EU Governance and Trade Union–Social Movement Coalitions: Explaining the Unequal Success of the 'Right2Water' and the 'Fair Transport' European Citizens’ Initiatives

This paper presents the result of a pilot study of our new European Research Council project on labour politics and the EU’s new economic governance regime in the public transport and water services sector (www.erc-europeanunions.eu ). We have selected water and transport because both are network industries where labour is assumed to have a strong structural position. The choice of these sectors is also informed by the fact that social movements and unions are active in both of them, albeit often with different priorities and orientations. Whereas established unions tend to prioritise immediate industrial relations concerns, such as higher wages, social movements usually mobilise to guarantee citizens’ access to quality public services. At times however, the two concerns converge, as the case of the first successful European Citizen Initiative on right2water demonstrates. This campaign was coordinated by the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), but it strongly relied on the support of social movements at the national and transnational level. This combination made the collection of the required number of signatures possible. By contrast, the ECI fair transport campaign, launched in 2015 by the European Transport Workers’ Federation (ETF) to compel the EU to propose measures for ensuring fair competition in transport and to guarantee equal treatment of workers, lacked broader support. These two examples indicate that mobilisations of users and producers of public services do not always converge. The paper therefore aims to uncover the conditions that may explain the different outcomes in the two cases.