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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• GKN
• labour mobilizations
• labour studies
• Italy
• social movement studies

Acknowledgments

I would not have been able to write this piece without the long and prolific discussions with two of the best industrial relations scholars I had the privilege to meet and become friends with, Arianna Tassinari and Maurizio Atzeni. This article is also theirs. All errors, instead, remain mine. I also want to thank Benedetta Rizzo, a very good friend of mine and a comrade of the Florentine antagonist political milieu, without whom I would not have been able to access all the relevant information on the GKN struggle.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. GKN stands for Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds (GKN), who were the original owners of the company, a British multinational automotive and aerospace components business, headquartered in Redditch, Worcestershire.

2. This section draws on Cini and Tassinari (2021), Insorgiamo. The GKN Struggle and the Resurgence of Working-Class Militancy in Italy. Notes from Below, September 25. Available at: https://notesfrombelow.org/article/insorgiamo

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lorenzo Cini

Lorenzo Cini is a research fellow in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where he is a member of the research group of COSMOS (Center on Social Movement Studies). His main research interests are social movements and conflicts in the current transformations of the world of work.