The Great Recession and the upsurge of widespread social movements in various crisis-ridden countries have given new impetus to the debate on the relationship between economic breakdown and the occurrence of collective action. I revisit the issue by examining strike activity in Spain between 2002 and 2013. For a better understanding of the continuities and changes, I contrast two sets of literature on industrial conflict. The first deals with economic factors influencing strikes or, in other words, with the question of whether and how fluctuations in manpower supply and demand account for continuities and changes in strike activity. The second advocates for a look beyond the economy, towards the political exchange that takes place between unions and state actors and which, depending on its positive or negative nature, leads to shifts of the distributional struggle away from the marketplace towards the public arena or vice versa. The findings reveal that, rather than exclusive, the two perspectives prove to be mutually conducive and are most significant when they are combined. The political exchange model is helpful for understanding the rather stable or even declining strike frequency prior to the economic crisis but also the three nationwide general strikes in 2010 and 2012, which represented a rupture in the social consensus. If the general strikes are left aside, the economic variables come into play: an increased strike frequency during the economic crisis is in fact accompanied by a shift towards smaller strikes related to a single workplace, and to so-called "defensive" strikes. This indicates that an actual decrease in workers' bargaining power was overcompensated by a growing number of circumstances in which the recourse to strike action became a means of last resort.
Workers' responses to austerity measures during the Great Recession were multiple and diverse. When and why they opted for contentious collective actions instead of reluctant acquiescence is still a subject of debate. In this article, I revisit the issue by examining the genesis of a total strike in Madrid Underground in June 2010, which occurred in response to a wage cut applied to this publicly owned enterprise. By drawing upon union communications produced at the time of the events and semi-directive interviews conducted with union representatives and ordinary workers, I retrace the sequences of interaction between workers, unions, the company management, and the regional government, which eventually led to the total strike. The findings reveal that the question of 'how' is as important as the 'why': the relationship between the wage cut and the strike is in fact anything but direct. Rather, the strike resulted from a largely unintended 'composition effect'-a combination of nested interactions between multiple and interdependent players.
During the past half century, the study of social contention has been characterized by a division between research on labor movements and studies on other social movements. This division also left its mark on the study of modes of action: while labor scholars mainly examined strikes, social movement scholars have increasingly come to focus on street protests. This article is a contribution to bridging the gap between the two research areas both on theoretical and empirical levels. On a theoretical level, I discuss the usefulness of combining economic and political models of contention from the two research areas. On an empirical level, I use official data provided by Spanish ministries to examine and relate the workers’ use of strikes and street protests between 2000 and 2016 in Spain. Examining strikes and street protests jointly does not only provide a fuller picture, it also helps to discern contrasts and thus the specificities of each mode of action.
En el último medio siglo, los estudios del conflicto social se han caracterizado por una separación entre investigaciones sobre movimientos laborales y estudios sobre otros movimientos sociales. Esta división también dejó su marca en el estudio de los modos de acción: mientras que las sociólogas y los sociólogos del trabajo examinaban principalmente las huelgas, las y los especialistas en movimientos sociales se han centrado cada vez más en las protestas callejeras. Este artículo es una contribución para cerrar la brecha entre las dos áreas de investigación tanto a nivel teórico como empírico. A nivel teórico, se discute la utilidad de combinar modelos económicos y políticos del conflicto social de las dos áreas de investigación. A nivel empírico, se utilizan datos oficiales proporcionados por ministerios españoles para examinar y relacionar el uso de huelgas y manifestaciones callejeras por parte de los trabajadores entre 2000 y 2016 en España. El examen combinado de las huelgas y las protestas callejeras no sólo proporciona una imagen más completa, sino que también ayuda a discernir los contrastes y, por lo tanto, las particularidades de cada modo de acción.
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