Immigrant Identity and Solidarity in European Public Hospitals

Immigrant identity can play a pivotal role in the success of immigrant mobilization within unions. In order to improve their working conditions and forge durable partnerships with natives, immigrant union members must initially develop group-based identities. Effective leaders in turn generate the relevant identities in two ways. Immigrant leaders receive information from colleagues about problems with pay and conditions and transmit information to colleagues about alternative working arrangements. Immigrant leaders also engage in transformative behavior by modeling alternative interactions with employers, developing and amplifying a group-based identity and initiating cooperation with native co-workers. My argument about the role of identity and partnership as enabler of effective immigrant mobilization belongs to a tradition of social movement research. This paper draws from two case studies of protests by immigrant workers at public hospitals in the UK and Germany. Immigrant workers at both hospitals faced similar challenges as privatized workers in workplaces with the same degree of union competition, while seeking an end to arbitrary employer behavior. Whereas immigrant leaders in the UK succeeded in developing a group-based identity around race and racial discrimination as an explanation for why contracted out workers had problems with their employer, immigrant leaders in Germany did not develop a distinct identity to explain the plight faced by their colleagues. Lacking effective leadership, immigrant workers in Germany did not succeed in attaining the outcomes of improved working conditions and durable partnership with natives in contrast to their counterparts in the UK.