Photo: © Shutterstock Johanna Poetsch
Lead partner: UCD, University College Dublin
Research team: Roland Erne, Graham Finlay, Imre Szabó, Darragh Golden
In the framework of the ERC Project “Labour Politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance regime (European Unions), we have compiled a database of all transnational trade union actions from 1996 to 2019 (Nowak and Erne 2020). Database helped us to identify two dominant types of transnational political contentious action in labour politics across Europe, namely actions:
- of public service unions targeting EU institutions in response to the new vertical EU governance interventions affecting workers’ working conditions and the provisions of public services (Erne 2018, 2019, Jordan et al 2020);
- of private sector unions targeting multinational corporations in response to corporate restructurings affecting workers’ working conditions within the European Single Market and the Economic and Monetary Union (Erne 2008).
For this reason, we envisage to conduct a case study for each of these two paradigmatic situations.
We will conduct a case study for two paradigmatic situations of transnational political contentious action in labour politics in Europe. The former concerns public sector unions targeting EU institutions, in particular the “Rights4Water” and “Fair Transport” European Citizens Initiatives campaigns; the latter is the case of private sector unions against a multinational, Ryanair. Through these critical case studies we will see that mobilisations of users and producers of public services do not always converge and that the weakening of national unions does not necessarily undermine transnational collective action.
Bibliography:
- Erne, Roland. 2008. European Unions. Labor's Quest for a Transnational Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
- Erne, Roland. 2018. Labour politics and the EU’s New Economic Governance regime (European Unions): A new European Research Council project. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research 24(2): 237–247.
- Erne, Roland. 2019. 'How to Analyse A Supranational Regime That Nationalises Social Conflict? The European Crisis, Labour Politics and Methodological Nationalism', in: Nanopoulos, E. and Vergis, F. (eds.) The Crisis Behind the Euro-Crisis: The Euro-Crisis as Systemic Multi-Dimensional Crisis of the EU. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 346-368.
- Finley, Graham and Lisa Ginsborg 2017 Coherence Versus Coherence: Normative Versus Structural and Interest-Based Coherence. In Wolfgang Benedek, et al. (eds.) European Yearbook on Human Rights. Wien and Graz: Neuer Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.
- Jordan, Jamie, Vincenzo Maccarrone, and Roland Erne 2020. 'Towards a Socialisation of the EU's New Economic Governance Regime? EU labour policy interventions in Germany, Italy, Ireland and Romania (2009-2019). British Journal of Industrial Relations, doi: 10.1111/bjir.12522
- Nowak, Jörg, and Roland Erne. 2020. ERC European Unions Transnational Labour Protest Database. Dublin: University College Dublin.
TraPoCo's Research
Each TraPoCo's partner will conduct its research strand resulting in the publication of scholarly and policy papers that will be published in leading journals in the various fields addressed by the research. Moreover, a final edited volume will be published at the end of the project.
