Research context of article two

Like the other articles in this dissertation, this one is the product of a Danish research setting. This one, however, draws on empirical material from two fairly different organisations. One is an organised collaboration between three of the biggest trade unions in Denmark; the other is a non-profit, non-governmental, volunteer-driven breakout organisation that, so to say, began to organise outside of another organisation. The trade union collaboration organisation is called FIU-Ligestilling.

The other case organisation is named Sabaah. For the sake of simplicity, I will present them one at a time.

FIU-Ligestilling is a collaboration or partnership between several of the biggest trade unions in Denmark to offer internal training courses on equality (in Danish, ligestilling) issues related to the Danish labour market in general and, in particular, the workplaces of trade union members. In Denmark, the majority of workers are trade union members, and union density is among the highest in the world. Equality is broadly understood as relating to gender, sexuality, (dis)ability (typically denoted as handicap in the Danish context) and religion. Common for the Danish context, gender and ethnicity are the two overarching areas of focus. This means that equality work often takes the form of addressing sexual harassment, the gender-segregated labour market, integration of minority ethnic employees and prevention of discrimination with regards to these two specific categories, that are also protected classes in national legislation.

When I first became engaged with FIU-Ligestilling in 2016, three major trade unions were involved: Dansk Metal (which organises metalworkers), 3F (the largest union in Denmark in terms of membership but also the number of collective

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agreements covering both skilled and unskilled workers) and Serviceforbundet (consisting of ten discrete unions, e.g. for watchmakers and opticians, hairdressers and cosmeticians, and veterinary nurses). Since then, two more unions have joined:

Dansk Sygeplejeråd (which organises nurses) and HK (which organises wage-earning and salaried office workers, including state officials, making it the second-largest union in Denmark in terms of membership, due to the public sector being a relatively large employer). Other unions are not excluded from FIU-Ligestilling, even if not directly involved in the partnership. FIU-Ligestilling offers courses on request but charges unions that are not part of the collaboration. I have, for example, facilitated workshops for Teknisk Landsforbund (the association for professional technicians) during my engagement with FIU-Ligestilling.

While gender (understood in binary terms as men and women) and ethnicity remain the main areas of concern for equality work in FIU-Ligestilling, gender identity and sexual orientation began to receive more attention as I entered the organisation – not because I was the one to introduce those focus areas to the palette of equality issues but because the trade union movement more broadly had become aware of LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) as a significant yet overlooked member group. A representative survey of the Danish labour market, conducted for three union confederations (two of which have now merged), revealed that many workers who self-identify as LGBTQ+ remained closeted at work. That is, they refrained from disclosing their LGBTQ+ status, among other reasons, in anticipation that disclosure could potentially lead to them facing various forms of discrimination. The survey also strongly indicated that many of the LGBTQ+

respondents did not know if their trade union representatives would be open, let alone able, to handle cases of discrimination on the basis of gender identity and

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sexual orientation.⁵ One of the union confederations that commissioned the survey took these insights as a call to strengthen their equality work in these particular areas. Thus, funding was allocated for a three-year period to develop within the FIU-Ligestilling collaboration a training programme that would qualify union representatives to include LGBTQ+ more explicitly in their equality work. This marked the inception of my research collaboration with FIU-Ligestilling.

I, together with two other teachers and one coordinator, helped develop the workshop format offered in FIU-Ligestilling and co-facilitated these throughout the three-year period of the project, which, as I submit this dissertation, has reached its formal conclusion (albeit it is yet to be evaluated). While the second article in the dissertation is based on empirical data generated during the first year (2017) of the FIU-Ligestilling LGBTQ+ project, I continued my active engagement with the organisation throughout my own project. As is the case with all organisations included in this PhD project (except for the ones in article one), my engagement was never a matter of me entering to get the data I needed, only to leave again, closing the door behind me with no regard for their needs. My insistent use of the word ‘engagement’ with reference to the cases is an attempt at conveying how my relationship with the organisations is one of continuous and mutual commitment.

Although less intensely, I continued to influence the further development of the LGBTQ+ project in FIU-Ligestilling. Seeing the project through inevitably had an influence on my thinking beyond the publication of the second article. At the time of its publication, I had facilitated a total of six workshops for FIU-Ligestilling. And it is my observations from these workshops (participatory in nature due to my dual

5 I expand on some of the findings from the survey in the third article.

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role as researcher-facilitator) as well as collective reflection before and after the workshops when planning and evaluating with my co-facilitators that make up the empirical material analysed in article two.

Sabaah, the other organisation whose workshop format – similar to that of FIU-Ligestilling – contributed to the empirical material of article two, organises for the values of diversity, inclusion and equality. It is a breakout organisation of LGBT Denmark, which is an interest organisation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Denmark. LGBT Denmark was founded in 1948 (albeit under a less inclusive acronym), which makes it one of the longest established LGBTQ+

organisations in the world. Sabaah was founded in 2006, not in protest against LGBT Denmark but out of a felt need among certain members to break with some normative structures (essentially a whiteness norm) that were found to exclude the lived realities of LGBTQ+ people with minority ethnic backgrounds in Denmark.

The raison d’être of Sabaah, therefore, is to work at the intersections of not only gender identity and sexual orientation, but also ethnicity, race, culture and religion.

Internally, Sabaah works socially and culturally to create a community in which the specificities of their members are reflected. Externally, the organisation works politically, and in other ways, with the outreach project that I became part of in early 2016 when the project was in its infancy and, thus, still under development. Like in FIU-Ligestilling, I helped develop the workshop format and also go went on to co-facilitate – always with someone representing Sabaah’s target group (minority ethnic LGBTQ+ persons in Denmark). The workshops are offered mainly to pupils in lower secondary education but, in principle, to any organisation requesting a workshop, provided that Sabaah has the capacity to meet the demand. Notes (using

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the technique of immediate recall) from a total of 12 participatory observations made up part of the empirical material for the second article. As with FIU-Ligestilling, I continued my engagement with Sabaah post publication, and I am still affiliated as I submit this dissertation.