This article shows how International Political Economy of Labour (IPEL) approaches can be fruitful in the study of working class and institutional transformation in contemporary capitalism. It draws from an analysis of variegated union strategies in the Mercedes-Benz-Vitoria Global Value Chain (MBV-GVC), located in the autonomous community of the Basque Country (north Spain). More concretely, it explains how the recurring adoption of micro-corporatist strategies at the car assembly plant undermined and fragmented working conditions whilst, in sharp contrast, the adoption of confrontational strategies in supplier companies led to the empowerment of the workforce, increasing salaries of new entrants well above new assembly workers’. This occurred parallel to Basque unions’ challenge of prevailing institutionalised forms of collective bargaining, especially by questioning the power that Provincial Metal Sector Agreements have in the regulation of salaries and working conditions of medium and small (non-unionised) companies. Thus, in exploring how Spanish and Basque trade unions’ strategies produced different institutional settings, this article argues that IPEL approaches are helpful in providing complex and nuanced accounts of the uneven development of capitalism as a result of labour’s agency.

This article analyses the fragmented working class struggles that emerged in Spain after the eruption of the economic crisis in 2008–2010. Through the use of qualitative methods, such as in‐depth interviews and activist participant observation, the article traces the progressive institutionalization of the major Spanish trade unions—Comisiones Obreras and Union General de Trabajadores—, which during the crisis have prioritized the defense of social dialog over the adoption of more radical strategies. The article argues that the incapacity of institutionalized trade unions to organize an increasing proportion of displaced workers, including unemployed and precarious workers, has been challenged through the establishment of new, more inclusive grassroots forms of resistance and mobilization based on civil disobedience, prefigurative practices, and direct action.

I compare collective bargaining in the Basque and Catalan automotive industries to show that since the early 2000s, two contrasting bargaining frameworks have emerged. The two largest Spanish unions have followed ‘top-down’ strategies in Catalonia, in which organizing the rank and file was secondary to signing the provincial agreement. This has created a relatively passive membership with little capacity to confront management. By contrast, the main Basque union refused to give priority to signing a provincial agreement and adopted a devolved strategy, resulting in higher unionization rates and more frequent strikes. I conclude, first, that union (renewal) strategies do in fact matter in the regulation of global industries and, second, that when unions modify their strategies, the organizational and bargaining dynamics also change, producing institutional configurations that embody new contradictions and dilemmas.

This article provides a historical materialist critique and response to Bob Jessop’s Strategic-Relational-Approach (SRA) to the structure-agency debate. The critique is developed in four steps and four class-based solutions are given. First, the SRA provides no ontological entry-point to account for historically specific relations of power, while the researcher inescapably finds herself within them (e.g. class relations). Second, the SRA provides no ‘method of articulation’ to understand and explain why particular disruptive agencies exist within the structure-agency dialectic. Instead, Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’ locates the researcher as a potential ‘organic intellectual’ in the confrontation and transcendence of class relations. Third, for the SRA, power is meaningless because agency can always be ‘redefined’ so that it is explained through structural determinations. In politicising power through historical materialism, this article provides a concrete emancipatory operationalisation of Jessop’s dialectical ontology. Fourth, when studying uneven historical change, adopting a partisan approach may well suggest focusing on contingent action instead of structural necessities. Therefore, acknowledging the ‘politics of power’ may well be social scientists’ first step when contrasting historical change with their own political views.

Gramscian International Political Economy scholarship has predominantly focused on studying capital's power to subsume labour under different hegemonic projects. Various Autonomist Marxists have recently sought to fill such gap by proposing a disruption-oriented International Political Economy. However, the article argues that it mirrors domination-oriented International Political Economy approaches for overemphasising labour's disruptive potentiality and for paying little attention to the limitations that labour faces in its own empowerment. To escape from the unilateralism of these two mutually exclusive perspectives, the article reviews Gramsci's 'Methodology of the Subaltern' in order to propose a Gramscian or strategic International Political Economy of Labour. Hence, the article shows that it is possible for International Political Economy scholars to study uneven capitalist development as the result of the agency of (dis)organised labour as well as to account better for the emancipatory potentiality of working-class strategies in specific contexts.