This panel focuses on the organizational actors that mobilize workers and on the strategies through which they build participation across different segments of the workforce. Rather than taking workers’ collective action for granted, we invite contributions examining how trade unions, grassroots unions, worker collectives, social movement organizations, and civil society actors organize workers across segmented labour markets: which workers they reach, through which frames, networks, repertoires, and organizational practices, and which groups remain difficult to mobilize.
A central concern is the role of intersectionality in understanding the mobilization of vulnerable workers. Contemporary labour markets are structured by intersecting inequalities related to gender, race, migration status, class, citizenship, skill level, and contractual position. Intersectionality is therefore crucial not only for identifying vulnerability, but also for understanding which organizations are able to represent workers facing multiple forms of exclusion and which instead reproduce tokenism, internal hierarchies, or unequal power relations (Montoya 2021; Roth 2021; Muñoz-Puig 2023; Einwohner et al. 2019).
The panel is particularly interested in how labour conflicts and coalitions are constructed: which grievances are mobilized, how they are framed, which actors sustain them, and which repertoires are deployed. We welcome research on efforts to connect workers across sectors, contracts, and labour-market positions, and on links between labour struggles and broader fields of contention such as migration, social reproduction, gender justice, housing, anti-racism, environmental justice, and democracy. Such mobilization may combine strikes, protest, legal action, mutualism, digital campaigns, and community organizing (Leonardi and Pedersini 2023; Trongone 2022; ILO 2022).
Social movement unionism is approached not as a fixed model but as a research question: under what conditions do convergences between labour organizations and other social actors broaden participation, especially among harder-to-organize workers, and when do they reproduce internal inequalities or symbolic inclusion? (Azzellini 2021, 2022; della Porta 2021, 2022; Chesta et al. 2019; Cini and Goldmann 2020; Tassinari and Maccarrone 2020; Atzeni 2021).
We welcome conceptual and empirical contributions from labour studies, social movement studies, political sociology, industrial relations, gender studies, migration studies, and related fields.
