From social conflict to social dialogue: Counter-mobilization on the European waterfront

Can trade unions organize internationally and ensure common standards of employment to prevent capital flight, social dumping and an international ‘race-to-the-bottom’? The experience of European dockworkers suggests that trade unions need to frame domestic conflicts in a global context and respond to foreign or international pressures within domestic politics before they can shift the scale of contention from the national to the European level. The campaigns against proposed Port Services Directives demonstrate that if social actors can project their domestic claims vertically onto international institutions and/or foreign actors they can divert the course of EU policy-making. In particular, if they can co-operate with other social actors through horizontal networks across different countries with similar claims, they can use both conflict and dialogue to protect their interests

The War on Europe's Waterfront - Repertoires of Power in the Port Transport Industry

When the European Commission proposed a Directive On Market Access to Port Services in February 2001, the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) issued a declaration of war on Europe's waterfront. To protect established terms and conditions of employment in the port transport industry, the ITF developed a strategy of internationalization that required dock workers to engage in a new politics of scale wrought by globalization. A new repertoire of collective action - based on more effective union articulation (i.e. stronger interrelationships between the workplace, national and international levels of organization) combined with the activities of new labour networks that connected port workers at the trans-national corporation, port range and pan-European levels - enabled dockers to sink the Directive in the European Parliament in November 2003. The dockers' victory will not be lost on other European unions or indeed other global union federations, although their success will doubtless prove more difficult for other occupational groups to emulate. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2006.