European Labor Unions and the Global Justice Movement: Strengthened Cohesion or Reflection of Diversity?

This paper deals with the participation of labor unions in the Global Justice Movement at the European level. We focus on the strategies of unions that are members of the European Trades Union Council (ETUC) and of the Council itself toward this transnational movement of contention, which has been visible in Europe and the world through several counter-summits and social forums since the end of the 1990s. Do the unions in the Global Justice Movement refer to a common strategy aimed at reinforcing the cohesion of labor unionism behind the ETUC banner? Although the decisions to take part (or not) in the movement reflect a great diversity of conceptions of labor unionism in Europe, the unions and the ETUC try to appear as a homogeneous actor within it. However, these attempts remain limited by the remote participation of the ETUC and by its lack of leadership. From a labor union viewpoint, the emergence of the Global Justice Movement reveals the weaknesses of organized unionism at the European level as it has been built since the 1970s.