Workers’ power, care ethos and union identities: A comparative analysis of union organizing in the Polish and Italian care sector

The paper analyses social and care workers’ trade union organizing practices in the context of the crisis of care. Inspired by the literature on union identities, power resources theory and feminist scholarship on the contradictory nature of the care ethos, it focuses on Poland and Italy as two countries sharing some common characteristics, such as familistic social policy, but differing from each other in terms of industrial relations. The analysis draws from interviews conducted with workers and trade unionists and focuses on union-led and grassroots organizing. These efforts are situated on a continuum of established and emerging fields of workers’ struggles in the sector differentiated by institutional and associational workers’ power resources. It is argued that intra-sectoral differences in union organizing across the sites are greater than cross-country differences. This outcome is explained by the shared experience of the crisis of care in Poland and Italy as well as the impact of the care ethos and workers’ power resources.