Party governments, US hegemony, & a tale of two Tillys’ Weberian state

Labor repertoires, neoliberal regimes and US hegemony: what ‘deviant’ Italy tells us of OECD unions’ paths to power

“…In Britain, the first OECD country to undergo full regime change during neoliberalism’s second wave, the country’s largest unions – Unite, Unison, and the General Union of Britain – have focused part of their efforts on challenging and changing the Labour Party from within, while the Rail, Maritime, and Transport Union has swung between supporting left faction candidates of the Labour Party and supporting the formation of a new party – all in addition to their community strategies (Ludlam and Taylor, 2003; Upchurch et al ., 2009; Connolly and Darlington, 2012). In 1998 Australia, in the midst of a dogged campaign by John Howard’s Liberal government against the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), the MUA and ACTU developed and then wielded a new citizen repertoire in part to pull the Australian Labor Party (ALP) back to their side (Gentile, 2011). Then, in 2005, the ACTU organized a major ‘Your Rights at Work’ campaign in the community and the media, contributing to the electoral defeat of that same government in 2007 and putting the ALP back on a road to more pro-labor reforms (Wilson and Spies-Butcher, 2011).…”

“…As argued in depth elsewhere, during this wave of neoliberalism, factional conflicts in conservative parties that produced party-room victories for the neoliberal factions have normally initiated the process of neoliberal regime change (cf. Gentile, 2011). These transformed conservative parties, once in government, end routine political exchange, legislate away workers’ rights, and erect legal barriers to unions’ right to organize, to bargain, and to deploy performances from the labor repertoire.…”

“…This study builds on the ‘regime–repertoire’ hypothesis, which combined the tools of the Contentious Politics program with the typological approaches of Varieties of Capitalism and the Welfare Capitalism literature (Gentile and Tarrow, 2009; Gentile, 2011). According to that hypothesis, in this age of neoliberal globalization one can still speak of a variety of labor repertoires, that is, of repertoires that vary by regime of capitalism: From the perspective of labor, there are corporatist regimes, such as Sweden and Germany, where labor still relies heavily on its labor repertoire, featuring performances such as the strike, the go-slow, and stop-work meetings.…”