In the Interest of Labour? Union Strategy Toward Flexicurity

Political economists tend to view labor unions in contemporary advanced capitalism as exhausted, characterizing them as having become less relevant and merely oriented toward maintaining the status quo. This paper argues against this view, demonstrating that it is misleading and misconceptualizes the politics of “flexicurity,” i.e. distributional struggles over efforts in the rich democracies to move toward labor market arrangements that combine high levels of both economic flexibility and social security. Addressing unions’ contemporary struggles head-on – from declining membership and weakening solidarity to threats of labor market dualization – the paper leverages industrial relations and social movement scholarship to develop a synthetic theory of organized labor’s evolving interests and room for strategic maneuvering. The paper subsequently probes arguments about unions’ constraints, choices and influence in Denmark – the most prominent home of flexicurity arrangements and a critical case in scholars’ debate over the evolution of coordinated capitalism. As detailed process-tracing reveals, organized labor not only continues to centrally shape the evolution of collective bargaining, social policy and vocational training institutions in the 21st century, flexicurity-type outcomes would have likely remained out of political reach without them. A conclusion addresses the paper’s lessons for reconceptualizing union influence on institutional changes at the work-welfare nexus across both other coordinated economies and the rich democracies more broadly.