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“Today, we are precarious. Tomorrow, we will be unbeatable:”1 Early Struggles of Precarious Workers in Italy and Greece

Alice Mattoni (European University Institute)

Markos Vogiatzoglou (European University Institute)2

1 The slogan “Today, we are precarious. Tomorrow, we will be unbeatable” was used in some early mobilizations against

precarity in Italy. It is also the title of an article on precarious workers’ struggles published in the second volume of the

independent journal Quaderni di San Precario.

2 Authors may be contacted at the following addresses: alice.mattoni@eui.eu and markos.vogiatzoglou@eui.eu. Both authors

contributed equally to this work. However, in compliance with Italian academic norms, the authors acknowledge that Alice

Mattoni wrote the introduction, sections 1 and, 4 and Markos Vogiatzoglou wrote sections 2, 3, and the conclusion.

A version of the text that follows is included in the collective tome From Silence to Protest: International Perspectives on Weakly Resourced Groups (2014), D. Chabanet and F. Royall (eds.), Ashgate, Burlington.

Please cite this article as follows: Mattoni, A. & Vogiatzoglou, M., 2014. “Today, We are Precarious. Tomorrow, We Will be Unbeatable”: Early Struggles of Precarious Workers in Italy and Greece. In D. Chabanet & F. Royall, eds. From Silence to Protest: International Perspectives on Weakly Resourced Groups. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.

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Introduction

In this chapter we explore early precarious workers’ mobilizations in two southern European countries, Italy and Greece, so as to detail how marginalized categories of workers engage in protest.3 In doing so, we show how innovative forms of workers’ participation have emerged in recent years outside the realm of traditional labor organizations. Overall, the study of precarious workers’ protests facilitates the understanding of the struggles that preceded—and to some extent foresaw—the social discontent of the current economic crisis. Indeed, precarious workers’ struggles played a key role in both countries from the late 1990s to the early 2010s. In Italy, the national demonstration of precarious workers, the Mayday Parade, which first took place in 2001, expanded to the point of attracting some 100,000 participants in 2004 when it changed its name to the Euro Mayday Parade. By 2006, the Mayday Parade had become a transnational European day of protest. In the same period, protests emerged across Italy concentrating on local and national issues and involving precarious workers. From 2004 to 2006, when the cycle of contention reached its peak, dozens of grassroots collectives focusing on precarity flourished in Italy, many of which are still active today. In Greece, a number of grassroots labor organizations, populated by precarious workers, sprang up during the 2000s. Due to their strong solidarity and spirit of collaboration as well as latter attempts at cross-sectorial coordination, these grassroots labor organizations managed to stage numerous and successful labor-related campaigns. Moreover, they became key players in the ongoing anti-austerity struggle and mobilized thousands of protesters in general strikes.

For many years, the focus of social movement studies moved away from labor organizations. Many scholars suggested that the “new social movements” of the 1960s and the 1970s were quite different from traditional workers’ mobilizations, and that conflicts based on class division had given way to broader struggles led by the middle-classes. Some 30 years later, however, labor-related conflicts also began to change as a progressive enfeeblement of the working class occurred in many countries, including Italy and Greece (Kalleberg 2009; Wallace 2003; Standing 1999). The national and global workforce which was once easy to categorize into relatively homogeneous blocs has become ever more fragmented as a result of labor market flexibility (Grimm and Ronneberger 2007: 3). The mobilizations of precarious workers mirror these shifts and represent a change in the composition of workers’ movements because,

3 Precarious workers are still active today in the two countries where local, regional and even national mobilizations continue to

include precarity as a key issue. This chapter, however, focuses on the emergence of precarious workers as a political subject in

Italy and Greece, taking into consideration the first wave of mobilizations, spanning from the late 1990s to the late 2000s, at

the margins of the current economic crisis.

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as with the new social movements in the 1960s and the 1970s, they have had to cope with the increased differentiation and individualization of their bases. Hence, precarious workers have been required to engage in organizational patterns capable of overcoming this fragmentation, as will be outlined below in the cases of Italy and Greece.

The main research question we address in this chapter is the manner in which collective identification processes are linked with the process of developing the mobilization of precarious workers, especially in relation to organizational patterns. Based on empirical material collected through participant observation, in-depth interviews, and social movements’ documents from 2001 to 2011, our analysis highlights how different discourses about labor flexibility and precarity in Italy and Greece contributed to the development of different kinds of mobilization in the two countries. In addition, we illustrate how the above led to the development of different collective identification processes.

In doing so, our chapter engages with two diverse branches of the literature on social movements. One strand of research focuses on (collective) identities, amongst which we find the prominent “new social movement” approach (Melucci 1985, 1989 and 1996; Touraine 1988) as well as scholarship on collective action frames produced in the context of mobilizations (Snow and Benford 1988; Snow et al. 1986; Gamson 1992). Another strand of research focuses on organizational structures and is often based on the “resource mobilization” approach (Edwards and McCarthy 2004; della Porta and Diani 2006: Chapter 6). In line with the other chapters in this volume, we engage critically with these two classical paradigms of social movement studies to highlight the points of connection between them, in order to analyze precarious workers’ mobilizations and the broader field of the struggles in which they are embedded.

In the following analysis, we point out what we consider as the multiple marginality of precarious workers in Italy and Greece, as it is constructed through the public discourse around them and through the relevant legislative framework and their political alliances. We then examine the first wave of mobilizations against precarity in Italy and Greece by analyzing the collective identification processes amongst precarious workers and by considering how these processes were linked with the organizational aspects of mobilizations, as well as the consequences this had for the contentious field developing around the issue of precarity. In the conclusion, we reflect on the relevance of the theoretical framework of collective identities in order to understand the emergence of workers’ movements centered on precarity.

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The Multiple Marginality Precarious Labor4

In this section we consider three interrelated macro-dimensions that have turned precarious workers into marginalized social actors: the legislative, discursive, and political dimensions.

Table 5.1 Contextual dimensions of precarious labor in Italy and Greece

Italy Greece

Legislative context

Progressive flexibilization

No Welfare State modifications

Progressive flexibilization

No Welfare State modifications

Discursive context

Positive perception of flexibility

No reference to precarity

Negative perception of flexibility

No reference to precarity

Political context

Few institutional allies Few institutional allies

Looking at the marginality of precarious workers from different, although connected perspectives, allows us to show that precarious workers were not (and are still not) marginalized to the same extents in Italy and Greece. Although starting from similar conditions of marginalization at the legislative and political levels, the discursive dimension varies in the two countries. In what follows, we refer to the information presented in Table 5.1 by comparing the three dimensions in the two countries. This approach is useful to help us appreciate the limited amount of material and non-material resources that precarious workers possessed when they started to mobilize against precarity.

The Legislative Dimension

Legislative measures constitute a crucial dimension in order to understand how contemporary precarious labor came about. The flexibility of labor relations is a long-lasting process that became internationally wide-spread from the 1970s (Atkinson 1984; Wallace 2003). However, both in Italy (Jessoula and Alti 2010) and in Greece (Ioannou 1989), the labor

4 Precarious labor refers to the explosion of short-term, temporary, part-time and other “atypical” jobs issuing from the

flexibilization of the labor market and the simultaneous weakening of the Welfare State.

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markets and welfare systems were based on full-time and open-ended contracts for the large majority of workers in the private and public sectors since the end of the Second World War. Only in the 1990s did a series of legislative measures increase the number of precarious workers in the two countries.

In Italy, four legislative proposals drafted and passed between 1993 and 2003 contributed to this process of flexibility in labor relations (Gallino 2007). The measures progressively expanded the categories of short-term contracts that employers could use to hire workers and extended the number and range of labor market sectors in which they could be used. Overall, whilst for Italian employers it was still difficult to fire employees holding open-ended contracts, hiring new workers on short-term contracts became increasingly easier. In Greece, from 1990 (the year when part-time employment was introduced into the labor relations system) to 2009, at least eight legislative packages made reference to flexible labor, which deregulated certain aspects of the labor market, and/or regulated other employment features in accordance with international standards (Milo 2009). The last initiative took place a few weeks prior to the 2010 “bail out” agreement between the Greek government and its creditors and included various regulations on leased employees,5 and a new configuration of the status of human resource management companies (Vogiatzoglou 2010).

While the legislative measures quickly changed the structure of the labor market in both countries, they left the welfare system almost untouched with regard to labor protection. In other words, a strong “process of dualization” occurred according to which “policies increasingly differentiate rights, entitlements, and services provided to different categories of recipients” (Emmenegger et al. 2012: 10). Public authorities’ inaction with respect to social protection contributed to marginalize precarious workers who, in the meantime, were becoming ever more numerous in both countries.6 In this way, a further cleavage began to appear in the two countries’ labor markets at the end of the 1990s.7 On the one hand, there was the category of protected, full-time, and open-ended workers and, on the other hand, there was the category of workers who were increasingly excluded from basic working and social rights, amongst which young people, women, and migrants represented the most vulnerable sub-categories.

5 A leased employee is an individual contracted to a leasing organization that provides services for the employer.

6 In Italy, while temporary workers constituted 16.7 percent of the citizens aged between 15 and 24 in 1994, in 2010 the

percentage was 46.7 percent. For Greece, the percentages were 7.1 percent in 1994 and 17.5 percent in 2010 (OECD 2012).

7 For a review in the case of Italy, see Pedaci (2010), Madama and Sacchi (2009) and Bronzini (2002). For Greece, see INE-GSEE

(2008 and 2009).

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The Discursive Dimension

A further important aspect is the public and political discourses that preceded and then accompanied changes at the legislative level. In Italy, a number of economic and political actors—including left-wing political parties and trade union confederations—participated in the intermittent but enduring debate about the need to increase labor market flexibility (Mattoni 2012). Notwithstanding the obvious distinction between trade unions and business associations as well as between left-wing and right-wing political parties, the overall public and political debates strongly supported the idea that open-ended contracts were no longer viable and that labor market flexibility was the only solution to overcome the economic crisis and the structural unemployment that characterized Italy at the beginning of the 1990s (Mattoni 2012). A similar convergence between political and economic actors took place in Greece. The need for labor market reforms was proposed to the public through a process entitled the “social partners’ debate.” This process was fully embraced by the trade union leadership, by the employers’ federations, and by Greece’s two main political parties (Daskalakis 1995; Psimmenos 1999). In Greece, the discussion on the flexibility of labor relations was confined to academics. During the early 1990s, several scholars pointed to the dangers of implementing a drastic deregulation of the labor market, given the traditionally weak nature of the Greek Welfare State (Ioannou 1989; Kassimati 1997). However, unlike what took place in Italy, the Greek public never really understood flexibility as having positive connotations.8

At the same time, the term precarity was largely absent from the public and political debates of the 1990s in both countries. In Italy, the expression “precarious workers” had sometimes been used in earlier cycles of mobilization, especially during the 1975–7 struggles (Grispini 2006), and applied to specific categories of workers, such as high school teachers. Nonetheless, it remained confined to the social movement milieu and, even there, it lay at the margins of critical discourses. The same holds true for the term “precarietà,” which could be translated as “precarity” in English. Although used commonly in Italian, this term is not usually associated with the labor market. In Greece, the term precarity (“episfaleia”) was largely absent from the public discourse. The first references to “episfaleia,” both in translations of foreign-language texts and in original contributions by activists and scholars tackling labor relation issues, are to be found in the early 2000s (Blackout 2006; Triantafyllou 2008). It is reasonable to

8 Indeed, the term itself can be translated two ways in Greek: as “eveliksia” which has a positive connotation, and as

“elastikopoiisi,” which bears a negative one. Apart from government documents which tended to use the former, the latter

prevailed in the public debate about labor market flexibility.

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expect, therefore, that in the 1990s the terms “precarity” and “precarious workers” were not in the vocabulary of politicians, unionists, economists, and academics.

To sum up, the lack of expressions to refer to the negative changes inherent in the flexibilization of the labor market also marginalized precarious workers in public and political discourses.9 The above assumption had an important role especially in Italy, where public and political discourses around flexibility had a rather positive connotation in the 1990s. In Greece, on the contrary, the shift towards flexibility was met with silence, at least when it came to public discourses, with the exception of a few references bearing negative connotations. To some extent, therefore and with respect to the discursive context, Greek precarious workers were marginalized in a different sense to their Italian counterparts. This is because the perception of temporary workers as a positive example of a new working class was never developed in Greece. In Italy, on the contrary, the public discourse fostered the idea that flexible workers were going to become the new dynamic workforce, able to organize leisure, family, and working life in a positive way.

The Political Dimension

A third relevant dimension is the structure of the contentious field related to labor market flexibility and, within it, the political actors that are active on issues related to precarious workers. In the 1990s, when the first mobilizations of precarious workers took place in Italy, radical left-wing political parties and confederate trade unions were quite visible in the political realm, especially regarding labor issues. Yet, until the late 2000s, they were not able (or willing) to promote major mobilizations focused on precarity (Choi and Mattoni 2010). Confederate (and thus mainstream) trade unions were particularly slow in supporting struggles against precarity despite the fact that union branches devoted to precarious workers had been established. Radical trade unions were more active on precarity. However, they did not support early grassroots attempts to organize precarious workers since they were still focusing on workers holding an open-ended employment contract. As the precarious activist F.D. explains in this interview extract:

They said that we [precarious workers] were marginalized actors in the field of labor, that we were at a temporary stage, and that once we would have had a full-time contract, then we could see how workers’ struggles should be developed, through the traditional union means. (Interview with F.D. 2007)

9 Flexibilization is the process of rendering a labor market more flexible, that is, providing more flexible workplace arrangement

options to the employers.

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In Italy, the most relevant political actors mobilizing around precarity were social movement groups of self-organized precarious workers. Also heavily involved were grassroots political actors, such as university collectives and social centers, whose actions and interests extended beyond the field of labor relations (Mattoni 2012; Choi and Mattoni 2010).

In Greece, the contentious field related to labor market flexibility mirrored the patterns of diffusion of precarious workers, but also more general struggles mainly supported by younger generations of activists, such as the mobilization against educational reforms (2006–7) and protests against police brutality (2008–9). Mainstream trade unions failed to develop mechanisms or structures capable of incorporating flexible workers in their ranks, despite the fact that the unions’ research institutes had previously warned that the constituency of the labor force in Greece was changing rapidly (INE-GSEE 2008). The two main left-wing parties—the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) and the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA)10—were also largely absent from this contentious field.11

In this setting, the first anti-precarity initiatives occurred as a result of self-organized attempts in the late 1990s at grassroots levels, especially in the highly flexible service sector. Grassroots unions of precarious workers began to engage in various labor disputes and activities inside the workplace, as well to participate in broader workers’ mobilizations at the national level. Yet the turning point of their activity was the attempted assassination of an immigrant trade unionist, Konstantina Kouneva, in December 2008. In an effort to build a horizontal network of solidarity and to offer support to the gravely injured unionist, more than 28 grassroots unions, the majority of which were made up of precarious workers, formed an assembly to coordinate their actions and undertook many initiatives and joint activities (indy.gr 2008 and 2009). As K.V., a member of the coordination notes:

The trade unions’ confederation did nothing in solidarity [with Kouneva]. No strike, nothing! You know, there is widespread suspicion that they wanted to silence the issue. We went there and asked them: “what are you going to do about Kouneva”? And we received no response. Therefore, we decided to take the situation in our own hands. (Interview with K.V. 2010)

In this case, it is interesting to note that the motivation for building the coordination was the unwillingness (or the inability) of the official trade union system to intervene on behalf of

10 SYRIZA, a coalition of left-wing parties and organizations, was established in 2004 and it largely overlaps with the previous

euro-communist coalition of Greek parties, SYNASPISMOS.

11 Until late 2009, SYRIZA was a weak left-wing party, always struggling to secure its entry in Parliament, with limited strength

and influence in organized trade unions, student movements, and other civil society organizations.

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an injured trade unionist. In short, both in Italy and in Greece, the more established and institutional political actors did not openly or visibly engage in struggles against labor market flexibility and its negative consequences. Therefore, precarious workers were also marginalized at the political level, with few if any institutional political allies and very limited political representation. It was for this reason that precarious workers’ struggles were initially organized by less-resourceful and less-established political actors, without the support of trade unions and political parties (and sometimes in strict opposition to them).

The Construction of Activist Discourses around Precarity

In Italy, precarious workers who mobilized at the beginning of the 2000s had first to create a new vocabulary to name, define, and interpret their working and living conditions which were radically different from those of the full-time workers with open-ended contracts. Precarious workers often engaged in collective actions in which an “expressive logic” (Pizzorno 1978) prevailed so as to become visible at public and political levels. Social movement organizations with fewer resources were especially active in the promotion of a “discourse of precarity” in opposition to the dominant “discourse on flexibility” outlined in the previous section (Mattoni 2012). As the activist Z.R. explains in this interview extract:

[Flexibility] was portrayed in a positive way, as an opportunity for workers to manage their time. But from the very beginning, it was clear that we were not really dealing with flexibility favorable to workers, but with precarity that was damaging to workers. (Interview with Z.R. 2007)

From 2001 to 2006 in particular, a number of protests centered on precarity took place all across Italy. These protests became crucial generators of resources at the cultural level. The protests also contributed to the creation and the diffusion of new symbolic tools (Williams 1995: 127), the most important of which was probably the very concept of precarious workers, denoting a composite and inclusive political category that encompassed many forms of social exclusion and inequalities. The Euro Mayday Parade and some related protest events played an important role in creating new imageries of precarious workers. The Euro Mayday Parade was first organized at the national level on May 1, 2001 in Milan with the objective of bringing together the wide range of precarious workers. In their call for action, activists underlined the fact that precarious workers were invisible and had no voice (Mattoni 2012; Doerr and Mattoni 2014). In interviews with some of the organizers of the parade (Mattoni 2012), the need to redefine the very ideas of “flexible workers” and “flexibility” was highlighted.

In 2002, social movement organizations that supported the Euro Mayday Parade used a more general expression, “social precariat,” to include all precarious workers: “The goal is to

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mobilize the whole social precariat [sic] through new forms, more direct and less ideological, so that union activism networks spread all over Italy and the EU” (Chainworkers Crew 2002).

Overall, activists elaborated a discourse which suggested that short-term contracts, coupled with the exclusion from the welfare system, led to a general condition of precarity. Accordingly, they argued that workers were not able to manage flexibility in an autonomous way but rather that workers were subjected to flexibility. Activists’ discourses on precarity were usually sustained by a catchy, aesthetic, and popular way of expressing themselves. Activists developed their own symbols, icons, and expressions representing and narrating the experience of being a precarious worker by using a language that was more closely related to popular culture than to the more traditional, left-wing unionist discourse. As of 2004, they used San Precario, the patron saint of all precarious workers, to mock the strong Catholic tradition in Italy. San Precario soon became an icon of precarious workers’ struggles all over Italy (Mattoni 2008; Tari and Vanni 2005). By the use of a popular language different from the common political lexicon, activists expressed the need to elaborate a new vocabulary related to their living and working conditions, as C.S. explains in this interview extract:

From the very beginning, we decided to use a pop imagery to enter the minds of younger generations. ( … ) [We decided] to use the leverage of communication to spread a new concept of workers’ subjectivities. And we did this with San Precario. (Interview with C.S. 2007)

In Greece, mobilization was spearheaded by grassroots unions operating directly in the workplace and without the theoretical refinement of the Italian counterparts. In reference to a six-month strike from late 2008 to early 2009 in which his union participated, N.A., a grassroots trade union member, clarified the situation:

If you hadn’t explained to me [prior to the interview] what your project was about, I wouldn’t even know what a precarious worker is! [laughter] We didn’t know that you have to be precarious worker to mobilize. We just thought that what is happening was unfair and went ahead with the strike! (Interview with N.A. 2011) (emphasis added)

The above quote points to two issues. First, and contrary to the situation of Italian workers, no visibility campaigns based on the notion of precarity were attempted by their Greek counterparts. Only a few articles on the issue appeared in academic publications (Blackout 2006; Blaumachen 2006; Mabruki 2007; Mimis 2005) and these authors’ theoretical approach was largely imported from Italian scholars. An attempt by several Athens-based anarchist groups to participate in the Euro Mayday Parade—the transnational version of the Mayday Parade mentioned above (see Doerr and Mattoni forthcoming)—by organizing a similar protest in Greece failed to attract participants.

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Second, in the Greek case, the symbolic content that precarious workers built upon in order to organize their struggle was linked to the specific characteristics of the social movement organizations involved, namely grassroots trade unions. This also set limits and constraints on the struggle’s symbolic content. For example, the emblematic Janitors’ Union of Attica—that represented precarious workers—did not make one reference to the term “precarity,” either directly or indirectly, over a two-year period (2009 and 2010). The union’s announcements and texts from that period consist of information on various labor disputes, denunciations, anti-government press releases, and briefings on internal union issues (PEKOP 2013). Since the precarious workers’ unions were operating in a working environment consisting both of precarious and non-precarious employees and addressed an equally mixed audience, the obvious choice would have been and, indeed, was to embed the flexible labor-oriented claims and demands into the more general setting of working class struggles. As R., a call center workers’ collective member, notes:

The most important activities for me [amongst the call centers] are the texts we produce. Because here, we can go more in depth into the issues of precarity. The problem is that when you distribute the pamphlets, the person who might receive it may not understand anything, or consider that what we’re saying is irrelevant to him/her! That’s why we always try to set the call center workers’ demands into a broader perspective. We do this all the time. (Interview with R. 2010)

The collective identification process of the Greek flexible workers, thus, focused more on the “worker” part of the expression than on the issue of flexibility.

Collective Identities on the Move: From Context to Protest and Back Again

The symbolic level of protest and, in particular, the development of collective identities is brought about at the strategic and expressive levels in mobilizations (Melucci 1995 and 1996). In precarious workers’ struggles, collective identities were well linked with the organizational structure of the respective movements.

In both cases, organizational patterns dealt with the fragmentation of the precarious workforce. In a comparable fashion to how, in France, the entertainment sectors’ intermittent workers developed their mobilization (Sinigaglia 2009), the actions of activists in Greece and in Italy were focused on the construction of social ties liable to sustain the mobilization of precarious workers through a reframing of their working and living conditions. Precarious workers went from being passive victims of labor flexibility to become active agents capable of pressing for their social and working rights. Social ties amongst precarious workers were crucial cultural and social resources (Edwards and McCarthy 2006) to be developed further—or even created from scratch in some cases—through collective action. This process was important in

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equal measure in Italy and in Greece. As we shall point out in this section, in both cases the collective identification processes were strongly intertwined with the movements’ resource mobilization strategies and the organizational patterns selected from the various options available. However, the organizational patterns and the construction of social ties between activists and precarious workers occurred in different ways in the two countries. Italian and Greek activists protested at different territorial levels: Greek activists focused mainly on the workplace in order to mobilize precarious workers; Italian activists frequently went beyond the local level to engage in protest at the national level.

In the Greek case, most of the actions took place in specific workplaces. This facilitated daily communication between activists and the many precarious workers who did not mobilize. In addition, the majority of the founders of the new unions comprised of precarious workers were already strongly embedded in activist networks due to previous political involvement and contacts with other labor-related, activist groups. As G., a grassroots union member noted, “the initiatives launched in precarious labor workplaces, are usually led by people who have already traced their own path, who are already politicized” (Interview with G. 2010). Therefore, creating social ties amongst the precarious workers consisted mostly of activists identifying organized collectives in which the workers could participate, and offering limited services and support. This mechanism did not involve the creation of alternative discourses around precarity nor did it explore the possibility of expanding the potential audience beyond the immediate environment of the individual workplace. The Wage Earner Technicians’ Union, for instance, a precarious workers’ union in the construction, engineering, and telecommunications industries, used its resources mainly to organize “surprise visits” to companies and workplaces where no union representation had hitherto existed. Usually, a small group of activists arrived early in the morning. Occasionally, they engaged in scuffles with the employers’ security or with the employer him/herself, and then spent the day distributing leaflets and speaking with employees. Kostas, one of the union’s board members, explains the rationale behind this contentious performance: “[we] want[ed] to make [our] presence felt to the workers. We want[ed] both the employer and the employees to know that we could return as many times as needed, if an issue occur[ed]” (quoted in Vogiatzoglou 2010: 59–60). The argument made by Kostas is that the mere hint of an organized collective’s presence in the workplace was a potentially sufficient incentive for non-unionized flexible workers to become involved in the movement/the union. As shown in the previous section, members of the precarious workers’ unions considered that the point departure of collective identification process was rooted in the perspective of a broader “workers’ unity.” In order for the process to be completed, strategic actions had to be performed, such as the surprise appearance of a union in a previously non-unionized labor sector.

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The construction of social ties between Italian activists and precarious workers took a much more complex path. As in Greece, there were examples of struggles rooted in specific workplaces, like the precarious workers of the Atesia call center in Rome who mobilized in 2005 and 2006 (Mattoni 2012). However, national struggles were also organized in Italy, such as the aforementioned Mayday Parade, in which activists aimed to build social networks of precarious workers that went beyond specific workplaces. Social ties amongst precarious workers who did not belong to the same workplace were important because they constituted the communicative infrastructure through which meanings about precarity circulated on a nationwide basis. In Milan, for instance, precarious workers organized in autonomous political collectives that considered the planning and preparation of the Euro Mayday Parade as an important moment during which to construct political interactions and to circulate political meanings around precarity. In the course of the Euro Mayday Parade in 2005, the Chainworkers Crew created a set of cards which were distributed during the Parade. Each card represented a precarious worker and showed how to overcome precarity on a daily basis (Vanni 2007; Mattoni 2008). The cards were cultural artifacts capable of pointing out the differences between precarious workers and yet conveying a sense of workers’ unity despite the range of the living and working situations they experienced. Furthermore, the process through which this cultural artifact was developed, its planning and creation also had a strong symbolic relevance, as the activist B.L. points out in this interview extract:

We had to invent something new to force some relationships … since we had a problem. We were collaborating with a number of different groups and we wanted to do something with all of them. (…) We needed to create a mechanism to involve these people so that every one of them could become a protagonist. (Interview with B.L. 2007)

For this reason, activists in the Chainworkers Crew asked various groups of people to create their own superhero fictional character to be printed on the cards. Some of the groups involved were already small, grassroots political groups that were active on the issue of precarity. Others were groups of friends, living in the periphery of Milan and experiencing precarity without being politically engaged. Making the set of cards, therefore, became a space of shared symbolic work around the very idea of experiencing precarity. The cards were an organizational tool that went beyond the preparation of protest and served as a connector of experiences, meanings, and emotions around precarity. The simultaneous presence of these two elements (the strategic and the identity-building) confirms that, although the Italian precarious workers commenced from a different starting point than their Greek counterparts, they ended up with a similar outcome: an action intended to disseminate the feeling of belonging to a common identity proved to be a self-reproducing resource—and vice versa.

In short, the creation of social ties that were sufficiently strong to mobilize precarious workers was crucial although in different ways in the two countries. This was also linked to the

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creation of discourses and identities around the issue of precarity. In Greece, the objective was not to engage in the creation of all-encompassing collective identities around the issue of precarity. Rather, Greek activists wished to develop and to consolidate local mobilizations rooted in the workplaces, where precarious workers could resist labor flexibility starting from their very own working experiences. In Italy, on the contrary, mobilizations at the national level were an important site to go beyond the fragmentation of precarious workers that were employed in different labor market sectors and in different workplaces. Although some local struggles emerged, many grassroots social movement organizations focused on the development of discourses and identities around precarity that could resonate at the level of national public discourse. These differences concerning organizational patterns and collective identities intertwined in the course of the mobilizations, but they also had a role in the articulation of the very contentious field around precarity as we show in the next section.

Collective Identities and the Articulation of the Contentious Field

Social movement scholars who focus on collective identification processes single out a number of ways in which collective identities have a positive role in mobilizations.12 In this section, we suggest that stressing the symbolic dimension, and its deep connection with the meso level of protest, had a role to play in reshaping the contentious field in which precarious workers acted.

In the struggles of Italian and Greek precarious workers, the fragile balance between constructing shared meanings about precarity and preserving individual experiences of precarious workers was important for organizational activities. Although frequently represented as an uncontested realization of a common “we,” collective identity implies conflicts and fractures, readjustments, and negotiations. They are a “field of tension” in themselves (Touraine 1988) in that constant negotiation takes place between those who want to be recognized, precarious workers in this case, and those who should recognize them (Melucci 1982). At the same time, continuous negotiations, and sometimes even open conflicts, emerge within the social movement milieu related to the meanings and interpretations attached to the means, the ends, and the whole field of collective action (Melucci 1995). Indeed, in the case of precarious workers’ struggles in Italy and Greece, the tensions related to the symbolic level were important in the articulation of the field of contention.

In Italy, the field of contention on precarity was characterized by sometimes subtle disagreements amongst social movement actors. The very definition of precarious workers

12 For a review of these studies, see Flesher-Fominaya (2010), Polletta and Jasper (2001), della Porta and Diani (2006).

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often became the subject of contestation. According to the Precari Atesia collective, for instance, precarious call center operators and their efforts best represented mobilizations against precarity, while the Mayday Parade or the San Precario appearances were not able to have a real impact on the wider struggle of precarious workers. Therefore, they did not represent “true struggles against precarity” (interview with P.A. 2007) since they were not rooted in a specific workplace. Similar opinions were shared by traditional and radical trade unionists that eventually joined the parade because of the parade’s ability to attract large numbers of participants. The same debate took place in Greece, but along different lines. In the aftermath of the failed attempt to participate in the Euro Mayday Parade protests, a lively discussion took place on whether it made sense to tackle labor issues outside the workplace. The organizers were accused by some of “elitism,” “speaking an incomprehensible language,” and “ignoring the workers.”13 Yet the debate did not last for long, as the failure to introduce a successful Italian-style anti-precarity activism in Greece resolved the issue in favor of those who argued that the struggle against precarity should be based solely within the workplace.

Different interpretations of precarious workers also developed within the same social movement network in which disputes often emerged about how to frame the contentious issues at stake as well as other dimensions of collective action (Benford 1993). Both in Italy and Greece, though, these differences were difficult to identify by just looking at the external appearance of the mobilizations. Activists involved in struggles against precarity were aware that it was crucial during the peaks of the mobilizations to maintain a certain level of unity in the struggle and to go beyond internal political differences. In this sense, activists went beyond specific organizational and movement identities (Gamson 1991; Jasper 1997) and focused more on the construction of temporary alliances that could impart a rather consistent and cohesive image of precarious workers. This is particularly evident in the case of the Euro Mayday Parade in Italy in which dozens of activist groups participated in the day of action (Mattoni 2012). It is even more pronounced in the coalition-building processes of the Greek precarious workers’ unions. For instance, in the case of Altec Telecoms, during the first two months of its struggle the union managed to extend its network of allies and affiliates from an initially small network of five social movement organizations to more than forty affiliated organizations, ranging from all the telecommunication sector unions to social movement organizations covering the full spectrum of the Greek left (Vogiatzoglou 2011). This active strategic effort signals the self-reflexive side of collective identification processes, but also the importance that activists attributed to the construction of shared systems of meanings with respect to precarity.

13 A summary of the various arguments expressed can be found in Athens.indymedia (2006).

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Collective identification processes elaborated in the framework of grassroots protests against precarity also had a role in the transformation of the field of contention. In Italy, political actors that considered precarity as a residual problem became more active on this contentious issue. An example is the main trade union confederation, CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro—the Italian General Confederation of Labor). At the end of the 1990s, the CGIL had already established a branch devoted to precarious workers named NIDIL-CGIL (Nuove Identitá di Lavoro—New Labor Identities). The branch, however, did not play a key role in early struggles against precarity and remained substantially invisible for the best part of a decade. Members of other branches of CGIL, moreover, did not support NIDIL-CGIL, which remained rather marginal in the confederated trade union (Choi and Mattoni 2009). In the years following the initial grassroots struggles against precarity, NIDIL-CGIL engaged in a national campaign entitled “Assunti Davvero” (“Employed for Real”) that was based on viral marketing14 and guerrilla communication techniques. The campaign was not a struggle in any specific workplace, but rather a tool for becoming more visible in the field of contention related to precarity. For the first time in a decade, the confederated trade union decided to devote a considerable amount of resources to a communication campaign about precarity, instead of focusing solely on local struggles in specific workplaces. This was due to the coordinated action of young trade unionists within the CGIL, many of whom had witnessed, and sometimes even participated at the individual level, in the grassroots struggles against precarity (Coppola and Di Nunzio 2013).

In the case of Greece, in which collective identification processes were less central than in Italy, the impact on the field of contention was different. Despite the fact that the research institute of the Union Confederation (GSEE) is actually the only institutional organization that actively promotes the theoretical debate on precarity and its consequences, mainstream trade unions failed to harness the recruitment, organization, and mobilization potential of precarious workers. They did not manage to create new internal structures which would be more suitable to the particular needs and conditions of flexible labor. Additionally, mainstream trade unions initially perceived the mobilizations of precarious workers, which were characterized by a significant degree of autonomy, as a possible hostile move against them. Nowadays, the relationship between mainstream trade unions and precarious workers’ unions is characterized by contrasting elements. Mutual suspicion and occasional hostilities are still to be found, yet the precarious unions actively seek some sort of institutionalization in order to be able to provide collective bargaining services for their members. Moreover, several trade union

14 Viral marketing is a strategy used in advertising and/or marketing which relies on active involvement of consumers who pass

on messages to their peers through word-of-mouth and/or web platforms.

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officials are eager to link up with the more militant organizations in order to adopt a social movement union profile and to bolster their waning popularity amongst the working population.

Conclusion

This chapter compares the first wave of precarious workers’ mobilizations in Italy and Greece. Overall, our contribution analyzes the rise of precarity as a contentious issue in the two countries, as well as the consolidation of precarious workers as a political subject. More specifically, this chapter presents a cross-national comparative analysis centered on collective identification processes and how they overlapped with different dimensions of protest.

Our discussion of the multi-level reconstruction of the marginalization affecting precarious workers showed significant differences between the structural contexts in which protests took place. In particular, we showed that the discursive level presented important differences between the two countries. In Italy, the discourse on flexibility was dominant and had an overall positive connotation in the public debate. In Greece however, the discourse on flexibility was marginal and had an overarching negative connotation in the public debate. This structural difference was relevant for the role that the symbolic level of protest had in the two countries. Indeed, we illustrated that Italian mobilizations were much more attentive towards the development of an alternative discourse that challenged the positive depiction of flexible labor patterns. By contrast in Greece, social movement actors were less interested in subverting the existing dominant discourse. Accordingly, the symbolic level of protest played a minor role in Greek mobilizations. Our comparative analysis continued by considering how the symbolic level of protests, and the requirement for elaborate collective identities around the issue of precarity, overlapped with organizational patterns and contentious performances. Again, the different emphasis put on collective identification processes introduced different dynamics with respect to the two social movement dimensions. In Italy, organizational patterns and contentious performances seemed to follow, to some extent, the need to elaborate alternative discourses and collective identities around precarity. In Greece, the precarious workers prioritized well-established organizational patterns and contentious performances in the tradition of labor struggles over strategic and expressive actions at the symbolic level. In both cases, collective identification processes were strongly intertwined with resource mobilization and the choices of strategic repertoire made by the respective organizations. Finally, we concluded our investigation by summarizing how collective identification processes articulated the contentious field related to precarity. On the one hand, we discussed the cleavages and tensions within social movement networks and coalitions. On the other, we considered the role of institutional labor organizations in the emergence of precarious workers as a new political subject.

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In short, our contribution describes how the symbolic level of protest has had a relevant role in precarious workers’ mobilizations, both in Italy and in Greece. Furthermore and moving to a more abstract level, our work suggests that the labor-related social movement research shall face some theoretical as well as empirical challenges. In particular, it is important to theorize the new subjects that constitute the workers’ movements of today, without losing the analytical capacity of connecting them to the rapid and violent changes to which the labor relations field is subjected at a global scale.

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