Political and Economic Factors Influencing Strike Activity during the Recent Economic Crisis: A Study of the Spanish Case between 2002 and 2013

Abstract

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.

Weakening the Last Resort: The Uk Newly Proposed Minimum Service Levels Bill to Weaken the Legal Right to Strike

“…28 For the capital to satisfy the workers and regain power, it would have to accept the strikers' new requirements, even though doing so would cause a crisis in profitability. 29 In addition, the idea of valid industrial action is limited, the necessary procedures are burdensome, and unions face severe consequences for illegal strikes. 30 In all, the "right to strike" in the United Kingdom generally is enacted through a convoluted statutory framework.…”

On the Usefulness of Combining Strike and Protest Research: Some Insights from the Spanish Case (2000-2016)

“…2 The present article is a contribution to further decompartmentalizing strike research and protest analysis. The article builds on previous studies on levels of labor contention in the recent history of Spain (Luque 2012;Luque y González 2017;Pohl 2018). However, it is novel in two ways.…”

Striking to Renew: Basque Unions’ Organizing Strategies and Use of the Strike‐Fund

“…This underpinned the progressive adoption during the mid-1990s of a rather ambivalent 'union renewal' strategy that combined 'social dialogue' at macrolevels with the contingent organization of industrial conflictmainly in the form of general strikes as a form of 'contention politics'. The institutional role of UGT and CCOO as class organizations would be legitimized then through both: (i) their capacity to sporadically mobilize the rank-and-file, and (ii) in their production of overarching collective and social agreements that could bring few benefits to the working classes (Hamman and Martinez-Lucio 2003;Hamman et al 2013;Luque-Balbona 2010; Luque-Balbona and Gonzalez-Begega 2017) Such strategy has been recurrent during the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath (Pohl 2018), but with questionable results since it has not augmented union affiliation, neither the trust of the general workforce (Molina and Barranco 2016), nor that of other labour organizations and radical social movements (Las Heras and Ribera-Almandoz 2017;Pérez-de-Guzmán et al 2016;Roca and Las Heras 2020).…”

“…Another fact worth mentioning is that the counterpower bloc is capable of having a larger economic impact per strike (534-64 DNW) and last more (24 days to 12), thus leading to a higher rate of DNW per striker involved (4,9-1,7).Second, analysing the statistics longitudinally, one finds a major self-reinforcing trend in each bloc that corresponds to their positioning towards the economic crisis and the various labour reforms that have been implemented in Spain (see López-Andreu 2019) Within the 'counterpower' bloc, we can see that ELA and LAB have been clearly capable of socializing and expanding industrial conflict among the workforce. This derives from a period of an economic crisis in which unions have made use of work stoppages to halt industrial restructuring (Pohl 2018) but not only, as two recent examples presented below show. For the period 2010-2018, the absolute number of companies involved, the number of companies involved per strike, the absolute number of workers involved and workers involved per strike have increased by 8,3 times, 4,6 times, 60 and 6 per cent, respectively, while the absolute number of DNW has increased by 49 per cent.…”