Labor repertoires, neoliberal regimes and US hegemony

What ‘deviant’ Italy tells us of OECD unions’ paths to power

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6261027
AutoresAntonina Gentile (University of Milan, autor de correspondencia)
Año2015
Volumen7
Número2
Páginas243-270
Fecha de publicación2015-05-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaEuropean Political Science Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1755-7739 • E-ISSN: 1755-7747
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1755773914000101
OpenAlexW1987418187
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas74

This paper notes the tendency of ‘social movement unionism’ scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic to focus on and prescribe the citizen repertoire as the single most important repertoire of labor for challenging neoliberal globalization. Consistent with liberal conceptions of civil society and theories of participatory democracy, it implicitly dismisses political unionism as a path to labor’s revitalization. It also assumes epochal change and confines neoliberalism to the post-Washington Consensus era. Deviant case analysis of Italian labor’s use oftworepertoires (the citizen and the labor repertoire) and of its two regimes of capitalism (in succession, a post-WWII neoliberal regime and a post-1970 corporatist regime) over the course of the ‘American Century’ gives pause to both these contentions. This study relates labor’s citizen repertoire to the era of US hegemony that promotes changes in party-government that tend to reproduce the image of the archetypically neoliberal American polity: a polity that is devoid of ‘labor’ as a recognized category of the political community, is low in social rights, and, relatedly, is devoid of a party of labor. In this neoliberal political order, labor is perennially locked into the category of ‘citizen’ and reliant on the citizen repertoire. By contrast, the survival of parties of labor in non-US polities during the post-war wave of neoliberalism permitted union movements a routeawayfrom labor-decategorizing orders – political unionism. Now, in the post-Washington Consensus wave of neoliberal regime change, that route is more onerous owing to Third Way changes in parties of labor. The major challenge for labor movements that have experienced regime change to a neoliberal polity is in directing their efforts and even their new citizen repertoire to the task of recapturing parties of labor or to creating new ones – or risk long-term US-style labor decategorization

Capitalism · Hegemony · Neoliberalism (international relations · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Polity · Social movement · Sociology · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Social Policy and Reform Studies