della porta, 2008, forms oportunities

PROTEST ON UNEMPLOYMENT: FORMS AND OPPORTUNITIES * Donatella della Porta † The "return" of poor people movements encourages reflection on the impact of changes in the social structure, the availability of organizational resources, and political and discursive opportunities for collective action. Based on a quantitative and qualitative claim analysis in six European countries, this article maps unemployment-related protest actions in three areas: (a) long-term unemployment; (b) massive dismissals; and (c) unemployment and labor policies within more general cycles of protest. The article discusses the actors, the forms and claims of the protests, and the social and political opportunities for their development. Protests on unemployment tend to assume some similar forms, each oriented to stress the "absolute injustice" of the position of the unemployed. The framing of the issues of both labor changes and the evolution of the labor market restates the importance of social dynamics for political protest. Unions as well as other social movements and political actors play an important role in the protest against unemployment. In the mid-nineties, France saw the “return of the social question,” with an (uneasy) alliance between public sector workers, the unemployed, and the marginally employed. In 1995, the extended strike of the cheminots (public transport workers) unexpectedly gained large support in the public opinion, as it brought millions into the street in remarkable demonstrations of solidarity across the country, and forged direct organizational and symbolic links between the labor movement and various groups of excluded, including illegal immigrants, unemployed workers, and the homeless, as well as the lycée and university students and an intelligentsia that had been widely dismissed as apathetic and uninterested (Fantasia and Stepan-Norris 2004: 556). Various marginal groups mobilized in the so-called “mouvements de sans” on behalf of the “have-nots”: migrants without legal residence permits, homeless people, and the unemployed. Analysts described a coalition between the “moral left” of the middle class that defended human rights, and the “social left” that mobilized the workers. In particular, the unemployed protested in 1997 against a reform that reduced the funding for unemployment compensation and centralized its management. Already in 1994, the group Agir contre le Chomage (AC! Act against Unemployment!) organized five marches converging on Paris from the provinces, asking for a reduction in work hours in order to create new jobs, as well as more investments “against exclusion.” During and after the marches, the unemployed mobilized at both the local and national levels. In the winter of 1995-96, groups of the unemployed staged a campaign of * This analysis is based on data collected by the members of a project entitled “The Contentious Politics of Unemployment in Europe: Political Claim Making, Policy Deliberation and Exclusion from the Labor Market.” The project includes the following countries: Britain (Paul Statham, University of Leeds), Switzerland (Marco Giugni, University of Geneva), France (Didier Chabanet, University of Lyon), Italy (Donatella della Porta, University of Florence), Germany (Christian Lahusen, University of Bamberg), and Sweden (Anna Linders, University of Cincinnati and University of Karlstad). The project is financed by the European Commission (HPSE-CT2001- 00053 UNEMPOL) and the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science through the Fifth Framework program of research of the European Union. We thank all the members of the UNEMPOL research consortium for their contri- butions to the project.A previous version of this report was presented at the conference on The Contentious Polit ics of Unemployment, Geneva, April 1-2, 2005. † Donatella della Porta is Professor of Sociology at the Department of Political and Social Science at the European University Institu te in Florence. Please direct all correspondence to [email protected]. © Mobilization: An International Journal 13(3): 277-295

della porta, 2008, forms oportunities

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