Is trade unionism making a comeback in Europe?

It was a first step in the right direction. On 11 March 2024, the employment ministers of the EU's 27 member states approved an agreement on a draft directive to regulate the job market of internet platforms. It is the first European law to set minimum labour conditions for the 28 million workers on platforms such as Uber and Deliveroo.

"This is obviously a success, at least symbolically”, says political scientist Kurt Vandaele, who has documented the struggle of delivery couriers in Belgium. “The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) has been lobbying MEPs and the Commission for years to regulate the 'platform economy'."

Two countries did not support the agreement: Germany, which abstained, and France, which voted against. "From now on, much will depend on how the directive is transposed and implemented in the member states", says Vandaele. "Not to mention the lobbying power of the platforms. There's still a long and difficult road ahead".

But a win is still a win. In recent years there have been few such victories on the social front.

Are trade unions in decline?

Since the 1980s, most Western countries have seen a weakening of the trade union movement. This has reflected changes in the labour market: an explosion in the outsourcing of services, particularly in the cleaning and home-help sectors; a casualisation of the workforce with the rise of gig work and self-employment; a general fragmentation of employment relationships; and structural reforms that call into question the way unions operate.

If Europe's unionisation rates are anything to go by, the general downward trend in union membership has not changed in recent years, notwithstanding an upsurge following the pandemic and inflation jump. "Looking at the unionisation rate is not enough", believes sociologist Cristina Nizzoli, author of “C'est du propre! Syndicalisme et travailleurs du 'bas de l'échelle'” (Marseille and Bologna) (PUF, 2015). "What's important is to understand what motivates membership and gives meaning to the union. When we see, for example, the mobilisation over pensions in France in 2023, it seems wrong to me to talk about a decline of trade unionism."

Kurt Vandaele makes a similar point. He points to the massive mobilisation in the Dutch civil service in early 2023 and the unprecedented battle waged by a thousand German Tesla employees, who joined the powerful IG Metall union to obtain better working conditions.

Yet the mutation of the labour market is certainly forcing traditional trade unions to rethink their practices and objectives.

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“The first step is to penetrate ‘union deserts’” - Jacques Freyssinet

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Cristina Nizzoli has studied sectors where the workforce is increasingly immigrant, female and brown-skinned – for example, cleaning workers in France and Italy. "It's impressive to see these insecure workers with such modest resources – and not just financial resources – wage battles that last for months. [...] These people don't have the same situation as platform workers, but it's interesting to watch how their mobilisations are challenging traditional trade unionism, particularly on the question of its structure and the way it represents workers".

Adaptation is not easy. "This is particularly the case in countries such as France and Italy, where unions are organised by confederation and tailored to the traditional salaried workforce", explains the sociologist. The fragmentation of that workforce means that domestic workers, home helps and cleaning staff may be covered by several different collective-bargaining contracts. To examine their situation by federation is therefore not enough to get an overall view of their working conditions.

The researcher notes the grassroots role played by unions at local and regional level. This "makes it possible to create a long-term link with workers". Going through local unions also helps to circumvent pressure from employers in the workplace. However, as Nizzoli points out, these locally-implanted unions still seem to be heavily reliant on the long-serving activists who run them, and as yet there has been no real rethink in this area.

Kurt Vandaele adds: "The rise of subcontracting requires 'network-type unionism', with better cooperation between existing union bodies and also a change to certain structures. The aim is to build trust, and this may often require language skills other than the language of the country concerned."

In Belgium and the Netherlands, the organising power of meal-delivery platforms translated into online digital communities and thence into activist groups in 2017. "The powerful narrative surrounding couriers played a major role”, recounts Kurt Vandaele. “As the platform economy is still relatively new, the traditional unions are not being proactive, but they are listening to the couriers' grievances and propositions", he adds..

Penetrating the “union deserts”

English-speaking countries have a long tradition of "organising", which involves using community networks to target specific categories of workers, such as immigrants, women or young people on insecure contracts. Cristina Nizzoli explains: "This is happening outside the confines of the company and traditional trade unions, with the use of activist figures who work through communities, whether it's a church, an ethnic group or an immigrant community".

The aim is to go beyond simply attracting members from groups with low levels of union membership, and to seek the empowerment of these groups. The economist Jacques Freyssinet elaborates: "Of course, the first step is to penetrate 'union deserts'. But the final objective is to promote self-sustaining union structures that give workers the capacity to determine their demands and modes of action autonomously."

The practice  inspired German unions to counter the growing demand from companies for interim staff, particularly in the metal industry. As Jacques Freyssinet recounts in “Tensions et ambiguïtés dans la stratégie d'organising”, Germany's main metalworkers' union, IG Metall, was pushed to reconsider its institutional strategy, centred on the inter-union negotiating approach, and to overhaul its repertoire of tactics.

On the initiative of IG Metall's head office in Frankfurt, an innovation fund aimed at unionisation has been set up (worth €16-20 million a year). The new management of the union is also encouraging the recruitment of young permanent staff with experience of activism in social movements. The resources freed up at central level are being channelled into organising campaigns in sectors with low union density. From 2010 to 2016, IG Metall's membership grew from 1.8 million to 2.2 million.

Fostering the collective spirit

Insecure workers outside the "traditional" workforce are also receiving support from non-union players. The case of the Las Kellys collective, formed in 2014 in Spain, has been emblematic of this. This association brought together hotel cleaning staff – some of them immigrants with little formal education – who were determined to fight collectively despite a lack of support from the major trade-union confederations.

Their grievance focused on deteriorations in their working conditions and the economic insecurity caused by the subcontracting system in force in the hotel sector. "Activist networks are very useful for ensuring that campaigns go the distance, and for obtaining money, organising strike funds, etc. But I would hesitate to say that this is a new phenomenon", says Cristina Nizzoli. "From the 1990s onwards, we have seen lots of cases of undocumented workers mobilising with the support of activist groups."

Organising and creating links with locally-implanted unions is all the more important in a context where the labour market is being balkanised. "Home helpers never meet up and so there is no shared time to get together and talk about work," says Nizzoli. "This is why the union, as I see it in my fieldwork, is becoming a key forum for the socialisation of work in these precarious sectors."

The question of representation

In recent years there has been an unmistakable trend of feminisation inside trade unions, with women increasingly holding positions of responsibility. The change is symbolically important but also helps bring attention to the fact that women are over-represented in sectors with low job security. According to a report by the European Parliament's Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality, presented in June 2022, "the risk of poverty or social exclusion in the European Union in 2020 was higher for women than for men (22.9% compared to 20.9%)", and the gap between women and men in terms of poverty had increased since 2017 in 21 member states.

Despite a number of measures at EU level over the last ten years to address labour insecurity, particularly for women, it is women who are still the worst affected. "This over-representation is due, among other things, to the disproportionate amount of time women devote to childcare and domestic work, both of which are unpaid and largely unrecognised", commented the European Parliament's Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs in 2020.

Another factor is "partly socially-constructed career choices and gender segregation", resulting in a high prevalence of insecure work for women in the care, education, cleaning, tourism and personal-services sectors. All of these industries are characterised by part-time work, which is often associated with exclusion from social benefits and disadvantages in terms of promotion.

"We need to consider everything that being a working-class woman of a racial minority implies in terms of stigmatisation and the way in which social relations are constructed", argues Cristina Nizzoli. "Yet within trade unions there is still a lack of thinking about this intersectional form of discrimination, which explains why these people, who may show themselves during disputes, tend to disappear over time. We are faced with women for whom it is much more costly, in every way, to get involved, and the union does not always offer them the space to advance."

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