505
European Labour and the Struggle Against Austerity
European Labour and the Struggle Against Austerity
Monday, 11 July 2016: 14:15-15:45
Location: Hörsaal 16 (Main Building)
RC44 Labor Movements (host committee) Language: English
Since the onset of the Eurozone crisis, austerity has been increasingly pushed across the European Union (EU). The so-called Troika of Commission, European Central Bank and IMF imposed austerity directly on Greece, Portugal and Ireland in exchange for bailout packages. Nevertheless, the new economic governance structure around the Six Pack and Fiscal Compact has extended austerity to the other EU member states too. This also includes Eastern European members like Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary among others, which have experienced huge pressures for austerity.
Austerity has had a dramatic impact on European labour movements, partly because it has implied high unemployment and drastic cuts to income and working conditions of their members, partly because it often signified a direct attack on established trade unions rights. More broadly, it also included pressures to privatise public utilities and services. And yet, workers and trade unions have not simply accepted cuts and privatisation, but started to fight back. This is also expressed in Syriza’s electoral success in Greece.
This session is intended to bring together papers with a focus on different responses, different strategies of resistance to austerity by European labour movements. “Labour movement” has to be understood here in a broad sense beyond the formal sector and official trade unions as institutional expression, including also informal workers and different organisational forms of workers’ unrest. Papers can engage with particular labour movements, sectoral trade unions or struggles based on broader alliances between trade unions and social movements.
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