Conditions for cross-professional union coalition-building: When enough is enough, but solidarity also has its limits!

Nana Wesley Hansen and Nick Krachler
Additional contact information
Nana Wesley Hansen: FAOS Employment Relations Research Centre, Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Nick Krachler: King’s Business School, King’s College London, UK

Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2024, vol. 45, issue 2, 530-555

Abstract: Competition between unions whose membership has different skills and professionalization levels is a long-standing issue in the labour movement. This article investigates the conditions for why and how a unique cross-professional coalition of all Danish public-sector unions developed between 2017 and 2018. Operating in a favourable context, unions overcame professionalization differences when skilled brokers primed a common instrumental base as other unionists used a public interest frame to legitimate the coalition and its demands ideologically. However, once the common instrumental concern was met, the coalition collapsed. The article argues that union coalition-building depends on multiple factors comprising both contextual, and identity and relational conditions. The article further argues that adopting a framing that focuses on the public interest over professional self-interest helps to successfully overcome professional cleavages.

Keywords: Coalition; mobilizing; professionals; public sector employment relations; union strategy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0143831X231173462 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:ecoind:v:45:y:2024:i:2:p:530-555

DOI: 10.1177/0143831X231173462

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic and Industrial Democracy from Department of Economic History, Uppsala University, Sweden
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().