Social Crisis in Europe – Karamessini

The Social Crisis in Europe: Politics of Precariousness or Shift to a New Social Model of Regulation

By: Maria Karamessini

One year and a half after the outbreak of the current economic recession, generated by the financial crisis that began in the USA a year earlier, all international organisations are announcing the beginning of recovery in Europe, but recognise that unemployment is going to rise further in the coming years due to a continuing downward adjustment of employment meant to bring labour productivity back to its pre-crisis level.

”Adjustment”, “correction” and “clearing” mechanisms for capital to protect or redress (rates of) profits during economic crises always imply painful social consequences for the working classes, labour market (re)entrants, and vulnerable social groups. However, the extent and acuteness of such consequences differ in time and space, as a result of state intervention and national institutional settings that may reinforce or mitigate them. Finally, crises can also be moments of rupture of the prevailing social and institutional order and of major reshuffling of class coalitions, power relations, and institutional architecture at the national and international levels.

Reinventing, Reimagining, Rebuilding – Labour Internationalism

ReinventingLabour is for people who organize, struggle, analyze, critique and strategize within and around the international labour movement. It is for people who seek a space to share ideas and resources regarding challenges and potentials to strengthen a vibrant, critical, plural and emancipatory movement of all kinds of working people everywhere – a movement intimately related to the new ‘global justice and solidarity movement’ (aka the anti- or alter-globalisation movement).