Southern European Labour Contention: New and Old Repertoires, Social Alliances, and Party Relations

Abstract

Both the debt crisis and the EU’s and governments’ response to it with more neoliberal nostrums and austerity measures have threatened the rights, living conditions and even the very lives of southern European workers, prompting national cycles of protest and arguably a trans-regional one. It is now well accepted that cycles of popular contention are cauldrons of the revival, reinvention, innovation, and transformation of workers’ political claims, and of the tools of protest and social alliances they deploy to make those claims. And it is also well accepted that no two cycles are the same. But what is new and what is old about the current cycles? In this panel we will hone in on: the repertoires workers have and have not been engaging, and the social alliances they have and have not been making as they seek to block worker-punishing political responses, or, at times, to affect pro-worker political responses from national and European power-holders. Not least, this panel also seeks to examine the relation between union movements and their familial parties, a relational set that has been left somewhat unanalysed by scholars in recent years, despite small but significant signs in some southern European countries of a reinvention of political unionism and parties of labour: To what extent and how have union movements participated in the transformation of their familial parties or in the creation of new familial parties in order to re-order representative democracy in workers’ favour? As a first step to promoting a historically sensitive re-theorisation of labour contention in Europe from the perspective of southern Europe, this panel seeks to take stock of recent inventions and revivals by means of case studies, intra-regional comparisons of two or more cases, and intra-national diachronic comparisons.

Title	Details
Labour Unions confronting Unprecedented Austerity in Greece, 2010-2013	View Paper Details
Labour Conflicts in the Italian Crisis.The Case of the Occupied Factories	View Paper Details
Development Trends in the Politics of Italian Labour Market Reforms: Between Continuity and Discontinuity	View Paper Details