Contemporary labour immigration into the UK has been underpinned by two structural positions: the uneven development within the capitalist system and an intensification of competition driving towards flexibility and precarity. Immigrant workers are overwhelmingly concentrated in secondary sectors of the labour market with low pay, long working hours and poor health and safety and closely associated with non-standard work and informal economy where unions are often not available. How these immigrant workers in highly exploitative industries respond to work-related exploitations poses a great challenge to traditional trade unionism. While community unionism has received increasing attention from researchers and practitioners, an institution-centric approach is dominated in the scholarship which tends to overemphasize the role of institutional entity, such as trade unions and NGOs, in shaping collective agency and consider it as the centrality to immigrant workers activism. In contrast to such union-centred research, this study adopts a social movement perspective to explore whether and how community organizing approach can empower immigrant workers and enhance union organizing when globalization compromises its validity. By conducting the multi-method (interviews, surveys, participant observations and videos) ethnographic studies in an immigrant domestic worker self-help group-Justice for Domestic Workers in London over a year and a post EU-enlargement Polish association and local Polish neighbourhood in South Somerset over five months, the research shows that gendered and cultural space rather than traditional industrial entities could offer a political context in which immigrant workers start recognising structural class exploitations and develop an agency and activism for changes. This suggests that the collective mobilizations of immigrant workers in informal and individualised sectors may require creative leaps of sociological imagination in nurturing such communities of coping, wherever they may be occurring - in social clubs, cafés or churches. Community, however, is not a naturally harmonious and unified group setting. The internal divisions and competitions within immigrant communities pose limits to how far ethnic cohesion can serve as a basis for collective mobilization of immigrant workers. The research points to the potential tensions between immigrant community organizations and trade unions to compete for membership and social influence in the coalition building. There is a risk that the institutional goals of immigrant community organizations, in terms of securing funding and expanding its organizational influence, may take precedence over substantive goals of support provision. The research also suggests that academics and practitioners need to rethink the criteria that define the success of worker organising. To win union recognition and achieve collective bargaining agreements in the workplace is a rare case in community organizing of immigrant workers. A distinction should be made between capacity-building from the perspective of workers and organizations involved in community organizing of immigrant workers. There might be a contradiction between organizational developments and grassroots empowerment. Instead of merely focusing on political outcomes as the existing research indicates, more attention should paid to outcomes in social and cultural arenas and how gains in one arena facilitate or hinder gains in another.

Labor geographers have identified multiple strategies through which workers assert their demands in an era of global production networks. In this thesis I examine the strategic organizational actions of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a community-based organization representing immigrant farm-workers in southwestern Florida. Central to the successes of the CIW is its strategy to organize and embed its agency in civil society. Social actors have proved to be of vital importance as they enabled the CIW to position itself strategically in important locations of the production network to contest capitalist geographies more effectively. Using qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with representatives of churches, religious-community organizations, and interfaith non-profits working with the CIW, I argue that the CIW‘s strategies theoretically expands our understanding of labor agency and how spatiality, and specifically place, shapes the potential for workers‘ agency.

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No / The article shows that community initiatives take different forms and are the outcome of a broader interplay of factors between workers’ interests, representation, and the strategies of unions and broader coalitions that are mobilized in specific communities. Drawing from three case studies on black and minority ethnic (BME) workers and trade unions in the UK the article looks at how the rhetoric of community unionism has been adopted in an uneven manner by trade unions: the article suggests that: (a) community initiatives are variable, (b) they lack a structure and clear vision, (c) the question of BME engagement is rarely central in many projects, and (d) the ambivalent role of the state is a significant factor in many of these initiatives. This state role is downplayed in much of the literature, thus raising dilemmas in terms of community initiatives.

À travers une ethnographie militante au sein des coalitions québécoises revendiquant une augmentation du salaire minimum à 15 dollars l’heure, cette thèse étudie les relations entre les organisations syndicales et communautaires impliquées dans des coalitions agissant dans une optique de transformation sociale. Les coalitions observées sur une durée de trois ans regroupaient de nombreuses organisations qui se différenciaient tant par leurs formes organisationnelles — centrales syndicales, syndicats locaux, partis politiques, comités citoyens et des organisations communautaires plus ou moins institutionnalisées — que par leurs stratégies d’action. Conceptualisant les coalitions comme étant à la fois un lieu de transformation culturelle pour les organisations, dans le prolongement des écrits abordant les coalitions comme une stratégie de renouveau syndical, et un lieu de compétition interorganisationnelle, tel que l’appréhendent bien souvent les travaux issus du champ de la sociologie des mouvements sociaux, cette thèse interroge les tensions internes et les rapports de pouvoir au sein des coalitions syndicales-communautaires. En mobilisant une approche interactionnelle et culturelle des coalitions inspirée des travaux de Cefaï et de Goffman pour penser l’action collective, la thèse démontre comment les organisations syndicales exercent un pouvoir d’influence important au sein des coalitions, ce qui vient limiter leur potentiel transformateur et comment les coalitions peuvent contribuer à marginaliser les personnes concernées, dont les travailleur·euse·s précaires, dans les espaces de prise de décision au sein des mouvements sociaux. La thèse met ainsi en relief que, dans les coalitions pour le 15 dollars de l’heure, le travail d’organisation et de mobilisation des travailleur·euse·s non syndiqué·e·s et à bas salaire a été assumé par des organisations non syndicales, lesquelles ont le plus souvent moins de ressources, alors que les actions mises en place au sein des coalitions se rapprochaient davantage du répertoire d’action traditionnelle des organisations syndicales, dont l’organisation d’actions médiatiques et d’actions dites « de visibilité ». En mobilisant cette fois le concept de « solidarité de coulisse » de Goffman et la conception des pratiques discrètes de résistance de Scott, la thèse expose comment, les personnes impliquées dans les coalitions, conscient·e·s du déséquilibre de pouvoir existant entre les organisations syndicales et les organisations communautaires, créent des espaces de concertation alternatifs, en coulisse des coalitions, pour résister et contester la hiérarchie au sein de la coalition. En s’éloignant ainsi de la perspective syndicalo-centrée prédominante dans la littérature, la thèse démontrent comment les coalitions transforment davantage les modes de fonctionnement et les pratiques des organisations communautaires et parasyndicales que ceux des syndicats. / This thesis examines the labour-community coalition for the $15 minimum wage in Quebec using a militant ethnographic research approach. Forged in the aftermath of similar mobilizations in the United States and Ontario, these coalitions brought together a variety of organizations that differed both in their organizational forms — local unions, political parties, activist groups, citizens' committees, and community organizations — and in their strategies of action. Defining coalitions as both a vector of cultural change for organizations — in continuity with the literature on coalitions as a strategy for union renewal — and as an arena for inter-organizational competition — as often considered in the sociology of social movements literature — this dissertation examines the internal tensions and power dynamics within labour-community coalitions. Based on an interactional and cultural approach to coalitions inspired by Cefaï and Goffman's framework for analyzing collective action, the thesis shows how trade union organizations wield considerable influence within coalitions, which limits the transformative potential of coalitions, particularly with respect to practices that promote the participation and organization of precarious workers. It also reveals that in the $15 coalitions, the work of organizing and mobilizing non-union and low-wage workers was assumed by non-union organizations, i.e., organizations with fewer resources, while the actions undertaken within the coalitions were closer to the traditional repertoire of actions of union organizations, including visibility actions. Drawing on Goffman's notion of "backstage solidarity" and Scott's notion of infrapolitics and everyday forms of resistance, the thesis also shows how coalition participants created alternative spaces for concerted action in the backstage of coalitions that enabled them to resist and challenge the hierarchy within the coalition. As such, this thesis moves away from the union-centric perspective that dominates the literature and demonstrates how coalitions transform the practices of community and para-union organizations more than those of trade unions.