Workers’ transnational networks in times of austerity

Introduction

Italy and Greece share a long tradition of cross-national movement networking. Ever since the military coup and dictatorship of 1967, Italy has been a favoured destination for exiled or self-exiled Greek activists, who have established personal and inter-organizational links with their Italian counterparts. Greece’s new anarchist-leaning political environment in the 1970s and 1980s drew major practical inspiration and theoretical refinement from the Italian ‘autonomy’ movement. More recently, the Italian left has shown great interest in developments in Greece: Italian activists frequently visit Athens and other cities, thereby reinforcing their contacts, while Greeks across the left-wing spectrum are invited to provide updates on their situation and prospects. However, only recently has this political networking expanded to include labour issues or labour-related organizations. The purpose of this article is to describe the development of cross-national labour networks between the two countries and to explain why some of the attempts have managed to produce concrete results, while others have not.

To start with, we identify three types of inter-movement network: (a) coordination, where organizations choose a given point in time and/or space to perform jointly their collective action; (b) resource transfer, that is, the transfer of material and immaterial resources from one entity to another; and (c) collaboration, where the organizations actively engage in a mutual exchange of resources, know-how and experiences.

We go on to examine particular instances of labour networking. First, the large Italian and Greek union confederations’ attempt to coordinate their actions, on the occasion of the European Days of Action, is revisited. Then, we focus on the mobilization of precarious workers. In 2005–2006, several Greek activist groups worked together with Italian anti-precarity organizations to introduce the Euro Mayday protest onto the Greek political scene, as well as to refine and reinforce the debate on the lineaments of precarious labour. Finally, we examine the recent efforts to bring together the experience of occupied factories in order to build strong collaboration networks and construct a common discourse on alternative economic practices. While the two former attempts did not manage to produce solid outcomes, the latter has already fertilized the ground of collaboration and stabilized cross-national channels of communication.

The article concludes by evaluating collaborative networks as the strongest and most productive of the three. It is argued that structural similarities between countries should not be considered as a sufficient condition for labour collaboration; the discursive context of each country needs to be taken into account. Finally, transnational actions stand more chance of producing substantive outcomes when their immediate goals are tangible and rooted in real-life experiences rather than more generic declarations.

The article’s findings are grounded on rich empirical data gathered during six years of research. Methods used for data collection include documentary analysis of unions and other labour collectives’ archives; semi-structured interviews with union members, officials and non-unionized employees; and finally, participant observation of trade union and labour-related organizations’ activities, which included the author’s participation, as a translator and contributor, in two tours by the workers of the occupied factory VIOME in Italy, each lasting several days.

Typology of transnational, inter-movement networking

In the early 2000s, when the prospect of a brand new globalized movement seemed closer than ever, scholars engaged in an extensive analysis of the modes through which national and local social movement organizations interrelate with one another in order to construct transnational networks of collective action (Della Porta, 2008; Diani and McAdam, 2003). Some of these endeavours went as far as to argue that new, transnational collective activist identities were being formed as an outcome of the above-mentioned process (Della Porta, 2005). At around the same time, social science literature focusing on labour highlighted similar efforts in the workers’ movement (see, for example, Ghigliani, 2005; Lambert and Webster, 2001; Waterman and Wills, 2001). Transnational labour networking had never disappeared from union activists’ agendas, of course; a variety of such instances are to be encountered in the labour movement history of both Greece and Italy. From the revolutionary internationalism of the Italian autonomous workers’ movement (Wright, 2002) to the, more institutionalized, cases of the European Metalworkers’ (EMF) and Public Officers’ (EPSU) federations (Bieler, 2007; Bieler and Erne, 2014), the transnational exchange of theories, ideas, practices and organizational formats is, as Pizzolato eloquently put it, a transversal, crossing the whole history of the labour movement, sometimes taking unexpected forms and/or appearing in settings where this seemed highly unlikely (Pizzolato, 2011).

Some conceptual clarifications are required prior to examining the typology, to be presented below, which derives from this large body of literature. On the one hand, our focus is not on classifying social movements’ transnationalization processes, (as developed, for example, in Della Porta and Tarrow, 2005: 3–5), but rather on the processes’ outcome, namely the types of relations established among the actors and their practices. On the other hand, while the typology corresponds to transnational networks, as the empirical focus of the article is only on two specific country cases (and the links developed between them), when referring to the specific networks developed between the two the term cross-national is preferred. The notion of ‘international’ (as well as its derivatives) has been avoided, as it is usually associated with more explicit, ambitious and long-term political projects (Featherstone, 2012: 2–12), traces of which are not to be found in any of the instances examined.

Returning to the network types: the first – and the simplest to perform – is the coordination of activities. Coordination may occur in three different ways: first, two (or more) social movement organizations may choose a given point in time simultaneously to carry out their – locally based – protest. Perhaps the most spectacular example is the 15 February 2003 global day against the war in Iraq; millions of people demonstrated against the forthcoming invasion, in more than 600 cities worldwide (Diani, 2009). A second form of coordination, more rarely encountered, is spatial: organizations jointly decide the location of their protest (which should have symbolic or practical added value), spreading their actions in time in order to increase the visibility and magnitude of the protest. An example of the above is the Syntagma square occupation in Athens (May–September 2011), where the daily protest, scheduled at 18.00, was followed by the popular assembly and cultural events, organized by the more ‘politicized’ entities present at the square. Commonly enough, these cultural and artistic events would culminate in a second round of protests, which could last until late at night (Sergi and Vogiatzoglou, 2013). Finally, the most advanced type combines both elements: organizations agree on a place and time, emerging at the protest simultaneously and en masse. The so-called alter-globalization movement was built in accordance with this basic principle of coordination.

The second type of networking is resource transfer networking, the direct or indirect transfer of resources from one organizational entity to another in order to serve the recipient’s political goals. Resources are not confined to material ones. Visibility, information dissemination, know-how exchanges, a ‘helping hand’ in practicalities, assistance in building a critical mass, even a mere public statement of a shared stance on an issue, may become movement resources, if treated wisely by the recipient.

Two types of resource transfer networking may be identified. The first is inter-organizational solidarity. Solidarity is widely debated and interpreted in various ways, depending on the scholarly field and viewpoint. The relevant literature on labour studies is vast; solidarity has been examined both as inter-personal and inter-organizational, in a historical perspective (Ansell, 2001; Dixon et al., 2004) and as a victim of globalization and the restructuring of production (Hyman, 2005: 29). Recent contributions have centred on the potential for redefining solidarity in terms of the new state of affairs of the post-Fordist workplace (Fantasia and Voss, 2004; Fine, 2005; Ross, 2008; Turner, 2007). The second type of resource transfer networking is related to what Oikonomakis and Roos have termed cross-national movement ‘resonance’. Being an instance of the ‘non-linear, vibrating patterns of [movement practices’] dispersion resembling sound waves’ (Oikonomakis and Roos, 2013: 5), the transfer of resources requires the previous establishment of direct links between the recipient and the sender, as well as a common political goal that the resource transfer is supposed to promote. Resource transfer actions, especially in a cross-national context, are mainly one-directional – no expectation of immediate/direct compensation for the sender is raised.

The third networking category is collaboration. Collaborative efforts differ from the above definition of solidarity in that they necessarily involve a mutual exchange of resources, know-how and experiences. Personal contacts and strong bonds between the activists are required for the collaboration to be fruitful. Commonly, coordinative efforts are also made, since jointly organized events are the most efficient way of strengthening inter-personal relations and exchanging ideas and know-how. However, as is obvious, collaboration requires both a shared purpose and sufficient resources on all sides (Table 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Characteristics of the three types of networking.

	Common political objective	Direction of relation	Strength of relation	Resources required
Coordination	Not necessary	One- or two-way	Weak	Few
Resource transfer	Necessary	One-way	Weak or Strong	None (recipient) /Significant (sender)
Active Collaboration	Necessary	Two-way	Strong	Significant

In what follows, we shall examine three instances in which cross-national coordination, expression of solidarity and collaboration developed between entities of the Greek and the Italian labour movement. The first instance took place in November 2012, when the union leaderships of the GSEE General Trade Union Confederation, in Greece, and the centre-left CGIL confederation, in Italy, announced their participation in the European Day of Action called by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). The second takes us back to 2006, when the calls by precarious workers in Italy for a Europeanization of the Mayday Parade they had been organizing since 2001 were heard by radical grass-roots trade unions and anti-precarity activists in Greece. The third is the most recent: since 2013, the occupied factories of VIOME in Thessaloniki, Ri-MaFlow in Milan and ex-RSI in Thessaloniki have developed a very strong collaborative network which includes supporters, social centres and activists in various cities of Italy and Greece.

Union leadership coordination: the European Day of Action experience

Prior to examining the first instance itself, it is useful to provide some background information on the anti-austerity campaigns which took place in Greece and Italy, as well as trade union participation in them. The economic crisis of 2008 had a heavy impact on both countries under scrutiny. Austerity and the consequent recession was the solution proposed to remedy their problematic public and financial sectors. The two countries were soon confronted with political turmoil. In Italy, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned in November 2011, leaving the country in the hands of a short-lived technocrat government, led by Mario Monti. At the 2013 general election, the two main parties of Italy’s previously bipolar system were significantly weakened, whilst Beppe Grillo’s populist and anti-EU ‘Five Star Movement’ achieved an impressive 25.55 per cent of the votes. The coalition government formed by the social democrats and the centre-right staggered on for several months, due to intra- and inter-party disputes. In February 2014, yet another prime minister resigned, handing over to the 40-year-old social-democrat leader, Matteo Renzi.

In Greece, the social-democrat government led by PASOK, elected in 2009 with the support of more than 45 per cent of the electorate, collapsed under international pressure in June 2011. The technocrat Prime Minister Loukas Papademos was soon forced to call national elections, due to widespread social unrest. Two rounds of elections (in May and June) were needed for a new government to be formed, as PASOK was pushed practically to the margins of the political map, suffering losses up to 32 per cent, while the radical left party SYRIZA shot up to 27 per cent from the mere 5 per cent it had achieved in 2009.

As is clear from the above, the trade unions in the two countries had both incentives and political opportunities to increase their socio-political presence in their neighbour. However, they did not manage to do so. When the austerity blight reached southern Europe, its labour organizations were weaker than ever when it came to blocking austerity measures and negative changes in labour legislation, as well as protecting their members’ rights and living standards (Heyes, 2013; Mattoni and Vogiatzoglou, 2014).

The biggest trade union in Italy, CGIL, not only failed to block the reform of the infamous Article 18 of the Italian Worker’s Statute, ¹ it did not even mobilize its members in protest. In 2002, a similar proposal by then-Prime Minister Berlusconi was put on hold, after an unprecedented protest by three million people in Rome (Nicola, 2002). Ten years later, the mobilization was almost invisible, due to the CGIL leadership’s ambivalence between retaining its alliance with the co-governing Democratic Party (PD) and maintaining its pro-Article 18 position. ² In Greece, the trade unions participated in all the anti-austerity mobilizations which evolved during the crisis years. The main tactic employed by the nationwide unions was the nationwide 24-hour general strike. During the strike days, ³ tens of thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Athens and other major Greek cities, with frequent clashes with the police and other violent action. These impressive mobilizations achieved little of substance, however. Every legislative package to implement austerity was adopted by the Parliament and, as if that was not enough, several opinion polls showed that the union leaderships were mistrusted by the rank-and-file, who accused them of being friendly toward the government and the employers. Their response to the critical situation in Greece was considered inadequate (Laoutaris, 2011). In sum, the Greek unions will exit the crisis even more socially discredited and isolated than before 2008.

It was during this turbulent period, in November 2012, when the ETUC decided to organize the European Day of Action, which included, among other activities, ‘strikes in Spain, Portugal, Greece and Italy. For the first time in its history, an ETUC day of action [would] include simultaneous strikes in four countries’ (ETUC, 2012). Hopes of a massive mobilization that would boost coordination efforts in various countries soon proved vain, at least with regard to the two countries under examination.

In Greece, participation in the international strike was announced several months before the given date. On 14 November, the country was supposed to be paralysed by a simultaneous 24-hour general strike of private sector and public workers. However, the timing and general context forced the trade unions’ leadership radically to alter their plans and the European Day of Action passed completely unnoticed. As already mentioned, the summer of 2012 found Greece with a new, troika-friendly cabinet. In early November 2012, a renewed bailout agreement between the country and its creditors was brought to the Parliament. It included the usual round of austerity measures. As always, the pressure on trade union leaderships to mobilize was irresistible. Indeed, a 48-hour general strike was immediately called, for 6 and 7 November. All branches entered a strike frenzy, which included a total blockade of public transport, the courts and medical services, strikes by shops and artisans, and so on.

The expectations were high, as the strike was perceived to be the first real confrontation between the new government and the social forces opposing austerity. Unfortunately for the latter, the outcome was not impressive. Participation in the strike and the number of protesters in the street of Athens were both lower than usual, no major clashes or riots occurred and the austerity package was adopted, as predicted, without major losses for the governing majority. There are two main reasons for this: on the one hand, there was a certain general disappointment, due to the recent election result. On the other hand, the majority of the (already significantly weakened, after almost three years of continuous mobilization) available movement resources had been allotted to purposes other than a direct confrontation with austerity policy. Radical politics in Greece had developed a mono-thematic anti-fascist agenda, in order to confront the rise of the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. The more moderate parts of the left were promoting social solidarity structures in an attempt to counter the severe humanitarian crisis Greece was facing.

Given the unexpected failure of the 48-hour general strike and the (correct) prediction that the European Day of Action, scheduled for just a week later, would be met by potential participants with indifference, if not scorn, the GSEE leaders were obliged to undermine their own initiative. They implemented no publicity campaign and, a couple of days before 14 November, reduced the planned 24-hour strike to a mere three-hour work pause and a demonstration in the centre of Athens, in which fewer than 500 people participated. Despite the obvious reasons for these decisions, the GSEE leadership was harshly criticized by the political opposition for their stance, as their opponents accused them of bringing forward ‘recipes for mobilization without the masses, which only serve as symbolic moves made by a corrupted bureaucracy’ (DEN PLIRONO, 2012).

By contrast, in Italy the protest was fairly successful. Participation in the strike was not enormous, but some 300,000 people, according to the organizers, did take part in the national demonstration in Rome. The Italian Confederation CGIL, which organized the strike, had perceived the European Day of Action as a good opportunity to take to the streets, without portraying themselves as a major opposition force to the technocrat government, an act that would outrage their political allies in the co-governing Democratic Party. The European context of this protest, thus, was the perfect window of opportunity.

The problem for CGIL, however, was that they did not constitute the bulk of protesters on that date. In Italy, November is the traditional month of student mobilizations. This particular November, high school students were already mobilizing against a reform proposal for high school governing bodies. On 14 November, therefore, rather than trade union members, it was students, social centre activists and other actors on the Italian political scene who flooded the streets of the capital, bringing along, as one would expect, their own movement repertoire. During the violent clashes that occurred in various parts of Rome, 16 police and some 60 protesters were injured, property was destroyed and dozens were arrested. The embarrassed CGIL quickly issued a statement condemning ‘with extreme firmness and maximum intransigence the violent incidents’ (Pignatelli, 2012) and seldom made reference to the European Day of Action ever after. Today, many account the event as a ‘student demonstration’, ⁴ not even mentioning the European character of the protest.

In sum, the coordinative efforts of both Greek and Italian trade unions did not manage to promote the international character of the day, nor to build an argument, in each country’s public discourse, with regard to the need for cross-national labour coordination. This may be attributed to two reasons: (a) large-scale labour action is extremely context-related; failure to embed properly the mobilization’s agenda, modality and purpose in the broader social movement setting is unforgiven; (b) none of the efforts managed to communicate properly to their audience – the prospective participants – the benefits of raising labour activity to the transnational level. While in Greece, the GSEE was confronted with a lose/lose situation, because Greek society was coping, at that time, with yet another emergency situation, where all other issues were of secondary importance, the Italian CGIL merely utilized the European character of the protest in order to conceal its true objectives, ultimately paying a heavy price.

Precarious workers beyond borders: an attempt to import the anti-precarity struggle to Greece

The second instance put under scrutiny is the efforts of several organizations and activists in Greece to introduce an ‘a la Italiana’ struggle against precarity.

The emergence of precarity in the labour market occurred in a similar manner and time frame in both countries. The introduction of ‘flexible’ labour contracts in the 1990s, the traditionally weak welfare state and the expansion of atypical employment in several sectors (including universities, schools, white-collar occupations such as designers, architects and so on, the catering and cleaning services sector, telecommunications and call-centres) coincided with a weak trade union presence in most of the workplaces concerned. This explosive mix, on both sides of the Ionian Sea, left a large number of employees uncovered in terms of labour rights, access to social security and trade union assistance.

The first efforts to organize precarious workers in the early 2000s emerged simultaneously in Greece and Italy. However, the obvious structural similarities did not result in a similar pattern of organization in the two countries. In Italy, during this early stage of precarious worker mobilization, many protests emphasized the need to construct and reinforce a common sense of belonging among precarious workers. The importance of constructing a common understanding of precarity while respecting the differences amongst the various workers’ categories was reflected in the very format of the Mayday Parade against precarity, which took place in Milan from 2001 – when it was still a national protest event – to 2004, when it was transformed into a transnational day of protest for Europe’s precarious workers (Choi and Mattoni, 2010). Even the few struggles aimed at improving working conditions in a specific workplace – for example, the fight of the Precari Atesia collective in the Atesia call-centre that reached its peak in 2005 – had strong symbolic elements oriented towards constituting a cohesive political awareness. In this sense, the emphasis on the symbolic dimension intertwined closely with the forms of protests used by precarious workers in Italy, most of which originated outside the trade union realm (Mattoni, 2009). In sum, the anti-precarity campaign was led by political organizations operating mainly outside the workplace, putting the emphasis on symbolic action and collective identity construction.

In Greece, the opposite path was followed. Mobilization was spearheaded by grass-roots unions operating directly in the workplace. This was partly due to the specific characteristics of the Greek trade union system, which has only one – pluralist, in political terms – private sector workers’ confederation, which offers a relatively high degree of autonomy to grass-roots union formations (such as productive sector and single-corporation ones) (Kouzis, 2007). Contrary to the situation of Italian precarious workers, no visibility campaigns were attempted by their Greek counterparts. The symbolic content that the Greek precarious workers built upon in order to organize their struggle was linked to the specific characteristics of the grass-roots trade unions. The discourse developed was linked to traditional labour demand-making procedures (Mattoni and Vogiatzoglou, 2014). As the Greek precarious workers’ unions were operating in a working environment consisting both of precarious and non-precarious employees and addressed an equally mixed audience, the obvious choice was to embed the flexible labour-oriented claims and demands into the more general setting of working class struggles.

It soon turned out that these organizational formats were constricting mobilization potential. By the mid-2000s, it had become obvious to many Greek anti-precarity activists that the new employment conditions called for a more refined theoretical approach to what precarity is and how it can be tackled. Furthermore, the repertoire employed by their Italian counterparts, the massive ‘colourful’ demonstrations, the co-research attempts by intellectuals close to the movement and the symbolic protests aimed at uncovering the reality of ‘flexibility’, had been put under careful observation by some Greek activist milieus. Although the above-mentioned repertoire could not be considered innovative, at least in the literal sense (protest forms such as the ‘colourful demonstrations’ had gained prominence, but also exposed their limits, during the golden years of the anti-globalization movement), its combination with a radical labour agenda seemed a far more promising way out of the Greek labour movements’ shortcomings than the ‘old school’ trade union repertoire of industrial action. The Italians, on the other hand, were eager to export their experience to other European countries. This was due, on the one hand, to the analysis the movement itself had conducted, which recognized the international aspect of mobilization as essential for its success. On the other hand, the activists knew all too well that the mobilization in their home country had reached a peak which was difficult to sustain in the long term.

In this context, the first coordinated efforts to transfer know-how from Italy to Greece took place. The main texts defining precarity were translated into Greek and published in movement journals and publishing houses (Blackout, 2006; Kolinko, 2003; Mabruki, 2007; Mimis, 2005); the Greek activists became familiar with the work of Italian intellectuals such as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Sergio Bologna, who had written extensively on the subject; Greek activists would visit the large Italian social centres and participate in the main anti-precarity protests. Then, in 2006, the first ‘Italian-style’ activity took place, in Thessaloniki. A group of anarchists close to a big squat in the city organized a fake publicity campaign on behalf of an imaginary human resource management company, called ‘Adeho’. ⁵ The campaign reached its peak at a public event at which supposed Adeho representatives explained to potential customers and employees the virtue of working without remuneration. This event, a variation on the 2005 Serpica Naro action in Milan, Italy (see Mattoni, 2008), sparked a lively and occasionally bitter debate among the Greek activists. The organizers were accused by some of ‘elitism’, ‘speaking an incomprehensible language’ and ‘ignoring the workers’ (a summary of the various arguments expressed can be found at: Athens.indymedia, 2006). All in all, this experiment was considered a failure and was never repeated. Two years later, a second attempt to import Italian practices was, once again, met with bitter comments. Several precarious workers’ unions decided to split from the traditional 1 May demonstration and perform their own parade in Athens, following the steps of the Euro-Mayday Parade. The idea had its merits, but the unions got trapped in the contradictory expectations of their supporters. Many members and militants of these unions come from the anarchist movement and extreme left, which is extremely hostile towards any ‘colourful’ protest, considering it to be more suitable to a carnival than to a political struggle. In order not to alienate this core group of allies, the unions organized a protest which, in its main elements, was absolutely identical to the ones called by the institutional trade unions. In the end, only around 1000 people showed up for the demonstration – even during the parade, the participants were criticizing the organizers and predicted that this mistake would never be repeated. Naturally, it wasn’t.

Summing up, a number of things need to be highlighted regarding the failed attempts to establish a one-way resource route linking the experiences of Greek and Italian precarious workers. The first is almost self-evident: structural similarities do not guarantee a successful import of know-how and practices from one context to another. In the case of precarious workers, the Greek activists failed to perceive how incomprehensible the refined discourse on precarity which had been developed in Italy was to the Greek labour force. The second derives from the above. Before any given resource transfer, a careful mapping of the recipient’s field needs to be conducted, in order to make sure that (a) the recipient does, indeed, need the resources the sender is about to provide; (b) the recipient knows how to handle the resources delivered; and (c) the political projects and practices of all nodes involved in the network are compatible. Finally, the golden rule of repertoire resonance was once more confirmed: an inability to contextualize properly the imported practices will inevitably result in erroneous strategic choices, embarrassing failures and, ultimately, a waste of resources. This final observation is especially relevant under the current harsh socio-economic conditions, faced by the two labour movements since 2008. Mass unemployment and the consequent fear spread among the most vulnerable workers acts as a disincentive towards mobilization and limits the – already scarce – resources precarious workers may draw upon.

The occupied factories: building strong and comprehensive collaboration networks

The third case to be examined has proven, to date, to be much more productive for the actors involved than those noted above. When, in 2012, the owners of the construction material factory VIOME in Thessaloniki, Greece announced the imminent closure of the company and the dismissal of their – unpaid – employees, no one expected the dramatic events that would follow. Up to then, no example of an occupied and self-managed workplace could be found in the country. Both practices had been occasionally employed, but separately and rarely. The Latin American experience had never been regarded as anything but exotic. However, when the factory’s grass-roots union announced that the workers were not willing to abandon their workplace, but intended, instead, to re-launch production as soon as possible under workers’ control, various social movement organizations rushed to express their solidarity and support. The key turning point in the occupied VIOME’s activity was the so-called ‘opening the factory’s gates to society’ (VIOME Workers’ Union, 2013). A series of initiatives were launched in order to raise the visibility of the project, while social solidarity networks undertook the responsibility of distributing the factory’s products, given that the lack of any legal framework could not allow distribution to take place through normal market channels.

Soon, VIOME became known beyond Greek frontiers. The ‘Solidarity with VIOME’ assemblies operating in Greece, in collaboration with groups of Greek migrants all over Europe, translated and diffused audiovisual and textual material concerning the project. In May 2013, the VIOME workers were invited to participate in a tour in Italy. Events and debates were to be hosted in various social centres around the country. Upon arrival, the Greeks were surprised to discover that two similar experiments were being prepared in major Italian cities: The Ri-MaFlow in Milan and the ex-RSI in Rome. The Ri-MaFlow was supported by a large number of Milanese social movement organizations, the main hub of which is the social centre CS CANTIERE in San Siro. The train workers of RSI had only recently occupied their factory, in collaboration with the neighbouring social centre Strike, which belongs to a large alliance of Roman autonomous collectives, operating under the name Assemblea Metropolitana (Metropolitan Assembly). Workers from both Italian factories warmly welcomed their VIOME colleagues; a fruitful exchange of experiences, sharing of challenges encountered and solutions proposed took place during the days of the VIOME tour.

In September 2013, the VIOME visit in Italy was repeated. This time, they were joined by the spokesperson of the Latin American Occupied Factories Coordination and a researcher who worked with FraLib, an occupied tea factory in Marseilles which was also planning to re-launch production. The network of transnational collaboration was consolidated, inter-personal contacts were established and the first elements of a joint project aiming at mutual assistance which would ensure the various experiments’ survival were brought forward. In January 2014, delegates from all the above-mentioned factories met in Marseilles and the South European Occupied Factories’ Network was officially launched.

The workers on both sides had to overcome numerous obstacles and difficulties. First and foremost, there was a language barrier: none of the workers spoke any other languages than their own and a whole army of translators had to be mobilized in order for communication to take place. Then, the different legislative frameworks of each country did not allow direct import of practices from one project to the other. Finally, the scarcity of resources made them highly dependent on external solidarity networks, in order for the encounters to take place.

However, these obstacles were soon overcome. First, the occupied factories’ workers dealt with the issues of self-managed production in a very practical, hands-on manner. In contrast to the trade union leaderships’ generic reference to the need for transnational cooperation, the workers simply enacted it, focusing on practical issues rather than declarations of intent. Secondly, the resource flow in the case of occupied factories was reciprocal. Contrary to what one would expect, Greek workers did not merely ask for support from their (more resourceful) Italian counterparts, but incited a vivid exchange of know-how and experiences. Thirdly, the ‘opening the factory gates to society’ argument facilitated the inclusion of other, not necessarily labour-related social movement organizations in the broad solidarity matrix surrounding the factories. The factory’s physical space provided the necessary spatial relevance, which allowed local organizations to participate, adding elements of their own agenda to the ongoing activities. Just to give an example, the Metropolitan Assembly of Rome launched, in collaboration with the ex-RSI workers and inside their premises, the Officine Zero (Zero Offices) project, which includes student housing facilities, a self-organized restaurant, a co-working space for creative industry employees and artisan laboratories. Through these collateral benefits for the solidarity network not only is the membership of the projects renewed constantly as new supporters are invited to join, but also the societal impact of the collaboration network is enriched and augmented.

Concluding remarks

The main point of this article is that, indeed, strong transnational solidarity and collaboration networks between labour organizations can be formed, even under the harshest conditions, such as the ones the southern European labour movements are facing in the post-2008 setting. However, one needs to know where to look for them, how to distinguish their characteristics analytically and what sense to make out of the various examples available. Among the three cases we examined, the most successful was the one in which the formal trade union structures had the least involvement. Furthermore, the most content-rich network was linked to the most advanced of the three proposals with regard to productive relations in post-industrial capitalist economies. Could comparative examination of the Greek and Italian labour-movement networking efforts provide sufficient data for a general theory of labour solidarity in the 21st century? Definitely not. However, it does provide indications of the direction in which our scholarly lens should turn, as well as some initial insights as to how transnational labour networks might increase their effectiveness, scope and durability.

First of all, it may be argued that collaborative networks, although much more difficult, time-consuming and resource-demanding to construct, may prove more durable and more productive than the coordination or resource transfer networks. For the occupied factories and their supporters, previous mistakes had to be avoided and relations had to be built from scratch in order to overcome the obvious challenges their project entailed. The most crucial characteristic of their network was each hub’s commitment to mutual aid and reciprocity, rather than being limited to the role of resource provider or recipient. The occupied factories’ workers and their supporters prioritized the mutual exchange of know-how rather than flows of material resources.

Secondly, as noted above, the cross-national structural similarities should not be considered a sufficient condition for labour collaboration; the discursive context of each country needs to be taken into account. This does not mean it would be impossible to create discursive spaces and channels of communication if initial diversities are taken into account. However, a careful and flexible approach is required to avoid a simple ‘import–export’ activity; the same applies to the compatibility of political projects. It is common for organizations to lose political focus when addressing a spatially distant potential collaborator. This is not to be considered flawed in itself, but some prudence is required to avoid achieving the opposite outcomes to the ones desired.

Finally, transnational action stands a higher chance of producing rich (in terms of content) and durable (in time) networks, when their immediate goals are tangible and rooted in real-life experiences, rather than more generic declarations. As the European Days of Action confirmed, a simple statement of the need to construct a transnational space of debate and collaboration among labour organizations is not sufficient. A complex and multi-faceted set of practices is required, aimed at the macro-level while being in direct touch with local organizations, their grievances, agendas and claims. The occupied factories’ workers and the solidarity groups standing next to them have achieved the latter; what remains is to examine the extent to which the former will be accomplished.