Political Exchange and Collective Identity in Industrial Conflict

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore whether the various events which followed the sudden increase in wages of the years 1968–70 in the main industrial countries can be accounted for by one general theoretical framework. Do the very high wage claims, the intensity of conflicts, their new forms and the new types of claim put forward, the increase in the political involvement of the unions, the spread of unionisation and of social movements into new groups of the population belong to a common pattern? Are they to be explained as a consequence of some structural trend or as a temporary alteration of the systems of political and of labour representation?