ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on qualitative interviews with activists and other types of qualitative materials to discuss the emergence of different types of relationships between confederate trade unions and other collective actors mobilizing in the contentious field of precarity in Italy, i.e. social movement organizations and grass-roots groups of precarious workers. Following changes in the legislative and economic contexts from a cross-time perspective, the chapter analyzes the struggles of precarious workers from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, discerning different patterns of conflict, competition and collaboration that are characteristic of the ways in which confederate trade unions interact with social movement actors in the realm of labour. Most importantly, the experiences analyzed in the chapter cast light on the agency assumed by grass-roots groups of precarious workers vis-à-vis the confederate unions, especially when it came to the representation of interests in public and at the political level.
