In spring 1893, mines and factories in Belgium fell silent as the streets filled: thousands of workers joined one of the first general strikes in history, winning a significant extension of suffrage and parliamentary representation.
Half a century later, in March 1943, walkouts at the FIAT Mirafiori plant in Turin spread rapidly across northern Italy, as workers demanded bread, peace and freedom – the first act of mass resistance against fascism and the first nail in the coffin of Mussolini’s regime.
In the summer of 1980, workers of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk downed their tools, occupied their workplace, and founded Solidarność (Solidarity), helping to set in motion the collapse of Soviet-backed rule in Poland.
Three different countries, three different periods, one common thread: workers’ collective action was fundamental to the expansion of democratic rights, exposing the limits of authoritarian and elitist systems. Yet, when we discuss democratic backsliding – the slow deterioration of democratic values and institutions – attention turns to rule of law, corruption, media freedom and judicial independence, while collective labour rights rarely feature in the conversation.
They should. Across Europe, the right to strike, protest and organise is under growing pressure. Labour rights backsliding might not make headlines but it’s quietly reshaping our democracies.
The 2025 edition of the Global Rights Index by the International Trade Union Confederation, while still ranking Europe as the ‘least repressive’ region for workers, recorded our continent’s worst score since 2014. This only partly reflects the inclusion of countries such as Russia and Belarus, as worrying trends are also visible within the EU – driven in no small part by the rise of far-right parties.
Different routes, same destination
The backsliding doesn’t follow a single playbook. In Italy, transport minister Matteo Salvini has repeatedly used administrative injunctions (precettazione) to curb strikes, turning what once was an exceptional measure into a routine constraint on workers’ dissent. The 2025 and 2026 Security Decrees target protest more broadly, criminalising acts of non-violent civil disobedience such as blocking roads or railways (a tactic long used by striking workers), and introducing preventive detention and bans on participating in public assemblies.
In Finland, a 2024 reform caps political strikes at 24 hours, restricts solidarity strikes, increases penalties for ‘unlawful’ walkouts, and introduces fines for individual workers. In Hungary, amid teachers’ protests, the Orbán government misused emergency powers to restrict their right to strike, enabled dismissals for civil disobedience, and adopted a ‘revenge bill’ stripping them of public employee status.
In France, Macron’s 2023 pension reform was passed without parliamentary vote, following months of strikes and protests that were met with systematic preventive arrests and the ‘excessive use of force’. In January 2026, a bill limiting rail strikes during peak hours and for up to 30 days per year was approved by a parliamentary committee and now awaits plenary debate.
In Belgium, after backlash forced the withdrawal of a bill endangering the right to protest in 2024, similar proposals have resurfaced under the current federal government, alongside draft laws to impose legal personality on trade unions – potentially undermining their autonomy and fundamental rights.
Not a seismic shift, but a molecular transformation
None of these actions amount, on their own, to the suppression of the right to strike or protest. If you have recently had a flight or train delayed or cancelled, you will know that strikes are still very much with us. But across countries and over time, they add up to a creeping, molecular transformation: a layering of measures, proposals, practices and discourses that cumulatively reshapes the ground on which workers stand.
While formal rights remain enshrined in constitutions and laws, what shrinks is the effective ability to exercise them.
This is framed in language emphasising security, public order, and economic harm and unduly expanding the notion of ‘essential’ services. Critics argue that restrictions are needed because strikes cause too much disruption. But strikes or mass protests work precisely because they disrupt. They make visible what is taken for granted: that it’s workers’ labour that keeps the economy running. Would the 1893, 1943 and 1980 strikes have been so consequential without causing disruption?
This happens while pressure is also building from inside the workplace. Recent trends in algorithmic management risk deepening workers’ disciplining and exclusion if their voice isn’t embedded in how these systems are designed and used – turning workplaces into laboratories for the authoritarian fantasies of some Big Tech CEOs.
One can legitimately ask what would happen to our societies if workers spent most of their waking hours in authoritarian workplaces, only to find their right to strike curtailed. Collective labour rights – and democracy – are being squeezed in a pincer movement, in the workplace and the public space.
A threat to diversity and inclusion
This May, as the EU marks Diversity Month under the banner ‘inclusive labour markets for all’, collective labour rights should be central to the debate. When they’re eroded, the consequences fall heaviest on those with the least individual bargaining power: women in low-paid sectors, migrants, ethnic minorities, disabled workers and the precariously employed.
Without a collective voice, discrimination is harder to expose and individual grievances remain invisible. Restrictions on striking or organising further undermine the inclusivity of workers’ organisations themselves. For the temp worker afraid to lose their job or the migrant worried about their permit, the calculation tips more decisively against organising once fines or criminal sanctions enter the picture.
For democracy and inclusion to be effectively upheld, collective agency must be taken seriously. Although the Treaties explicitly exclude the right to strike from being a supranational competence, a narrow path remains: EU institutions can monitor whether collective rights are effectively exercised and issue recommendations where they are undercut.
Beyond ‘soft’ measures, recent initiatives also show that the EU can go further than often assumed, as with the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive and the Platform Work Directive. The EU’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals, reiterated in Commissioners’ mission letters, reinforces the point – SDG8 calls explicitly for labour rights protection for all workers.
What remains largely absent, however, is a sustained public debate — among citizens, experts, social partners and policymakers — that acknowledges the scale of the backsliding and recognises collective labour rights for what they are: the most basic form of democratic participation available to people whose only leverage is to withdraw their labour, and who have no voice but a collective one.
This commentary is part of a short series of commentaries to mark European Diversity Month, which will be published over the course of May.
