Has been trending topic on social networks and has deserved the attention of experts such as Nicholas Kristof, in his column for The New York Times, or Lydia Saad, in Gallup’s digital newsletter. The large union mobilizations, that Jurassic beast in danger of extinction since the end of the 20th century, would be experiencing an unexpected rebound after the pandemic. In recent months, we have seen a sitting president of the United States joining a picket against the Big Three of Detroit, Hollywood studios taking a knee after a 145-day writers’ union strike supported by actors, French union centers engaged in a fertile battle against their Government, riders or precarious employees of digitalized and disruptive companies organizing for the first time to improve their working conditions. Even the members of the women’s soccer team turning to a union, Futpro, to coordinate efforts in their fight with the Spanish Federation.
Kristof affirms that pickets like those in Detroit, traditionally accused of “destroying, with their stubborn blindness, the automobile industry,” are these days being recognized as “a powerful agent in the fight for equity,” the only containment dam that prevents less qualified workers from being treated “like doormats.” Saad provides a fact: 67% of Americans consider the action of unions “necessary and positive”, a number that contrasts with the meager 48% approval registered in 2010 or 56% in 2016.
In Spain, according to figures provided by Beltrán Roca, professor of Sociology at the University of Cádiz, “membership remains stagnant at around 13%-14%, but at least it has stopped falling and the social perception of labor demands is improving”, which would allow us to affirm that “we are facing a positive turning point that would leave behind the trend towards increasing demobilization of the last 25 years.” Roca attributes this to the confluence of phenomena such as “inflation, rising housing prices and the emergence of new production processes and new labor sectors.” In this context of “acceleration of change and increase in precariousness,” workers would be feeling the need to “start from scratch and resort to new strategies for negotiating collective and sectoral agreements.” In Beltrán’s opinion, this is a “firm” trend both in Spain and around the world. “It is happening in almost all major Western economies.”
For the sociologist and political scientist Antonio Antón, from the Autonomous University of Madrid, “there are symptoms of union reactivation” that affect, above all, “new groups of workers, especially in the services sector and among women and the youngest.” Antón specifies that this new rejuvenated and feminized unionism “has some different characteristics from the conventional union action of the industrial working class and large companies.” The new mobilizations are “less institutional.” They are “grassroots” movements with a “remarkable capacity for public response.” Sometimes, “as has happened in Spain with the tides of education and health, they have achieved great participation and have awakened broad solidarity and sympathy in society as a whole.”
Lis Gaibar, associate professor and expert in associations and the third sector at the Miguel Hernández University, believes that there is a rebound, forced by circumstances, in “collectivism or associations, but not necessarily unionism.” This is because the newest and most high-profile labor mobilizations, such as those of “domestic employees, housekeepers or riders,” are promoted by associations, not unions. In other words, we are witnessing a mobilization against systematic labor abuse led by the victims of precariousness and the associations that support them. The main agents of this collective action are “young people to whom the labor market does not offer the possibility of building a life project that lives up to their aspirations.” From their frustration derives “a confrontational attitude” that is very rarely channeled through traditional unions.
For Gaibar, the new generations would be contributing new blood to labor demands. In particular, “a dose of fatigue and a greater ability to see the seams of a system that for years had been able to hide them.” Beltrán Roca adds that the future of collective mobilizations lies, in his opinion, in “creating new structures that combat the vacuum of representation, which is what the most precarious workers suffer in small companies, such as those in the hospitality industry, that are not unionized and in which sectoral agreements are not respected.” The solution is to “create union representation structures at an intermediate scale, such as the municipal committees that are beginning to proliferate in the United Kingdom.” The old recipe—unity is strength—must give rise to “less rigid, more flexible strategies adapted to the specific circumstances of each sector, to channel discontent and continue to be effective.”
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