Faculty Presents at Indiana University on Labor Strikes

Dr. Kerstin Hamann was recently invited to present her research on general strikes at Indiana University Bloomington. She gave a presentation on “Policy Reforms and General Strikes in Western Europe” at the Institute for European Studies. She also gave a talk on “European Labor Unrest and Varieties of Capitalism” at the Labor Studies Brown Bag Lunch Series. The presentations were based on research conducted in collaboration with John Kelly (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Alison Johnston (Oregon State University). Hamann and her collaborators recently published part of this research in an article entitled “Striking Concessions from Governments: Explaining the Success of General Strikes in Western Europe, 1980-2009” in the journal Comparative Politics, a leading journal in the field of comparative politics. The article examines the conditions under which governments are likely to modify their policy reforms in response to general strikes and finds that coalition governments and those that are led by Christian Democratic and centrist parties are most likely to make concessions to general strikes.