The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation

In The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation, Heather Connolly, Stefania Marino, and Miguel Martínez Lucio compare trade union responses to immigration and the related political and labour market developments in the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The labor movement is facing significant challenges as a result of such changes in the modern context. As such, the authors closely examine the idea of social inclusion and how trade unions are coping with and adapting to the need to support immigrant workers and develop various types of engagement and solidarity strategies in the European context.

Traversing the dramatically shifting immigration patterns since the 1970s, during which emerged a major crisis of capitalism, the labor market, and society, and the contingent rise of anti-immigration sentiment and new forms of xenophobia, the authors assess and map how trade unions have to varying degrees understood and framed these issues and immigrant labor. They show how institutional traditions, and the ways that trade unions historically react to social inclusion and equality, have played a part in shaping the nature of current initiatives. The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labor Representation concludes that we need to appreciate the complexity of trade-union traditions, established paths to renewal, and competing trajectories of solidarity. While trade union organizations remain wedded to specific trajectories, trade union renewal remains an innovative, if at times, problematic and complex set of choices and aspirations.

Heather Connolly is Associate Professor of Employment Relations at the University of Leicester. Stefania Marino is Senior Lecturer in Employment Studies at the University of Manchester. Miguel Martínez Lucio is Professor of International HRM & Comparative Industrial Relations at the University of Manchester.

The book is clearly of interest to an academic audience–students and researchers. This book really brings what might be possible into sharp focus.

The book can be useful to both academics and policy makers. While analysing an extensive amount of data, the book remains clear, wellwritten and nicely structured with a framework that facilitates the comparisons it makes.

Janice Fine, Rutgers University:

The relationship between immigration and labor movements is less straightforward historically and cross-nationally than many assume, and captures an enduring dilemma for labor leaders. At a moment when nationalist leaders are targeting migrants and refugees in the US and across Europe, Connolly, Marino and Martínez Lucio's excellent book helps us make sense of the story.

Paul Stewart, Senior Research Professor Sociology of Work and Employment, GEM, Grenoble ComUE Universite de Rhone-Alps, France:

The Politics of Social Inclusion and Labour Representation provides a unique, path breaking analysis, and is destined to become a classic. It will be difficult to provide enduring transnational analyses of labour and trade union responses to migration in future research without using this book as a key reference point.