An assessment of European integration for the EU-15 (1971-2015)

A long-term assessment of the EU integration process is attempted for the1971-2015 period, by comparing per capita Gross Domestic Product (in constant Purchasing Power Parities) and its change, for EU-15 and non-EU states that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. A growing divergence is found between Greece but also Portugal and the EU southern periphery on the one hand, and Luxembourg, Ireland and Scandinavian states on the other that have benefi ted from EU integration, especially after the Eurozone was formed. Those EU-15 members that have joined the Eurozone have not benefi ted as much as non-members. It is suggested that two types of states can be trapped by the integration process: The relative or absolute losers of the currency zone, like Greece and states like the UK that have benefi ted less from integration, while choosing to remain at an earlier integration stage. Given the mix of monetary and fi scal policies pursued, resolving the former problem will require setting-up a common production union to advance competitiveness and co-operation, while solution to the latter should avoid the risk of disintegration and of the permanent loss of EU membership.

Labour, organisational rescaling and the politics of production: union renewal in the privatised rail industry

Researchers are becoming more alert to the importance of geography to union renewal in counteracting the strategies of corporate and state actors. In this article the example of the UK’s rail industry is used to show how privatisation created a new geography of employment relations. Unions responded to the destruction of national collective bargaining and a new fragmented geography of employment relations through organisational restructuring, which, in different ways, was marked by a continuing commitment to a politics of production in connecting grassroots workers to national leaderships. Engaging with the new labour geography, however, the article argues that a further critical element in renewal has been the unions’ ability to rethink their internal geographies and scalar relations to contest change at the level of the workplace.

Defense Workers' Struggles for Patriotic Control: The Labor-Management-State Contests over Defense Production at Brewster, 1940–1944

Labor historians have heretofore presented bifurcated portrayals of the relationship between defense workers and the wartime, corporatist state during the Second World War. While liberal CIO leaders energetically tried to establish labor's greater representation in wartime mobilization and politics through patriotic social unionism, militant rank and filers turned out to be antistate wildcatters. In contrast, this local study of Brewster workers producing naval aircraft suggests that the wartime fetish with patriotic productivity had converging impacts on the relationship of both international union leaders and rank and filers with the state. Industrial mobilization by the military simultaneously demanded and impeded orderly expansion of production, which in the process manufactured faltering companies like Brewster. Brewster workers, criticizing corporate and military mismanagement and calling for state intervention as a political remedy in their political letters and confidential reports, intensified their contests for joint control of production, employment, and planning. However, their struggles for patriotic control were contingent upon the Navy's continuous demands for Brewster planes, skills, and facilities and thus could not survive reconversion downsizing in defense production. Union leaders retreated into organizing new shops in metropolitan New York, which primarily involved routine interplays between few union leaders and NLRB officials. The reconversion at Brewster marked the postwar bureaucratization of defense workers' relationship with the state.