Participatory action research (PAR) will help you create worker research teams to do one-to-one individual surveys of workers and analyse the results. Participatory action research, also known as horizontal mapping in South Africa, is a way to link collectively driven research about workers and working conditions to campaigns, organising, collective bargaining and other union work.
The union gains information and an understanding of workers’ living and working conditions and the workers gain a sense of collective interest and an increased ability and desire to take action.
Participatory action research is critical to all union work. This is because PAR builds associational power, workers’ collective power that is the fundamental power of unions.
Participatory action research helps us expand our knowledge and bond with workers and working-class communities and to identify the issues and experiences that workers face in a way that leads to action. It allows us to gather demographic details of workers, including their employment relationships and conditions at home, their links with organisations and communities, and the problems they face. PAR is particularly useful when there are groups of workers who are underrepresented in the union when it comes to age, gender, migration status, racialised workers, lower caste and/or religious minorities.
Unlike traditional research, participatory action research is not just about documenting workers demographics and problems. Participatory action research encourages participants to share and develop knowledge together and take action based on that knowledge. The research process can give vulnerable workers a sense of identity as “workers” and hence a sense of belonging to a group/class and thus can be used to develop a sense of collective interest.
Before you begin you will need to discuss which specific workers you will be interviewing. Participatory action research is particularly critical to organising, campaigning and collective bargaining with both formal and informal sector workers. If the union wants to improve the union’s gender representation, one-to-one individual surveys of workers about gender issues could be helpful. Or, if you are looking at expanding your education programme, you might want to conduct action research interviews with past and potential future participants in the union education programme.
The next step is to form a collective research team or teams. Each research team then identifies which groups of workers to interview and discusses how they will contact these workers. The research team can have up to 7 people who are committed to doing the work. Rank-and-file workers should be involved in the creation, decision-making, implementation, and analysis of the research. Union staff and leaders will need to participate so that they can gain an increased understanding of, and relationships with, the workers interviewed.
Once you have the collective research team(s) formed and they have identified the specific group of workers to focus on, the participants create their research instrument together, usually a survey questionnaire. The questionnaire or series of open questions gathers information about the workers, their situations at home and the nature of their work. It identifies the nature of the relationship with their employers or key decision-makers, their income/wage processes and the problems and issues they are facing. The questions may be related to the future action plans of the union or may be more general in nature.
How will you recruit workers to form research groups?
What information do you need to help you decide which workers you are going to survey?
What problems may you run into in terms of accessing the workers? What can be done to overcome these problems?
What support and information might be needed to create the survey? Will you be able to adjust the survey questions as you gather information?
Are any additional resources needed for the worker interviews?
At the OR Tambo International Airport in South Africa, shop stewards investigated their workplace, asking:
Investigating the Workplace: A Powerful and Challenging Approach to Airport Organising. Satawu, Naledi and IHRG Participatory Action Research project at OR Tambo International Airport (2011-2014).
The research groups then go into the field to conduct their surveys using their questionnaire. It is important that these surveys are one-on-one, face-to-face interviews with each individual worker. A location and time is decided where each worker feels safe either at their home, place of work, after work or during a break. Risks to the workers should be minimised. The survey interviews are conducted by other workers so as to ensure both individual skills development and to strengthen the collective knowledge. If it is not possible to meet in person, the interviews can be done by telephone or online, but this is not ideal as the ability to develop a relationship with the worker being interviewed is limited.
During the interview, you want the interviewee to trust you and to open up so that the information provided “tells you a story” about the worker. Conversation and bonding are encouraged between the interviewer and the interviewee. The interview should focus on information-gathering, not giving. Note should be taken of non-verbal signals, going “beyond the words” and creating a shared sense of empathy.
The rights of the interviewees are important as a part of ethical research. The interviewee has a right of explanation. You will need to introduce yourself and explain what you are doing, the research project and request an interview. The interviewee also has the right to anonymity and confidentiality and the right to refuse both the entire interview and to answer particular questions.
How can you best ensure that the workers you will be interviewing are comfortable?
How will you introduce yourselves, explain what you are doing and request the interview?
Once the interviews are done, the research group(s) analyses the interview responses by entering the data into a spread sheet or adding up the responses.
Participants analyse the data and identify the most pertinent or interesting correlations and present the survey results and any action plan ideas produced by the interviews with workers to union members and leaders.
Aviation ramp workers in Argentina, members of the Asociación Del Personal Aeronáutico union, load and unload planes in very small spaces. Workers were reporting back pain and injuries.
Workplace stewards with the assistance of the union health and safety committee developed a questionnaire for every worker to fill out that formed the basis for the worker interviews. The stewards spent a month talking to workers individually on every shift.
The stewards collected and analysed the data and organised one-day workshops with workers and assisted by a doctor who was an expert on workplace back injuries. 54% of the workers reported injuries in the survey. The workshops and the survey results showed that there was a collective pattern to the location and duration of the pain. The workers formulated their demands and created an action plan to pressure the employer.
Workers put stickers on passenger luggage and handed out leaflets to passengers at the airport for weeks. The leaflets and stickers were coordinated with other aviation workers around the world who were also fighting for weight limitations on passenger luggage through the ITF (International Transport Workers Federation).
The employer agreed to the worker’s demand to introduce a policy of 23 kilos of weight per passenger.
How will you analyse your data? What problems might you expect and how will these be overcome?
What actions need to be taken as a result of the information you have gathered and analysed?
When you use participatory action research, good critical research becomes the basis for the union’s action plans.
You may want to return to participatory action research as your union work develops in order to keep in direct and systematic touch with how workers understand the organising campaign, collective bargaining or organisational work. Participatory action research can help you continually adjust your plans to meet the needs of workers at the base of the organisation.
How might you continue using participatory action research later as your union work develops?