Europe on Strike: Wildcat Strikes as a pan-European Phenomenon, 1944-1953.

During the first post-war years, Europe saw thousands of strikes – the great majority of which was of a wildcat character (i.e. not backed by trade union leaderships), short-lived (often lasting no longer than a couple of hours), and inspired by bread-and-butter concerns (with demands for better provisions almost always taking centre stage). Yet, this type of spontaneous and localized strike has by and large gone unnoticed in academic literature, which has shown a strong preference for politically more “significant” strikes (e.g. the “insurrectional” strikes that swept France in 1947-48). My project, conversely, takes wildcat strikes as its point of departure. I aim to write a comparative social history of the wildcat strike movement hitting the European continent (both in Eastern and Western Europe) following World War Two – with a focus on wildcat strikes in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, Italy, and Poland. My project addresses a broad range of themes, including gender history (exploring how trade union leaders grappled with this frequently women-led protest form) and the history of racism (exploring how striking workers often attributed the problems of their local community to ethnic outsiders). Above all, however, by focusing on spontaneous, wildcat strikes, my project (more so than studies of those strikes stagemanaged by trade unions) provides us with a real insight into the everyday concerns of workers at a crucial juncture in European history.