Cycles of labour protests: public and private sector unions' contentious actions (original) (raw)
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Labouring Lives and Political Protest Across and Beyond the Nordic Countries
Nordic Labour History Conference, 2020
Call for Papers: Nordic Labour History Conference 2020. The next Nordic Labour History Conference – taking place at the Workers’ Museum (Arbejdermuseet) in Copenhagen, November 26-29, 2020 – will continue the efforts from Reykjavík 2016 of expanding the field with new approaches to what can be interrogated as labour history: What counts as labour, where does labour take place and under what conditions, who constitute the working class and indeed ‘the worker’, what can be recognized as labour organizing and workers’ associations. The title of the conference – Labouring Lives and Political Protest Across and Beyond the Nordic Countries – is meant to encourage this expansion of approaches by pointing to the specificities of labour as such, of labour organizing, of workers’ associations and parties, of collective bargaining practices and traditions, of the lived lives of workers, of convergences of and segregations between workplace and home, labour and free time, of various forms of political protest, activism and dissidence, as well as the spatial and temporal geographies of labour within, but not limited to a Nordic context. Labour and workers travel beyond sectoral and national borders and thus labour history inquiries must travel too. Find more information in the full CfP.
Drawing both on social movement studies and labour studies, this article investigates the kind of people who join trade union-staged marches during the current crisis, looking at the presence of (politicized) grievances, collective identity and the embeddedness of mobilization. Data were taken from surveys conducted during 13 marches organized by the main trade unions in five European countries. They show that participants in union-staged demonstrations in countries in which a corporatist model dominates and trade unions have a tradition of business unionism (Belgium and the Netherlands) are characterized by higher political trust, more moderate positions on the left– right continuum and stronger organizational ties. On the other hand, in countries in which unions are less institutionally recognized and with a tradition of oppositional unionism (Italy and Spain), participants in union-staged demonstrations are more mistrustful of politics, located more to the left and rely more upon informal social networks to mobilize. The United Kingdom falls between these two poles.
Industrial action in Sweden - a new pattern?
The paper studies the modern conflict patterns and conflict dimensions in Sweden 1993-2005. The aim is to trace and interpret the new patterns and dimensions of labour market conflict by collecting and compiling strike data from the National Conciliation Office, (1993-99) and the National Mediation Office (2000-2005). On the whole, strike activity has decreased steadily from the 1980s and onwards and in large parts of the Swedish labour market conflicts are very rare. A few small un-ions organising primarily non-manufacturing working class in the domestic sector, account for the majority of the sanctioned conflicts. The new pattern is that the re-maining conflicts in broad terms can be divided in two parts: conflicts over wages and other working conditions and conflicts about the collective bargaining itself. Each with its own logic.
Social Movements in 1980s Sweden
Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements
The 1980s has been described as a time when there was a ‘neoliberal turn’ in public and political debate. In Sweden, many of these new ideas focused on the size and organisation of the welfare state. Although the government implemented a few reforms in the 1980s, activists mobilised many welfare-state-related protests. In this chapter, we describe the trends of these actions and investigate which actors were behind these protests. Our findings show that trade unions and client groups of the welfare state were particularly active, and this aligns well with research on the retrenchment of the welfare state that has shown unions’ and client groups’ opposition to cutbacks everywhere. The third group that we expected to mobilise concerning welfare state issues comprised the proponents of neoliberal reforms, such as pro-business groups. Similar to other studies on the rich people’s movement, we show how these groups seldom choose visible actions, but when they do, they have the resources ...
Empiria. Revista de metodología de ciencias sociales, 2021
During the past half century, the study of social contention has been characterized by a division between research on labor movements and studies on other social movements. This division also left its mark on the study of modes of action: while labor scholars mainly examined strikes, social movement scholars have increasingly come to focus on street protests. This article is a contribution to bridging the gap between the two research areas both on theoretical and empirical levels. On a theoretical level, I discuss the usefulness of combining economic and political models of contention from the two research areas. On an empirical level, I use official data provided by Spanish ministries to examine and relate the workers’ use of strikes and street protests between 2000 and 2016 in Spain. Examining strikes and street protests jointly does not only provide a fuller picture, it also helps to discern contrasts and thus the specificities of each mode of action. En el último medio siglo, lo...
Social Dialogue and Protest: Comparison of Collective Bargaining in Europe
ImproCollBar, 2024
This comparative research explores the factors and mechanisms that improve the scope and coverage of collective bargaining in different industrial relations regimes. Based on a unique protest event dataset and interviews with a diverse set of organisations, the research team identified challenges and threats, opportunities and resources available for trade unions and suggested successful mechanisms for enhancing trade unions’ power and collective bargaining coverage and scope. By bridging concepts and tools from industrial relations literature and social movement studies, the report offers a comprehensive comparative overview of the traditions, structures, and strategies of trade union movements in the European Union.
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.
DISENTANGLING PROTEST CYCLES: AN EVENT-HISTORY ANALYSIS OF NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN WESTERN EUROPE
The theory of protest cycles has informed us that the external political environment and the internal competition among social movement organizations are distinct elements leading to the emergence, development, and decline of popular protest. This theory, however, has not been examined systematically. I conduct an event-history analysis to test and refine the theory of protest cycles using a well-known new social movement event dataset. While proposing a general way of operationalizing the core concepts in social movement studies, I show that political opportunity only matters during the initial phase of social movement mobilization, rather than throughout the movement’s lifespan. What explains declining frequencies of protest occurrence during the demobilization phase is the joint effect of two internal factors: the institutionalization of social movements and the growing violence during protests.
Patterns of protest participation are changing
Sociologisk Forskning, 2017
Since the late 1960s, participation in political protests has become more common in sweden. Today, a large majority of swedes have at one point joined a demonstration or would be willing to join a demonstration, and around six percent of the population participates in a demonstration at least once a year. This article uses survey data to discuss the changing protest patterns in relation to the country's traditional corporatist political culture, with a focus on which groups participate in contemporary political protests.