Labour, New Social Movements and the Resistance to Neoliberal Restructuring in Europe

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse one of the very first European-level instances of trade union and social movement interaction in defence of the public sector, namely, the Coalition for Green and Social Procurement, an alliance of European trade unions and green and social non-governmental organisations (NGOs), and its campaign for an amendment of the new public procurement directives from 2000 to 2003. It will be examined to what extent this campaign was able to change the directives and counter neoliberal restructuring effectively as well as what the possibilities but also limits of trade union and social movement cooperation are as exemplified in this particular case study.

Keywords:

• European integration
• neoliberal restructuring
• resistance
• social movements
• trade union

Notes

Comments on earlier drafts by Ian Bruff, Jan Willem Goudriaan, Jeremy Green and Adam Morton are gratefully acknowledged.

See http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/publicprocurement/index_en.htm [accessed 21 September 2007].

The analysis is based on public documents by the Coalition as well as its individual members, 10 semi-structured elite interviews with representatives of Coalition member organisations, as well as the archive by the main representative of EPSU in relation to the Coalition efforts. The latter includes copies of e-mails related to the campaign, official position papers, as well as minutes of Coalition meetings. Public documents are helpful in that they provide information about the main positions of the Coalition and its individual members. Interviews, in turn, provide an insight in Coalition formation and strategy processes as well as internal tensions and disagreements. Material from the EPSU archive, finally, is important for the confirmation of the validity of interview data and provides a direct insight into the Coalition internal processes as they occurred at the time itself. Interviewees were guaranteed anonymity as was the EPSU representative re his archive. Hence, for ethical reasons there are no direct quotes from either interviews or the EPSU archive, nor are the names of individuals revealed. Instead, it is indicated in a Harvard style system where information was drawn from which source.