The Italian Labour-Capital Conflict During and After the Crisis: Between Trade Unionism and Social Movement Unionism

The paper aims to explore the reappearance of labor-related protests observed in European countries during and in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. We join the social movement scholarship, the socio-economic literature and the industrial relations debate to explore the capacity of trade unions to manage the capital-labour conflict in Italy. Italy has witnessed fragmented and isolated trade unions, with marked differences and competition between the three traditional union confederations. This situation has led to sporadic and contingent protests, often coordinated by independent and more radical trade unions which have replaced traditional trade unions to address workers’ claims. Despite collective actions by these groups remains, often, limited to local settings and contingent upon specific events, autonomous and radical trade unions are frequently active on broad issues such as those related to social exclusion, and are able to join other civil society actors through participation in shared events, producing dynamics of social movement unionism. We aim to examine the aforementioned dynamics by focusing on labor-related collective actions, either involving workers or actions related to labor-issues, occurred in Italy between December 2007 and 31st December 2010. Following the well-established literature on Protest Event Analysis (PEA) our empirical study is based on a new dataset whose unit of analysis is labor-related collective actions. The latter go beyond an analysis of protests and include any type of political collective action in the labor-field, therefore including actions such as negotiations or consultations, but excluding announcements and expression of interests that do not generate any collective action. With this dataset we investigate the repertoire of actions, the actors engaged, their degree of organization and alliances with other civil society groups, and the issues claimed. Our preliminary results show major patterns of change in Italian labor-related collective actions in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis: 1) prevailing labor-related actions are strikes. However, in the second half of 2010, data show an increasing presence of disruptive actions, squatting principally. 2) labor-related actions are mainly coordinated by organized actors, mostly traditional trade unions. However, almost at an equal rate, workers engaged in such actions participate through informal and spontaneous groups. 3) Claimed issues concern both economic and political issues, the latter especially rising in 2010.