Success and failure in the UK: the importance of local communities

We consider two British campaigns, one involving cleaners and the other hotel workers – both of which took place in London.  These examples are useful to identify both limits and opportunities for unions in immigrant-rich sectors of urban economies.  A critical factor is the scale at which unions (in this case Unite) tried to build unity among fragmented workforces.  More broadly, the strategies employed in these cases can be understood as union responses to the patterns of labor market segmentation identified earlier in the book.