The labour fix : workers and unions within the Green automotive transition

Introduction

In recent years, the automotive industry has garnered considerable attention because of the wide-ranging implications of the transition to electrification and autonomous driving. In Europe, this shift has been accelerated by the ban on the production of internal combustion vehicles (ICVs) by 2035. One key implication concerns the impact on employment, as the changes in production could result in workforce reductions and, potentially, the obsolescence of skills, among other effects (Boewe and Schulten, 2023; De Propris and Bailey, 2020). The extent of the impact on employment might be overstated at this stage of the transition, however; some research suggests that, in the short to medium term, labour intensity in the production of electric vehicles (EVs) could be higher than for ICVs (Cotterman et al., 2024; Küpper et al., 2020). Nevertheless, several major European original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and large suppliers are either threatening to close plants, have already began doing so, or are divesting. This indicates a significant shift in the industry (Humphrey et al., 2025).

However, the automotive industry’s problems are part of a broader global trend of manufacturing overcapacity (Benanav, 2019), market saturation and declining overall profit margins (Haines-Doran, 2024) because of a realisation problem, in other words, an inability to transform the surplus value from the production process into value at the moment of exchange (Harvey, 2019). This tendency, which is particularly evident in high-income countries where legacy manufacturers are based, had been mitigated by sales in the Chinese market (Inagaki et al., 2024). The necessity of reducing greenhouse gas emissions also plays a role in the current automotive transformation. However, drawing on Silver’s (2003) theorisation of business strategies to restore profits and control the workforce, we argue that the transition to EVs is best understood as a product fix aimed at restoring margins. This has so far failed for traditional brands, which has accelerated other concomitant fixes, whether spatial, technological or financial. We also propose a fifth fix, which we call the ‘labour fix’, which encompasses the strategies capital uses to reorganise labour both to restore profitability and weaken workers’ leverage.

Our study focuses on Italy and Poland, with particular emphasis on how reorganisation of the automotive industry is affecting the existing supply chain and how workers are positioning themselves amid the transition. Unlike other major car manufacturing countries, Italy has had only one major car maker since the mid-1980s, Fiat (now within Stellantis, following successive mergers). Nonetheless, the country has developed an important components industry which, beyond a simple manufacturing role, has also acquired research and development responsibilities (Zirpoli, 2023). Despite this, the Italian automotive sector has suffered a continuous workforce decline over the past two decades (Bubbico, 2023). By contrast, Poland has not had its own national car manufacturer since the liberalisation of its economy. However, it has a historically important industrial region, Silesia, where several OEMs have invested since the 1990s, followed by numerous auto parts suppliers. The two countries thus occupy different positions in the international division of labour. Yet, the 2021 merger of Peugeot’s five brands with Fiat-Chrysler’s nine brands, to form Stellantis, created a supplier overlap that, together with the ongoing crisis of Europe’s legacy car-makers, is affecting both.

Our research contributes to the debate on the challenges facing the green automotive transition by focusing on the impact on workers. By introducing an original analytical fifth fix – the labour fix – we highlight how capital seeks to restore profitability by increasing workloads and thus exacerbating labour precarity, a strategy that becomes more evident under conditions of growing uncertainty. Section one outlines the theoretical framework and recent literature on the automotive transition, followed by a discussion of our methodology. We then present our findings, organised into three subsections examining the industry’s various reconfigurations. Finally, we explore the labour fix and workers’ current positioning amid the restructuring.

New transition, old tendencies in capital’s restructuring

The automotive industry was one of the defining pillars of 20th century capitalism, profoundly shaping state investments and policies. It prioritised spaces and infrastructure for cars over other human activities to such an extent that it became normalised and largely unquestioned. As Brand and Wissen (2021) observe, this ‘automobile consensus’ has become deeply entrenched, not only due to decades of pressure and lobbying by car manufacturers, but also because the working class in high-income countries has been rendered dependent on individual cars for their mobility needs. Moreover, the automotive industry is a major employer that, thanks to past workers’ struggles, offers comparatively higher wages for manual tasks than other sectors, particularly for direct employees in core producing countries. Consequently, decreasing output and offshoring by OEMs threaten union leverage and put significant pressure on governments to respond to and accommodate the industry’s demands (Keil and Steinberger, 2024).

Like other industries, automotive companies periodically face downturns. The last major transformation of the sector began to unfold following the peak of labour struggles in the 1960s and 1970s, compounded by the oil shock. It gained momentum with the rise of Japanese and other South-east Asian car-makers. These manufacturers produced cheaper and more efficient vehicles, steadily capturing market shares in North America and Europe (Gerbaudo, 2024). Although OEM strategies varied, a common trend among legacy manufacturers was to move away from vertical integration towards lean production, relying on a multitude of local and offshore suppliers (Jürgens and Krzywdzinski, 2016). This not only diffused risks along the chain but also fragmented the workforce. As a consequence, worker power varied according to their position in the international division of labour and the legacy of their country’s industrial relations.

The digitalisation/electrification of cars – as a product fix – is taking place in a context of the continuous decline of new car registrations, at least proportionally. ¹ It is also shaped by decades of EU emissions regulations that, as Pardi (2022) demonstrates, have – ironically – encouraged an upmarket shift towards premium car models, which offer higher profit margins per unit. In particular, the 2009 EU regulation, with weight-based CO₂ targets, favoured vehicles that, rather than being less polluting in absolute terms, became heavier, more expensive and not necessarily ‘greener’ (Pardi, 2022). Moreover, the sector’s ‘overall profit margins have steadily declined, from 20–30 per cent in the 1920s to between 3.5 and 5 per cent by the 2010s’ (Haines-Doran, 2024: 342). We therefore propose that this latest transformation of the automotive industry can be interpreted primarily as a renewed response to a profitability crisis.

Silver (2003) identifies four types of strategy, or ‘fixes’, that have been implemented by capital, namely spatial, technological, product and financial. Each has a functional role in restoring accumulation, on the one hand, and weakening workers’ leverage, on the other. All these forms have been implemented in the automotive industry at different points in time and, currently, a combination of these strategies appears to be in play. For our research purposes, we will focus mainly on the first three forms, although Haines-Doran (2024) offers a discussion about the industry’s financialisation.

Product fix refers to capital’s tendency to shift towards products that provide higher margins. The transition to hybrid cars and EVs is intended to boost sales of such expensive vehicles, aided by a combination of EU regulation and government incentives as part of the ‘European Green Deal’. European governments’ environmental concerns are, in fact, closely linked to the need to maintain not only acceptable levels of employment, but also acceptable levels of profitability. In the long run, the crisis in car sales should therefore be overcome through an ‘incentivised’ renewal of the vehicle fleet with EVs to reduce emissions in the region. Furthermore, both electrification and digitalisation are predicted to shift the locus of the highest margins from the powertrain to batteries and software (Boewe and Schulten, 2023; Inagaki and Keohane, 2024). This shift will probably have implications for workforce composition and workers’ bargaining power (Wright, 2000), as the components generating the widest margins are expected to move from mechanical to software-based systems. As these processes are not immediate, however, other fixes are interacting with and shaping the transition.

Concurrently, European car makers are enacting a new spatial fix, which refers to the relocation of production, partly or entirely, to areas with a cheaper workforce and, often, weaker unions. Notably, plants are being delocalised to North African countries and Turkey (Pilling, 2023). Previous waves occurred during the 1990s and 2000s, primarily to Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU as ‘integrated peripheries’ (Pavlínek, 2020). Their integration took place amid significant labour market restructuring, the privatisation of their state-owned enterprises, de-industrialisation, high unemployment and depressed wages (Balcet and Enrietti, 1997; Meardi and Trappmann, 2013). This occurred at the same time as production capacity was being expanded to large and growing markets, notably to the BRIC countries, namely Brazil, Russia, India and China (Jürgens and Krzywdzinski, 2016).

The technological fix refers to changes in the organisation of production through the introduction of labour-saving technologies (Silver, 2003). In the automotive industry, but not exclusively, it manifests itself as a continuous attempt to increase mechanisation to reduce reliance on workers. However, while certain manufacturing steps have been successfully automated, many assembly processes have remained highly manual (Pardi et al., 2020). Concerning the current transition, while there has been speculation that EV production would be more automated than that of ICVs, recent studies suggest the opposite is true when the supply chain is considered, at least in the short to medium term, for both legacy manufacturers (Cotterman et al., 2024) and native EV manufacturers, such as China’s BYD (Gerbaudo, 2024).

However, all these forms of fix are transient; they only temporarily resolve the profitability crisis for some actors, typically those higher up the value chain. Fixes such as delocalisation or automation can exacerbate the problem by increasing global manufacturing overcapacity and overproduction, while realisation problems remain. Consequently, the crisis in manufacturing cannot be explained solely by a drastic technological transformation. Instead, it reflects decades of rising inequality in Global North economies (Streeck, 2014), a tendency towards stagnation – initially apparent in the Global North, but increasingly relevant for the Global South – and ‘worsening overcapacity in world markets for manufactured goods’ (Benanav, 2019: 26).

The current automotive industry seems intent on reviving the sector through these various ‘fixes’. These strategies are profoundly reshaping the automotive sector, but to fully understand the ongoing transformations we argue it is necessary to add to the analysis what we term the labour fix: namely, the ways in which capital is trying to reorganise the workforce both to increase profitability and weaken worker organisations. This restructuring is achieved primarily through workforce segmentation by resorting to outsourced suppliers and recruitment agencies. While this strategy is not new, we argue that uncertainty pushes suppliers along the value chain to privilege this fix over others, as it is relatively easier to implement in such a context. This has prompted a reduction in the so-called core workforce by favouring both the outsourcing of ever larger parts of production – inside and outside OEM plants – and the recruitment of workers through agencies and other intermediaries.

Trade unions have often sought to resist or limit the different forms of labour fix, but the protection of the core workforce has remained their priority, especially in times of crisis (Benassi and Dorigatti, 2015). Consequently, rather than actively opposing increased precarity, unions may become involved in forms of concession bargaining as a strategic answer to the threat of plant closure or downsizing (Hürtgen, 2021). Such acceptance can contribute to the erosion of union leverage, however, as precarious workers are more challenging to organise.

The question of how workers and trade unions position themselves amid these fixes remains both crucial and complex. This research focuses on the supply chain for two main reasons. First, the organisation of the automotive industry around just-in-time and lean production tends to create geographical clusters of production. Consequently, threats of closure or downsizing can have severe local effects on the regions concerned (De Ruyter et al., 2024). Second, the supply chain is likely to bear the brunt of the decisions made by OEMs which, in turn, may exert stronger pressures on its workforce. The different ways in which workers and unions in the automotive sector are responding to the transition have only recently gained momentum, at least in Italy and Poland.

Historically, we could roughly categorise the positioning of trade unions into three groups, ranging from uncritical alignment with the employers, varying degrees of critical alignment and, finally, more radical approaches that rethink the productive system and the role of the workers. The first approach aligns with what Hyman (2001) describes as ‘business unionism’, in which unions are concerned primarily with collective bargaining and job preservation, often prioritising employment over other issues. This perspective exemplifies the classic opposition of jobs versus the environment (Räthzel and Uzzell, 2011). An intermediary approach positions unions as critical actors who, while acknowledging the problems derived from the production in which they take part, strategically advocate for technological investments to mitigate environmental impact, while maintaining a strong emphasis on job security (Kalt, 2022). Ultimately, radical rethinking approaches go beyond merely recognising the negative impacts of production to offer a deeper critique of the capitalist mode of production and the roles of workers and unions within it (Barca, 2024). In this research, we explore these dynamics within the supply chain of the automotive sector in Italy and Poland amid the ongoing reorganisation of the industry.

Methodology and data

This article presents the results of qualitative research conducted as part of a larger study that addresses various aspects of the electric transition in the automotive industry, focusing on Italy and Poland. Our findings draw upon original data collected between October 2023 and November 2024. Case selection was carried out through purposive sampling from an existing Italian automotive suppliers’ dataset, concentrating on large Tier-1 suppliers operating in both countries. These companies were selected from among the top 200 enterprises by turnover. They were chosen for their production of diverse components with varying levels of obsolescence risk within the framework of the shift towards electric vehicle production. From this group, we identified 15 Stellantis suppliers with plants in both countries to conduct a more detailed inquiry. This involved an analysis of secondary sources to determine their specific production profiles, a preliminary characterisation of their geographical organisation – including the location of headquarters, R&D and production facilities – and an assessment of the obsolescence and innovation risks linked to their products. We decided to analyse companies already operating within the supply chain, which might experience repercussions linked to the transition.

Despite the selection criteria, all companies also served other clients in the car manufacturing sector and often in other industries as well. Consequentially, our reflections should be considered as part of a broader discussion on the changes taking place across Europe. Moreover, analysing suppliers from different companies and sectors allowed us to understand how supplier relationships and pressures vary, depending on their clients.

The findings presented here are based primarily on semi-structured individual and group interviews that took place in Italy and Poland. In collaboration with two other universities, we conducted interviews with 98 participants. For this article we focus on the testimonies of 56 interviewees, and a sub-set of seven companies with plants in both countries, aiming to cover both the metalwork sector and the rubber and plastics sector. The interviews – carried out in Italian, English and Polish – offer testimonies from trade unionists, ² shop-floor representatives, workers, managers and other key informants. This provides multiple perspectives across the automotive supply chain in both countries. All responses have been translated into English by the authors and anonymised, indicating only a pseudonym, nationality, generic role and the primary country of operation of each interviewee.

Additionally, we also gained access to four production facilities in Italy and Poland, and examined documents produced by the companies and other relevant public and private entities.

At the time of our data collection, Stellantis had recently implemented major operational changes, including workforce and output reductions in Italy, ³ and plant closures in Poland, with part of production relocated to the Maghreb, mainly Morocco, but also Tunisia and Algeria. Moreover, one week before we began our interviews in Poland (in May 2024), the Solidarność union held a national demonstration against the European Green Deal, ⁴ denouncing, among other issues, the transition to electric vehicles. A researcher from our team observed this demonstration and talked informally with some of the participants. These developments provided an important context for the discussions we had with the interviewees.

Reconfiguration of the automotive supply industry in Italy and Poland: between crisis and ‘fixes’

‘Uncertainty’ is the term that perhaps best encapsulates the sentiments expressed by many of our interviewees, ranging from managers and trade union officials to workers and other key informants. While the uncertainty specifically associated with the transition to EV production is undeniably significant, other factors were frequently highlighted. These include a long-term declining trend in the automotive market, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent wars. Furthermore, the role of new competitors – most notably Chinese manufacturers – was underscored, as well as, in our specific case, the ongoing restructuring derived from the merger of the Fiat-Chrysler and Peugeot groups into Stellantis. The uncertainty arising from these combined crises and transitions contributes to shaping the positioning of the various actors along the supply chain. The capacity of suppliers to implement different kinds of capital fix will be determined by their positional strength and consequently might also have implications for the ability of trade unions and workers to respond. The countries studied for this research, Italy and Poland, occupy different positions in the global automotive industry. The former is classified as a core producing country and the latter as an integrated-peripheral one. However, the latest Stellantis restructuring could affect Italy’s position, pushing it towards more peripheral status (Zirpoli and Perez Almansi, 2024).

In Italy, the lean production transition of the 1990s led to a fragmentation of the workforce resulting from the disintegration of the productive structure. This was followed by a gradual shift towards a dual labour market, with increasing use of fixed-term labour contracts, a trend that accelerated with the labour market reforms of the mid-2010s. Nevertheless, Italy’s industrial relations configuration, with the continuing role of national sectoral bargaining, has allowed metalworkers to retain a relatively strong position. In Poland, this shift towards labour market segmentation was more abrupt and radical, driven by post-communist reforms and the country’s integration into the European Union as a low-labour-cost area with weakened trade unions and relatively low collective bargaining coverage, primarily confined to the enterprise level (Kajta and Mrozowicki, 2016; Meardi and Trappmann, 2013). In what follows, we discuss the evidence emerging from our research, which suggests that several of the adaptations undertaken by auto makers over the past decade can be understood as forms of ‘capital fix’, and why – under the current uncertain conditions – the labour fix is gaining importance.

The labour fix: from organisational reshuffling to accentuated flexibility

Beyond the four fixes identified by Silver, we propose an additional, crucial type, the labour fix, which refers to the various ways in which capital seeks to reorganise the labour force to both improve profitability and counter workers’ leverage. In the automotive industry, though not exclusively, one way this has been implemented is through the increasing reliance on agency – and more generally temporary – workers, a strategy implemented in both Italy and Poland for decades now.

Italy has undergone a more recent and gradual labour market liberalisation, with the spread of short-term employment arrangements, unlike Poland, which experienced radical reforms in the early 1990s. However, Italian reforms since the mid-2010s have removed – or made it easier to bypass – other protective mechanisms. For example, the use of temporary contracts has grown, despite the legal thresholds dictating the proportion that a company can employ. ⁶ As one of our interviewees explained, the reform included ‘protected’ worker categories who can be hired through agencies without being accounted for within those limits:

The law is blatantly circumvented, because, besides [the fact that] 30 per cent refers to the entire company and not a specific site – meaning that a company could concentrate all the temporary workers at the production plant and still comply with the law – you must also exclude those defined as disadvantaged groups. This includes workers that, before being hired, were receiving unemployment benefits for more than six months, young people under 25, those over 50 years old, and women who are the sole income earner in their families. None of these groups count towards the percentual limit. (Marco, Italian union official, Italy, 2024)

In Poland, the range of contractual forms is broader, including workers on temporary contracts through agencies, workers employed under civil contracts and outsourced production within the plant’s premises, among others. The use of these contracts, including agency contracts, was so pervasive that, during the early 2010s, more than a quarter of the Polish workforce – one of the highest proportions in the European Union – were employed under a temporary contract (Butković et al., 2023). Following a public campaign led by the major trade unions to denounce the abuse of temporary contracts, resort to the most precarious forms of contracts receded (Butković et al., 2023). Nevertheless, our interviewees indicated that their prevalence in the automotive industry remains very high.

A telling case emerged after one of the interviews with a union delegate, conducted at their office in a Polish factory. The delegate offered to show us around the premises. In the building where the electronic components were assembled, the ample space was divided into different sections separated by glass panels with controlled access. All the workers were wearing the company’s overalls. However, the delegate explained that several production lines had been rented out to another company, meaning that those workers – despite wearing the same overalls – were not technically employees of the main company, nor were they agency workers commissioned by the latter. Instead, they were formally employed by a different company, either directly or through an agency, thereby increasing the layers of the outsourcing system. The union delegate remarked that having all workers in the same uniform was useful during inspections, as some German clients explicitly required that their production be carried out by direct employees.

As Neo (2010) notes, internal subcontracting disguises an employment relationship as a business one. By making suppliers subcontractors with direct responsibility for parts of production – and direct control over workers – it creates divisions within the workplace, complicating union efforts to negotiate for the workforce as a whole. While subcontracting in its various forms is not unique to Poland, its diffusion there illustrates how it fragments labour and weakens collective bargaining.

The strategy of using workers employed by other companies for production processes is more prevalent in Poland than in Italy’s metalwork sector, where this practice is typically limited to non-productive functions, such as catering, cleaning and logistics. However, in both countries, firms rely heavily on a workforce employed through agencies. As we mentioned earlier, even in Italy there is increasing deployment of agency workers in production:

Nowadays, few workers are hired with a permanent contract [. . .] When I joined this company in 2010, I was hired by an agency, like most people, for 36 months, which is the maximum. After that, they would hire you directly. But now it’s different, there are new kinds of contracts, they call it staff leasing [. . .] And now you go on for five years, always with the agency. And you also have less union power. There used to be a lot more permanent employees and fewer temporary workers. Now you have so many people under the agency because people are retiring and being replaced by these young people hired through staff leasing, who are waiting for a direct contract for 4–5 years. They can’t get a house, a mortgage, nothing. (Manish, migrant worker and shop-floor union representative, Italy, 2024)

Of course, this division, beyond providing companies with flexibility to cope with the fluctuating vehicle market, serves both to lower suppliers’ labour costs during periods of low demand and to create divisions among workers. Union representatives in Poland often echoed criticisms levelled against migrant workers, who, being under more precarious and conditional contracts, are less inclined or able to resist orders. For example, in one of the few firms in which workers went on strike, only core workers participated. Thus, while part of the production was effectively halted, non-striking workers were ordered to help load the trucks, weakening the effects of the strike. This was possible because of the multitude of legal employers present on the premises, including temp-work agencies and subcontracted firms:

Not everyone was on strike, because at our plant, in addition to our workers, there are still a lot of foreigners of different nationalities [. . .] These are external companies operating inside the factory [. . .] There are fewer of us than there are external workers. There are about 1053 of us while the external ones are twice as many, if not more! (Monika, Polish union representative, Poland, 2024)

Finally, the initial tightening of labour markets caused by the pandemic, combined with the impact of the war on mobility, put pressure on suppliers in Poland that had long relied on a come-and-go workforce from Ukraine, the country’s largest immigrant community. This has since shifted to a more settled but rigid migrant workforce. While a tighter labour market typically strengthens workers’ leverage, employers have countered this rigidity by broadening recruitment beyond nearby countries such as Belarus and Georgia, bringing in workers from Asia and Latin America. Workers’ permits for nationals from Colombia and Bangladesh increased by 189 per cent and 106 per cent, respectively, between 2022 and 2023 (Ministerstwo Rodziny, Pracy i Polityki Społecznej, Departament Rynku Pracy, 2024). Whereas mobile Ukrainians enabled quick responses to production needs, recruiting from these new regions is slower, more complex and less flexible, as workers’ freedom of movement is more restricted.

Other ways in which suppliers reorganise the workforce involve various methods of arranging working time, extending or contracting working hours to meet production needs. We observed that in both Italy and Poland, flexible arrangements, even for permanent direct workers, were included in the collective agreements. However, while this practice is applied in Italy, a more blatant case was found in Poland. A Polish workers’ representative at a supplier’s plant explained that their collective agreement sets the minimum working hours and extra time on a quarterly basis which is used by the company to cope with peaks and lows in demand.

We must do a minimum of 504 hours and a maximum of 96 extra hours in three months, but it is the employer’s decision when. You might do 150 one month, 170 the next [. . .] This is what happened during the pandemic, we were forced to do this stupid online training, we were paid less because we were on stand-still, but then we had to make up for all the hours, coming all Saturdays, because we have this stupid three-months counting system clause in the contract. (Karol, Polish shop-floor union representative, Poland, 2024)

Workers’ positioning amid the reconfiguration

At the workplace level, workers’ positioning is different in Italy compared with Poland, although in both cases the unions seem to be on the defensive. Italy, owing to past collective struggles, still retains forms of welfare protection that companies and unions mobilise to avoid closures and redundancies of workers with permanent contracts during periods of low demand. Notably, Italy has the cassa integrazione guadagni, an income support scheme ‘provided to workers in case of a temporary lay-off or periods of short-term work as an alternative to mass dismissals’ (Manzella, 2018). Its use was frequently mentioned:

We haven’t lost that many workers on the lines. There have been partial line closures, we’ve adjusted the shifts by activating cassa integrazione, all to compensate for the two million fewer batteries no longer demanded by OEMs like Stellantis and Renault. (Valerio, Italian worker and shop-floor union representative, Italy, 2024)

However, these protections for permanent workers are often accompanied by the dismissal of temporary workers, exacerbating fragmentation of the workforce.

Unfortunately, the first to be sent home were always the temporary workers. The company prioritises its own permanent staff, and only if there’s enough work are the temporary workers brought in. Sadly, it’s a war amongst the poor. I feel bad because, as we all know, temporary workers tend never to take sick leave and are always present, but when there’s a drop in production, they’re the first to pay the price. (Mario, Italian shop-floor union representative, Italy, 2024)

When mass lay-offs or plant closures are announced, beyond the use of statutory protections, the workers rally to secure agreements that preserve at least part of the jobs, resulting in a gradual, rather than an abrupt, employment decline in the sector. However, the recent closures and massive use of cassa integrazione in some iconic plants are creating unease in the industry.

Poland, by contrast, has less generous welfare protections, and unions tacitly accept that temporary workers serve as a buffer for the core workforce in case of crisis. This position is reinforced by the assumption that Polish workers tend to use exit as their primary strategy. High employee turnover has been a notable feature for decades (Meardi, 2012). In a context of very low unemployment levels and relatively flat wages, workers frequently change not only jobs but sectors.

People in Poland aren’t like those in the West. A year here, a year there, they pack their bags and go. (Mariusz, Polish trade union representative, Poland, 2024)

In Italy, better collective agreements in the metalwork sector – dominant among automotive suppliers – provide better pay and working conditions than other manufacturing sectors, which in turn limit, especially among the directly employed, their inclination to change jobs. This appears to be less true of younger workers entering the sector under more precarious, temporary contracts. The workers’ exit strategy was mentioned slightly more frequently in the rubber and plastic manufacturing branch, where the sectoral agreement is comparatively worse. Unions have been pushing for the internalisation of agency workers, but the results are, in all cases, meagre:

There are 60 agency workers. It’s complicated to convince the company to make them permanent. Most of these workers are stabilised through the employment agency on staff leasing contracts. With the agreement we made in January, 35 workers took early retirement and we managed to stabilise 12 temporary workers directly with the company [. . .] It was a difficult negotiation because they would like to have a company entirely made up of temporary workers – the words of our CEO. Our goal, during the discussion of the next collective agreement is to include a clause that addresses the regularisation and stabilisation of temporary workers. (Bernardo, Italian trade union representative, Italy, 2024)

Other attempts at internalisation are pursued through judicial channels, mobilising EU definitions of temporary work and challenging the increasingly prevalent staff leasing arrangements:

We are starting to see court rulings – recently in Bologna and Trieste – that question staff leasing. The EU directive on agency work does not set a maximum contract length, but it does state the work should be temporary. Yet we found cases where agency workers had been employed for 15 years, hardly temporary. Judges are beginning to agree, not on the basis of Italian law but EU directives. The issue is shifting, though I don’t know if the government will intervene to block these changes [. . .]. (Marco, Italian trade union official, Italy, 2024)

At a national and more political level, trade unions in both Italy and Poland have taken a coordinated stance relatively late. In Poland, union representatives tended to hold a negative view of the EU directives – associating them with lay-offs – and display a certain disbelief in the actual extent of the electrification push, criticising both its unpreparedness and the rushed pace of change.

Take my powertrain example, in 2020 we had around 1100 people working on diesel and petrol engines. As demand for diesel fell and EU standards tightened – Euro 6d being the last – production was phased out, and jobs with it. With new petrol standards under the Green Deal, another 300 people were laid off. In the end, combustion engine production in Bielsko was completely closed. We’re not hiding the fact that electrification, driven by EU rules, has led to this. (Andrzej, Polish Trade Union representative, Poland, 2024)

Over 100,000 people participated in a Solidarność demonstration in Warsaw in May 2024 against the EU Green Deal. The protest gathered workers from various sectors – from agriculture to metalworking – and raised a series of criticisms against, among others, the cost of the war, agricultural imports from Ukraine and an alleged influx of migrant workers for wind turbine installation, as well as the transition to EV production.

We must stay vigilant and oppose what is being imposed by the European Union. The Warsaw demonstration didn’t come out of nowhere; as a union we see the threats – especially those posed by EU CO₂ emissions targets. (Bartek, Polish shop-floor union representative, Italy, 2024)

In Italy, there have been strikes for the renewal of the metalworkers’ national collective agreement and demands for an industrial policy, and in October 2024 the three largest metalworker confederations called for a joint national demonstration demanding a new industrial policy and a just transition that takes workers into consideration:

The union should anticipate changes, but instead it just follows them. That’s why I sometimes feel uneasy in leadership meetings. We ought to have a vision that looks ahead – even if it proves wrong, it’s important to have one. The risk is our vision becomes secondary, always cleaning up after others instead of building alternative paths. That proactive approach is missing. (Baldo, Italian union official, Italy, 2024)

While the transformation of the sector is ongoing, at the time of our fieldwork the dominant stance of the major trade union confederations in Poland prioritised job protection above other considerations. In contrast, the main Italian unions tended to adopt a position that could be described as one of critical alignment with the industry, recognising the need for the transition while insisting that jobs should not be sacrificed.

Conclusion

The restructuring of the automotive sector is posing significant challenges for workers and unions across Europe. Although the industry has recently garnered widespread attention because of the closure of iconic factories in several countries, the difficulties it faces are part of a broader and longer pattern characterised by manufacturing overcapacity and saturated EU markets, which give rise to a realisation problem. To interpret the sector’s restructuring, we drew on Silver’s theory of capital’s ‘fixes’ and observed that multiple forms are emerging simultaneously in this latest industry shift. Rather than simply viewing the current electrification and digitalisation as driven by the imperatives of the green transition, we interpret them as a form of product fix that has so far failed to reinvigorate the European industry. This makes it clearer why other fixes are taking precedence. By incorporating the notion of a labour fix, we gain a more comprehensive understanding of how capital is operating amid this reshuffling. While companies always push to make the workforce more flexible, we stress that in a situation of uncertainty such reorganisation becomes more far-reaching, with various forms of fix interacting with each other.

While waves of automation have occurred since the inception of capitalism, none of the cases studied have seen a recent introduction of radically new labour-saving technologies. As such, the production of the new EVs relies largely on workers’ capacity to adapt to the different models. The fact that production remains highly dependent on human labour strengthens the need for capital to implement other fixes. The most visible of these, the spatial fix, is now expanding production delocalisation towards nearby Mediterranean non-EU countries. However, as not all production is immediately relocated, the labour fix is crucial to the production that stays in place. Flexible contractual arrangements are prevalent in both Poland and Italy, but owing to distinct patterns of industrial relations they produce different interactions with workers’ responses. While Italy’s relatively robust welfare protections provide safeguards for permanent workers, they also reinforce the precarious position of temporary workers, intensifying workforce fragmentation. In Poland, weaker protections and high turnover lead unions to accept a more segmented workforce as a feature of their industrial relations system.

Unions’ recent but growing efforts towards coordinated action suggest two distinct approaches to the current transition. However, both remain within the bounds of an expansion of the automotive industry, tasked with preserving current and future jobs. It remains to be seen whether a mass movement will emerge from these nascent coordination efforts, one capable of providing a more profound critique of the automotive industry while advocating for socially beneficial alternatives to reconvert production. Such a movement would need to think beyond the confines of the automotive industry and envision mobility futures that ensure dignified jobs.