Labor market transformation and new forms of self-organizing: the case of Italian Clap

The late 20th century age of globalisation witnessed growing deregulation of national labour markets following the OECD (1994) guidelines. Some scholars (i.e. Avdagic and Crouch 2015) have argued that labour market deregulation has resulted into a growth of “precarious work”, a non-standard form of employment that is poorly paid, insecure, unprotected, and cannot support a household. Traditional trade unions organizations have failed in addressing the needs of this fraction of the working class. Indeed, some commentators (Näswall et al. 2004) have showed that greater levels of subjective job insecurity tend to be systematically correlated with less member satisfaction with unions, less identification with unions and a stronger desire to leave unions. Our presentation addresses this issue as well as the process through which precarious workers organize and find new collective strategies to defend and improve their working conditions.