1. What contribution do Trade Unions
make to Social Innovation?
Changemaking is simply where someone spots a social problem and does something about it.

2. fair deal
• Vice Chancellors and Principals get 5%
increases while staff get just 1%.
• when our sector has a combined surplus of
more than £1bn and has built up reserves
many times that on the back of previous pay
restraint.
• the Office for National Statistics shows that
average annual pay for full time academic staff
has remained stagnant since 2010.

3. what have unions done for us?
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A weekend, a limit to the working week
Paid lunch breaks
Workplace pensions
Health and safety
The right not to be sacked for being ill or pregnant
The end of child and slave (indentured) labour
Working together to set pay and ensure safe working
conditions
Tackling lower pay for women
The end of apartheid
National minimum wage
A living wage
State funded University education, up to 1996

4. capital relies on
• A surplus of labour, to replace those currently working –unemployment
(Marx, 1867)
• Receiving more income from products than it costs to create them- low
pay
• A false separation between workers and managers- divide and rule (Stiglitz
1987)
• The creation and sale of ‘fictitious’ money- trading toxic debt (Harvey
2006)
• The manipulation of culture (Gramsci, 1971), through contestable
mechanisms of hegemonic power (Foucault, 1971)
• Companies bigger than governments* (Visa bigger than Zimbabwe)
• The majority of workers to be silenced by the above vulnerabilities (Freire,
1972)
• See also Catholic Social Teaching (Pius X, 1931)
* http://www.businessinsider.com/25-corporations-bigger-tan-countries-2011-6?op=1

5. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lj
s1pfPvJQ1qdqgqpo1_500.jpg
http://www.cry.org/resources/images
/vasite/VA_Site/VA_child_labour.jpg

6. http://www.economicshelp.org/wp-content/uploads/blog-uploads/2012/09/total-unemployment-1979-20121.png

7. http://www.nwlc.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/rotating_tabs_59
0x316/images/tabs/pwfa-iptab.jpg

8. http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2013/09/18/article-2424516-1BDA944B000005DC-708_964x646.jpg

9. Trafigura, the multinational company behind
the 2006 dumping of toxic waste in Abidjan,
Côte d’Ivoire, resulting in over 100,000 people
seeking medical assistance,
http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/newsitem/report-slams-failure-to-prevent-toxicwaste-dumping-in-west-africa
http://www.latimes.com/includes/soundslides
/oil-spill/la-oil-spill.50.jpg

10. What is social enterprise?
• Social Innovation
– ideas to change the way society
works
• Social Entrepreneurship
– the processes of getting the idea
ready to be delivered
• Social Enterprise
– the venture that emerges from the
innovation
Changemaking is simply where someone spots a social problem and does something about it.

11. What should social enterprise feature?
• Not just a single legal format (CIC) – industrial & friends
provident, co-operatives
• An internal mission to ethical behaviour, not just an
external activity
• Inclusion of the voice of those who benefit (including
employees)
• Social efficiency not just financial efficiency
– Social enterprises (on the whole) exist within the rules of
capitalism
– Social innovation can transform the rules and behaviours of
society and capital
• Developing a critical theory informed position (Curtis, 2006,
2007, 2008 & 2012)

12. Saul Alinsky
• 1930s, in Chicago’s “Back of the [Stock]Yards”
neighborhood, Saul Alinsky and Joe Meegan, a
local Catholic recreation and park director,
organized the Catholic churches and other
voluntary associations of the feuding Slavic
neighborhood groups in an effort to address the
poverty of the Great Depression.
• They added to the mix local merchants and small
businesses along with the growing Packinghouse
Workers Union. (Alinsky, 1971)

13. Unions: Represent, Organise, Solve
Social innovation:
investigates, organises, innovates and solves

14. References
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Alinsky, Saul D. (1971) Rules for Radicals. A pragmatic primer for realistic radicals (1972 edn), New
York: Vintage.
Curtis, T. (2006). What does procurement do to the third sector? Third Annual UK Social Enterprise
Research Conference. 22-23 June 2006 at London South Bank University, UK.
Curtis, T. (2007). Mind forg’d: taking a Foucauldian look at prison based social enterprises. Fourth
Annual UK Social Enterprise Research Conference. London South Bank University, UK
Curtis, T. (2008). "Finding that grit makes a pearl: A critical re-reading of research into social
enterprise." International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour & Research 14(5): 276-290.
Curtis, T (2012) It's a Rough Trade: a longitudinal study of changing enterprise ethics. 4th
International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC). 12-14 September 2012. Third Sector
Research Centre, University of Birmingham
Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Foucault, M. (1991). Discipline and Punish: the birth of a prison. London, Penguin.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971), Selections form the Prision Notebook, edited and translated by Quintin
Hoare & Goffrey Nowell Smith, Lawrence and Wishart, London.
Harvey, David (2006). Limits to Capital. London: Verso.
Marx K, (1867) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, USSR
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/
1931 Quadragesimo Anno – “On the Fortieth Year” – Pius X