Articles by Cécile Guillaume
Les Mondes du Travail, 2023
Sociology, 2024
Building on studies looking into how professionals encounter stigma and negotiate their work live... more Building on studies looking into how professionals encounter stigma and negotiate their work lives, this article fills a gap in extant sociological literature on gender and professional work by providing original qualitative data on professional women supported re-entry-to-work experiences. Examining the development of returner programmes in the UK, we investigate the supportive factors in the mitigation of stigma threats associated with the returner status, including organisational support and individual stigma-management strategies. We examine how these social processes contribute to alleviating stigmatisation only partially, while maintaining persistent wage and career discrimination for women returners. To explain this mixed result, we explore the way in which women returners inhabit neoliberal feminist subjectivities.
Work Employment and Society, 2024
Building on the notion of feminising the union agenda, and drawing on the concept of political in... more Building on the notion of feminising the union agenda, and drawing on the concept of political intersectionality, this article explores unions’ efforts at ‘racialising’ the agenda with a focus on how workplace union representatives grapple with race/racism and hence execution of the anti-racism political project. The study, located within nursing and midwifery in NHS workplaces where the existence of racism has long been recognised by all employment relations actors, reveals recognition of workplace racism among union representatives, but also a degree of denial and the absence of empowering strategies that needs to be disrupted and addressed in order to deliver a racially inclusive agenda.
Handbook on Gender and Public Sector Employment
Drawing on qualitative research in the main UK unions for nurses/midwives, this article investiga... more Drawing on qualitative research in the main UK unions for nurses/midwives, this article investigates how union reps are responding on the ground to the realities and challenges confronting nursing and midwifery staff working in the English National Health Service (NHS). It confirms the difficulties encountered by public sector trade unions in maintaining and developing a resilient workplace unionism despite membership growth and organising efforts in highly feminised professions facing work pressures, increasing workload and staff shortages.
Economic and Industrial Democracy, 2023
Drawing on qualitative research in the main UK unions for nurses/midwives, this article explores ... more Drawing on qualitative research in the main UK unions for nurses/midwives, this article explores union reps’ views of the functioning of workplace partnership in two feminized professions working in the English National Health Service (NHS). Through the investigation of two professional unions, which despite their vitality remain under-researched, the study offers an investigation of the interactions between formal and informal partnership arrangements at the workplace level, and the ways in which they intersect with the professional nature of the union context, and the deterioration of working conditions. In doing so, this article contributes to reflections on the prospects of workplace partnership for professional trade unions.
Journal of Law and Society, 2022
Based on cross-national comparative research conducted in France and the UK, this article explore... more Based on cross-national comparative research conducted in France and the UK, this article explores to what extent and under what conditions trade unions situated in different legal systems have turned to the courts to challenge discrimination at work. It investigates the interplay between a broad range of structural factors that offer specific opportunities, and the way trade unionists interpret contexts to promote legal mobilisation in addition to or in place of other repertoires of action. In so doing, it contributes to the understanding of employment discrimination law enforcement and the role of micro-level actors in enabling litigation strategies.
Handbook of Research Methods on Gender and Management, 2021
Nouvelle Revue du Travail, 2020
Poussés par les demandes de leurs adhérents, la légalisation et la juridicisation et des relation... more Poussés par les demandes de leurs adhérents, la légalisation et la juridicisation et des relations sociales, les syndicats se sont engagés dans des processus d’internalisation du droit, notamment sous la forme de services juridiques internes. Les professionnels du droit qui y travaillent évoluent dans des organisations où prédominent des formes de rationalité politique et partisane qui peuvent entrer en conflit avec les logiques professionnelles qu’ils représentent. Cet article se penche sur les conditions d’exercice de leur métier entre savoir expert et logiques militantes et s’interroge sur le processus de professionnalisation hybride qu’ils parviennent à construire.
Industrial Law Journal, 2020
Based on in-depth qualitative research conducted in one of the major French trade unions (CFDT), ... more Based on in-depth qualitative research conducted in one of the major French trade unions (CFDT), this article explores to what extent and under what conditions trade unions adopt different legal practices to further their members’ interests. In particular, it investigates how ‘legal framing’ has taken an increasingly pervasive place in trade union work, in increasingly decentralised industrial relations contexts, such
as France. This article therefore argues that the use of the law has become a multifaceted and embedded repertoire of action for the CFDT in its attempt to consolidate its institutional power through various strategies, including collective redress and the use of legal expertise in collective bargaining and representation work.
Research report, 2019
Healthcare systems around the world have been under immense pressure for some years now caused am... more Healthcare systems around the world have been under immense pressure for some years now caused among other factors by shortages of trained staff, changing demographics and introduction of market-based approaches. In the UK, staff shortages in the NHS and an ageing population have combined to create a perfect storm within nursing with demand for nurses and midwives outstripping supply (NHS Improvement, 2016). In a recent study, an overwhelming majority of NHS Trusts reported that they were experiencing a severe shortage in supply of registered nurses . The unions estimate a shortage of around 40,000 nurses and 2,500 midwives. The impending likelihood of Brexit threatens to intensify NHS staffing shortages not least because of the dependence for healthcare professionals on non-UK EU nationals who are expected to become in short supply post-Brexit RCM, 2018). For patients, understaffing can lower quality of care, compromise safety and increase clinical errors. These risks came into full public view with the publication of the Francis Report in 2013 that attributed the failings of one NHS Trust in part to understaffing of qualified nurses. The long-term crisis has also had an extremely negative impact upon the work environment and working conditions of healthcare employees globally. The five most common problems nursing staff experience globally are understaffing, health and safety, mandatory overtime, privatisation, and bullying . There is plenty of evidence that the UK is experiencing these problems where the staff supply shortages that self-evidently cause understaffing in workplaces, in turn lead to additional stress and greater work/workplace pressures for nursing staff in particular, and to some extent midwifery staff. The greater research gap exists on how unions are responding to these challenges and defending and promoting nursing and midwifery.
Cause Commune, 2020
Sans perdre courage, vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage ». La représentation syndica... more Sans perdre courage, vingt fois sur le métier remettez votre ouvrage ». La représentation syndicale des femmes, une bataille perpétuelle ? Cécile Guillaume, maîtresse de conférences à l'Université de Roehampton en Grande-Bretagne, auteure de Syndiquées. Défendre les intérêts des femmes au travail, Paris, Presses de Sciences Po, 2018.
Sentidos das mudanças no trabalho no Brasil e na França, 2019
In France, as in many other countries, women have great difficulty in gaining access to responsib... more In France, as in many other countries, women have great difficulty in gaining access to responsibilities within trade union structures, even when gender equality policies are implemented, as in the case of the CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail) since 1982. Based on about fifty biographies and fieldwork of training sessions and congresses, this survey explores the structural, organizational and individual factors that enabled a minority of women to become trade union leaders in the 2000s. In particular, we examine the interrelationship between internal gender equality policies and other dimensions such as struggles between internal political factions, the evolution of trade union work, social selectivity in terms of qualification level and employment, and the relationship to feminism.
Je travaille donc je suis, 2018
Trabalho, logo existo: perspectivas feministas, 2019
Work Employment and Society, 2019
This article utilizes a multi-method case study of the probation service of England and Wales to ... more This article utilizes a multi-method case study of the probation service of England and Wales to explore the perspectives of practitioners and their union on how restructuring/privatization affected the probation profession. Professionals perceived restructuring/privatization as ideologically and politically motivated, rather than evidence-based in relation to service goals. Against this context, the article outlines the probation union’s organized resistance, but ultimately its inability to halt the reform. The findings highlight practitioners’ concept of ‘the death of probation’ created by philosophical opposition to privatization, but also by the splitting of their profession and the resultant assault on professionalism. The study underlines the unique aspects of restructuring/privatization in the specific service domain in particular those linked to working with a socially stigmatised client group, but it also has resonance for other public service professions facing the actuality or prospect of restructuring/privatization.
Industrial Relations Journal, 2018
Driven by their members’ demands and the need to adopt more combative legal strategies in order t... more Driven by their members’ demands and the need to adopt more combative legal strategies in order to oppose the deterioration of working and employment conditions, British trade unions have developed in-house legal expertise and supported many individual and multiple claims. This article investigates the variation in unions’ legal practices and examines their organizational responses to law and the role of compliance professionals in the regulation of employment litigation. It provides a nuanced account of the influence of legal rationality on the framing of union strategies and shows that, under certain conditions, trade unions are able to build multi-pronged tactics using litigation as a complement to other forms of action.
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2018
This article investigates the under-researched topic of women’s representation in radical unions,... more This article investigates the under-researched topic of women’s representation in radical unions, drawing on an in-depth case study of the French SUD movement. In addition to an overview of the institutional and organizational dynamics of unions’ ‘inequality regimes’, it offers a contextually grounded analysis of the barriers and enablers of women’s participation in SUD Unions. More specifically, this research reflects on the complex interrelationships between class and gender in class-based militant trade unions that claim to be feminist but fail to support working-class female workers’ participation.
Industrial Relations Journal, 2017
Most research on the phenomenon of public service restructuring/outsourcing focuses on lower skil... more Most research on the phenomenon of public service restructuring/outsourcing focuses on lower skilled work in peripheral activities and typically provides an overview of effects on work, employment and employment relations. Through an in-depth case study of probation, the intention of this article is to explore professional worker experiences of the restructuring/outsourcing of a core public service activity where the workforce is female dominated. The article highlights three dimensions of job quality that all suffered deterioration-work, employment and engagement. The case of probation adds to evidence demonstrating that employees experience adverse effects even though transfer regulations and union agreements supposedly protect workers. Probation also stands as an exemplar of impoverishment processes in a femaledominated occupation which reinforces the view that public services can no longer be relied upon to provide high-quality jobs for highly qualified women.
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Articles by Cécile Guillaume
as France. This article therefore argues that the use of the law has become a multifaceted and embedded repertoire of action for the CFDT in its attempt to consolidate its institutional power through various strategies, including collective redress and the use of legal expertise in collective bargaining and representation work.
as France. This article therefore argues that the use of the law has become a multifaceted and embedded repertoire of action for the CFDT in its attempt to consolidate its institutional power through various strategies, including collective redress and the use of legal expertise in collective bargaining and representation work.
Les parcours de militantes retracés dans ce livre témoignent des difficultés quotidiennes rencontrées par les femmes ayant osé pénétré ces bastions masculins que sont les syndicats. Alors qu’elles ont massivement investi le marché du travail depuis les années 1970, leur représentation syndicale n’a commencé à devenir une réalité qu’à partir des années 2000.
L’enquête menée par l’auteure auprès de syndiquées en France et au Royaume-Uni montre que les femmes n’ont réussi à faire entendre leur voix dans ces instances que grâce à des politiques d’égalité volontaristes. Et l’étude approfondie des grandes mobilisations pour l’equal pay au Royaume-Uni atteste que pour défendre leur cause, elles ont dû renoncer aux actions syndicales traditionnelles pour s’emparer des armes du droit et mener des recours en justice.
À travers des récits riches et touchants sur un sujet peu visité, celui de la parole syndicale des femmes, tout un pan de la réalité sociale se dévoile ici.
d’ouvrages retraçant l’intense activité de (re)définition identitaire qui
l’a conduit du syndicalisme chrétien à l’autogestion puis au « syndi
calisme de proposition ».Sur la période récente, les recherches publiées sur les militants cédétistes, mais également l’observation des différents congrès de la CFDT, révèlent de manière évidente l’adhésion d’une très grande majorité d’adhérents et de militants au syndicalisme réformiste porté par la confédération. Loin d’être mécanique, cette conversion s’est accompagnée d’un long travail conflictuel
de construction et de légitimation. Au croisement de la sociologie, de l’histoire et de la science politique, cet ouvrage explore les conditions sociales, organisationnelles, politiques et juridiques qui ont contribué à cette fabrique institutionnelle originale. Les différentes contributions retracent ainsi le travail de la CFDT sur elle- même pour redéfinir ses frontières internes et externes, professionnaliser ses militants, rationaliser ses structures, et adopter un répertoire d’action privilé
gié. Parallèlement, les auteurs insistent sur les évolutions récentes de l’environnement légal et politique qui ont contribué à matérialiser ce « syndicalisme de proposition » en accordant une légitimité accrue à la négociation collective d’entreprise, créant ainsi les conditions d’une appropriation par les équipes de terrain d’un projet souvent décrit comme imposé « par le haut » de l’organisation.