Mass Strikes in the Global Crisis, Special Issue of Workers of the World (original) (raw)
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Global Labour Journal, 2018
The Great Recession and the upsurge of widespread social movements in various crisis-ridden countries have given new impetus to the debate on the relationship between economic breakdown and the occurrence of collective action. I revisit the issue by examining strike activity in Spain between 2002 and 2013. For a better understanding of the continuities and changes, I contrast two sets of literature on industrial conflict. The first deals with economic factors influencing strikes or, in other words, with the question of whether and how fluctuations in manpower supply and demand account for continuities and changes in strike activity. The second advocates for a look beyond the economy, towards the political exchange that takes place between unions and state actors and which, depending on its positive or negative nature, leads to shifts of the distributional struggle away from the marketplace towards the public arena or vice versa. The findings reveal that, rather than exclusive, the two perspectives prove to be mutually conducive and are most significant when they are combined. The political exchange model is helpful for understanding the rather stable or even declining strike frequency prior to the economic crisis but also the three nationwide general strikes in 2010 and 2012, which represented a rupture in the social consensus. If the general strikes are left aside, the economic variables come into play: an increased strike frequency during the economic crisis is in fact accompanied by a shift towards smaller strikes related to a single workplace, and to so-called "defensive" strikes. This indicates that an actual decrease in workers' bargaining power was overcompensated by a growing number of circumstances in which the recourse to strike action became a means of last resort.
General Strikes in Western Europe 1980–2008
2009
Since the 1970s, the incidence of strike activity against employers in Western Europe („economic‟ strikes) has declined dramatically, whether measured by days lost, numbers of strikes, or workers involved. Between 1970 and 1979 an average of 419 working days per 1000 employees were lost to strike action each year in the major OECD countries, but by 2000-2004 days lost to strikes had decreased by almost 90 per cent to just 51 days per 1000 (Piazza 2005: 290; Scheuer 2006: 144, 149; van der Velden et al. 2007).
Political, general, or economic strikes? New types of strikes and workers' contention
Partecipazione e Conflitto
The article provides an overview of workers' collective actions in Italy between 2008 and 2018, which characterized a new wave of contention; the article focuses on the development of strike activities in this period. While the literature suggests an increase in general/political strikes and a decline of economic strikes, we argue that this distinction does not sufficiently account for the variety of strikes that has recently occurred. Our contribution aims to clarify the differences between three types of strikes: general political strike, general/large-scale economic strike, and local economic strike. The empirical analysis is based on a new data set of workers' collective actions, including strikes, observed in Italy in the decade 2008-2018. The data set was built using protest event analysis (PEA). Multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) reveals three types of strikes that differ along these dimensions: the actors promoting them, the workers' occupations involved, the issues claimed, the scale of action, and the addressee of the actions. Conclusions compare the characteristics of workers' contentious actions between 2008 and 2018 with the old cycle of protests observable in the 1960s and 1970s, and suggest an integration of economic and political explanations to account for the new types of strikes.
Economic and Political Strikes: A Social Movement Unionism Hypothesis
Socialism and Democracy, 2023
The European economic and political landscape has undergone significant changes since the 2008 economic and financial crisis. The 2008 economic downturn resulted in widespread job losses, reduced bargaining power for workers, and increased job insecurity, triggering a global recession that led to significant economic and political changes, including increased social unrest and protests (Rüdig and Karyotis 2014; Kriesi et al. 2020). In the aftermath of the crisis, economic and political strikes around the world have increased. Strikes have been observed in several European countries, especially in
Unions against Governments: Explaining General Strikes in Western Europe, 1980-2006
2013
Across Western Europe, unions have increasingly engaged in staging general strikes against governments since 1980. This increase in general strikes is puzzling as it has occurred at the same time as economic strikes have been on the decline. We posit that theories developed to explain economic strikes hold little explanatory power in accounting for variation in general strikes across countries and over time. Instead, we develop a framework based on political variables; in particular, whether governments have included or excluded unions in framing policy reforms; the party position of the government; and the type of government. Our empirical analysis, based on a conditional fixed-effects logit estimation of 84 general strikes between 1980 and 2006, shows that union exclusion from the process of reforming policies, government strength, and the party position of the government can provide an initial explanation for the occurrence of general strikes.