‘Ideational power’ as a resource in union struggle

Abstract

Contributing to our understanding of ideas as power resources in union struggle, this article analyses a labour dispute in Israel's shipping industry. The article follows the union's foregrounding of a specific idea of the state contained within the collective understanding of Israel's history, by which the union legitimised its position in the dispute and significantly influenced a government decision. The article therefore suggests that ideas can be an important power resource, particularly when other power resources are lacking but that this power resource is dependent on the specific ideational context: effective foregrounded ideas draw on a shared narrative that enables political actors to claim the moral high ground, while accusing their adversaries of failing to fulfil their moral obligations as understood via the frame of that shared narrative.