Stepping Stones or Crumbling Rocks: Divergent Decent Work Campaigns for Service Work on University Campuses

• In Event: Labor-Community Solidarity

Abstract

Across higher education, service workers increasingly work under subcontracted arrangements that degrade wages, benefits, and job security. This study examines three union- and worker-led decent work campaigns at large public universities in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States to assess how worker strategies and institutional responses shape both short-term outcomes and the long-term durability of worker power. Drawing on comparative case study analysis of interviews and campaign materials, we distinguish between wage-parity campaigns pursued within subcontracted arrangements and insourcing campaigns aimed at ending those arrangements. While employer wage-parity concessions delivered meaningful gains to workers, they left enforcement outside formal bargaining institutions and rendered those gains conditional on continued employer commitment. Although often framed as stepping stones toward insourcing, in the absence of structural change wage-parity concessions became crumbling rocks—temporary gains that stabilized subcontracting and weakened momentum for reform. By contrast, insourcing produced wage parity and embedded enforcement within the employment relationship itself. These findings suggest that ending outsourcing may produce more durable shifts in bargaining power by restructuring the employment relationship itself, rather than negotiating improvements within fissured employment arrangements.

Authors

• Kelly Quinn, University of California-Berkeley

• Shannon Giannitsopoulou, University of Toronto

• Kiran Mirchandani, University of Toronto

• Michelle Buckley, University of Toronto

• Kanksha Chawla, Simon Fraser University

• Sanjukta Mukherjee, DePaul University

• Enda Brophy, Simon Fraser University