How to represent the unrepresented? Renewing the collective action repertoires of autonomous workers in three countries

In modern labour markets, the archetypal model of full-time regular employment is now more and more challenged by wide-ranging alternatives. The main common features of such alternatives are a progressive evolution of the standard employment relationship towards a fragmentation of the work process in specific tasks and higher autonomy in the way of doing the job. Numerous work relations that do not conform with traditional forms of control by the employing entity are excluded from the domain of labour legislation and social protection. The workers’ autonomy seems therefore not devoid of risks, which raises the question of new forms of collective action likely to deal with them.

Three ways of renewing the social dialogue in a more inclusive perspective are here compared through case studies embedded in three contrasted contexts, i.e., Belgium, France and the Netherlands. In each context, we analyze union and non-union initiatives by scrutinizing the ‘functional equivalents’ they provide to open-ended standard employment relationships and their engagement in a process of collective capability building. Drawing on the institutional literature, our analysis explores the links between the industrial relations system as well as the flexibility of national labour markets and the modalities of collective action likely to be offered to autonomous workers. Our analysis demonstrates the undeniable influence of the institutional context in which initiatives are developed.