Do Unions Still Care about Class? Text Mining a Near-Century Decline of Class Rhetoric in a British Trade Union

Using an original dataset of 91 years of the Fire Brigades Union’s journal, The Firefighter , we use text mining to analyse changes in how the union discusses class. We show that where class was once a central discourse within the union, it is now rarely mentioned. We attempt to show why this has occurred, connecting these results to the broader debate in sociology concerning whether class identities are declining. We argue that while class remains a core part of the union’s organisational identity, the decline of class rhetoric results primarily from political change. In particular, we argue that the progressive marginalisation of traditional working-class political rhetoric by the Labour Party has strongly influenced how unions talk about social class. We argue that these findings have important implications for our understanding of class politics in contemporary Britain and the role of class identities in union renewal.