Two Crises, Two Cycles of Contention. Workers' Protests in Western Europe in Comparison

The paper compares two cycles of labor unrest and its relationship to capitalist crises in Western Europe. In the first cycle, starting around 1968, workers were able to mobilize high power resources and to push for wage increases and new institutional rights on the plant level. However, the offensive phase of the Western European workers' movement was eventually stopped by the crisis of 1974/75, thus raising unemployment and weakening labor's workplace bargaining power. As a consequence, since the 1980s, Western European trade unions lost members and faced increasingly complicated economic and institutional conditions. With the global financial crisis 2008, a new cycle of labor unrest has started, and the nature of social conflict has changed. First, the uneven and combined development of European integration has led to a spatially uneven distribution of workers' protests. While countries such as Germany and Austria are characterized by low protest activities, social unrest in Southern European countries has increased significantly. Also, workers' repertoire of contention seems to have changed throughout the crisis period: In the current wave of conflict, forms of “non-normed conflicts” such as plant occupations (“bossnapping” in France) and riots (London, Stockholm) have soared, indicating not only the severe consequences of the crisis but also trade unions' growing representation gap. The paper draws theoretically on the “Jena power resource approach” and empirically on a database on social conflict (JenaConDa).