"Today, We are Precarious. Tomorrow, We will be Unbeatable". Early Struggles of Precarious Workers in Italy and Greece

In this chapter we explore early precarious workers’ mobilizations in two southern European countries, Italy and Greece, so as to detail how marginalized categories of workers engage in protest. In doing so, we show how innovative forms of workers’ participation have emerged in recent years outside the realm of traditional labor organizations. More specifically, this chapter presents a cross-national comparative analysis centered on collective identification processes and how they overlapped with different dimensions of protest. We reconstruct the marginality of precarious workers in the political, legislative and discursive arena, showing the significant differences between the two national structural contexts in which protests took place. In particular, we show that the discursive level presented important differences between the two countries. In Italy, the discourse on flexibility was dominant and had an overall positive connotation in the public debate. In Greece however, the discourse on flexibility was marginal and had an overarching negative connotation in the public debate. This structural difference was relevant for the role that the symbolic level of protests had in the two countries, especially with regard to the organizational patterns, the forms of protest and the field of contention linked to Italian and Greek mobilizations to fight precarity.