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This paper outlines recent examples of labor movement renewal in Europe in the context of European integration and globalization. It highlights an increasing tension between the strategy of social partnership pursued by official labor organizations and grassroots “social movement unionism.” The paper demonstrates that the prospects for successful renewal involves linking workplace mobilization and organization with wider popular struggles to form a movement against the new regionalized forms of corporate and state power. This has direct relevance to current debates in the US concerning the tension between “service” and “organizing” models and demonstrates the need for vibrant autonomous workplace unionism as well as a political dimension to labor movement renewal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the logical and historical determinants of European integration and reflects on the potential and dangers this presents for labour movement renewal. Through the principle of ‘subsidiarity’ a regulatory gap has been established between political mobilisation at the national level and neo-liberal regulation at the European level. The historical determination of this form is traced through an exploration of the social struggles against neo-liberalism that have developed within member states and transnational mobilizations that bridge this regulatory gap by linking resistance across national boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using field research at both the national and the local levels, the author reconstructs the process that led to pension reform in Italy. This reconstruction becomes the basis for a critical re-examination of corporatist theory, which has recently been challenged by the emergence of social pacts in a host of 'unlikely' countries, including Italy. The author argues that the theory's traditional emphasis on hierarchical and internally undemocratic interest groups is fundamentally at odds with the particular organizational mechanisms through which consensus was mobilized among both middle-level union structures and rank-and-file workers in Italy. In contrast with standard neo-corporatist theory, the Italian pension reform shows that organizational democracy, far from weakening the hands of reformist union leaders, may actually strengthen them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the race, multiculturalism and labor organization prevailing in the U.S. Massive immigration and the subsequent ethnic re-composition of the working class are forming an essential part of the new U.S. economy. The U.S., during the recent two decades, has also witnessed important struggles of non-white immigrant workers for social organization and political representation, which have hardly become known in Europe. The United States is re-emerging as a global model for economic restructuring and these changes include many lessons for the labor movement in Europe.