Unions and New Shopfloor Strike Strategies and Learning Processes among Public Employees

Abstract

The construction of a welfare state in most western industrialized countries went hand in hand with the development of an expansive public sector. Having discussed the theoretical arguments social scientists have applied to explain the increasing collective industrial activity among public employees in selected industrialized countries, this article endeavours to test the proletarianization, the organization and the interaction hypotheses alongside the welfare state crisis argument. In light of statistical data on strikes and four detailed case studies of the development of mass organizations and shopfloorbased strike activity, that is base organizations, in Denmark, only a conditional interaction model remains. This model states that the development of the public sector contributed to the growth of modem mass organizations and to the construction of informal base organizations with shared goals, especially through the establishment of large bureaucratic settings with elaborate internal labour markets. The model also confirms that base organizations acquired their main resources from, and partly owed their existence to, the formal labour unions, who themselves could not remain unaffected by the base organizations either. Finally it is argued that the combined, but often unintended, efforts by mass and base organizations introduced durable changes in the system of industrial relations, and opened up new labour market strategies for public employees.

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