This chapter offers a novel interpretation of mid-1970s (macro)economic policy as cumulative polyvalent performances. Revisiting the 1976 IMF crisis, the chapter argues that mid-1970s economic policy did not result from, for example, ideological conversion or unilateral (international) imposition. Instead, I trace how overlapping public-facing and behind-closed-doors framing contests drove government elites’ mid-1970s policy decisions. From the government’s perspective, the challenge was to strike a balance between satisfying financial markets, foreign governments, and the IMF, while holding government to power, maintaining government and party unity, and preserving the partnership with the trade unions. It was not the possibility of IMF conditionality being too demanding that concerned PM Callaghan the most but the chance that it could be too little to convince what he deemed the government’s financial market constituency. The goal was to craft a policy package that different audiences could interpret slightly differently. In the end, despite the drama made of the IMF deal at the time and the later mythology about it, the government was able to get it on relatively soft terms.

This chapter explores how the American Federation of Labor (AFL) used humanitarian aid as an instrument of postwar diplomacy in occupied Germany. Through thousands of Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) packages sent to German trade unionists between 1945 and 1949, the AFL sought to promote liberal-democratic labor ideals and counter Soviet influence during the early Cold War. These packages, nominally gifts of solidarity, functioned as vehicles of ideological persuasion and channels of transatlantic communication, allowing the AFL to bypass official state diplomacy while shaping the reemergence of German unionism in an “American image.” Central to this effort was Jay Lovestone and the Free Trade Union Committee, whose anticommunist agenda intertwined humanitarianism with propaganda and intelligence-gathering. The chapter demonstrates how material relief became a form of “humanitarian diplomacy,” blurring the boundaries between altruism, ideology, and power in the reconstruction of Europe’s labor movements after World War II.

Chapter 2 examines several groups of persecuted and émigré jurists in concentration camps and exile. There are a few general themes of exile that shaped the postwar constitutional structures of West Germany. Primarily, political and interdenominational coalition-building was crucial in Western exile. In the United States, Social Democratic Party (SPD) members were sponsored by the Jewish Labor Delegation; Jewish émigrés formed alliances with Christian apologists in interdenominational anti-Nazi coalitions. In Switzerland, Wilhelm Hoegner, a Bavarian particularist, founded a group with Prussian civil servants. The divisions of German society were weakened in exile, with the notable exception of the divisions between the communist and non-communist left. The strengthening of anticommunism in exile made the postwar SPD more willing to work in coalition with the Christian Democrats.

Kenya’s labour movement was deeply embroiled in the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule and the colonial campaign against the insurgency between 1952 and 1956. Militant labour leaders were integral to the growth of the rebellion in Nairobi, but the colonial government sought to use the opportunity presented by the State of Emergency declared in October 1952 to bring the entire labour movement to heel. This created an opportunity for a young Tom Mboya, who became leader of the Kenya Federation of Registered Trade Unions, later renamed as the Kenya Federation of Labour. Mboya used the organisations links to the British Trades Union Congress and the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions to campaign for the release of wrongly arrested moderate trade unionists, and to develop further opportunities for trade union training, including a scholarship for him to study in Oxford and his attendance at an ICFTU seminar in India. However, Mboya became frustrated with the limited appetite within the ICFTU or TUC to support the adoption by the KFL of an avowed anti-colonial stance, which in turn pushed him towards the United States.

Mboya’s engagement with the AFL-CIO was a critical stage in his development as a nationalist and Pan-Africanist leader. Cultivated during a hugely successful tour of the United States in 1956, his relationship with figures connected to the American labour federation would last until his death in 1969. But Mboya’s network in the United States stretched beyond the labour movement. By following Mboya on his 1956 tour, the chapter shows his rapidly developing and deep connection to the American Committee on Africa, which had emerged out of the civil rights movement. Mboya returned home to Kenya as a hero, and decided to capitalise on his fame by standing for election to the colony’s legislative council in 1957, the first opportunity Kenya’s African population had to vote for their representatives. Mboya’s charisma, record as a trade union leader and policy platform certainly made him very popular in his Nairobi constituency, but the financial support his American allies provided was also a significant reason for his success. Mboya also leveraged his international profile on the Pan-African stage too, most notably when chairing the All-Africa People’s Conference held in Ghana in 1958.

This chapter seeks to shed light on the strategic reorientation of social democratic parties in the 1990s and the reasons why these parties have lost support among working-class voters while failing to expand their electoral base among other voters. Focusing on the Swedish experience, the chapter addresses three topics: (1) what social democrats have done in government; (2) how the social background and practices of social democratic politicians have changed; and (3) how the decline of trade unions and changing trade union practices have undermined working-class support for social democratic parties.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central questions: Why have labor activists in Europe turned to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to claim trade union rights, and what impact does this international litigation have on labor movements? While organized labor has historically relied on collective action rather than courts, this chapter situates that shift within broader transformations, including the erosion of union power under neoliberalism and the expanding authority of international courts. Yet the limited reforms states often undertake in response to ECtHR rulings rarely meet activists’ expectations. To explain how international litigation became a resource for workers, the chapter introduces the concept of strategic mobilization of human rights: an instrumental approach in which activists deploy human rights law to pursue concrete goals without necessarily embracing its ideals. Even pending or unsuccessful cases can catalyze social movements and shift political dynamics. The chapter also outlines the book’s methodological approach, which combines an original database of ECtHR labor rulings (StrasLab) with fieldwork on labor movements in Turkey and the UK. Situating the book’s contribution to debates on legal mobilization, labor revitalization, and international courts, it argues that the transformative potential of human rights courts ultimately depends on mobilization from below.

This chapter places labor lawyers center stage, examining their role in advancing labor rights litigation at the ECtHR. The analysis shows how ideologically driven lawyers – often working with limited resources – led international litigation efforts on behalf of unions in the UK and Turkey. Drawing on interviews and case law analysis, it traces how these lawyers identified the ECtHR as a viable target within a broader landscape of international legal institutions and crafted litigation strategies. The chapter conceptualizes this process across three phases: an initial probing phase in the 1990s, marked by uncertainty and experimentation; an expansion phase in the 2000s as the ECtHR signaled growing receptiveness to labor rights; and a post-2010 backlash phase, during which the Court’s authority came under strain. By tracing these developments, the chapter underscores how lawyers bridged local struggles and international legal arenas, expanding the scope of human rights protections while adapting litigation strategies to shifting political constraints at home.

This chapter shifts attention to the indirect effects of international litigation, specifically, how grassroots mobilization can be shaped in the shadow of official law. It examines the case of the Blacklist Support Group (BSG), a network of construction workers in UK who were blacklisted for their union activism. Even without favorable rulings from the ECtHR, BSG activists used the litigation process to amplify their claims, attract media attention, and apply political pressure. The chapter introduces the concept of “on-stage” and “off-stage” mobilization to describe how workers adopted an instrumental approach to human rights, invoking them in public campaigns while continuing to ground their internal discourse and solidarity ties in class-based themes. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, media coverage, and parliamentary debates, the chapter shows how BSG’s strategic mobilization of human rights yielded concrete victories – including major settlements, exclusion of blacklisting firms from public contracts, and formal investigations into police surveillance – that reshaped the political terrain for labor activism.

This chapter continues the book’s focus on the indirect effects of international litigation, examining how pending cases can help spur social movements at the domestic level. It analyzes the case of KESK, Turkey’s public sector union confederation, which mobilized international human rights law to carve out space for union organizing amid post-coup repression in the 1990s. Even before favorable rulings were issued, KESK activists invoked the authority of ratified treaties and the threat of ECtHR litigation to legitimize their demands, attract new members, and challenge state restrictions. In the post-2000 period, however, the AKP government shifted to more covert tactics, cultivating a clientelist relationship with a pro-government union to marginalize KESK and stifle dissent. As its organizing strength weakened, KESK increasingly turned to litigation, but ECtHR rulings proved ineffective at disrupting the structural constraints unions faced. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork data and archival material, the chapter shows how litigation evolved from a dynamic tool of mobilization into a strategy of documentation and symbolic resistance. KESK’s trajectory underscores a key insight of the book: the transformative potential of international courts depends less on their enforcement power than on the strength, strategy, and mobilization capacity of grassroots actors.

Folk music, and especially in the United States, has frequently been grounded in the fertile soil of labour struggles. Beginning with a cultural analysis of the Industrial Workers of the World and the little red songbook, the argument of this chapter is that folk offers a vision of the worker as a figure in which two contradictory phenomena are experienced at once. The experience of labour, in this account, is to live under a curse but to also embody the promise of collective redemption, to know that, when labour acts strictly as a class, it might yet abolish all classes and with that bring about the conditions of its own emancipation. Counterpoised to its many descriptions of wage work, folk articulates an alternative and hopeful vision of the worker as a collective subject defined by expansive solidarity, class antagonism, and common property. To make this argument, the chapter listens to three well-known folk songs from within the context of their composition and with an ear to the indivisible politics of class and labour: ‘Solidarity Forever’, ‘Which Side Are You On?’, and ‘This Land is Your Land’.

In the debate on the impact of multinationals on society, the “labor question” has occupied a prominent role for many decades. Surveying this debate, the chapter starts by outlining the main challenges posed by multinationals, in particular with regard to their ability to continuously reshape their production geographies. The main part of the chapter addresses two core issues. First, it provides a literature survey on the labor impact of multinationals, distinguishing between the Global South where the impact of multinationals occurred in the wider context of colonialism and, later, decolonization, and the Global North where discussion of the “labor question” revolved around issues of offshoring and labor relations practices. In the second part, the chapter analyzes the role of organized labor (especially trade unions) in multinationals, placing equal emphasis on domestic strategies and efforts to establish transnational bodies for interest representation.