Union campaigns to organize across production networks in the European telecommunications industry: lessons from the UK, Italy, Sweden and Poland

Virginia Doellgast, Katja Sarmiento-Mirwaldt and Chiara Benassi provide lessons from the telecommunications industry in the UK, Italy, Sweden and Poland. Their chapter focuses on trade union campaigns to improve or maintain the pay and working conditions of workers – including those employed through temporary agency and freelance contracts – involved in the restructuring of call centres and technician and IT services in incumbent operators. Successful organizing involved creative campaigns across the whole production network. The historic bargaining power of unions could be relied on in the telecom incumbents to negotiate limits on externalizations. Strategies included partnerships to improve productivity as well as protests and organizing to generate additional externalization costs through negative publicity and labour confl ict. Successful campaigns extended collective representation and legal protection to externalized groups. This required mobilizations to organize the peripheral workers and campaigns to close loopholes in national legislation. In the end, some campaigns proved to be more effective than others. However, variation in outcomes could not be attributed to any choice of unions to represent peripheral workers (or not). Successes could be explained by the possibility of accessing encompassing labour market institutions (i.e. regulations on equal pay and working conditions for peripheral workers) and the ability to develop member mobilization across the production network.