Social democratic parties and organized labour in the 21st century

What is it about?

The project of social democratic renewal goes through the rebuilding of strong institutional ties with the trade union movement and the formation of a broad progressive political platform. This broad coalition, including NGOs and other social movements, can only be built if social democracy succeeds in combining its message of materialist restoration of welfare and social compensation with a positive response to the anxieties of late modernity. Social democracy needs to articulate a new vision of the good society as the secure society, one in which solidarity and a sense of community offer individuals the chance for collective self-expression. In building such a coalition, the support of representative, innovative and forward-looking trade unions can prove very valuable.

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Why is it important?

The politics of the new era, it seems, has made the party–union link something of an aberration, a historical relic underpinned by the interest-based congruent action that brought politicians and union people together, in support of workers’ rights and collective emancipation, in the now-forgotten golden age of welfare capitalism. But does the party–union story need to end this way? In fact, is there a reason for it to end at all? In what follows I will argue that, far from being obsolete, strong organizational and political links with trade unions ought to be at the heart of social democracy’s attempt to resuscitate its political fortunes

Perspectives