ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Italian mobilisations against precarity, initiated and sustained by social movement groups and social movement organisations without the support of institutional political actors, such as trade union confederations and political parties. It shows on the contrary, that the contentious field related to the labour market saw the emergence of social movement groups opposed to the flexibility discourse from a bottom-up perspective. The chapter discusses how non-institutional political actors such as social centres and groups of precarious workers engaged in the organisation of struggles against precarity and interacted with institutional political actors such as political parties and trade union confederations. It sketches the figure of precarious workers and the notion of precarity and then discusses the discursive context about labour market flexibility that was dominant in Italy till the end of the 1990s and introduced the constellation of institutional and non-institutional political actors that populated the contentious field related to labour market flexibility.
