Which Road to Go? Aiming to Improve Health and Safety at Work Through Multiple Belongings

Health and safety at work are increasingly at the center of trade union action and negotiations of work conditions. This agenda was essentially influenced by new social movements and employee representation as well as other actors involved at shop-floor level. Based on a case study on Arbeit & Gesundheit e.V., this paper examines how protest communication transformed into a communication on a lasting basis by building (in)formal network structures and creating zones of plausibility, which became relevant for trade unions. One of the factor supporting this successful transformation was that most of the founders of Arbeit & Gesundheit e.V. were active in different organizations ranging from informal networks to formalized trade union structures. Nevertheless, these multiple belongings were both a blessing and a curse: on the one hand, new social movement spaces offered up creative and less governed procedures for developing ways of protecting people at work. On the other, having “additional belongings” represented a fragmentation which sometimes caused confusion, mutual mistrust and the fear of disloyalty due to a perceived lack of identification. However, it can be shown that the members of Arbeit & Gesundheit e.V. were able to transfer knowledge on different levels, e.g. in legislative processes referring to health and safety at work as delegates representing trade unions. These broker positions reflect interdependencies and ambiguities: It was not strategic organizing, but trying not to lose direction by collaborating with unions, acting on different levels and differently — protesting, influencing, and reshaping at the crossroads.