Category Academic activity

A collective tome on precarious labor has just been published:

The New Social Division: Making and Unmaking Precariousness.

The book has been edited by Donatella della Porta, Sakari Hänninen, Martti Siisiäinen and Tiina Silvasti.

It includes a chapter I wrote, entitled Varieties of precarious workers’ unionism: Greece and Italy compared.

Here’s the book’s abstract – the full text of my contribution will be soon available on my Academia.edu webpage:

This volume addresses issues of precariousness in a broad perspective, examining socio-economic transformations as well as the identity formation and political organizing of precarious people...

The latest  issue of Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations includes an article I co-authored with Lefteris Kretsos, on the challenges the contemporary Greek labor movement is facing.

Here’s the article’s summary:

Lost in the Ocean of Deregulation? The Greek Labour Movement in a Time of Crisis.

The 2008 financial crisis had a tremendous impact on the Greek economy and society. Since 2010, widespread popular mobilizations have emerged against the austerity measures that were part of the bail-out package proposed to the Greek governments by the Troika of creditors (EU-ECB-IMF). Yet the institutional trade unions have failed to impede the reduction of wage earners’ income, which, by 2013, had dropped by 50% compared to 2008 levels...

The May 1st special issue of Transfer – European Review of Labour and Research includes an article I wrote on the transnational networks of Italian and Greek workers.

Here’s the abstract:

This article describes the development of cross-national labour movement networks between Italy and Greece and explains why some of their efforts produced concrete results, while others did not...

Lorenzo Zamponi and myself just published a piece on new forms of workers’ organizing in Italy and Greece. The article Organizing workers’ counter power in Italy and Greece is included in the annual report of the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam) State of Power 2015.

You may find the article here.

The whole book (edited by Nick Buxton and Madeleine Bélanger Dumontier) is available for download here.

Article Abstract:

During the last three decades, the gradual loss of labor struggle’s centrality in the context of social conflicts in Europe, as well as the decreasing  trade unions’ ability to represent an effective counter-power to capitalist hegemony, had been almost unanimously acknowledged in the scholarly and activist debate.

The economic crisis and the implementation of austerit...

An article of mine just got published in the Hans-Böckler Foundation journal, “WSI-Mitteilungen”.

The title is:

Trade Unions in Greece: Protest and Social Movements in the Context of Austerity Politics.

Die griechische Gewerkschaftsbewegung: Protest- und Sozialbewegungen im Kontext der Austeritäts-politik.

I am deeply thankful to my friend and colleague Heiner Dribusch for the careful editing, useful comments and translation in German.

The full text, in German, can be found here.

And here’s the abstract:

Even before the 2008 crisis, the Greek trade union system was already characterized by low density and weak links to other societal actors...

This is the title of an article we co-authored with Alice Mattoni.

It just got published in the French journal Quaderni, issue 84 (Spring 2014).

You may find the full text HERE.

And here’s its abstract:

The article discusses the mobilizations and resistance against precarity in Italy and Greece, before and after the economic crisis, showing how protest involving precarious workers – as well as precarity as a contentious issue – changed over time in the two countries...

The “Labor Relations in Context” research group of the Hans-Böckler Stiftung organized a conference in Düsseldorf on developments in European trade unions’ issues.

I presented there the following paper:

Title: “Trade Unions in Greece: Protest and Social Movements in the Context of Austerity Politics”.

Abstract: On the eve of the 2008 financial crisis, the Greek trade union system was already characterized by low density and weak links with other societal actors. The unsuccessful trade union response to the austerity policies imposed on the country in the period 2010-2013 reflected the extent of the institutional labor organizations’ weakness. This article provides some insights on the changes the workers’ movement is undergoing in this extremely challenging environment.

The focus is ...

The above is the title of my presentation at the Oslo Center for Advanced Studies’ conference “Labour and transnational action in times of crisis: from case studies to theory.”

Here is the program of the conference, which took place from 26 to 28 of February, 2014.

And here is my presentation’s “prezi”:

http://prezi.com/iyxzdfjmc9qn/workers-trans-national-networks-in-austerity-times/

The photo that accompanies this post was taken in Oslo. It portrays the ‘Match Factory Girls’ – the statue is situated next to a bridge that crosses a waterfall and guides the curious passerby to the city’s Workers’ Museum.

In the aftermath of the conference, I was invited by the anarchist group MotMakt to deliver a brief presentation on the Greek movement, followed by a Q&A session...

The above is the title of the paper I presented in Hans Böckler Stiftung’s conference “International solidarity reloaded”, which took place in Göttingen, April 2-4, 2014.

The conference was a great experience, overall. High quality presentations, interesting debates and flawless organization. Congratulations to the organizing committee from the University of Göttingen Graduate School.

In the attached link, you may find my “prezi” presentation.

This brief article is a (non-peer-reviewed) contribution to a collective publication in Interface (vol.5, issue 2) entitled: Social movements and the European crisis: activist and researcher reflections. 

You may download the article from here.