From the 1970s onwards, Britain’s weakened trade unions have attempted a
rejuvenation of their orientations and strategies: chiefly in order to appeal to and
represent precarity-prone workers in a more satisfactory manner than they had before.
However, this rejuvenation process has occurred in a piecemeal and uncoordinated
manner: orientations have only shifted partially, and certain rejuvenatory strategies
have been far from effective.
An interwoven process has occurred alongside, and helped necessitate, this
attempted rejuvenation: Britain’s urban labour markets have become increasingly
‘ruralised’. That is to say, the British economy has been fundamentally restructured,
and urban industrial relations in the ‘New Economy’ have come to increasingly
resemble those long found in British agriculture. Britain’s Farmworkers’ Union has
had to contend with ‘new economic’ institutional conditions – namely the norms of
small-employee firms and interpersonal and/or triangular relations between employers and workers – for an extended period of time. It is therefore reasonable to assume that, from 1970 onwards, the Farmworker’s Union would have utilised those
orientations and strategies adopted by Britain’s urban unions during their rejuvenation
processes, but in a more systematic, coherent and effective manner, and from an
earlier date.
To interrogate this assumption I pose the following research question: in terms
of form and effectiveness, how differentiated have the orientations and strategies of
the Farmworkers’ Union been, with regards to precarity-prone workers, when
compared to the wider Trade Union Movement, and why