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Tenants union

Collectively organized housing tenants group

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Tenant unions are modeled on trade unions: just as workers collectively bargain with employers, tenants collectively confront landlords, though tenants generally lack the statutory collective-bargaining rights that workers have under labor law in most countries.

Definitions and history

Definitions

The terms tenants union and tenants association are used interchangeably in popular discourse, but scholars have drawn distinctions. In 1966, Schwartz and Davis defined a tenant union as "an organization of tenants formed to bargain collectively with their landlord for an agreement defining the parties' mutual obligations."

In 2024, Baltz refined this further, distinguishing tenant associations, groups of tenants in a single building who organize against their landlord, from tenant unions, which are membership-based organizations that organize across properties or geographic regions. Under this framework, tenant associations often affiliate with broader tenant unions, which help support their self-organizing. Tenant councils unite residents in different buildings sharing the same landlord.

Tenants join tenant unions and associations due to grievances with the landlord such as high rents and poor building maintenance to seek reduced costs and better quality housing. Tenant unions are modeled on trade unions, collectively joining tenants against landlords. Tenant organizers are individuals who build these organizations. They may be tenants themselves, independent volunteers, or paid staff of tenant unions or coalitions.

History

Origins

Modern tenant organizing emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries alongside rapid urbanization and growing concerns about overcrowded and unsafe housing in industrial cities. Tenants collectively refused to pay rent increases, blocking evictions with rent strikes in several countries. The International Union of Tenants, founded in 1926 in Switzerland, represents one of the earliest attempts at coordinating tenant organizations internationally.

In Buenos Aires, a dramatic early example unfolded in 1907. Thousands of tenants protested a 47 percent rent increase by refusing to pay. Spreading to 2,000 buildings, the yearlong strike included close to one-tenth the population of Buenos Aires. Women emerged as a significant and visible presence in the Argentine labor movement. Whole families participated in broom parades, a popular symbol of sweeping out corrupt landlords. The action prefigured later tactics and coalition forms tenant movements would develop.

Prince Edward Island, Canada, had the first documented Canadian rent strike in 1864, where the Tenant League of Prince Edward Island committed to withhold rent and resist eviction unless tenants were given the opportunity to buy their land at a fair price. The landlords were largely absentee British nobility who had been gifted the land by the Crown. By the time the government sent in troops to enforce compliance, the league membership was estimated at more than 11,000 members. The league disbanded soon after, though Prince Edward Island passed legislation in 1878 dispossessing absentee landlords.

Post-World War II developments

The movement gained momentum in the post-World War II era as housing shortages and urban development created new tensions between tenants and landlords. In the United States, the Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act of 1972 provided the earliest legal acknowledgment of tenant unions, stating that landlords may not retaliate against tenants for having "organized or become a member of a tenant’s union or similar organization". In Sweden, the Rent Control Act of 1942 laid the groundwork for rental corporatism that remained until 1978 and left traces in Swedish housing policy long afterwards.

After the mid twentieth century, tenant organizing increasingly intersected with civil rights movements and urban renewal fights. From the 1960s–80s, tenants at the Habitations Jeanne-Mance public housing complex in Montreal had active tenants' committees that organized against evictions, for fairer treatment from management, and for increased tenants' rights city-wide.

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