THE CONTENTIOUS FIELD OF PRECARIOUS WORK IN ITALY: POLITICAL ACTORS, STRATEGIES AND COALITIONS

Abstract

This article aims to present an empirically grounded analysis of the field of actors mobilized against precarious work in Italy. Based on extensive fieldwork including interviews and document analysis, we discuss and compare four types of social and political actors and their organizing patterns: traditional trade unions, radical trade unions, groups of self-organized precarious workers, and grassroots activist groups. The underlying questions focus on patterns of organization and coalition building. By analyzing how precarious workers organize, which goals they have, which kinds of collective actions they engage in, and how they connect to other actors, we found that distinctive strategies lead to diverse degrees of agency and subjectivity that precarious workers develop, ranging from almost nonexistent to high degrees of subjectivity. Recent transformations in the Italian labor market toward more flexible forms of employment lead to a broader diffusion of precarious work, especially among younger generations, women, and migrants. Despite the existence of many studies about labor market flexibility and precarity in Italy, there is only a small amount of publications dealing with the organization of precarious workers struggling to improve their working and living conditions. 2 Among these publications, empirically grounded analyses that compare different actors organizing precarious workers are seldom. Drawing on different strands of literature, such as social movement studies and labor and industrial relation studies, we adopt a comparative perspective on the contentious field related to precarious work. The results we present in this article are based on extensive fieldwork revolving around three sets of data sources: forty-one semistructured interviews 3 ; official documents like public declarations and collective agreements; documents produced during protest events and campaigns like call for actions and leaflets. We analyzed and compared the data constructed during the fieldwork according to a qualitative analysis strategy focusing on four dimensions linked to collective action that we introduce below. This article develops as follows. The first subsection presents a critical literature review about the concept of precarious work and precarity that also serves to introduce a working definition for our understanding of precarious