(Re)mobilizing labour. A lesson from recent labour struggles in Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Social movement studies and labour scholarship have been developed as separate research fields, the former exploring the mobilizations of the so-called ‘new’ social movements, the latter the ‘old’ labour movements. However, such a sharp disciplinary distinction does not do justice to the interwoven character that social mobilizations may often take on in their formation processes and outcomes. This distinction seems especially untenable today given the return and proliferation of struggles on labour issues, where bottom-up forms of worker organizing and social movement types of action have been mixed, giving rise to a new array of labour actors and mobilizations. In short, the time seems ripe to spur on a scholarly prolific discussion between scholars of social movement and labour studies. In this profile, I start to do so by accounting for the case of the ongoing worker struggle at the GKN plant in the outskirts of Florence (Italy), where workers have been carrying out a bottom-up mobilization, consisting of the factory occupation and other radical forms of action. Both labour and social movement scholars can learn from this struggle, as it encompasses features whose interpretation cannot be confined to only one of the two disciplines, but it necessitates their integration. ‘Remobilizing labour’ entails, therefore, to stimulate a prolific conversation between these two communities of scholars on the topic of workers’ collective organizing. With this contribution, I hope to be opening up the way for such kinds of studies to come.