Labour Union Strategies in the European Union Steel Sector

Labour unions need to develop policies and demands appropriate to the changing political economy in which they operate. Thus, for example, it is important for unions to seek to place members at an advantage within the extant processes of ‘modernisation’ and restructuring. It would seem, however, that on a range of different issues it is management that dictates the shape of change, with union leaders and activists failing to engage employers (or their own members) in ways that challenge policy and practice that disadvantage workers. The evident danger is that workplace union influence is marginalised. In this chapter, we identify how unions have failed to respond in effective ways to the restructuring that is occurring across the European steel sector. We suggest that unions have found it difficult to address the shift in corporate form within the sector, from nation-based and focused corporations to both multinational (and increasingly transnational) ones — a key development that is at the base of the sector’s restructuring activity. The specific contention is that unions have maintained an approach to interest representation that focuses on the state and/or supra-state, rather than the emerging corporate form that is beginning to characterise the sector. We suggest that one initial issue for unions to focus on is the articulation of alternative perspectives to prevailing corporate practice, as part of union strategy development (see Hyman 2007).