Vested interests? Unions,the gilets jaunes movement and the bases for sustainable solidarity

Abstract

In the 2010s, in response to the impact of the financial crisis of 2008, anti-establishment, anti-austerity, pro-democracy movements such as Occupy!, the Spanish indignados and, in 2018, the gilets jaunes in France emerged. With the rise of independent unions and new forms of work and organising in the platform economy, the future of unions increasingly depends on their ability to engage with a broader range of social and community-based interests and organisations. The gilets jaunes movement in France, like the indignados in Spain, explicitly rejected any links or joint actions with unions, at least initially and in a formal sense. The gilets jaunes case makes visible the challenges for unions, as institutions embedded and reinforcing the current configuration of capitalism, to represent a more fluid set of interests. On the flipside, the dissipation of these movements also makes visible the challenges for social movements maintaining collective action and solidarity without the leadership and organisation familiar in union organisations, and the meta-collective action frame of shared working-class interests. In this reflection, we revisit the gilets jaunes movement and its significance for building bases of sustainable solidarity at a time of the movement’s attempts to establish lasting forms of solidarity through gaining recognition in representative elections as the Union Syndicale Gilets Jaunes (USGJ).