In this important and original book, Roland Erne deftly challenges mechanistic analyses that depict an ineluctable labor and citizen disempowerment through a continent-wide “race to the bottom” in the single European market of the post-Maastricht era. The author effectively counters powerful conventional images of an inevitably prostrate or, instead, elitist and accomodationist labor movement by means of an empirically grounded analysis built on extensive interviews and a careful review of primary and secondary sources. The theoretically provocative analysis draws insights from social movement theory and employment relations and speaks to debates within comparative political economy, regional integration theory, and labor studies. Erne finds considerable contingency in the conditions underlying (or undercutting) nascent cross-border maneuvering by labor actors, as well as in the workings of ostensibly monolithic regional institutions of regulation, labor organization, and employment relations.
The cracks, crevasses, and even contradictions within emerging European institutions, the author demonstrates, sometimes prove rife with opportunity for labor and its allies—and, by direct implication, for progressive actors working on nonlabor issues in the European Union context—to contest and reshape the decisions of regulators and firms. In a novel and significant strand in the range of labor responses he uncovers—conceptualized as a strategy of “Euro-democratization”—labor actors seek to create public spheres over “technical” matters of firm restructuring and economic regulation and engage in collective action across national boundaries. They thus politicize them as broader social concerns where countervailing pressures may be mobilized.
In exploring efforts at transnational coordination of within-nation wage bargaining, the author finds that local and national unionists across member countries adopted standardized wage norm benchmarks (based on inflation plus productivity) as the starting point for national and local bargaining rounds. These norms had been first proposed and then adopted through cross-border intra- and interunion discussions, and then more or less aggressively promoted by the European Metalworkers Federation, the European Trade Union Confedederation, and the bilateral “Doorn” process of meetings between German and Benelux unions.
Faced with the threat to wage and other standards by cross-border labor, rather than capital mobility, European construction unionists developed an opposite but equally promising transnational response—shaping EU directives on posted workers and more recently on work in services through pressures and protest, so as to strengthen the national autonomy of collective bargaining and respect for national norms in service-providing countries with large migrant workforces.
By juxtaposing these diverse instances of (actual or attempted) coordination of approaches to bargaining and in some cases of bargaining itself, the author recasts emergent transnationalism as a pragmatic, learned response to a shifting opportunity structure in terms of evolving European regulatory institutions and market structures. Under the right conditions, such transnational labor activism may become part of a broader, expanding multilevel collective action repertoire that seeks creative connections between local, national, and regional-level institutions and decision-making arenas—rather than reflecting a new hierarchy of levels of action and organization in unionism, which some have seen as an inevitable or desirable outcome.
Turning to the issue of labor responses to job losses resulting from proposed cross-national European mergers and acquisitions, Erne underlines that the decision rules and technocratic composition of the EU competition authority under the European Commission formally prohibit consideration of the social impacts of proposed combinations, yet they also stand in conflict with EU norms regarding prior consultation of worker representatives in the event of mass redundancies and promotion of employment. In the merger of Alstom (France) and ABB (Switzerland-Sweden) and the subsequent operations of the merged firm, unionists took advantage of these contradictory logics by politicizing the process and thus limiting the impact of unilateral restructuring and downsizing plans. They did so by enlisting allies within the European Parliament and in national and local governments, in large part through joint protests.
By contrast, in the announced merger of Alcan (Canada), Pechiney (France), and Algroup (Switzerland), joint actions were not contemplated by unionists working together across national boundaries. Instead, they pursued a “Euro-technocratic” strategy of filing a submission against the initial merger based strictly on the institutionally permissible antitrust concerns—a less promising but equally likely variant of transnationalism that Erne treats as “playing within elite-dominated rules.” Although cross-border union networks helped contribute to the initial Commission invalidation of the merger on antitrust grounds, a subsequent restructured merger was approved despite their opposition, and their efforts to combat the negative employment fallout were mostly diffuse and nationally contained and, hence, largely ineffective.
Comparing the two merger cases, Erne demonstrates persuasively that the strength or weakness of existing intracompany, cross-border ties and intercompany, within-nation ties—a contingent factor that transcends alleged “cultural” or “ideological” divides among national labor movements—shaped the level of trust and ongoing learning out of which unionists could build joint collective action when faced with new threats and opportunities. A crucial aspect of such action is finding weak points or contradictory logics in ostensibly monolithic and technocratic EU institutions promoting the single market, and enlisting allies concerned about social impacts in an effort to exploit such weak points.
Erne provides grounded hope that cross-border collective action through protest and political action need not be—as many fear—an elitist, top-down process. Yet the author is rightly aware of this ever-present challenge, particularly given his emphasis on the heavy role of union technical experts and union-hired consultants in both wage bargaining and merger-related restructuring in the cases explored. While he reveals tellingly how ostensibly technocratic, market-dominated European institutions are sometimes permeable to cross-border activist pressures, one still wonders about the extent to which creative labor transnationalism can effectively politicize merger and acquisition approvals going forward beyond the two potentially “paradigmatic” early cases explored in the study—particularly given their rather divergent implications for effective labor voice.
Finally, it is difficult not to read this insightful study of the past two decades in light of the global economic crisis now upon us. Clearly, then and now there are some “red lines” that labor and its political allies cannot cross, no matter how creative and transnational their responses. Orthodox European Central Bank monetary policy remains nearly perfectly insulated from political pressures and concerns about rising unemployment. And the strong antistimulus postures of key member governments in France and Germany and, by extension, of the EU remain remarkably passive in the face of a historic crisis and frustratingly impervious to citizen and labor pressures for a more forceful “neo-Keynesian”-style response. Even in terms of the key issue areas discussed in this insightful study, the nascent but fragile cross-border action analyzed so cogently here is all too quickly facing a serious test of its durability and creativity.
