Andrew Mathers

The European Trade Union Confederation at the Crossroads of Change? Traversing the Variable Geometry of European Trade Unionism

There are growing indications that the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) is undergoing a shift in strategic orientation from an exclusive focus on institutional ‘social partnership’ within the European Union towards a more campaigning ‘social movement’ model. This article explores two recent campaigns, on the European Charter of Fundamental Rights and the Convention on the Future of Europe, and considers how far these developments mark the emergence of a distinctive trade union identity at European level. The article concludes with examples of other areas where the ETUC could encourage ‘internal dialogue’ within European trade unionism and develop further a ‘hybrid’ transnational identity.

The Crisis of “Social Democratic” Unionism The “Opening up” of Civil Society and the Prospects for Union Renewal in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany

This article defines and explores the crisis of social democratic trade unionism in three countries in western Europe. The authors contend that a particularized form of postwar trade union orientation was socially constructed in Britain, Germany, and France in which a party union nexus gave special privileges to unions in return for compliance with state policies in the national interest. This arrangement has broken down in recent years under the pressure of global product market competition. As a result, trade unions are being forced to adopt alternative strategic orientations, involving both a fracture in the party union nexus and a willingness to work within wider civil society.

Beyond the chains that bind: the political crisis of unions in Western Europe

The dynamics of neo-liberal restructuring have generated serious tensions in the institutional alignments between social democratic political parties and labor unions in Western Europe. This article explores the origins, development and consequences of the resulting political crisis through a detailed analysis of the institutional alignment of parties and unions in Sweden, Germany, UK and France. The authors reject the argument that the changing contours of the party-union nexus can be understood solely on the basis of a rational choice analysis of labor movement actors in favor of an account that also highlights the importance of historical path dependency and ideological orientation. The resulting complexity of union responses to the crisis of the party-union nexus is explored through the construction of a typology that charts union reorientation along the dimensions of accommodation with, or resistance against, neo-liberalism and within and beyond the national political context.

Beyond ‘Political Economism’: new identities for unions in Western Europe?

This article engages critically with Richard Hyman’s work on union identity and European integration. It includes a sympathetic review of Hyman’s contribution to the debate on these topics over the past two decades, alongside a critique of Hyman’s approach that highlights certain weaknesses and contradictions resulting from his uncritical use of a range of categories and concepts taken from regulation theory. The authors question Hyman’s argument that developments in European unionism can be conceptualised adequately through an analysis of the development and crisis of ‘political economism’: a dominant union identity that Hyman aligns with the development and crisis of Fordism. An alternative model for understanding the reorientation of European unions is presented based on a critical and dialectical conceptualisation of the relationship between unions and capitalist development. This is used to construct a model of contemporary union reorientation along the dimensions of ‘accommodation’ and ‘opposition’ to neoliberalism and to ‘national’ and ‘international’ modes of organisation and mobilisation.

Book Review: Gwyn Williams, Struggles for an Alternative Globalization: An Ethnography of Counterpower in Southern France. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008

universal standards and measurements of well-being is misleading, ‘since the more abstract such standards, the emptier they are’ (p. 126). He suggests that the nuances emerging from combined quantitative and qualitative data can help to produce a more complex and complete picture. An anthropology of well-being seems a relevant project at this historical moment when globalization, migration and displacement are changing our comprehension and representation of the world. Notions of ‘the good life’ affect each one of us, in a constant re-elaboration of what it means to be a person, or a group, and how we engage in relations with the state, the natural environment and other nations. Therefore, a book with an anthropological perspective on the topic is more than welcome; the cross-cultural comparison could be even stronger, especially if ethnographic case studies from other regions of the world, such as North and South America, and the Far East had been included.