The Great Recession and the upsurge of widespread social movements in various crisis-ridden countries gave new impetus to the debate on the relationship between economic breakdown and the occurrence of collective action. Regarding strikes, it is still an ongoing scientific debate whether and how economic crises actually affect strikes. In fact, multiple (and in part contradictory) explanatory models prevail. The business-cycle model directly relates strike activity to economic cycles and to the workers’ changing bargaining position due to fluctuations in manpower supply and demand. The political exchange model, for its part, advocates for a look beyond the economy, towards the political exchange that takes place between unions and state actors. If this exchange is positive, strikes are expected to decrease because the distributional struggle would shift away from the marketplace and towards the public arena. The resource mobilization approach suggests that strikes depend on union strength and, hence, more attention should be paid to the changing resources available to the unions. Finally, the institutionalization approach calls for a closer look at the transformations of the collective bargaining framework, which are expected to affect the cost-benefit ratio of strikes.

Regarding the Spanish case, there is no doubt that workers were profoundly hit by the Great Recession: Short and long-term unemployment rates, the share of people being at risk of poverty or social exclusion increased, in-work poverty rates or rates of involuntary temporary and part-time employment – all these figures attest to the generalized deterioration of working and living conditions in Spain. But the crisis did not only affect individual workers, it also had negative effects on organized labor: Employment loss, for instance, resulted in a decline in union membership and thus in union strength. Especially the latter of the two labor market reforms in 2010 and 2012 significantly weakened the unions’ bargaining power in the negotiation of collective agreements. While all these evolutions can easily be discerned and described, it is much more complex to examine whether and how they affected the patterns of strikes.

I revisit the issue by examining continuities and changes in strike activity between 2002 and 2016 in Spain. This time frame enables to draw comparisons between a pre-crisis period (2002-2007), a period during which the crisis came to its full force (2008-2013), and a period of moderate economic recovery (2014-2016). In order provide in-depth insights into the processes at work, three scales are related with one another: Findings at a national scale are articulated both with patterns found at the level of the Community of Madrid and with micro-processes observed at the company level of Madrid Underground. For the first two scales, official strike data provided by the Spanish Ministry of Employment and Social Security are analyzed. Regarding Madrid Underground, data were gathered through a 14 months lasting fieldwork among workers and union members within the company. This research design allows for a fine-grained analysis: Mixed methods relate macroscopic trends, obtained through analysis of aggregate data, with micro processes observed through an ethnographic study. The multi-scale approach, for its part, takes into account the specific logics that operate on different scales.

This paper offers a better understanding of the changing patterns of strikes during the recent economic crisis in Spain. I produce three main contributions to the research area on industrial conflict: 1) I stress the weakness of mono-causal explanatory models: I show that, rather than exclusive, the different theoretical perspectives are mutually conducive and that they are most significant if they are combined. 2) I call for a sequential and interactionist perspective: In fact, only the political exchange model considers (and only to a certain extent) interactions between different actors. In this paper, I argue that strikes can be better understood if they are considered as sequences of interactions, which include workers, unions, employers and governments. 3) I identify the shortcomings of studies limited to strikes: Research on industrial conflict is in fact often limited to strikes. In this paper, I also address the rise of the “Indignados” and the multiple “Mareas,” which took the streets (and the workplaces) in the aftermath of the Great Recession in Spain. I argue that strike patterns can only be fully understood if they are related to other contentious tactics – notably street protests – available to the workers. By bridging research on industrial conflict with social movement studies, this paper thus ultimately calls for an interdisciplinary perspective on collective action.

These empirical and theoretical insights also prove to be useful for unions and other political actors engaged in social change. The combination of an in-depth analysis of Madrid Underground with the examination of regional and national patterns prevents from hasty conclusions and allows one to consider the complexity of the processes at work. By taking into account that each scale involves specific configurations of and relationships between actors, such a perspective shows that varying processes can operate at different scales. This fine-grained analysis should guarantee that my findings correspond to the realities (and the dilemmas) that workers and union members face in their daily lives. Finally, this presentation should also serve as a basis for discussing the parallels but also the differences with those Latin American countries which have experienced comparably severe economic crises in the recent past.