ABSTRACT
Protests by the unemployed have been a recurrent topic of news coverage for over two decades. Numerous examples can be given such as the European marches against unemployment, job insecurity, and social exclusions that started in 1997, the Monday demonstrations of the German unemployed in the contentious summer of 2004, or the national marches of Spanish unemployed (los parados) in July 2012. Social movement scholars have devoted a number of studies to the analysis of these protest waves (see for example Demazière and Pignoni 1998; Maurer 2001; Lahusen and Baumgarten 2010; Chabanet and Royall 2010; Reiss and Perry 2011; Chabanet and Faniel 2012a). This interest is not accidental because protest movements by poor and low-resourced people belong to the research agenda of social movement analysis since its establishment within academia (see for example Lipsky 1970; Piven and Cloward 1977; Gamson and Schmeidler 1984). Social movement scholars have thus contributed considerably to the advancement of empirical and theoretical knowledge. To this, we have to add several historiographical studies that provided ample evidence about the mobilization of the poor during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States (Folsom 1991; Lorence 1996; Gabriel 2011), Great Britain (Croucher 1987; Perry 2000); France (Perry 2007) and Germany (McElligott 1987; Zukas 2011).
