Legal change and legal mobilisation: What does strategic litigation mean for workers and trade unions?
- Social &Legal Studies
- 33(4), Aug, 2024: p.479-500
This article examines the meaning and implications of strategic litigation for workers and trade unions in the United Kingdom. Drawing on existing literature and semi-structured interviews with union officials, lawyers, and other labour movement actors, it explores how unions understand and experience legal mobilisation, their objectives, and the perceived effectiveness of litigation. The study uncovers both differences and commonalities across unions, emphasizing that decisions to allocate resources to litigation—often costly—are made with caution. Findings suggest that trade union approaches to strategic litigation are nuanced, involving neither full embrace nor outright scepticism, but rather a pragmatic assessment of its potential to advance workers’ rights and collective goals. Article addresses the question of what strategic litigation means for workers and trade unions. Drawing on the existing literature and on a series of semi-structured interviews with union officials, lawyers with experience in representing them and other actors from across the labour movement, it explores how U.K. trade unions and actors within them understand and experience strategic litigation and legal mobilisation, what they seek to achieve, and what has been effective and ineffective for them. Uncovering both differences and commonalities between different unions, it suggests that the decision to devote union resources to – usually very costly – litigation is never taken lightly. Trade union approaches to strategic litigation involve neither a straightforward embrace of it nor an outright scepticism regarding its potential.- Reproduced