When trade unions turn to litigation: ‘getting all the ducks in a row’

Abstract

Driven by their members' demands and the need to adopt more combative legal strategies in order to oppose the deterioration of working and employment conditions, British trade unions have developed in‐house legal expertise and supported many individual and multiple claims. This article investigates the variation in unions' legal practices and examines their organisational responses to law and the role of compliance professionals in the regulation of employment litigation. It provides a nuanced account of the influence of legal rationality on the framing of union strategies and shows that, under certain conditions, trade unions are able to build multi‐pronged tactics by using litigation as a complement to other forms of action.

Collective labor relations and juridification: A marriage proposal

“…Mundlak, 2007Mundlak, , 2009, the article adds to recent scholarship (e.g. Deakin et al, 2015;Guillaume, 2018) which explores how these two regulatory approaches and logics might coexist: the case presented here shows social partners acting as 'institutional entrepreneurs', who create 'hybrids from the institutions of collective bargaining and substantive, individual employment law' (Heery, 2011: 90).…”

“…In contexts of decentralized IR systems, cooperation among unions and non-union actors can increase the inclusive nature of unions and their embeddedness in local communities (Narro, 2008(Narro, , 2009. Moreover, unions themselves are playing an increasing role in representing individual employment rights, providing accessible channels for enforcing those rights and using new labor legislation to advance their members' interests (Colling, 2012;Currie and Teague, 2016;Deakin et al, 2015;Guillaume, 2018;Heery, 2011), or investing resources in legal representation of workers, either directly or through legal firms (Schneider, 2001). But union funds are limited, leaving huge numbers of cases to new IR actors, who provide services to increasing numbers of workers.…”

“…This trend is manifested in the increasing importance of lobbying and litigation to address workers’ grievances and enforce rights, at the expense of traditional paths to worker representation (Gooberman et al, 2018; Ibsen and Tapia, 2017). In the US and UK for example, there has been a marked rise in the number of cases brought before employment tribunals (Guillaume, 2018; Schneider, 2001), reflecting the increasing significance of employment rights and of judicial means of enforcing them. 2 Even in ‘classic’ examples of corporatist labor relations, we see decentralization and shrinking collective agreement coverage (e.g.…”

“…Bechter et al, 2012; Bondy, 2018, 2020a, 2020b). Heeding Guillaume (2018: 239), who argues for a ‘nuanced and contextualized approach to the juridification of employment relations’, we present a precedential development in the sectoral IR of the Israeli construction industry – the establishment of an ‘enforcement committee’ under the auspices of the traditional social partners (the union and the EA), to address recurrent grievances of noncitizen Palestinian workers. Based on this rich case study, the article analyzes the ways social partners take advantage of the juridification of IR; we thus adopt an actor-centered approach, which suggests that ‘entrepreneurial actors, working within existing sets of institutions, engage in various forms of incremental change .…”

The role of legal intermediaries in the dispute pyramid: inequalities before the French legal system

“…Concerning the role of legal intermediaries, it seems useful to recall that socio-legal scholars have created this concept of 'legal intermediaries' to designate actorslawyers or non-legal professionalswho assist ordinary people in transforming their grievance into an appeal to the courts (Sarat and Felstiner, 1989;Kritzer, 1990;Spire and Weidenfeld, 2011;Lejeune and Orianne, 2014;Billows et al, 2019;Pélisse, 2019;Talesh and Pélisse, 2019). A new field of research has emerged that studies the wide range of people who, although they are not legal professionals, perform the function, roles and activities of legal intermediariesfor example, insurers (Talesh, 2015), safety engineers in research laboratories (Pélisse, 2017) or union delegates (Guillaume, 2018b). Our theoretical approach draws on this literature, but it differs from previous works in two ways.…”