Narratives of cooperation, resilience and resistance: workers’ self-recovery in times of crisis

Purpose Worker-recuperated enterprises have appeared in Europe with increasing frequency since 2008, following the Great Recession that hit the western economies. The purpose of this paper is to depict the phenomenon of worker-recuperated enterprises in Italy, focusing on two different types of business recovery, that of workers buyouts and that of recovered social spaces. The paper compares these on the basis of four analytical dimensions: resilience/resistance, relationship with the market, relationship with the territory and workplace democracy. Design/methodology/approach The corpus of the research is based on the cross-sectional analysis of workers’ narratives. These were collected, within a small sample of theoretically relevant cases, in order to retrace and analyse the path from the crisis of the former companies to establishment of the workers’ cooperatives and their social and economic features. Findings The collected narratives allowed for a multi-level comparison between different types of worker-recuperated enterprises, providing some insights on their emergence, their features in terms of resilience and resistance, their relationship with the market economy and their outcomes in terms of workplace democracy and support to employment. Originality/value Worker buyouts are gaining ground in Europe as an effective mechanism to oppose the fall of the employment rate in consequence of economic crises. This research intends to offer some data and arguments to the current international debate on the effectiveness of these mechanisms in coping with economic shocks and opening up to a sustainable and cooperative work-driven economy

Some Theoretical Insights on Social Movements and Resistance Practices in the Era of De-Politicization of Representative Politics

The global economic crisis of 2008 has fostered a new wave of de-politicization intended as the shifting of national policy making from the public political arena to the field of extra-political supranational and international actors. The public policy making has become tightly linked to criteria that are much more economic than political. This change has provoked a consequent mutation in the nature and behavior of social movements which has result in different kinds of crossbreeding. Traditional social movements with their State-addressed requests have given way to new forms of social conflict that do not directly address to the national government. These new forms of mobilization act primarily in the form of direct social actions aimed at impacting directly on the economy and the environment. The common element of such experiences can be identified in the mix of resilience and resistance that they express

ESSA Identification of National (Sector) VET Qualification and Skills (Regulatory) Frameworks for Steel

Digital transformation and climate change represent the main drivers of innovation for European industry. In particular, green and digital technologies help to increase energy and resource efficiency and contribute to keeping materials in use for longer. However, the right skills are needed to implement, operate and exploit these technologies to best effect. The ESSA project has developed a sector-driven Blueprint following a bottom-up social innovation process to address skills needs, which integrates all the relevant stakeholders (companies, training providers, research institutions, associations, social partners, policy makers, public administration, and civil society organisations). It has identified where there is need for re- and up- skilling and talent recruitment, and identified strategies for developing a highly skilled workforce, proactively addressing skills gaps, and engaging the workforce with new technological innovations. As part of the Blueprint, we offer policy recommendations to support these strategies and address the deep transformations the industry is currently experiencing. The first policy recommendations are presented as general recommendations. Second, we offer policy recommendations at three levels in order to provide further contextualisation: European, national and regional. Third, we present some recommendations related to the specific support of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

Institutional complementarities and technological transformation: IVET responsiveness to Industry 4.0 - meeting emerging skill needs in the European steel industry

Digital technology is gradually changing the organisation of production and work. In this article, the authors explore the implications of such developments for workers through the lens of skill, and the skill needs developing out of the shift towards Industry 4.0 technologies now being employed within the European steel industry. Specifically, the article examines the preparedness of initial vocational training systems to support adaptation to Industry 4.0 and the changes in work and employment that will follow. The article addresses such developments from the point of view of institutional theory, analysing how different institutional architectures influence responses to change