Students and workers united! School student unions and trade unions in the mobilisations of 2014-2015 in Italy

• In Event: Students, Activism and Social Movements

Proposal

This paper addresses the convergence of student unions and trade unions in a protest campaign targeting neoliberal-leaning proposals regarding secondary education and the labour market put forward in Italy by the Government led by Matteo Renzi (2014-2016). It focuses in particular on the role of student unions of secondary education in the creation of a connection between school students, teachers and workers in the mobilisation wave in the school year 2014-2015. The mobilisation is seen as eventful in allowing an intensification of political cooperation between actors opposing the reform, that can be considered as a neoliberal change triggering protest. The paper is connected to the existing literature on the creation of alliances within and between social movements, coalition building and social movement – trade union relations.

The study includes three parts of literature review. Part I has the goal to reconstruct the most recent trends of scholarship on student unions. The research on third-level education student unions provides key insights that can allow a better start of studies on student movements and student unions of secondary education. Part II looks at trade unions and at the mechanisms of alliance building that involve them. The studies of social movement coalitions and of social movement unionism perfectly prepare the ground for new analyses of inter-sectoral cooperation such as the one among trade unions and student movements. Part III tries to connect this study to an eventful conception of temporality. Previous works on anti-austerity protest can be well linked to the mobilisations against neoliberal reform object of this study, and the attention on events can allow a better understanding of how unions changed their attitudes towards cooperation in front of the strong threat to legitimation represented by the Buona Scuola and Jobs Act reforms.

The focus on the common repertoire of contention of these different organisations and the integration of different sectoral campaigns will allow an understanding of how activists from different ages and with different backgrounds managed to unite their struggles, and which was the role of representative organisations and unions in this process. The research is based upon to the study of media sources (both traditional and online) and statements produced by the unions. Interviews with activists that were directly involved will allow an insight on the dynamics behind the cooperation among these organisations and their related constituencies. Even if constituting just a component of the labour and student movements, unions will emerge as key actors in cross-sectoral partnerships. This paper has already been presented at the Conference “From Student Unions to Trade Unions: Campus-Based Activism and Beyond” hosted by the SSLH – Society for the Study of Labour History at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne (England – United Kingdom) in January 2023 and it will be presented at the Conference of the SISP – Italian Political Science Association in Genoa, September 2023.

Author

• Giuseppe Lipari, Scuola Normale Superiore