Abstract
Reviewed by: Edmund Heery, Cardiff University, UK
This book offers a rejoinder to ‘dualist’ accounts of labour, which claim that trade unions, institutions of collective bargaining, and systems of social welfare act to the benefit of those in core labour market positions at the expense of unorganized outsiders. Through empirical research on union responses to the growth of precarious work, contributors to the book argue that European labour movements increasingly have sought to regulate precarious work and to bring precarious workers within the compass of trade union representation. There is in process, they contend, a concerted drive to ‘reconstruct solidarity’ by extending collective organization to new groups within the labour force and forging new, inclusive identities. The prime message of the book is that these processes of extension and inclusion define the new politics of labour in much of the European continent and run directly counter to the competing narrative of dualism.
In addition to this substantive purpose the book also has a theoretical objective that is set out in a compelling introduction by the editors. This introduction seeks to combine insights drawn from three separate bodies of literature – comparative political economy, critical sociology and comparative employment relations – and develops a complex, two-stage model for the analysis of precarious work. In the first, ‘static’ stage clusters of factors are identified that either inhibit or facilitate precarious work. The causal factors that are identified are: (1) the degree of institutional inclusiveness defined in terms of ‘the degree to which welfare state protections, labour market legislation, and collective agreements extend the pay and conditions secured by employees having relatively stronger bargaining power to those with weaker bargaining power’ (p. 12); (2) the pattern of collective identification amongst the workforce and the degree to which it is characterized by inclusiveness or fragmentation; (3) union strategies and the degree to which they incorporate diverse workforce groups into structures of representation; and (4) the strategies of employers and the degree to which they rely upon voice and cooperation or exit and opportunism. These four sets of factors, it is said, interact and reinforce one another to produce either virtuous or vicious cycles that are marked respectively by minimal or extensive precarity. One final thing to note is that the model is ‘power-centred’ in the sense that institutions and identities produce their causal effects by strengthening the power of labour, endowing it with greater capacity to resist precarious forms of work.
In the second, ‘dynamic’ stage of the model there is an emphasis on identifying causal variables that generate change either in the direction of ‘expanding precarity’ or holding it in check. Drawing on the findings reported by contributors, the editors identify three main factors that disrupt the virtuous cycle and which have expanded precarious work in European labour markets. These factors are: (1) the globalization of firms, product markets, and financial markets which have generated downward pressure on labour costs and provided opportunities for employers to escape from inclusive institutions through value chain restructuring; (2) the market-making policies of the European Union, which have both eroded national systems of employment protection and promoted austerity; and (3) labour migration from both within and beyond the European Union that has provided employers with new sources of labour supply and undermined collective identities.
Working counter to these forces are a second set of factors that serve ‘to sustain regulation of precarious work or reverse trends of expanding precarity’ (p. 23). The central actors within this counter-movement are trade unions and the editors argue that union strategy has been and can be effective in blocking the growth of precarious work. They also identify the conditions that enable unions to develop counter-strategies of this kind, including inclusive institutions, high levels of associational power and alliances across groups of workers and with other social movements. Where these conditions exist, it is claimed, unions can push back against precarious work but where they are absent then the best they may be able to achieve is the limited protection of core workers at the expense of the periphery.
The remaining chapters of the book explore and substantiate these arguments. There are nine empirical chapters, written by cross-country teams that examine different aspects of precarity, in different industries, and different institutional settings. In all cases, the trend towards precarious work is combined with examination of union responses. All of these chapters are comparative and in combination they draw upon evidence from multiple European countries, including countries of Eastern Europe that hitherto have featured less frequently in comparative employment research. The chapters provide evidence of mixed experience and variable union success in bringing precarious work within the span of collective regulation but the emphasis is on identifying successful responses and furnishing a theoretical explanation of why relative success occurred. In the final chapter of the book, Steven P Vallas summarizes the findings from an American perspective and endorses the explanatory utility of the model developed by the editors.
Reconstructing Solidarity is an exemplary edited collection. Not only is the standard of scholarship very high throughout the various contributions but the book has a coherence that is not found within many equivalent volumes. Partly this coherence comes from a shared subject matter – the focus on precarious work and the union response – and partly it comes from a shared comparative method. It comes as well from the overarching theoretical schema, set out by the editors, which is used as an organizing device in all of the chapters that follow. The different parts of the book are engaged in a single intellectual project and this endows it with a high level of coherence.
To conclude, I want to offer two reflections on the book, one substantive and one theoretical. The substantive point concerns the experience of the UK, where the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn has adopted a set of policies that seek to address precarious work and which conceivably will become government policy in the near future. These include abolishing zero-hours contracts, re-establishing multi-employer bargaining, and reversing the outsourcing of public services. These plans for the labour market are associated with a broader programme designed to combat the three causes of precarity identified by the editors. Labour’s economic policy is protectionist, with a strong emphasis on state-aid to unionized industries, it is anti-EU and pro-Brexit, and it is committed to ending freedom of movement for workers to and from Europe. It offers a class-within-nation conception of solidarity. This programme may foment fresh divisions within the workforce, most notably between migrant workers and the native-born, but the key point is that it has emerged as a result of political transformation. It is the left capture of the Labour Party that has allowed this policy to come to fruition and, while it has been supported and shaped by the left of the British union movement, it is not the product of revitalized unions. In this case, it is the political not the industrial wing of the labour movement that has been the agent of change and key developments have occurred at the apex and not at the levels of the enterprise or the industry, which are the focus of the empirical chapters in Reconstructing Solidarity.
The second point concerns the kind of integrative theoretical model that sustains the book. This synthesizes arguments from three discrete bodies of social science and develops a complex account of how contemporary labour markets function. If transcribed into a list of variables, the latter would include dozens of indicators. An alternative approach to theorizing has been advanced by Healy (2017), who calls for a rejection of what he calls ‘nuance’ in favour of simple, bold propositions. The dualism thesis, to which Reconstructing Solidarity is a rejoinder, might be thought of as exemplifying this alternative approach to theorizing. For Healy, complex model-building of the kind attempted in this book is mistaken, a theoretical dead-end unlikely to result in major advances in understanding. To my mind, this is too absolute position and there is ample room for both approaches to theorizing, model-building and claim-making. Indeed, it may be that the exponents of both need one another and continually engage in dialogue, the claim-makers advancing bold propositions while the model-builders hedge them round with qualification until a new claim is made. It is this dialectical of claim and qualification that underpins Reconstructing Solidarity.