Through this master thesis, we seek to present an alternative to the crisis of European traditional trade unions which have been losing membership and power for years. In doing so, we take the concrete example of the Italian unions di base – small and conflict-oriented unions – and their organisation in logistics. This is a key sector of the capitalist economy, dominated by migrant labour, which is often highly exploited. Despite the extremely difficult living and working conditions, this segment of the workforce, with the help of the di base unions, has managed to resist and win a high standard of labour. By comparing the approach of the di base unions and Italy’s main traditional unions to organising migrant workers in logistics, we seek to establish why the former have been particularly successful in this respect and summarise the final effects of the struggle in the sector. In doing so, we focus on the political effects rather than the economic ones – from how workers and their thinking changed during the struggle, to the broader social implications of their struggle and the efforts of the di base unions to engage politically beyond the workplace. In our analysis and interpretation, we draw partly on our own experience of working for the di base union ADL Cobas, which we present with a goal of potentially contributing to attempts to organise (migrant) workers in Slovenia.
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