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This research investigated variations in pay for adult social care workers in England. It explored how local conditions, such as unemployment, and local authority fees and processes for buying care affect pay variations. Finally, it investigated how pay variations affect workers, for example, leaving their jobs or developing skills. The research involved: working with data provided by Skills for Care; surveying organisations that provide adult social care; interviewing managers of care organisations and care workers themselves. Pay for adult social care workers is low with limited variation within and across roles. Most care workers receive a similar hourly pay rate, often at or only a little more than the National Living Wage; most senior care workers receive a similar hourly rate of pay, often only marginally higher than the care worker rate. In many cases, most care providers offer only one pay rate to each group. To maximise pay rates, few pay enhancements are offered, e.g. unsocial hours payments. Further, very few providers offer pay scales that recognise qualifications and/or experience, which creates few opportunities for care workers to increase their pay and limited incentive to gain qualifications. Low pay is also linked to lower retention. Other terms and conditions of employment are basic. Care providers argue that the fees they receive from local authorities are too low to allow them to pay more. Policy implications include: increasing government investment in adult social care to raise local authority fees and care worker pay; changing the way care is commissioned and/ or introducing regulation to ensure fee increases lead to higher pay and create more stability; introducing pay structures to recognise qualifications and experience; and improving other terms and conditions of employment. Stable and flexible working patterns are also important. Leadership development to support implementing pay systems and create strong working environments are needed.

This book explores the representation of women's interests in the world of work across four trade unions in France and the UK. Drawing on case studies, it unveils the social, organisational and political conditions that contribute to the reproduction of gender inequalities or, on the contrary, allow the promotion of equality

International audience

This paper examines the daily experiences of Jua Kali women entrepreneurs in Western Kenya, unpacking how gendered power relations are enacted in interactions within informal marketplaces, and in what ways women entrepreneurs mobilise agency within these structurally constrained contexts. Drawing on thirty in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations, the study reveals that, Jua Kali women face gendered control of economic resources and marketplace space, normalised gendered exclusion and gender-based violence, and extractive informal governance and harassment. Despite these structural and interactional constraints, women enact a range of responses, deployed individually and collectively, ranging from collective solidarity networks and strategic acquiescence, to tactful compliance and evasive resistance, as they navigate precarious structurally and institutionally constrained working environments. This study extends a processual understanding of everyday entrepreneurship conceptualising it as a gendered, embodied, and negotiated process of survival and restricted agency, shaped by the affective, spatial and institutional conditions of informal marketplaces in Global South contexts.

In the context of the new 2008 statutory recognition legislation, the Syndicat National des Journalistes (SNJ), being a craft union, has managed to benefit from the right to have its audience measured separately, through either a specific ballot for journalists-only or a ballot including journalists and managers. At the workplace level, the negotiation of these two options with the other general unions generates numerous tensions and reveals the struggle the SNJ is ready to lead to maintain its dominance within the Press profession. However, this case study led in a multinational company emphasizes the potential contradictions between this limited strategy and the need for unions' coalition in order to preserve employees' rights, in a context of corporate restructuring. More generally this article calls attention to the renewed significance union elections has gained in a French context where the main union confederations were granted an undisputable right to represent worker's interests. Le Syndicat national des journalistes (SNJ) bénéficie d'une disposition dérogatoire qui autorise la mesure de sa représentativité à partir d'un seul collège spécifique. Mais l'obtention de ce collège, le fait qu'il ne donne pas lieu à un rassemblement plus large (" journalistes et cadres "), suscite des tensions dans les entreprises tant se joue pour le SNJ, via l'agrégation de l'ensemble de ses résultats électoraux au niveau de la branche, le maintien de son rôle historique dans la profession. L'étude menée dans un grand groupe de presse permet de saisir comment cette stratégie spécifique peut entrer en contradiction avec des enjeux plus transversaux dans un contexte de restructurations économiques et d'affaiblissement des garanties collectives. L'article souligne l'importance stratégique que revêt désormais, en amont des élections professionnelles, la négociation du protocole relatif à l'organisation du scrutin et au découpage des collèges. Ce constat vaut particulièrement pour les syndicats catégoriels, dont le statut dérogatoire reste fragile, mais aussi pour les syndicats intercatégoriels, en fonction de leur base sociale et de leur influence effective sur les différentes catégories présentes dans l'établissement.

Si les congrès de la CFDT sont aujourd’hui plutôt consensuels, assister à ce grand rituel de la vie syndicale permet d’observer par quels processus l’institution entretient l’adhésion des militants à leur organisation, mais également de saisir in situ les enjeux de légitimation pour les dirigeants ou militants confirmés et d’intronisation pour les nouveaux qui y participent. Cet article s’appuie sur des observations ethnographiques lors du congrès confédéral de la CFDT à Tours en 2010, associées à des photographies de cet évènement. Dans cet article, nous soulignons la fonction aujourd’hui moins programmatique que symbolique des congrès confédéraux à la CFDT. Si quelques enjeux liés aux orientations politiques sur des sujets d’actualité sont toujours présents et scrutés par les médias (comme la réforme des retraites en 2010), la forte cohérence idéologique interne de l’organisation déplace le curseur de l’événement vers des enjeux avant tout symboliques de légitimation des dirigeants qui le portent et d’intégration des nouveaux militants. S’il est souvent difficile de décrypter les enjeux du congrès par la seule observation de ce qui se joue sur scène, la participation aux coulisses du congrès permet d’obtenir des éléments d’interprétation relatifs aux jeux de pouvoir au sein de l’équipe dirigeante, aux enjeux de détection des « bons militants », mais aussi de constater combien la participation à un congrès syndical suppose un apprentissage de longue durée.

L’effet des restructurations sur les carrières des cadres reste encore peu analysé, notamment dans une perspective genrée. Les deux cas ici étudiés de fusion-acquisition suivies de fortes restructurations, en Angleterre et en Hongrie, montrent que la recomposition des espaces d’opportunité semble en partie favorable aux carrières féminines, avec le développement de filières de carrière plus ouvertes aux cadres non détenteurs des atouts de départ anciennement indispensables (diplôme d’ingénieur dans les deux pays et capital politique/origine sociale modeste en Hongrie). Cette ouverture offre la possibilité aux femmes de combler en partie leur retard structurel lié à leur faible présence dans les écoles d’ingénieur. Mais le renforcement d’un modèle d’activité masculin-neutre caractérisé par des exigences de mobilité contrainte (avec des fermetures-relocation de sites, notamment pour les fonctions support très féminisées) et de disponibilité extensive pour tous les métiers, contribue parallèlement au durcissement du plafond de verre, pour ceux et celles qui ne peuvent se conformer à ces attendus, et en particulier les mères de famille.

Poussés par les demandes de leurs adhérents, la légalisation et la juridicisation et des relations sociales, les syndicats se sont engagés dans des processus d’internalisation du droit, notamment sous la forme de services juridiques internes. Les professionnels du droit qui y travaillent évoluent dans des organisations où prédominent des formes de rationalité politique et partisane qui peuvent entrer en conflit avec les logiques professionnelles qu’ils représentent. Cet article se penche sur les conditions d’exercice de leur métier entre savoir expert et logiques militantes et s’interroge sur le processus de professionnalisation hybride qu’ils parviennent à construire.

Ces dix dernières années ont vu la consécration progressive, mais chaotique, de la notion de « dialogue social » comme forme légitime des relations sociales en France. Adossée à une tradition ancienne de négociation de branche (Jobert & Saglio, 2004) et plus récente de négociation nationale interprofessionnelle (Pernot, 2013), la législation française n’a eu de cesse de se développer depuis 1982. Elle a ainsi favorisé l’autonomisation des accords d’entreprise et l’extension des champs de la négociation obligatoire (Jobert, 2009). Dans le courant des années 2000, une place centrale a été accordée à la négociation collective interprofessionnelle qui doit dorénavant précéder toute réforme envisagée par un gouvernement en matière d’emploi, de travail ou de formation professionnelle (loi Larcher de 20071). D’autres lois ont aussi ouvert de nouvelles possibilités de dérogation pour les accords d’entreprise (lois Fillon de 20042, Bertrand de 20083 et « relative à la sécurisation de l’emploi » de 2013). Les lois Macron4 et Rebsamen5 de 2015 s’inscrivent dans cette évolution. Elles placent l’accord collectif au centre des différents dispositifs . Leurs promoteurs affirment rechercher le renforcement du « dialogue social » par la clarification des différentes obligations de négocier au niveau de l’entreprise. Toutefois l’ensemble de ces nouvelles lois traduit l’ambivalence de l’État vis-à-vis de l’autonomie des « partenaires sociaux ». Il dit en effet vouloir « moderniser » les relations sociales pour les rendre « plus efficaces », tout en cherchant à contourner la régulation de branche, le Code du travail, voire les forces syndicales elles-mêmes par le recours accru au référendum d’entreprise.

During the 2000s, the battle for equal pay in the UK public sector materialised in large numbers of individual legal actions but also, for many women, in class action suits. Unions were partially reponsible for the rise of this latter approach, which allowed collective agreements to be renegotiated in a way that made grading systems fairer and helped many women get significant compensation for past inequalities they had suffered. These cases regularly encountered legal and other obstacles, however, showing how hard it is for union negotiators to counter the systemic gender- based inequality that they face. The end effect is that unions are no longer very interested in re- negotiating equal pay and generally tend to drag their feet before taking adversaries to court.

La mobilité internationale devient-elle un passage obligé pour les cadres ? Des récits de carrières avec des salariés au siège et dans les filiales hongroise et anglaise d’une grande entreprise française du secteur énergétique permettent de saisir le développement à la fois sélectif et restreint des opportunités d’expatriation/impatriation pour les cadres et surtout les dirigeants. Malgré la relative appétence des cadres pour cette aventure, les rétributions associées à ces mouvements sont très variables suivant le profil des individus (âge, sexe, diplôme), le type d’activités exercées et surtout les points d’entrée dans le groupe (siège ou filiale).

À la fin de l’été 2015, deux textes, de nature différente, se sont succédés qui marquent un déplacement important en direction de la promotion de la négociation collective et du « dialogue social » en entreprise. Le 17 août, la loi dite Rebsamen se fixe pour objectif d’« améliorer l’efficacité et la qualité du dialogue social au sein de l’entreprise ». Dans les premiers jours de septembre, Jean-Denis Combrexelle, ancien directeur général du Travail, remet un rapport qui formule une longue liste de propositions destinées à dynamiser la négociation et à « donner de nouveaux champs à la négociation », et dont certaines propositions ont nourri le projet de loi Travail du printemps 2016, dont la première version a été contestée par l’ensemble des syndicats de salariésPour bien comprendre les enjeux de ces textes et bien saisir les perspectives qu’ils ouvrent, deux juristes spécialistes de ces sujets ont accepté de répondre à nos interrogations. Cet entretien brosse un panorama des évolutions importantes concernant les CHSCT, la délégation unique du personnel, la représentation des travailleurs dans les TPE, les discriminations syndicales ou encore l’égalité professionnelle. Il permet aussi de donner sens aux transformations profondes que connaît actuellement le système français de relations professionnelles. Sylvaine Laulom et Cécile Nicod y montrent notamment que, si les mérites de la négociation collective sont aujourd’hui proclamés, c’est surtout parce qu’elle est supposée produire certains résultats et servir la compétitivité des entreprises. Elles soulignent également que le débat sur la simplification du droit du travail masque les enjeux de ce qui est en cours : « une simplification de certaines des obligations des employeurs ou, en d’autres termes, un rééquilibrage des rapports entre employeurs et salariés, où la réalité des rapports des pouvoirs entre les deux parties est occultée ».

This book explores the representation of women and their interests in the world of work across four trade unions in France and the UK. Drawing on case studies of the careers of 100 activists and a longitudinal study of the trade unions' struggle for equal pay in the UK, it unveils the social, organizational, and political conditions that contribute to the reproduction of gender inequalities or, on the contrary, allow the promotion of equality. Guillaume’s nuanced evaluation is a call to redefine the role of trade unions in the delivering of gender equality, contributing to broader debates on the effectiveness of equality policies and the enforcement of equality legislation.

Drawing on research conducted over the last 20 years, mostly in the United Kingdom and France, but also in the USA, Caribbean and Hungary, this paper examines the evolution of women’s union participation, in different organisational and occupational contexts, with varying degrees of skill, precariousness and feminisation. Exploring how feminisation processes manifest themselves at different levels of activism, it emphasises both importance of contextualising unions’ feminisation processes within specific inequality regimes and the need to adopt an intersectional perspective on women’s union participation.

Building on studies looking into how professionals encounter stigma and negotiate their work lives, this article fills a gap in extant sociological literature on gender and professional work by providing original qualitative data on professional women supported re-entry-to-work experiences. Examining the development of returner programmes in the UK, we investigate the supportive factors in the mitigation of stigma threats associated with the returner status, including organisational support and individual stigma-management strategies. We examine how these social processes contribute to alleviating stigmatisation only partially, while maintaining persistent wage and career discrimination for women returners. To explain this mixed result, we explore the way in which women returners inhabit neoliberal feminist subjectivities.

Based on cross-national comparative research conducted in France and the UK, this article explores to what extent and under what conditions trade unions situated in different legal systems have turned to the courts to challenge discrimination at work. It investigates the interplay between a broad range of structural factors that offer specific opportunities, and the way trade unionists interpret contexts to promote legal mobilisation in addition to or in place of other repertoires of action. In so doing, it contributes to the understanding of employment discrimination law enforcement and the role of micro-level actors in enabling litigation strategies.

This book explores the representation of women's interests in the world of work across four trade unions in France and the UK. Drawing on case studies, it unveils the social, organisational and political conditions that contribute to the reproduction of gender inequalities or, on the contrary, allow the promotion of equality.

Since the end of the 1980s, the British public sector has experienced huge changes, a mix of privatisation, restructuring and marketization. The current Conservative government's approach to industrial relations is clearly an extension of the anti-union policies inherited from the Thatcher era, with a new law passed in 2016 that further restricts the right to strike. However, by comparison with the private sector, public sector employees still benefit from numerous collective agreements. This article explores the strategy conducted by the small union representing probation officers to oppose the restructuring programme enacted by the government in 2013 and to maintain some forms of collective bargaining at the national and workplace levels.

In the context of restructuring that has swept across Europe in recent years, this article discusses the conditions of workplace unionism resilience in a small, predominantly female UK public service occupation - probation. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, the article offers comprehensive insights into members' expectations towards their union branches and provides evidence of even more accountable and responsive relationships between local reps and their members following restructuring. Factors that contributed to the resilience of the union included the influence of a shared occupational identity, the legacy of large and confident branches and the (gender) democratic tradition of the union. However, the research also highlights some limitations for the permanence of effective workplace unionism in a context of socio-demographic changes as well as organizational difficulties linked to the restructuring and outsourcing process.

A persistent problem in trade unions is the discrepancy/tension that exists between their progressive national equality-seeking agenda and the translation of equality principles into workplace activism and their application to members' everyday working lives. Building on the notion of 'feminising' the union agenda, this article explores professional unions' efforts towards 'racialising' the agenda, which is a neglected equality focus in extant literature. The study is located within nursing and midwifery in NHS workplaces where the existence of racism has long been recognised by all employment relations actors. It investigates how the national union anti-racism project is implemented by workplace union representatives. While it reveals recognition of the existence of workplace racism among union representatives, a degree of denial and discomfort also exists. This, combined with the absence of the empowering union strategies that might be expected, hinders the delivery of a racially inclusive union agenda on the front lines of healthcare.

Based on in-depth qualitative research conducted in one of the major French trade unions (the CFDT), this article explores to what extent and under what conditions trade unions adopt different legal practices to further their members' interests. In particular, it investigates how 'legal framing' has taken an increasingly pervasive place in trade union work, in increasingly decentralised industrial relations contexts, such as France. This article therefore argues that the use of the law has become a multifaceted and embedded repertoire of action for the CFDT in its attempt to consolidate its institutional power through various strategies, including collective redress and the use of legal expertise in collective bargaining and representation work.

This article investigates the under-researched topic of women's representation in radical unions, drawing on an in-depth case study of the French Solidaires, Unitaires et Democratiques (SUD) movement. In addition to an overview of the institutional and organizational dynamics of unions' inequality regimes', it offers a contextually grounded analysis of the barriers and enablers of women's participation in SUD unions. More specifically, this research reflects on the complex interrelationships between class and gender in class-based militant trade unions that claim to be feminist but fail to support working-class female workers' participation.

La 4ème de couv. indique : "Les lois de 2008 sur la réforme de la représentativité syndicale et de 2015 sur le dialogue social ont instauré de nouvelles obligations de négociation en entreprise portant sur la "conciliation" de l'activité syndicale et professionnelle. Comment expliquer cette soudaine attention des pouvoirs publics à la "discrimination syndicale" ? Assiste-t-on à une rupture historique dans les relations professionnelles à la française ? Fondée sur six monographies de grandes entreprises aux pratiques sociales contrastées, cet ouvrage montre comment la négociation d'accords de droit syndical et de "gestion des parcours syndicaux" est aussi une réponse à la croissance des contentieux, menés notamment par la CGT depuis les années 1990, qui ont contribué à une prise de conscience de leurs droits par les syndicalistes. Si ces accords d'entreprise protègent désormais mieux les mandatés les plus investis dans le jeu du dialogue social, qui signent des accords, ils ne modifient pas radicalement les pratiques managériales de terrain qui continuent à stigmatiser les syndicalistes de proximité, surtout quand ils s'opposent aux restructurations ou dénoncent la dégradation des conditions de travail par des pratiques protestataires."

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.

This article utilizes a multi-method case study of the probation service of England and Wales to explore the perspectives of practitioners and their union on how restructuring/privatization affected the probation profession. Professionals perceived restructuring/privatization as ideologically and politically motivated, rather than evidence-based in relation to service goals. Against this context, the article outlines the probation union’s organized resistance, but ultimately its inability to halt the reform. The findings highlight practitioners’ concept of ‘the death of probation’ created by philosophical opposition to privatization, but also by the splitting of their profession and the resultant assault on professionalism. The study underlines the unique aspects of restructuring/privatization in the specific service domain, in particular those linked to working with a socially stigmatized client group, but it also has resonance for other public service professions facing the actuality or prospect of restructuring/privatization.

The broadening of the anti-discrimination legislation and the growing use of litigation have put pressure on organizations to respond to the law by elaborating formal rules and, in the case of France, negotiating collective agreements on union rights. This article addresses the issue of union victimization by investigating the various organizational responses to anti-discrimination law. By focusing on in-depth case studies over a long period of time, it offers new insights into the processes whereby law is internalized and how they interact with litigation over time, and also highlights the active, contested and changing role of HR professionals and trade unionists in the shaping of organizational responses.

Drawing on qualitative research in the main UK unions for nurses/midwives, this article investigates how union reps are responding on the ground to the realities and challenges confronting nursing and midwifery staff working in the English National Health Service (NHS). It confirms the difficulties encountered by public sector trade unions in maintaining and developing a resilient workplace unionism despite membership growth and organising efforts in highly feminised professions facing work pressures, increasing workload and staff shortages.

This chapter argues that a methodology based on the interactionist concept of career offers an innovative research design for understanding the (un)making of women's underrepresentation in union leadership positions. Drawing on a comparative research project that investigated four unions in France and the UK, it presents and illustrates this methodology. It investigates how different institutional, organizational and individual processes shape union careers and contribute to the reproduction of inequality regimes within trade unions, while unveiling the conditions, including individual agency and equality policies, that have enabled progress to be made in some unions.

Most research on the phenomenon of public service restructuring/outsourcing focuses on lower skilled work in peripheral activities and typically provides an overview of effects on work, employment and employment relations. Through an in-depth case study of probation, the intention of this article is to explore professional worker experiences of the restructuring/outsourcing of a core public service activity where the workforce is female dominated. The article highlights three dimensions of job quality that all suffered deteriorationwork, employment and engagement. The case of probation adds to evidence demonstrating that employees experience adverse effects even though transfer regulations and union agreements supposedly protect workers. Probation also stands as an exemplar of impoverishment processes in a female-dominated occupation which reinforces the view that public services can no longer be relied upon to provide high-quality jobs for highly qualified women.