The European Trade Unions Confederation: A Labour Movement Among EU Institutions and Their Constraints, in M. Di Donato, S. Pons (Eds.), European Integration and the Global Financial Crisis Looking Back on the Maastricht Years, 1980s–1990s, Palgrave, 2022

Unions and pro-labour intellectuals have been deeply committed to a social Europe with unions as a driving force. At several moments and on various levels, these personalities have played key roles in the construction of unionist views and policies for an integrated Europe and in the establishment of the European Trade Unions Confederation (ETUC). The present chapter draws upon my studies in the archives of the Confederazione generale italiana del lavoro (CGIL) and the Nordic labour movement, alongside documents from the archives of trade union leaders and economists such as Emilio Gabaglio, Bruno Trentin and Franco Archibugi. It helps reconstruct ETUC’s development, building on the work of past scholars who have long considered the vast and groundbreaking investment plans of the European Economic Community (EEC) to have been key to the Confederation’s existence. The centrality of the EEC’s plans is so apparent that, in reconstructing the history of European integration, we must make note of the complete rejection of the plans Jacques Delors later presented to the European Commission, or those that Allan Larsson brought before the Party of European Socialists (PES). ETUC’s actions responded to the structural weakness of wages, and this is of central importance to our understanding of the nature of social dialogue and of ETUC’s practices and responses to European integration.