In manufacturing, strong trade unions have influenced debates on industrial and investment policy, as well as how technological change is taking place at the workplace.
Our examples from Brasil and Germany show how a combination of institutional power through co-determination rights and participation-intensive, company-based projects such as "Work + Innovation" has helped come up with practical solutions at the company level.
Such innovations on the ground have strengthened the understanding that workers embody indispensable knowledge about the labour process and are thus catalysts for successful changes on the shopfloor.
In Brasil and in locations where conflict-oriented industrial relations prevail, the ability of trade unions to mobilise and broaden the bargaining agenda to include issues such as investment, industrial, training and upskilling policy is crucial.
If in addition, transnational solidarity is mobilised among the German and Brasilian metalworkers' unions, company decisions can be influenced that lead to more investment, the protection of jobs and the observance of labour rights.
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The "Trade Unions in Transformation 4.0" project was initiated by FES with the aim of better understanding the representation of workers' interests in digital capitalism. The project sheds light on how trade unions and new organisations of workers are mobilising their power resources to face and shape the emerging new world of work. FES wants to contribute to the strategy-building among workers and trade unions and is offering its cooperation.
The project highlights how workers and unions are shaping change in the industrial sectors, how tech workers are becoming part of the workers' movement, how transport workers are opposing the restructuring of their sector through platforms, and what digital tools and apps unions are developing to expand their power in the digital economy.