Arise: power, strategy, and union resurgence, By Jane Holgate, London: Pluto Press. 2021. 248 pages. £16.99.

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• Author: Katy Fox‐Hodess
• Date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12266

DOI: 10.1111/ntwe.12266

BOOK REVIEW

Arise: power, strategy, and union resurgence

By Jane Holgate, London: Pluto Press. 2021. 248 pages. £16.99.

Katy Fox‐Hodess

Centre for Decent Work at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

Correspondence: Katy Fox‐Hodess, Centre for Decent Work at the University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK.

Email: katy.fox-hodess@sheffield.ac.uk

Bringing together 20 years of experience as a labour researcher and union activist, Jane

Holgate's Arise: Power, Strategy and Union Resurgence (Pluto Press 2021) provides an invaluable

contribution to our understanding of the current state of, and future prospects for, the British

trade union movement. Along with other recent publications for a general audience from Pluto

Press (including Jane Hardy's Nothing to Lose But Our Chains: Work and Resistance in 21st

Century Britain and Ian Allison's Workers Can Win: A Guide to Organising at Work), the book is

essential reading for anyone interested in these issues.

Beginning with an overview of British trade union movement decline and largely

unsuccessful approaches to revitalisation, Holgate examines how we got here and what can be

done about it. Holgate attributes the decline of the trade union movement firstly to legal

reforms from the 1970s onwards that gradually chipped away at workers' collective power and

emboldened employers and the state to launch further attacks. Second, she faults technological

changes that weakened unions' workplace bargaining power by eroding control over the labour

process and replacing workers with machines. But, as Holgate explains, these external shocks

only tell half the story. The trade union movement's inability to effectively innovate in response

to these challenges shares in the blame. Rather than a return to the grassroots organising and

social movement unionism of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries which had built the

trade union movement, some union leaders instead turned to a series of unsuccessful strategies,

including mergers, ‘partnership’agreements and servicing existing members, rather than

building numbers and collective power.

Even when the trade union movement adopted the ‘turn to organising’, beginning in the

late 1990s in Britain, Holgate argues that the approach has been limited. While organisers in

the United States adopted an organising model to mobilise workers to transform their working

lives and the broader society, Holgate makes the case that in translating the ‘organising model’

to the British context, it has all too often been reduced to a narrowly construed focus on

‘recruitment, tactics and individual campaigns’(p. 4). In other words, in Britain, the organising

model has resembled something akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—‘rather

than a strategic review of where power lies and how it can be (re‐)created’(p. 4). Holgate argues

that putting power analysis at the centre of revitalisation efforts instead has the potential to lead

to ‘transformational change’(p. 4), whereby the trade union movement will not only be capable

New Technol Work Employ. 2023;38:572–574.572

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