Out of sight, out of mind: The challenge of external work arrangements for industrial manufacturing unions in Germany and Italy

Work externalisation has challenged the ability of industrial unions to represent workers along the value chain and sustain solidaristic policies, leading to the growing fragmentation of wages and working conditions. This article aims to complement institutionalist analyses of unions’ strategies towards peripheral workers by pointing at the role of the labour process. The authors argue that variations in the bargaining strategies and their outcomes for different types of peripheral workers can be explained by observing the extent to which the use of different external work arrangements for specific tasks challenges the logic of industrial unionism. The findings rely on a structured comparison of unions’ responses to the use of agency work and on-site subcontracting in four plants owned by two multinational companies in Italy and Germany.