Strategic litigation and political lobbying: antidotes to declining worker power?

Even as unions face increasing difficulty in engaging employers in collective bargaining, they have alternative ways of exercising power on behalf of workers. In this chapter we consider two forms of action that unions and other labour organisations commonly engage in: strategic litigation and political lobbying. Drawing on the power resources literature, we characterise these activities as the exercise of ‘institutional power.’ The first part of this chapter explains the concept of institutional power, the types of institutions that can be engaged, and the scales at which these institutions operate. We also consider a variety of labour organisations and seek to understand whether their character has any relationship to the inclination to exercise institutional power. We follow up this discussion with a more detailed analysis of how unions and labour organisations are engaging in forms of strategic litigation and political lobbying. The examples we set out come from a variety of national contexts to demonstrate that these forms of activity are applicable in many environments. We conclude with an assessment of the capacity of strategic litigation and political lobbying to realise gains for workers, highlighting examples of successful activation of these power resources and other cases demonstrating their limitations.