quantification of ‘political and trade union activity’ on the European level is imprecise, and this broad view needs to be supplemented by figures on union membership. In all countries, except for the Scandinavian countries (Finland, Sweden and Denmark), Belgium and Spain, levels of union membership fell overall in Europe between the early 1980s and the 2000s.28 The picture in individual nations varies widely, owing to the fundamentally different systems of industrial relations. In countries where the unions have responsibility for services such as unemployment compensation (Scandinavian countries, Belgium), union membership has remained very high, and even increased, since belonging to a union is a way of ensuring priority access to support. In Belgium, for example, the unions are members of the organisations that pay unemployment benefits, and thus serve as intermediaries with the National Employment Office.29 By contrast, in countries where union activity centres on mobilisation of workers (France, the United Kingdom, Italy, etc.), the erosion of membership has played a major role in shifts in the power relation with employers, particularly since many governments – following the British example – have fostered this shift by passing laws limiting workers’ right to protest. In Spain, three general strikes were organised between 2010 and 2012 in opposition to reforms aimed at flexibilising the labour market, but faced with the government’s refusal to back down, the unions changed strategy and broadened the campaign to the whole of the population,30 with the risk that demands relating to the world of work became lost amid wider protest movements.
The socio-economic groups organised by the unions have altered substantially, in line with economic changes. Trade union presence in the industrial sector has declined, and unions still have difficulty gaining a foothold in services and retail, where the number of low-skilled jobs has risen. In Germany, campaigning activity has shifted from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, but this development has not checked the crisis in union representation.31 In the public sector and in major corporations where employment is more secure, the unions are stronger; employees are represented by one or more organisations, whereas this is rarely the case in the small and medium enterprises that make up an increasing proportion of European economies, owing to the growth in outsourcing. In addition, European employers have introduced many anti-union measures (blacklists of union activists, wrongful dismissals, wage discrimination, in-house unions, legal guerrilla tactics, the obstruction of union rights, etc.), backed by a flourishing market in consultants who specialise in discouraging activism. Thus a growing proportion of the working class has never been, or is no longer, represented in the workplace by a trade union.
This disadvantageous relation of power has repercussions on the capacity of the working class to mount protest actions. The legal regulations governing strikes vary from one country to another, and there is as yet no standard method for counting strike days.32 The fact remains that in the majority of European countries, the number of strike days per employee has been falling since the late 1980s.33 While a number of campaigns against factory closures and restructuring have hit the headlines (Arcelor-Mittal and Peugeot in France, Caterpillar in Belgium, Thyssen-Krupp’s AST steelworks in Italy, etc.), many redundancy plans have been made behind closed doors, with limited resistance. Mass strikes have shifted from private industry to the public and transport sectors. In retail, job insecurity severely limits social activism, despite a few exceptions such as the campaign by the cleaners of luxury hotels in Paris, Uber and Deliveroo delivery staff in the United Kingdom, and Amazon employees in Germany.34 The situation varies from country to country, depending on the social balance of power and legislation relating to the right to strike. In France, the level of conflict remains high, but is manifested in fragmented and isolated campaigns.35 In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, legal restrictions on the right to strike and the weakening of the trade unions make recourse to this kind of action very rare.36 There are still more strikes in the countries of Western Europe, despite the fact that workers in some former countries of the East, such as the Czech Republic, have mounted strong campaigns against the liberal reforms and austerity policies imposed by their government. But these campaigns have largely involved public-sector employees, and the process of relocation of industry to these countries has not revived worker activism, except in a few exceptional cases such as the strike that broke out in the Dacia factories (a subsidiary of the Renault group) in Romania in March 2008.
The decline in union activism has paved the way for the implementation of policies aimed at deregulating employment rights, often at the instigation of the European Union. These changes primarily affect low-skilled and unskilled jobs in industry and services. For example, the European directive on working hours sets the maximum number of hours to be worked per week at forty-eight – and even at sixty hours under certain conditions for lorry drivers.37 These ‘minimum rules’ are transposed to the various legislative systems of European states, but with upper limits set so high that labour legislation can vary widely from one country to another. In Poland, companies can now make greater demands for overtime or night working. In Portugal, overtime pay has been revised downwards. In the Czech Republic, Spain, Greece, Poland and Romania, the maximum length of short-term contracts has been extended, and new types of work contract with fewer protections have been introduced. Finally, in the Czech Republic and Poland, redundancy pay has been cut, and in Slovakia the minimum notice period has been reduced.38 And the European Union is continuing to demand that member states pass reforms imposing ever-increasing flexibility on the part of employees.
INCOME AND CONSUMPTION: THE WORKING CLASS SPLIT IN TWO
While the working class in Europe has been severely weakened on the labour market, its situation in terms of level of resources and access to consumer goods gives less cause for concern, particularly compared to their peers in other parts of the world. Moreover, over the last decade, the level of education has risen throughout Europe, helping to bring the cultural practices of the different social groups closer together. Nevertheless, substantial inequalities remain, both in the financial domain and in access to leisure.
Low-income families
A first measure of relative position in the social hierarchy is household disposable income: 22 per cent of the working class in Europe lives below the poverty line, meaning that members of it earn less than 60 per cent of the median wage in their country. This is due to the increase in unemployment, which forces more and more households to depend on a single source of income, and to wage-restraint policies. For these groups, deprivation is evident in every area of daily life. Those most at risk are farmers (40 per cent living below the poverty line), small-scale self-employed workers (29 per cent), low-skilled manual and white-collar workers (24 per cent) and farm labourers (23 per cent). These results offer a glimpse of the financial deprivation of whole swathes of the European working class, particularly in the countries of the South and East of Europe, where a class of small subsistence farmers, together with small-scale retail and craft sectors, persists. The financial subordination of the European working class emerges more clearly still when the composition of households is taken into account (Table 5).
Table 5. Poverty among European Households
| Proportion of individuals belonging to a family living below the poverty line | ||
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Working class
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