Preliminary Programme

Today, working as public servant in an administrative position is (in most countries) considered a highly secure and regular form of employment. Of course, this has not always been so. When the welfare state services – and thus the municipal administration of it – expanded in the first half of the 20th century in Denmark, a large group of the municipal office workers were hired on day-to-day basis and other precarious terms. This paper investigates the emergence of the municipal administrative workers’ union (HK/KOMMUNAL) through the lens of the fight to regularize employment conditions of public servants. (Show less)

When digital work platforms offering domestic cleaning services emerged in Denmark in the mid-2000s, it coincided with the introduction of a new type of temporary visa called the Working Holiday Visa (WHV), that allows people from certain countries – including Chile and Argentina – to live and work in Denmark for up to 12 months. On this visa you are not allowed to take up permanent full-time employment, which made the digital work platforms an attractive option for people on WHV. Through in-depth interviews this paper explores how the precarious labour dynamics of the gig economy interplays with the mobility regimes of temporary forms of work permits. (Show less)

Since the 1970s, work has been transforming all over the world. This paper discusses how workers reshaped their ways of collectively organizing in response to this transformation in the Netherlands, which was particularly far-reaching compared to other Western countries. In Dutch retail (supermarkets and distribution) and the meat industry more precarious working conditions emerged as the result of the local translation of worldwide processes such as globalization, flexibilization and robotization. The paper combines a global and a workplace perspective in a systematic analysis of changes in the self-organisation of these workers. This empirical contribution therefore focusses on the various ways in which they organized, in all kinds of organizational forms and activities, both formal and informal. (Show less)

For a long time, international trade union organizations did not lend institutional support to workers in the informal sector. It was only in the 1980s that they adopted a new perspective towards informal labour. The paper will analyse the reasons for and the effects of these new strategies. On the one hand, informal and precarious labour was spreading during the 1980s, and began to affect industrialized countries, too. On the other hand, trade unions started to lose political power in their traditional spheres of activity. Against this backdrop, the trade unions’ new alliances with informal and precarious labour were aimed at opening new possibilities for organising workers around the globe. (Show less)