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"Until the financial crisis of 2008, European labour politics has mainly been shaped by horizontal EU market integration through the free movement of goods, capital, services and people. Since 2011, the latter has been complemented by vertical EU integration through the direct surveillance of EU member states. The resulting new economic governance regime of the EU opens contradictory possibilities for labour movements and the European integration process."

"Industrial relations scholars have argued that east-west labour migration may benefit trade unions in Central and Eastern Europe. By focusing on the distributional aspect of wage policies adopted by two competing Romanian trade unions in the healthcare sector, this article challenges the assumption of a virtuous link between migration, labour shortages and collective wage increases. We show that migration may also displace collective and egalitarian wage policies in favour of individual and marketized ones that put workers in competition with one another. Thus, the question is not so much whether migration leads to wage increases in sending countries, but whether trade unions' wage demands in response to outward migration consolidate collective solidarity and coordination in wage policy-making or support its individualization and commodification."

"Processes of neoliberal globalization have put national trade unions under pressure as the transnational organization of production puts these labour movements in competition with each other. The global economic crisis has intensified these pressures further. And yet, economic and political integration processes have also provided workers with new possibilities to organize resistance.
Emphasizing the importance of agency, this book analyzes transnational labour action in times of crisis, historically and now. It draws on a variety of fascinating cases, across formal and informal collectives, in order to clarify which factors facilitate or block the formation of solidarity. Moving beyond empirical description of cases to an informed understanding of collective action across borders, the volume provides an insightful theorization of transnational action."

"This introductory article to the special issue proposes a more encompassing view of transnational collective action in Europe, which goes beyond the classical, country-by-country oriented, comparative industrial relations approach. Instead, we propose an extension of focus to capture also other actors, action repertoires, places and levels. Specifically, we introduce and integrate the contributions to this issue, by extending our analytical perspectives from traditional forms of employment to precarious and posted workers; from national and European trade union structures to informal groups of workers and social movements; from unions' traditional strongholds in manufacturing multinationals to workers in the meat industry, health care or occupied factories; from national unions seen as coherent units to a perspective that emphasizes their internal contradictions; from the analysis of discrete actions to historically more encompassing perspectives; and from utilitarian views on collective action to a larger perspective that assesses the analysis of the importance of collective struggles for the making and unmaking of a new European working class."

"While migration scholars often neglect the national and transnational relations of production and exchange within which labor migration occurs, international political economists tend to treat labor migration as a mere side effect of transnational capitalism. By contrast, this article considers the constitutive role that post-socialist transformations and the EU integration played in shaping the various patterns of intra-European east–west labor migration since 1989. We argue that labor migration was not driven by development differentials between the west and the east as such, but rather by the particular type of development the latter adopted after the fall of communist regimes and by the way post-socialist countries were integrated in transnational circuits of production and exchange. We are sustaining our claims by a comparative assessment across time of the articulations between the different modes of production and different labor migration patterns during different stages of Romania's post-socialist transformation. This historical comparison enables us to insulate the influence of changing levels of development and modes of production on labor migration because our focus on a single country is keeping the influence of other national institutional factors constant."

"Health services have long been insulated from the process of European integration. In this article, however, we show that we are witnessing their re-configuration in an emerging EU health-care system. The article uncovers the structuring lines of this system by focusing on three interrelated EU-wide processes influencing the integration of national health-care systems into a larger whole. First, the privatisation of health-care services following the constraints of Maastricht economic convergence and the EU accession criteria; second, health-care worker and patient mobility arising from the free movement of workers and services within the European Single Market; and third, new EU laws and country-specific prescriptions on economic governance that the EU has been issuing following the 2008 financial crisis. The article shows that these processes have helped to construct a European health-care system that is uneven in terms of the distribution of patient access to services and of health-care workers' wages and working conditions, but very similar in terms of EU economic and financial governance pressures on health care across EU Member States."