A “Just” Transition or Just Another Transition ?
Unions and the Decarbonisation/Digitalisation of the Automotive Industry in France and Italy
Through the analysis of concrete cases of collective bargaining related to ecological and digital transformation in companies belonging to both component production and final assembly, we set ourselves the objective of investigating trade unions’ action and strategies in corporate bargaining in order to understand their scope of influence on these processes, the possibilities of action available to them and the strategies adopted.
To this end, we conducted, between May and November 2023, around 50 interviews with managers, technicians, workers and trade union representatives from 4 companies in the automotive sector: 1 major car manufacturer, 1 luxury car manufacturer, 2 first-tier component firms. In addition, for each case study, in-depth visits were made to the plants involved in the transition processes and company and trade union documents relating to these processes and their collective bargaining were collected and studied.
Our findings show that, when faced with processes of digitalisation and decarbonisation of production in their workplaces, trade unions in France and Italy most often lack the resources and the institutional leverage to influence the strategic choices of their companies. As a result, they find themselves having to choose between accompanying the transition, accepting – also through collective bargaining – its most ‘unfair’ consequences, or resisting, when such processes jeopardise the permanence of their jobs. When they are not faced with such a brutal alternative, unions seem to prefer to focus on their traditional bargaining agenda and relativise the importance of the emobility transition as ‘just’ another transition in the industry.