Unions as “managers of precariousness”. The entrenchment of micro-corporatism in the Spanish automotive industry and its drawbacks
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Pages | 1054-1071 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-12-2017-0293 |
| Author | Jon Las Heras |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
Unions as “managers of
precariousness”
The entrenchment of micro-corporatism in the
Spanish automotive industry and its drawbacks
Jon Las Heras
Politics, University of Manchester School of Social Sciences, Manchester, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to argue that: in a context of global labour market competition and in
the absence of new strategic repertoires, class trade unions are progressively becoming “managers of
precariousness”. Thus, the paper challenges the compromise logic as the unique solution to corporate threats
to relocation, since it undermines trade union power resources, mainly discursively and organisationally, and
hinders trade union capacity to transform the balance of forces to their favour later, when the hegemonic
discourse can more easily be challenged in periods of crisis.
Design/methodology/approach –The paperdraws upon the doctoral fieldworkthe author undertookin the
city and province of Barcelona during Spring–Summer 2015. More than 30 semi-structured interviews to
variousunion delegates and regionalmetal officials havebeen accompanied by an exhaustivereview of primary
and secondary documentation. In so doing, this paper gives a rich and nuanced account on the different
“world-views”andstrategies that union delegatespursue when bargaining againsttransnational corporations.
Findings –This paper shows how the conservative position that Spanish trade unions adopted to the 2008
financial crisis in the automotive industry is path-dependent to dynamics established during the 1990s when
lean production techniques were implemented in exchange for higher salaries. It draws upon the collective
bargaining history of the Nissan–Zona–Franca assembly factory in the outskirts of Barcelona to, crucially,
explain how signing micro-corporatist pacts and portraying them as the unique solution to corporate
threats to relocation undermines trade union power resources, and has two important drawbacks: that
micro-corporatist pacts only postpone the recurring threat to relocation to the future by eroding, not
improving, the conditions of the workforce, accepting corporate discourse erodes the solidarity among
workers, and it also allows yellow unions to displace class unions.
Originality/value –This paper enriches and updates the literature on micro-corporatism, collective
bargaining in transnational corporations, and the erosion of trade union power resources which dates back to
the 1990s and early 2000s. Whilst the negative aspects that competitiveness pacts have on workers’salaries
and conditions have been widely reported, this paper provides a rich and updated explanation of how such
pacts have negative repercussions on the discursive and organisational power resources that unions have at
the workplace level. In that sense, the originality of this paper rests on engaging into a substantiated
historical analysis on how trade unions change throughout time as a result, at least partially, of their own
strategic choices. Moreover, this paper clearly shows that concessionary positions towards collective
bargaining are self-undermining.
Keywords Spain, Automotive industry
Paper type Research paper
Introduction: the 2008 crisis as an opportunity conjuncture?
Political economyscholars have widely argued thatthe 2008 financial crisis and its particular
unfolding inEurope have resulted from the overwhelmingpower of transnational capitalover
labour and the uneven entrenchment of neoliberal policy making and labour market
deregulation throughout different spatial scales ( Jäger and Springer, 2015). Enhanced labour
market competition has put nationaltrade unions in a very difficult position,in which win-win
coordinationstrategies are difficultto pursue due to the different,and often mutually opposed,
immediate interests of their members (Erne, 2008; Bernaciak, 2013). Nevertheless, forms of
collective resistance have existed at the national scale through, for example, the repeated
organisation of general strikes, or at the transnational scale, as happened on 14 November
2012, withthe Pan-European generalstrike that mainly affectedSouthern European countries.
Employee Relations
Vol. 40 No. 6, 2018
pp. 1054-1071
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-12-2017-0293
Received 12 December 2017
Revised 27 April 2018
22 May 2018
Accepted 23 May 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0142-5455.htm
1054
ER
40,6
However, despite the apparent upsurge of social mobilisations and prefigurative forms of
working class resistance (Bailey et al., 2017; Las Heras and Rib era-Almandoz, 2017), the
overall landscape is gloomy: scattered forms of resistance have not coupled with increasing
unionisation rates or more encompassing collective bargaining practices and industrial
conflict has oftenresulted more from the need to preventfactory shut-downs or lay-offs than
from demanding for better working conditions (Urban, 2012). The current historical
conjuncture puts national and European unions into a complicated situation in which
they need to be more audacious, find new opportunities and renew their strategic repertoire if
they want to change the balance of forces (Hyman, 2015).
In Spain, socialunrest has taken the form of three generalstrikes that mobilised millionsof
workers between 2010and 2012, the emergence of the 15-M and Podemos,and the defence of
citizen rightsthrough various community organisations, such as thePlataforma de Afectados
por la Hipoteca, whichdemanded decent and affordablehousing (Charnock et al., 2014; Bailey
et al., 2018). Yet, the effectiveness of these general strikes in stopping austerity and labour
market reformshas been limited. Neither have they beenuseful in increasing the legitimacyof
the two largest trade unions, Union General de Trabajadores (UGT) and Comisiones Obreras
(CCOO), among young workers, or in reinforcing their associational ties with other radical
unions and socialmovements, as they stillremain suspicious of union elites(Pérez-de-Guzmán
et al., 2016; Las Heras and Ribera-Almandoz, 2017). The use of general strikes as a major
pressure against neoliberal policy making was questioned before the crisis (Rigby and
Marco-Aledo,2001) and after (Molina and Barranco,2016): unions tended to only organise and
over-represent protected-workers, especially public sector workers, to the detriment of more
precarious workers or sectors more subject to global competition.
In contrast, what UGT and CCOO have predominantly sought is to preserve their
institutional power through: the recursive use of social dialogue (Molina and Miguélez, 2013;
Rigby and García-Calavia, 2017), and by wining trade union elections that enable them to
engage in sector negotiations (Beneyto et al., 2016; for a historical review of the Spanish
Industrial Relations system see inthis same journal Köhler, 2018).The effectiveness of recent
strategieshas been criticised by other scholars.On the one hand, because corporatistpractices
have not produced overarching accords with positive clauses that protect workers from
governments’unilateral macroeconomic policy making; instead, such agreements have
established wage-ceilings and promoted calendar flexibility to secure labour-competitiveness
(Martínez-Lucio, 2016). On the other hand, labour reforms have further decentralised those
collective bargaining structureswhere UGT and CCOO felt at ease, undermining the capacity
of their federations to sign sector collective agreements that could act as “protective
umbrellas”across the industry (Fernández-Rodriguez et al., 2016; Köhler, 2018). The latter
problem is an old one too, since workplace disempowerment dates back to the democratic
transition, the formation of the collective bargaining framework and the restructuring of the
economy, in whichUGT and CCOO prioritised sector-scale negotiations, especially provincial
agreements, overengaging the rank-and-file and making themparticipants in the bargaining
process in an increasingly fragmented economy (Martínez-Lucio, 1992; Köhler, 2001).
Nevertheless,and as Las Heras (2018a) show in a comparative case study atthe sub-national
scale, independentist trade unions in the Basque Country have challenged and dismissed the
effectiveness of “top-down”corporatist and collective bargaining practices, and sought to
empower the workforce “from below”.
This paper expands the critique to corporatism at the lowest scale of collective
bargaining, i.e. the workplace, and argues that the recursive adoption of micro-corporatist
strategies against managerial prerogatives to reduce labour costs has nothing but
enormously weakened unions, thus, reinforcing and worsening the globalisation trends
originated and advanced by global capital since the 1980s. By micro-corporatism we mean
institutionalised workplace/factory/company practices in which working class actors
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The
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