Call for papers
European Unions’ Relational Politics Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow: The Union – Labour INGO Link in Times of Change and Crisis.
Panel Sponsor: The Politics & Labour Network (Italy) Panel Chair: Antonina Gentile, Università degli Studi di Milano Panel Discussant: Rebecca Gumbrell-McCormick, University of London
The need for intra- European labour solidarity is palpable in today’s Europe. With the end of the Cold War, the widening and deepening of the EU, the recent global economic crisis, and the politics of Austerity in southern Europe, calls for unions’ cross-border coordination and mobilization – both political and industrial – have progressively increased. In theory, these phenomena have been seen as intensifying the incentive for labour to organize cross-border campaigns and to access centres of European power. And they have been seen as opportunities to develop a realm of European labour and social rights; to narrow the developmental divide between Europe’s internal regions; to strengthen the European Parliament; and to promote a politics of growth against the EU’s politics of Austerity. In practice, however, INGO-led attempts to organise cross-border political and industrial mobilization have been uneven across time, space, issues and sectors. Their attempts have revealed: conflicts of interest between regional cores and peripheries of labour; an uneven representation of national unions in labour INGOs; contradictory national and EU legal institutions and legal strategies; and widely differing repertoires of labour. For scholars of labour there is ample ground for empirical research and for re-theorizing labour internationalism. During the past decade, EU institutions posed new threats to existing labour rights, as evidenced by a series of European Commission directives and rulings by the European Court of Justice. These prompted labour INGOs to construct cross-border campaigns and cross-national legal strategies – sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Central to the process of coordinating and mobilizing unions of Europe were international and European labour INGOs, e.g., the European Trade Union Confederation and the International Transport Workers Federation. But how prepared and resourced for the task were these? What baggage did labour INGOs carry from the half-century long Cold War and to what extent was that baggage dropped? How universally shared were their campaign goals and frames and, indeed, how were those goals and frames designed and by whom? How strongly represented and integrated into labour INGOs were national affiliates and regional clusters of affiliates? What were the limits of INGOs’ political/industrial/legal strategies? Even more recently, workers and unions in southern Europe have felt the full force of national and European Austerity measures. Most southern European union movements have mobilized in record numbers, frequently joining forces with other domestic social movements. Conspicuous for its absence during these recent protest events and industrial actions, however, was an additional up-scaling of southern European unions’ campaigns to the regional or EU level. There was little coordination across southern European states, and only symbolic INGO campaigning for European-wide actions in solidarity with southern European workers and unions. What factors – whether internal or external to labour INGOs, internal or external to national unions, internal or external to regions of Europe, internal or external to EU institutions, or, indeed, in the dynamics between any of these – have restricted intra-European labour solidarity with southern European unions and workers? Why the drop in INGO-led campaigning by comparison to the 1990s and 2000s? This panel seeks to interrogate European labour internationalism today and yesterday in the hope of theorizing it for tomorrow. To broach these questions, the Politics and Labour Network (Italy) welcomes a range of methods and perspectives: case studies, comparative studies, historical studies, legal studies, institutional analysis and contentious politics approaches, among the many. It is hoped that the panel’s contributions will lay the basis for a publication.
NEW DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 9 FEBRUARY 2014
Please send abstracts to the Politics and Labour Network (Italy) Coordinator: antonina.gentile@unimi.it