‘You couldn’t have a heart and want to strike’: Mobilising workers in England’s social care sector

Abstract

This article uses John Kelly’s mobilisation framework, with its foundational concept of injustice, to explore workers’ propensity towards unionism in England’s outsourced social care sector. Drawing on 60 interviews with union organisers and officers, care workers, support workers and care company managers, this research highlights the difficulties of union organising in the sector and explores theorisations of mobilising. The research contends that for mobilisation theory to provide insight into relationships between work and unionism, varieties of injustice and collectivism need to be contextualised. Paid care provision generates both employment-related injustices and care-related injustices, which lead to divergent collective identities and attitudes towards unions. An absence of a coherent entity for workers to attach blame to – within a context where private providers frequently remain reliant on state funding levels – affects whether injustice and collectivism progress to mobilisation and unionisation.