Thomas Fetzer

• Central European University

Research on economic patriotism has so far focused on public policy and only marginally addressed the role of non-state actors. This contribution seeks to fill this gap. It examines the emergence of a European economic patriotism discourse among trade union representatives at General Motors since the late 1990s, which underpinned the operation of t...

Inspired by the ‘transnational turn’ in history writing, this essay reviews recent scholarship dealing with industrial relations from a transnational perspective. The essay starts with conceptual reflections on the merits and potential pitfalls of a transnational approach, and suggests that that such an approach should include not only the study of...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous growth of research about European Union legislation in the field of employee participation. Besides studies analysing the legislation itself, many publications also deal with the impact of EU developments on employee participation in member states. While impressive in its conceptual breadth and empirical deta...

Surveys of labour practices in subsidiaries of US-owned firms in Europe often argue that reluctance to join employer associations is a distinct feature of the American approach to industrial relations, entailing tensions with trade unions, particularly in so-called stakeholder economies like Germany. Taking the cases of Fordwerke and Opel, this art...

Multinational companies (MNC) are today one of the most important challenges for the trade union movement. Against this backdrop, and given that the growth of MNC has been a long-term historical process, it is rather surprising how little efforts labour historians have devoted to the topic — despite the existence of a relevant and rich sociological...

This article contributes to the recent transnational turn in labour history with a case study of West German and British trade union politics at Ford between 1967 and 1973. It demonstrates that international economic interdependence became a major concern for organised labour in both countries because of the emergence in 1967 of the Ford of Europe...

The European works council (EWC) at General Motors is widely regarded as an outstanding example of cross-border trade union coopera-tion. This article reconstructs its development as a European trade union 'risk community', which since the mid-1990s has faced unprecedented chal-lenges to workers' interests as a result of intra-European competition...

Abstract For a long time scholars of industrial relations tended to associate notions of internationalization with the debate about the cross-border convergence of industrial relations systems. Convergence versus path dependence was thus a key controversy in industrial relations studies for decades. This debate was mirrored in multinational compani...