Papers by Costanza Galanti
PArtecipazione e COnflitto, 2023
The healthcare sector has been profoundly impacted by global neoliberal restructuring which, in t... more The healthcare sector has been profoundly impacted by global neoliberal restructuring which, in turn, has provoked campaigns of resistance from workers and users. Scholars' investigations of this resistance to have focused on unions' struggles in the workplace, user campaigns relating to access as well as instances of self-organized healthcare provision. This paper adopts a new focus-self-organized groups of healthcare workers and users which strategically use union resources. Our findings show how these groups, while emerging independently of unions and often framing unions critically, nonetheless rely on unions both in workplace-related struggles and campaigns regarding access to services. We identify three main purposes for which these groups use unions-expertise, institutional and legal resources, and publicity-and argue that these strategic uses are related to the phase of demobilisation in which social movements find themselves. As well as providing new insights into a distinctive feature of organizing within the healthcare sector, our research contributes to the literature on workers' self-organization and to labour revitalization studies by showing how and why self-organization and trade unionism interact.
Gender, Work and Organization, 2022
During the pandemic, the ideal of the self-sacrificing health and social care worker became both ... more During the pandemic, the ideal of the self-sacrificing health and social care worker became both more powerful and more unsustainable than ever. This article explores the manner and extent to which health and social care workers collectively challenged this ideal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, this paper discusses mobilizations organized within three occupations: doctors in training, nurses, and social care workers. The study finds that collective action partially rejected and partially reproduced the self-sacrificing worker ideal. Moreover, it shows how inequality regimes, imposing this ideal through classist, gendered, ageist, and racist-nationalist processes in a pattern specific to each occupation, fundamentally shape the ways in which the ideal is challenged, as does the political culture of the groups organizing the mobilizations.
Una conricerca sul lavoro di cura e sui processi di esternalizzazione dei servizi di welfare
Books by Costanza Galanti
Covid, azione pubblica e crisi della contemporaneità. Primato o declino della politica? (Millefiorini, A. and Moini, G., eds.), 2022
Rete Iside, 2018
Questo ebook è diviso in tre capitoli.
Il primo, «Che lavoro è? Il lavoro domestico e di cura rac... more Questo ebook è diviso in tre capitoli.
Il primo, «Che lavoro è? Il lavoro domestico e di cura raccontato da chi lo fa», è composto da estratti di interviste a lavoratrici e lavoratori domestici e della cura - colf, babysitter, assistenti famigliari che si occupano di anziani (più comunemente detti badanti) e assistenti a persone con disabilità – che parlano del loro lavoro.
Nel secondo, «Rendere sostenibile un lavoro continuo e occultato», cerco di offrire un quadro sintetico delle riforme che in Italia hanno fatto, di questo che un tempo era un lavoro servile, un lavoro regolato da un contratto collettivo. Parlo poi delle condizioni di vulnerabilità scontate ancora oggi dalle lavoratrici e dai lavoratori domestici e della cura, nonché delle loro rivendicazioni di questi anni, spesso portate avanti a una scala internazionale da associazioni e sindacati di paesi diversi.
Il terzo capitolo, «Altri modelli», è un breve accenno a idee ed esperienze di socializzazione del lavoro domestico.
Book Reviews by Costanza Galanti
Global Labour Journal, 2020
Conference Presentations by Costanza Galanti
International Labour Process Conference, 2022
Studies of the relationships between social movements and trade unions often focus on how allying... more Studies of the relationships between social movements and trade unions often focus on how allying with social movements contributes to the revitalisation of trade unions (Tattersall 2005). In labour revitalization studies, the field of investigation in which scholars have developed heuristic concepts such as social movement unionism (Turner and Hurd 2001) to analyse these relationships, there is a widespread tendency to assume that unions are the primary organ through which labour can be revitalized (Levesque and Murray 2010). In contrast, other scholars have emphasised how labour can engage in collective action through groups of self-organized workers completely independently of trade unions (Atzeni 2010; Granberg 2014).
We adopt a third perspective, exploring the crucial area between trade unionism and social movements or workers’self-organisation. We do so by looking at mobilisations occurring in the national healthcare services oft wo countries - Spain and Italy - during the pandemic. Mobilisations analyzed are related to either working conditions and organized by the healthcare personnel or to access to care and organized by users. We draw on observations of mobilisations (both in their daily organizing and in their contentious actions), on unstructured interviews with activists and trade unionists as well as on the analysis of documents produced by the mobilizations and their social media presence.
We show that, while none of the mobilisations analized was primarily organized by unions, nonetheless unions were always involved in some capacity. More specifically, we argue that both workers’ and users’ groups organizing the mobilisations were able to pragmatically use the tools available to unions (for example legal protection) and their expertise while pursuing an agenda born outside of unions as well as building a community external to them.
We contribute first to the literature on the evolving forms of collective action of professionals caught between contradicting trends of professionalization and proletarization (Szabó, 2020). Second, we contribute to the literature on forms of organizing occurring “around the union form” (Atzeni, 2021, p. 2). Finally, we bring insights about struggles occurring in fields of partially socialized social reproduction such as healthcare, in which the working class can organize both as users and as workers.
References
Atzeni, M. (2010) Workplace Conflict: Mobilization and Solidarity in Argentina. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.
Atzeni, M. (2021) 'Workers’ organizations and the fetishism of the trade union form', Globalizations, pp. 1-14.
Granberg, M. (2014) 'Manufacturing dissent: Labor conflict, care work, and the politicization of caring'. Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 4(1), pp. 139-152.
Lévesque, C., & Murray, G. (2010) 'Understanding union power'. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 16(3), pp. 333-350.
Szabó, I. G. (2020) 'Professionals on the road to contention', Economic and industrial democracy, pp. 1-21.
Tattersall, A. (2005) 'There is power in coalition'. Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 16(2), pp. 97-112.
Turner, L., & Hurd, R. (2001) ‘Building social movement unionism’. Rekindling the movement: Labor’s quest for relevance in the twenty-first century, pp. 9-26.
Seminario Le professioni sanitarie tra rappresentazione pubblica e condizioni lavorative l'esperienza del Covid-19 in prospettiva storica (Università di Firenze), 2021
European Sociological Association (ESA) Conference, 2021
SASE (Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics) Conference, 2021
SISEC (Società Italiana di Sociologia Economica), Catania, Italy, 2021
Public Sector Employment Relations study group, 19th International Labour and Employment Relations Association (ILERA) World Congress, Lunden, Sweden, 2021
Seminario "Non torneremo alla normalità: nuove traiettorie dei movimenti sociali in pandemia" (Università di Bologna), 2021
The Critical Political Economy Research Network (CPERN) 2020 Mid-term Workshop, Limerick, Ireland, 2020
UCD Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence PhD Winter School, 2020
Council of European Studies (CES) research network European Integration and the Global Political Economy (EIGPE) Pre-conference Graduate Student Workshop, 2019
UCD Graduate Research Student Symposium, 2019
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Papers by Costanza Galanti
Books by Costanza Galanti
Il primo, «Che lavoro è? Il lavoro domestico e di cura raccontato da chi lo fa», è composto da estratti di interviste a lavoratrici e lavoratori domestici e della cura - colf, babysitter, assistenti famigliari che si occupano di anziani (più comunemente detti badanti) e assistenti a persone con disabilità – che parlano del loro lavoro.
Nel secondo, «Rendere sostenibile un lavoro continuo e occultato», cerco di offrire un quadro sintetico delle riforme che in Italia hanno fatto, di questo che un tempo era un lavoro servile, un lavoro regolato da un contratto collettivo. Parlo poi delle condizioni di vulnerabilità scontate ancora oggi dalle lavoratrici e dai lavoratori domestici e della cura, nonché delle loro rivendicazioni di questi anni, spesso portate avanti a una scala internazionale da associazioni e sindacati di paesi diversi.
Il terzo capitolo, «Altri modelli», è un breve accenno a idee ed esperienze di socializzazione del lavoro domestico.
Book Reviews by Costanza Galanti
Conference Presentations by Costanza Galanti
We adopt a third perspective, exploring the crucial area between trade unionism and social movements or workers’self-organisation. We do so by looking at mobilisations occurring in the national healthcare services oft wo countries - Spain and Italy - during the pandemic. Mobilisations analyzed are related to either working conditions and organized by the healthcare personnel or to access to care and organized by users. We draw on observations of mobilisations (both in their daily organizing and in their contentious actions), on unstructured interviews with activists and trade unionists as well as on the analysis of documents produced by the mobilizations and their social media presence.
We show that, while none of the mobilisations analized was primarily organized by unions, nonetheless unions were always involved in some capacity. More specifically, we argue that both workers’ and users’ groups organizing the mobilisations were able to pragmatically use the tools available to unions (for example legal protection) and their expertise while pursuing an agenda born outside of unions as well as building a community external to them.
We contribute first to the literature on the evolving forms of collective action of professionals caught between contradicting trends of professionalization and proletarization (Szabó, 2020). Second, we contribute to the literature on forms of organizing occurring “around the union form” (Atzeni, 2021, p. 2). Finally, we bring insights about struggles occurring in fields of partially socialized social reproduction such as healthcare, in which the working class can organize both as users and as workers.
References
Atzeni, M. (2010) Workplace Conflict: Mobilization and Solidarity in Argentina. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.
Atzeni, M. (2021) 'Workers’ organizations and the fetishism of the trade union form', Globalizations, pp. 1-14.
Granberg, M. (2014) 'Manufacturing dissent: Labor conflict, care work, and the politicization of caring'. Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 4(1), pp. 139-152.
Lévesque, C., & Murray, G. (2010) 'Understanding union power'. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 16(3), pp. 333-350.
Szabó, I. G. (2020) 'Professionals on the road to contention', Economic and industrial democracy, pp. 1-21.
Tattersall, A. (2005) 'There is power in coalition'. Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 16(2), pp. 97-112.
Turner, L., & Hurd, R. (2001) ‘Building social movement unionism’. Rekindling the movement: Labor’s quest for relevance in the twenty-first century, pp. 9-26.
Il primo, «Che lavoro è? Il lavoro domestico e di cura raccontato da chi lo fa», è composto da estratti di interviste a lavoratrici e lavoratori domestici e della cura - colf, babysitter, assistenti famigliari che si occupano di anziani (più comunemente detti badanti) e assistenti a persone con disabilità – che parlano del loro lavoro.
Nel secondo, «Rendere sostenibile un lavoro continuo e occultato», cerco di offrire un quadro sintetico delle riforme che in Italia hanno fatto, di questo che un tempo era un lavoro servile, un lavoro regolato da un contratto collettivo. Parlo poi delle condizioni di vulnerabilità scontate ancora oggi dalle lavoratrici e dai lavoratori domestici e della cura, nonché delle loro rivendicazioni di questi anni, spesso portate avanti a una scala internazionale da associazioni e sindacati di paesi diversi.
Il terzo capitolo, «Altri modelli», è un breve accenno a idee ed esperienze di socializzazione del lavoro domestico.
We adopt a third perspective, exploring the crucial area between trade unionism and social movements or workers’self-organisation. We do so by looking at mobilisations occurring in the national healthcare services oft wo countries - Spain and Italy - during the pandemic. Mobilisations analyzed are related to either working conditions and organized by the healthcare personnel or to access to care and organized by users. We draw on observations of mobilisations (both in their daily organizing and in their contentious actions), on unstructured interviews with activists and trade unionists as well as on the analysis of documents produced by the mobilizations and their social media presence.
We show that, while none of the mobilisations analized was primarily organized by unions, nonetheless unions were always involved in some capacity. More specifically, we argue that both workers’ and users’ groups organizing the mobilisations were able to pragmatically use the tools available to unions (for example legal protection) and their expertise while pursuing an agenda born outside of unions as well as building a community external to them.
We contribute first to the literature on the evolving forms of collective action of professionals caught between contradicting trends of professionalization and proletarization (Szabó, 2020). Second, we contribute to the literature on forms of organizing occurring “around the union form” (Atzeni, 2021, p. 2). Finally, we bring insights about struggles occurring in fields of partially socialized social reproduction such as healthcare, in which the working class can organize both as users and as workers.
References
Atzeni, M. (2010) Workplace Conflict: Mobilization and Solidarity in Argentina. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.
Atzeni, M. (2021) 'Workers’ organizations and the fetishism of the trade union form', Globalizations, pp. 1-14.
Granberg, M. (2014) 'Manufacturing dissent: Labor conflict, care work, and the politicization of caring'. Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 4(1), pp. 139-152.
Lévesque, C., & Murray, G. (2010) 'Understanding union power'. Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 16(3), pp. 333-350.
Szabó, I. G. (2020) 'Professionals on the road to contention', Economic and industrial democracy, pp. 1-21.
Tattersall, A. (2005) 'There is power in coalition'. Labour & Industry: a journal of the social and economic relations of work, 16(2), pp. 97-112.
Turner, L., & Hurd, R. (2001) ‘Building social movement unionism’. Rekindling the movement: Labor’s quest for relevance in the twenty-first century, pp. 9-26.