By Dr Duncan U Fisher and Professor Liam Foster | 4 min
The Employment Rights Bill is the most significant overhaul of workers’ rights for generations and one group set to greatly benefit is adult social care workers in England.
Ahead of Unions21’s conference on Strengthening Collective Voice, Dr Duncan U Fisher and Professor Liam Foster from the University of Sheffield share some recommendations for organising adult social care workers.
Our current, timely research on organising concerns a group that stands to gain significantly from the Employment Rights Bill, arguably due to it still having so far to go before securing a ‘decent’ standard of work: adult social care (ASC) workers in England.
We recently published a research briefing drawing on interviews with ASC workers and key actors (for example, organisers or administrators) in established and independent unions, campaign groups and community organisations. In it, we highlight key barriers to care worker organising, and identify factors that contribute to successfully engaging care workers in organising.
We also provide recommendations for unions and other organisations seeking to engage frontline ASC workers in organising. Here we discuss the contributors to successful organising and present some of our practice recommendations.
Engaging and sustaining care workers’ involvement in organising
We found that listening to care workers – often marginalised or ignored by employers or in wider society – and learning about their work and circumstances brought positive responses and was foundational to developing trust.
As one key actor in an established union argued, unions ought to be “willing to sit down in the workplaces or where the care workers are and listen to their concerns, understand their concerns and the challenges that they face and empathise with them”.
Relatedly, successful engagement relied on respecting care workers’ knowledge and regarding them as the experts, as a key actor from an independent union stated: “They know their workplace, they know what’s going to work, they know who is going to join, who is not going to join, all of that wealth of knowledge is in the membership.”
A third key point is adapting to the spatial dimensions of a fragmented employment context comprised of 19,000 ASC providers. In recent years, online meetings in various forms – for public information and discussion, planning campaigns and internal group peer support and solidarity – have proved vital in combating care workers’ dispersal and limited collective spaces.
Recommendations for engaging care workers in organising
Based on analysis of our findings, we made several recommendations for organisations looking to engage care workers in organising. Firstly, we recommend giving care workers responsibility, platforms and roles in decision-making and leadership. The voice of care workers has been sidelined for too long. Organising should resist this marginalising of care workers’ voices; instead, it should amplify them, with care workers and their views front and centre of messaging.
We found care workers’ pre-existing views on organising to be complex, containing scepticism around unions and organising. This means there is a need to promote the potential of organising, to educate and to publicise successes.
Relatedly, we found care workers’ complex views on organising included concerns about how organising might impact on supported people. In light of this, we recommend being conscious of care work’s relational nature and workers’ attachment to people they support. In addition, we suggest organisations be aware of workers downplaying their role, but harness their at times latent desire for change.
The immediate future of care worker organising
Long overdue improvements to ASC workers’ pay and conditions are in sight with measures in the Employment Rights Bill. Questions remain over their implementation, but this appears to be a significant step forward.
That said, organising and collective voice have ongoing roles here, to check implementation and drive further improvements. They also have additional functions in raising awareness of care work and care workers, and of more generally increasing recognition and advancing the status of this undervalued work.
Dr Fisher and Prof Foster’s research briefing was developed as part of the Centre for Care’s work on Care Workforce Change and can be downloaded here
Professor Melanie Simms, Professor of Work and Employment at the University of Glasgow, will be speaking on practical implementation of the new rights in the social care sector at the Unions 21 conference Strengthening Collective Voice on 13th November 2025
