Every place has its different environment, whether it be the level of organisation, reputation of socialism, dominant values of society, history and experiences, conflicts and crises. Because of these dynamics, I’d expect to see stark differences in what the movement looks like around the world. An obvious example familiar to most here is seeing the widespread and militant union mobilisations in France’s retirement age protests.
Which countries do you have experience in, and how are their labour movements different?
The title is intentionally vague by saying ‘labour movement’, so you’re welcome to talk about workplace attitudes, unions, socialist organisations, legislation and more.
I’m a union organizer in tech. I’m Italian, but I live in Germany and I do interact a lot with American organizers.
In Germany, most organizing is effectively cleansed of political identity and needs to be conducted in a very sanitized environment to be appealing to workers. It’s also very very focused on the legal aspects.
Americans are way more technical about the whole of it: more methodologies, more processes, more tools, it’s a game of numbers.
Italians…, well, let’s say the unions there deserve the hate. Not because they are particularly corrupted or conservative (which they are), but because they have no fucking clue what they are doing. They are much slower than their foreign counterparts, they have no resources, they have very little coordination and no interest in getting better. Like many things in Italy, they are slowly sinking in the quicksand. The organizers on the ground they are often under prepared and they have no concept of methodology: they know their legal stuff, but they believe that building momentum in the workplace is just a matter of identifying the right arguments and deliver the right speech at the worker assemblies. Basically they rely on luck, workers motivation and 50 years old processes. They also have no operational coordination on a regional or national level. People from the same union working on the same category don’t know or talk to each other unless they work in the same physical office.