Confronting Crisis and Precariousness: Organised Labour and Social Unrest in the European Union [Hardcover]

The 2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent Eurozone crisis triggered dramatic changes in European labour relations. Unemployment and precariousness increased considerably. This was further exacerbated by austerity measures, leading to declining minimum wages and layoffs in the public sector. These structural changes varied considerably by country but collectively pose challenges to organized labour as they confront neoliberal restructuring. Concurrently, recent social struggles continue to develop with unemployed and precarious workers playing a major role as protest actors.

Focusing on the triangular relationship of precariousness, trade unions and social movements, this book draws on a range of exciting cases, both comparative and country case studies, in order to understand how the shadow of the crisis still haunts organized labour in Europe. The chapters in this collection each offer a unique perspective on how the results of the crisis, in Western, Southern and Eastern Europe, are leading to a variety of new social movements as a consequence of increased precariousness and also how trade unions are attempting to respond.

Stefan Schmalz is Associate Professor at the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena, Germany.

Brandon Sommer is Researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague.

This ambitious comparative project addresses the weakening position of labor unions in the EU since the economic crisis of 2008. Editors Schmalz (University of Jena, Germany) and Sommer (International Institute of Social Studies, the Hague) bring together various viewpoints revealing the levels of precariousness of organized labor from southern Europe to the more established northern EU member states. In the south particularly, the neoliberal economic restructuring (codified by the Single European Act in 1987) combined with economic recession 20 years later to foment union resistance to austeritl3&