Kendra Briken and Dustin Hafki reflect on community-based efforts supporting workers to overcome legal gatekeeping.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states: “All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law”. Franz Kafka’s 1915 story ‘Before The Law’ captured the tensions between law and lived experiences that the UDHR was designed to overcome three decades later. A “man from the country” wishes to “enter the law”, but the doorkeeper does not let him in and, even worse, paints a bleak picture of how dreadful the man’s experiences will be with the law and with the many other doorkeepers beyond the first gate. “These are difficulties the man from the country has not expected; the Law, he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times and to everyone, but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper… he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter.”
Legal gatekeeping is seldom worse than for workers in non-unionised sectors, which comprise the large majority of workplaces today. In recent decades the imbalanced powers of the employment relation have shifted ever more towards the employer, with workers facing significant backlogs when trying to enter the gates of justice. The Bureau for Investigative Journalism predicted in May that claimants awaiting an employment tribunal hearing are being given dates as far off as 2030, and that rogue employers are “more likely to get away with abuse, wage theft or wrongful dismissal”. Imagine your wage is withheld, or you lose your job without any notice. With almost half of UK workers living paycheque to paycheque (People At Work data, 2025), and many subsisting on a shoestring, this threat is existential. Waiting ruins livelihoods.
The emotional and material exhaustion this system causes are well known by civil society organisations, who are stepping in to address the lack of affordable and accessible advice. Yet dedicated Employment Advice Centres are rare, despite the subtleties of work-related law and the desperation of workers, and they are often running on precarious funding themselves. Those centres that do exist often did not start as top down organisations. The Inverclyde Advice and Employment Rights Centre, handling over 350 cases per year with marginal paid staff and volunteers, has its roots in the Inverclyde Occupational Health Project (IOHP), initiated by the Greenock and District Trades Council in 1992. Shipbuilding workers, particularly, were suffering from deleterious ill-health caused by their employment. Subsequently, electronics workers, mostly women working in fabrication and ‘clean rooms’ of assembly and semi-conductor plants, were increasingly presenting with acute conditions, including reproductive trauma and cancers. These workers did not have access to representation, and employers had dodged the responsibility for their health and care, outsourcing the costs to workers, families, communities, and the broader health care system. The endurance of the Inverclyde Centre is testament to its roots in these local projects.
Over the last decade, other organisations have developed alternative approaches to worker empowerment, education and preventative efforts. The Workers’ Observatory in Edinburgh focusses on worker-led data collection on exploitative practices in the gig economy, while the Perth-based Worker Support Centre supports seasonal agricultural workers in anonymously reporting illegal practices and providing opportunities to voice concerns politically. Both groups are embedded in their respective communities, building collectivity and opening doors to civil society. Recent union-led projects such as Trade Unions in Communities and the STUC’s Our Rights in Action initiative highlight the importance of community-based approaches. These initiatives are in part a response to far right attempts to organise in worker communities. Centred around supporting individualised workers locally, they are providing legal education and building awareness about how to build collective capacity and power at work, and revitalising what is left of shared and accessible community spaces. This aim has been enhanced lately by the Strathclyde law clinic. Acknowledging that they are a last resort for workers who would otherwise not be able to afford legal representation, the clinic has started focussing on public legal education, including through schools. Initiatives like ‘Trade Unions into Schools’ and the law clinic hopefully will find ways to work together in the future. These important initiatives are stepping in to provide collective education paired with individual representation across a multitude of individualised contexts.
Where the state fails to make the gates to justice easy to open, workers’ power must force the doors. Organisations and projects like the Inverclyde Advice and Employment Rights Centre, The Workers’ Observatory, Worker Support Centre, Trade Unions in Communities and Our Rights in Action provide tools to help workers get past the gatekeepers in their respective contexts. Yet most workers never even get to see the gates of justice. Kafka’s story signposts to the pertinent question of how to return from futile individual journeys to justice, back to much-needed collective efforts to prevail in power struggles. With limited state support to access justice, community-based, localised approaches are demonstrating success in educating, building cases, gathering evidence and supporting workers on their endless journey to get beyond the legal gates.
Kendra Briken and Dustin Hafki work at the University of Strathclyde in the Department of Work, Employment and Organisation.
This article was inspired by a network meeting initiated by the authors as part of a larger ESRC funded project on ‘Amplifying Worker Voice’ in May 2026. The authors wish to acknowledge the input of all groups attending the event.
