E-11
Reconstructing Solidarity: Labor Unions, Precarious Work, and the Politics of Institutional Change in Europe
The central focus of the book (and proposed session) is to analyze the social processes associated with market liberalization and expansion of precarious work within contemporary European labour markets. These processes have contributed to expanding inequality by eroding the solidaristic character of formerly insular and encompassing industrial relations and welfare state institutions. The comparative political economy literature that has dominated theorization on these topics has predominantly focused on national-level policy choices and political coalitions to explain diverging patterns of institutional change. Much of that literature theorizes expanding dualization as an outcome of coalitions between employers and political parties on the one hand and unions seeking to defend core workers on the other.
In this session, we examine the conditions under which unions, as well as the different groups of ‘core’ and peripheral workers that they represent, pursue alternative responses to employer strategies to segment work within and across different political economies. These include both traditional bargaining approaches that draw on institutionalized bargaining power and alternative, non-market forms of agency rooted in broader goals of inclusion, solidarity, and social justice. To this end, we seek not only to examine the driving forces of institutional change at the sub-national level, but also to analyze the reasons for and outcomes from heterogeneous strategic responses of labour unions to these trends.
We will introduce the session with a brief description of the book, including its motivating questions and organizing framework. Chapter authors will then present their papers (see abstracts below). The first paper, by Benassi and Dorigatti, compares trade unions’ strategies towards agency workers in the metal sector in Italy and in Germany. Pulignano and Doerflinger similarly compare union responses to employer strategies to increase flexibility, based on matched case studies of multinational metal and chemical firms in Germany and Belgium – incorporating both external flexibility (via agency work and outsourcing) and internal flexibility (via working time arrangements). Umney, Greer, and Samaluk compare both self-organizing and union-led strategies to represent the interests of freelance musicians in the UK, France, and Slovenia: a profession characterized by extreme precarity. The papers all adopt an industry- and company- based focus, using cross-national comparative data. Findings contribute to debates concerning the conditions under which unions develop more encompassing strategies, moving beyond their traditional or core membership; as well as alternative explanations for their success or failure in representing more marginal or contingent groups of workers.