Abstract
This edited volume is born of dissatisfaction with the seeming inability of the social sciences to move beyond dichotomous ways of thinking about joint collective action by unions and social movements. By “joint collective action,” editors Jürgen Grote and Claudius Wagemann have in mind “both common activity by individuals across different groups and organizations, and, at the same time, common activities of these very groups themselves” (p. 5). The dichotomies refer to various ways of opposing interests and passions, as well as different forms of organization and anti-capitalist critique that are commonly associated with either unions or social movements. The editors wish for us to move on from older debates about what differentiates unions from social movements and come to terms with more recent experiences, particularly in Europe’s southern periphery, that defy the overly instrumental logics by which common action between union and social movement has traditionally been understood.
Rather than ascribing material interests to unions and anti-systemic passions to social movements, to mention one such dichotomy, the editors suggest that we think about how both forms of collective agency meet on the plane of vital needs. The editors pass quickly over what they mean by this (they refer to those needs that are “less extravagant and idiosyncratic than the ones having guided much social movement research in the past but also more encompassing than just advancing particularistic demands as practiced by many unions and defenders of workplace-related issues” [pp. 13–14]). But we may understand these needs as referring to decent work, and access to housing, education, health, and culture, all of which had been secured historically through union struggle and the extension of social citizenship. To argue that unions and social movements might find common cause in the struggle for vital needs in Europe today is to take a sober account of the social devastation occasioned by the decline of unions, the liberalization of labor market regulation, and the austerity policies of the past decade. More optimistically, Grote and Wagemann argue that the passions and interests of a new generation of precarious and excluded workers might be leading European industrial relations systems toward less institutionalized and more hybrid forms of worker mobilization, as glimpsed in the anti-austerity movements of the past few years.
The volume is structured by five theoretical chapters, followed by four rich and theory-laden case studies of labor mobilization in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Greece. It is bookended by broad surveys of current debates in the Introduction and the concluding Chapter 11. In the first section, Andy Mathers, Martin Upchurch, and Graham Taylor develop their concept of “radical political unionism” through a Marxist critique of social movement theory and an appreciation of the opportunities for labor renewal made possible by the legitimacy crisis of social democratic unionism and the political cleavages opened up by austerity. Mario Diani’s chapter covers some of the same ground, with an attempt to present a more formal and stylized model of “the relationship between unions and other social and political organizations in the context of broader collective action fields” (p. 46). For Sabrina Zajak, similarly but in a more Polanyian mode, joint action between unions and social movements is given in a “decisive cleavage . . . not just between capital and labour but between the entirety of forces and alliances either fighting for a further spread of the logic of markets or exercising voice and trying to regulate parts or all of the foundations of capitalist political economies” (p. 83). More sympathetic to social movement theory, Maite Tapia and Gabriella Alberti argue on the basis of their research on migrant worker organizing for a “looser, non-workplace centered, non-hierarchical and yet still-accountable” anti-systemic social movement in which unions “embrace the multiplicity of demands as a material condition of the ‘new’ working classes” (p. 124).
For this reviewer, the most rewarding chapters deal with the prospects of such a strategic re-orientation in the concrete case studies, in which we see not only the potential but also the limits and dilemmas of this shift. If the editors are correct to argue that the passions and interests of precarious and excluded workers struggling for their vital needs could remake labor unions in the image of social movements, then the countries on Europe’s southern periphery make for most-likely cases. In this section, the authors recount in every case how labor federations have lost legitimacy at the political level as a result of having negotiated neoliberal reforms in social partnership with the dominant parties, while colluding with employers to expand precarious employment at the workplace level. Here it is both the proliferation of precarious work and the dismantling of the welfare state that is leading, through the struggles against these processes, to a re-orienting of union and social movement action.
Two counter-tendencies are in evidence. On the one hand, social movement–style organizations have taken up the material interests of new sections of the working class in what Hermes Augusto Costa and Elisio Estanque in their chapter on the Portuguese experience herald as a “return to materialism” (p. 150). The discussion of social movement experiments in precarious worker union organizing in Greece is particularly fascinating. While cautioning that such experiments will remain marginal within the labor movement, Markos Vogiatzoglou sees the potential for such experiments leading to a questioning of the form and content of trade unionism more generally. On the other hand, the main union federations are slowly adopting social movement repertoires and taking up social movement demands in common struggles in defense of universal public services. Holm-Detlev Köhler and José Pablo Calleja Jiménez emphasize the unevenness of this process with regards to Spain, along with the barriers to more effective joint action, beyond instrumental alliances, given the very different ways in which unions and social movements relate to the state. All of the authors emphasize the need to move beyond these defensive and reactive strategies. A more encompassing, passionate, and transformative social project will be required to mobilize excluded and precarious workers.
Even if their answers remain tentative, the editors should be praised for asking ambitious and relevant questions about the future of worker organization in the current context, defined by post-democracy, growing inequalities, ecological collapse, and the rise of neofascism. Serious thinking is being done in countries that are undergoing enormous social, political, and economic stress, and the volume does a great service in advancing these debates in the English-language literature. Social Movements and Organized Labour is a call for industrial relations to face up to a dangerous moment in which the transformation of labor organizations within social movements will figure centrally.