed, at least among male workers. This meant that «marginal workers», were regarded as «a threat to traditional worker solidarity» (Holter & Sørensen 1984:248). Consequently, the growth and institutionalisation of agency work may lead to generalisation of insecurity, and union strategies might thus be devised out of fear (Kalleberg 2009). However, as Barachiesi (2012) argues, this feeling of fear and insecurity is largely a male discomfort, and the ensuing strategies may be exclusionary. Diversification of the employment relationship has, in other words, complicated efforts to coordinate, mobilise and build solidarity between workers (Coe & Jordhus-Lier 2015). How this affects workers was pointed out by one of our informants in the Irish union movement, who also admitted that temporary work agencies are really not the problem, misguided union strategies are:

OK – it depends on the industry […] [W]here agency workers are not seen as a threat, the relationship is good. In other words, where people see that they’re not a threat to their employment. But where they are seen as a threat, generally speaking, what will happen is that, a dispute will ensue, there’s no doubt about it, where the direct employees, will either get to a stage with the employer where they’re saying “If you need more workers, employ them directly” or they will get to a stage where they’re saying “If you’re bringing in agency workers, we want an agreement from you that that will not affect our terms and conditions”. And that really is the wrong way to go about it. That’s what causes the problem in the first place. (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

We can here see that the informant recognises that exclusionary strategies, be they seeking to replace agency work with direct employment or to segment the workforce in an effort to secure terms and conditions for the “core”, are held responsible for the situation the union movement now finds itself in. Although fear might be a bad advisor in many instances, it may also function as a spur. Providing an example of a successful case of organising agency workers and improving their terms and conditions, one of our informants gave us the following account:

How it happened was this, and again to a certain extent it’s probably a bit of self-interest for the people that were already there: the company were making certain major changes in the plant and it very quickly dawned on people that if they didn’t take some control of this, that the company could possibly […] replace them with agency workers, or certainly to have the agency workers doing work parallel to them. So, it became very apparent to us and to the people working on that site that there was a very strong need to recruit the agency workers. It was difficult to recruit them, and they were very resistant about talking to us. They had a fear of being dismissed from their place of employment. But we had the strength in that company to organise them and to get them, it was about an 18 or 20 per cent wage increase. We got them the same terms and conditions with regard to the supply of protective clothing et cetera, so we did get them a protection.

22 Organising for a change Ledwith (2012) argues that unions can potentially encompass new, diverse workforces, while Ebbinghaus et al. (2009) and Fievez (2009) have argued that unions have indeed become more responsive to the interests of new groups of workers. Renewal and recruitment will, however, necessitate recognising and representing young, precarious workers on their own terms (Ledwith 2012), that is, including them. We saw above that Byford (2009:228) argues that this is more likely to occur in unions inspired by the organising approach with its focus on empowerment and encouragement of “participative structures that contain ‘new autonomies’ and less paternalistic behaviour”. Such paternalistic behaviour can be seen in the so-called servicing model when it comes to how the union and its officials provide services and find solutions to problems faced by members who are treated as clients or victims. This sort of response, and how it derives from structural understandings of the challenges of organising agency workers and the separation of institutional and organisational power, was clearly formulated by our informant in Global Unions:

The other issue is that even if you have coverage of collective agreements you may not have very many members. In the Netherlands they have collective agreements covering temporary agency workers, but they have very few members. Partly because of the nature of it. You’re working all over the place, you don’t have any identification with a particular sector necessarily, you’re gonna be there for X period of time, so people don’t tend to get involved in the union. Number one. Number two, since they are working in so many different sectors, it’s difficult for people even to identify with the union […] You protect them sort of from above with a collective agreement, but the capacity of workers to really get involved, really determine the agenda is a problem. So the more and more you have strange forms of employment, the more difficult it’s gonna be for people to set the priorities for their own lives, for their own unions and run them. (Jim Baker, Global Unions)

There is, however, according to Ledwith (2012) increasing evidence that more diverse workers and unionists represent a change of attitudes in the union movement away from the abovementioned cultures of exclusionary masculinity of traditional unionism. The organising model, on the other hand, entails worker empowerment, activating and encouraging members to themselves pursue union goals (Fiorito and Jarley 2008), a major aim being to increase members’ identification with and participation in the union (Johnson and Jarley 2004). When asked directly how the turn to the organising model had affected SIPTU, one of our informants pointed out just how it had changed their approach to agency work through accepting the need for the union to change in an inclusionary direction as well and not just resist new developments:

I mean, the strategies are pretty much the same [as before], you adapt them, it just means you are flexible. But the priority is of trying to be inclusive. And we are a stronger trade union, we are a stronger group of workers, if we include everybody and try and have everybody as a member of a union regardless of their employment contract, as opposed to, traditionally, what would have happened, would have been “Well, we can’t do anything for agency workers anyway, they don’t want anything done for them at all, so let’s concentrate on our permanent employees” […] So the organising model changed us around and said, you know, we have to change our strategies […] We try and organise them in different campaigns involving them in the community, and we do try and encourage members to get involved in community campaigns and community issues. We have a lot of members that volunteer in the basic English learning scheme. We have a lot of members that would actually have migrant workers in their house […] So, it’s, I wouldn’t say it’s been a hundred percent successful, but it is achieving. It is changing our culture, it is changing our mindset. So, it

23 takes time to achieve it. But that’s where it’s going. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU).

As we can see, the above quoted informant argues that changes have to be made to the union culture and mindset. She emphasised that this needs to be done both at the level of the union and at the level of its members, who are in permanent, direct employement, through shaking the grounds of the traditional SER-centrism, arguing again that the turn to the organising model helped SIPTU realise the value of this and implementing it throughout the organisation:

I think part of the strategy is to get [understanding] from permanent employees of how important it is to include, being inclusive with agency workers. There would have traditionally been a reluctance from – and that would be our members – unionised members, who were permanent employees – to have any interaction with agency workers. They would have viewed them as aliens. You know, wherever they came from. They may never have represented them. They wouldn’t be inclusive with them. They would have said “Well obviously they are only agency workers”. I think that was a change in the strategy. There was a huge emphasis to try and get our members to realise how important it was that all workers are represented regardless of their employment contract and regardless of their employer. So, that was a big push, it was a big change in strategy. Because, I know in some of the bigger industries, in the early part of the last decade, there probably wasn’t much effort put into looking at agencies because they said “they are here one week and they’re gone next week”. But I think that’s been a change in strategy, it’s realising that the issues an agency worker has regarding their employment rights are the same as for a permanent worker. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU).

In other words, as part of the process of renewal the discourses and practices of traditional unions need to be unsettled and destabilised. To start with the practices, Clark (2009) emphasises the need to increase the power and effectiveness of unions through building a union culture bent on encouraging member participation. Remembering the term cultures of exclusionary masculinity, unions need to reflect on structural aspects, such as the question whether pronounced centralisation might circumscribe the space for rank-and-file participation and the involvement of diverse groups of workers not trained in or comfortable with centralised, specialised and professionalised bureaucracies demanding “mastery of bargaining issues and tactics” (Holter & Sørensen 1984:249, Offe & Wiesenthal 1980). A change of ways might entail both inviting members in to listen to them and to include them in ways that builds confidence. “Diversity democracy” would involve including (potential) members, in all their diversity, in discussions and decision-making, and one of our Irish informants told us about good experiences with arranging specific conferences aimed at precisely such inclusion, fostering understanding and avoiding “ghettoisation”:

And recently we have, in our manufacturing division, we have had a number of conferences where we have invited migrant workers who have got involved with the union […] to have a discussion so that we know what they feel the barriers are […] [T]hat was very instructive and we’ve got another conference scheduled before the end of the year and at that one we will also be bringing our Irish shop stewards into that equation so that we don’t ghettoise people. It’s just to try and build the concept of when they organise they can make improvements. And there’s case studies then that they can relate to themselves that prove that that’s the case. So, that’s encouraging.

In other words, we see that it is realised that unions will not succeed in empowering and building confidendence among members by telling them what the barriers are and what is in their interest.

24 Building confidence is also about including everyone as equal partners in the established structures, such as committees, which could, in some cases, influence agency workers in the direction of being willing to join the union despite potential risk factors:

In some cases they realised really they hadn’t an awful lot to lose. And secondly they, and maybe more importantly, they had the support of the people already in the plant. And what we did was to give them a bit of confidence. For example, our structure, union structure, generally, in an employment is where we have what we call a section committee. That is a group of representatives, shop stewards, who meet inside in that employment, and they would, you know, form the strategy […] [T]he best way to give people confidence is to elect a number of the agency workers to that committee. So they are now sitting at the table with other union representatives and from that they get the confidence to know that things can change if they organise themselves, that improvement can be made in their terms and conditions. (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

While including agency workers in the democratic structure, both by inviting them to conferences and by electing them to section committees, is an integral part of union democracy in the fullest, and most inclusive sense, it may also, as the above quote hints at, foster solidarity. According to the same informant, involving agency workers in such discussions, both in the union movement at large, but particularly at their place of work, is actually the best way to build solidarity:

The best way to build solidarity, obviously, is to involve them in our discussions […] You have to embrace these people and involve them in our discussions and involve them in the movement. In some places, that very, very successfully has been done. And that’s fine. […] So, really, the building of the solidarity really needs to be done at the place of work, because you can have national forums and you can have position papers and you can have people making speeches and you can […] lobby governments for more regulation and stuff like that, but to build solidarity – it’s got to be done at the local level. (Michael Browne, Manufacturing Division, SIPTU).

In other words, it is not necessary to invite agency workers to tell stories about their employment situation, motivation and attitutdes towards the union movement for use in position papers or speeches, the prevailing union structures, strategies, and discourse have to be unsettled and destabilised in a more profound manner, establishing in their stead inclusive democracies and systems of social justice (Ledwith 2012). In addition to a shift of focus regarding who to organise and how to represent them, such inclusive democracies could often also entail a shift of focus from collective bargaining to wider social issues, such as city planning and “living wages”:

[The best strategies for organising and representing agency workers, and building solidarity] is actually trying to get inclusion. As trade unions, I think traditionally we sometimes […] only look at representing, whether it’d be saying “We can only represent Irish people” or “We can only represent people who are on permanent employment”, or “We can only represent certain skills”. I think, given the way employment and employment trends has gone over the past two decades or so, I think it’s being inclusive. It’s not look for reasons why you can’t represent somebody, or why you can’t have somebody as a member. It is actually everybody can be a member of a trade union and let’s see how we can include everybody. You know, what’s going to be key for you, what’s important to you. Today it could be very important for me that I have a certain employment right, tomorrow I can say “Well, I live in this city, I work in this city, I have a problem with the planning in this city”. And that’s something we are trying to do as well, is what we call “Lift the city”, that is, we’re putting pressure on the local

25 city council […] If […] I’m building an office block here today or shop here today I have to pass certain environmental and certain health and safety laws, but I could have people employed there with the barest minimum rate of pay […] And that person would have to live about 40 kilometres from their job in the city centre to actually afford housing, because you couldn’t afford it in the city centre […] We want people to be able to eat in the city and we want people to work in the city […] So, if you broaden your mind and make it inclusive, you do have to be flexible on what are going to be the issues. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU)

The need “to be flexible on what are going to be the issues” is what establishing inclusive democracies and systems of social justice which acknowledge social differentiation without exclusion is all about. We have argued that “diversity democracy” entails involving the members themselves, in all their diversity, in discussions and decision-making. This is at odds with democracy understood as a relaying of representation, what Gramsci (1933) termed “bureaucratic centralism”. While bureaucratic centralism presupposes that the individual and the collective can be identified with one another, where the union in a clear-cut manner represents the interests of the members, democracy in its fullest sense entails allowing and inviting members to actively take part in policy discussion and implementation, where it is of utmost importance that these members will not be told what to think. Again this may call for a different approach from unions, not only regarding issues but also how these are raised. According to the following informant, traditional approaches of representing and negotiating, while still worthwhile, is not the most effective way of organising agency workers:

I think agency workers can only be organised effectively in campaigns […] So there has to be, in my opinion, a campaigning platform for those people. That’s what they want […] The point I’m trying to make […] is that the organising of those workers was based on the understanding of achieving an objective […] But it’s like every worker, it doesn’t matter if they’re agency or not, unless the union itself can identify with them what the objective is that they wish to be campaigning for, there’s nothing to say to them. It can be to ensure them permanent employment, it’s a pension, it’s salary, it’s conditions, you know, unless the union movement has something to say to those workers, they’re not going to attract them to join them, and become involved in collective activity. (Paul Bell, Health Division, SIPTU).

But as we can get a glimpse of, taking on the issue of agency work in a proactive manner may be unsettling, and success may hinge on the courage to let the organisation itself change in line with external changes, and not be merely reactive. So, instead of lamenting how “impossible” it is to organise agency workers because these do not fit the current institutional and/or organisational make-up, unions should strive to talk to them and “give them some other reason why they would want to join a trade union”, which could often necessitate broadening the perspective:

There was an expansion of the social justice part of it, as well. We have a lot of people working for agencies who may not have the luxury […] of actually being EU members […] And then recently we have looked at the undocumented workers that work in Ireland. And they are working for agencies […] So it has evolved to be not just about workers’ rights, but also the social justice part of it as well. So, there has been an evolution of it, that you are giving a wider message to agency workers that we’re trying to be inclusive of everybody. There are other issues we can help people about […] So, it’s not just about workers’ rights […] Besides housing, besides knowing their rights, their legal rights, we work very closely with the Migrants Rights Centre in Ireland, we do a lot of campaigns with them […] You can talk to people, I can say these are your employment rights, but mainly to give them some other reason why they would want to join a trade union, you know, when they have a different employer every week. (Teresa Hannick, Services Division, SIPTU).

26 This broadened perspective brings about another important issue as regards delimiting the work of a union, and, in the end, exclusionary practices, namely the distinction between members and non- members and what unions may and may not do for workers prior to or independently of membership at any given time. Given the precarious nature of agency work, workers may, as we have seen, be reluctant to joining a union out of fear. Providing them with reasons to join deriving from experiences of collective strength could thus be of central importance, but where the unions have become hamstrung by the current institutional make-up – where representation is part of a process of legally constituted interest intermediation and legal entitlements to participate in tripartite bodies – this option becomes more difficult to achieve and, arguably, there are fewer incentives for investing in these workers. As we can see in the following quote, organising agency workers, particularly when their status as such intersects with status as immigrants, and in that effort seeking cooperation from other civil society organisations, may challenge the sharp demarcation line between members and non-members, particularly when the issues are not employer-related:

I think the […] issues we’ve managed to organise some agency workers on, one of them was about housing and immigration status. So, I have found that a lot of the organising [where] we get involved with agency workers – because a lot of them are migrant workers – we’ve done in connection with the Migrant Rights Centre. So people might contact the Migrant Rights Centre first […] [They] wouldn’t actually be our members, but on behalf of the Migrant Rights Centre we would have represented workers […] I think there’s a reluctance among a lot of agency workers to contact a trade union themselves, you know […]. Sometimes people can be afraid of the word “trade union”, and the Migrant Rights Centre […] would never force anybody to become part of a trade union […] They […] would say [unions] should be representing workers regardless of whether they are members or not. And we’d love to do that, but we are restricted. We can’t, legally, […] represent somebody somewhere when they are not member of our trade union. So we can assist and advice, and we work closely with those NGOs, we give them advice […], but we are restricted because of legislation, […] under employment law we can’t represent somebody because they’re not our member.

Conclusion Our point of departure was the challenges faced by unions since the 1980s, in the form of crises of interest aggregation, employee loyalty and representativeness, despite unions still being important actors in the regulation of the labour markets, also as a formative institutional presence, along with employers, their associations, and governments. We have argued that Fordism rested on national- level negotiations between unions, employers’ associations and government were a key regulatory mechanism, and as such unions were pivotal in the establishment and generalisation of the so-called standard employment relationship (SER). This legacy may act both as token of relevance and strength on the one hand, and, as we have seen, as an exclusionary practice on the other. The effect of non-standard employment in general on trade unionism is often seen as unequivocally destructive, and temporary agency work in particular is held partly responsible for the recent decline in union membership (Croucher & Brewster 1998). Among others, the presence of this new group of workers is regarded as undermining traditional forms of bargaining power (Doellgast et al. 2009), and the workers themselves are seen as difficult, if not impossible, to organise. It has thus been argued that the emergence of non-standard employment warrants new strategies on the part of unions (Kalleberg 2009), an important part of which is moving beyond SER-centrism and ridding the union movement of cultures of exclusionary masculinity, building inclusive democracies capable of

27 uniting a diverse workforce not convinced by the conservative reflexes of resurrecting “labourism” (Standing 2011) or organising on the basis of a “working class melancholy” (Barchiesi 2011).

Another important point of departure for us is that union policies and strategies are not formulated in a vacuum, but must rather be analysed in relation to the socio-political context, which is why we adopted a comparative analytical approach, comparing union strategies toward temporary agency work in Norway and Ireland.

Employing a theoretical framework drawing on conceptualisations of power and power relations and of main union responses to temporary agency work, perspectives regarding the exclusionary and inclusionary aspects of union strategies and finally the ideal-typical approach delineating two models of unionism, we sought in our comparative analysis of union strategies in Norway and Ireland to answer the questions raised in the introduction, to which we will now return:

What structural differences across countries influence union strategies and union effectiveness at protecting and representing agency workers? While the socio-political contexts in Norway and Ireland are profoundly different, with implications for the institutional power of unions, our analysis shows that there are more similarities than differences in how unions have responded to the phenomenon of temporary agency work. In line with the argument that unions are not sole products of their external environment, this would suggest that explanations of union responses to agency work should pay particular attention to the properties of unions themselves. Socio-political contexts, particularly the nature of the bi- /multilateral relations unions enter into, are, however, important mediating factors and should figure in the background in explaining enabling and constraining factors as well as contingent outcomes.

Again, this is not to say that union strategies are formulated in a vacuum, as this paper also shows how the different contexts prevailing in different industrial sectors matter. We have seen that varying degrees for institutional power, and by extension of strength of the union movement, affects the incentives to make fundamental changes to union structures and policies. For instance, in industrial sectors where unions have greater institutional power, for instance in the health sector, it seems that replacement comes forward as an attractive and attainable strategy. Regulation of temporary agency work can also be favoured in such contexts, but may also be a response to agency work in sectors with low institutional power, using the accumulated institutional power of the union movement deriving from elsewhere. The institutional power of unions seemed also to influence the approach to agency workers themselves, where sufficient institutional power seemed to increase the propensity of reverting to SER-centrist replacement rather than having inclusion as an ideal. We are now drawing close to the next research question pertaining to internal and external facilitators and inhibitors.

What are the internal and external facilitators and inhibitors of successful union strategies? Based on our analysis, it seems that the main external inhibitors of successful union strategies are hegemonic understandings of work and workers, particularly what Standing (2011) terms “labourism” and Barchiesi “working class melancholy”, both of which lead to SER-centrism in an era in which precisely such an employment relationship is difficult to attain. Another external factor influencing union strategies are the bi- and multilateral relations unions enter into which (re)define and (re)constitute what they are. This would include the institutional make-up, such as industrial relations. Furthermore, unions may be more or less constrained by employment law and other legislation. In addition to industrial relations legislation on what unions may or may not do, an external inhibitor arising from employment law is, as we have seen, whether agency workers are

28 paid between assignments. Where they are not, like in Norway, they are all the more difficult to organise, since doing so would, for many, practically mean losing their job since they would not be assigned any work by the agency.

Internally, the same hegemonic understandings, when they prevail in the union movement and inform the choice of strategies, may act as a major inhibitor of devising new, and potentially successful, approaches to agency workers. As we have seen, “labourism”, “working class melancholy”, SER-centrism and cultures of exclusionary masculinity have led unions to the conclusion that agency workers are difficult, if not impossible, to organise, and consequently, to devising strategies not really involving the agency workers themselves, either by trying to get agency workers into the fold (i.e. replacement) or regulating temporary agency work. This seems to be particularly true when the strategies are conceived on the basis of fear of a new and alien presence. Such strategies often become conservative, reactionary and entail building fortresses. In addition to such understandings, union structures have also been established in historical contexts and may act similarly as exclusionary and as reproducing the alien status of agency workers by being more materialised fortresses into which they cannot enter, either by regulation or by custom. In other words, there seems to be an insider-outsider model in union policies.

To what extent is the insider-outsider model reflected in union policies? From our case studies it would seem that unions do rely on an insider-outsider model of which they are aware and, at the moment, explicitly strive to overcome. We have seen examples of this struggle in both of our cases. The insider-outsider model is reflected in union strategies seeking to build fortresses around core workers, only accepting agency workers in when they are converted into permanent, direct employment, or are agency workers “through no fault of their own”. The balance between exclusion and inclusion also seems to be affected by the kind of power the unions have or seek, that is, whether it is institutional or organisational power. Institutional power is derived from previous struggles and needs to be protected and maintained, and once accomplished it may lead to a complacency where it is tempting to “look for reasons why you can’t represent somebody, or why you can’t have somebody as a member”. As we have seen, institutional power might, partly because of such exclusion, undermine the organisational power of unions.

We have furthermore seen how inspiration drawn from the organising model have led especially the Irish union movement to stress its change in the direction of increasingly seeking to include agency workers, which would point towards building down the insider-outsider model. If unions indeed do adopt more inclusive strategies towards agency workers, including them as equal members in their constituency and adopt their issues into their agendas, agency workers could become an important agent of change rather than the mole undermining the union movement, as they are conceived of today. As Barchiesi (2011) has pointed out, this could have emancipatory potential.

29