The dataset contains recordings of 21 interviews with trade union activists from 10 European countries (Poland, Germany, Sweden, Kosovo, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, Hungary, Slovenia, and Luxembourg). The recordings are available in audio or video format. The interviews were conducted in the interviewees' native languages.
The data contained in the dataset was gathered during the project Remembering Deindustrialization: Autobiographical Narratives of European Trade Unionists.
The project involved collecting narrative biographical interviews from representatives of the generation of European trade unionists born between the 1940s and 1960s, whose lives spanned a period of profound economic, social and cultural change associated with the processes of deindustrialisation. These changes took place at different pace depending on the political and economic systems of individual countries, simultaneously influencing the transformation of the working world and, consequently, the shape of European societies at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. Trade unions were at the forefront of addressing the problems arising from the tensions of late modernity and conflicting social interests. At the same time, drawing on social, economic, technological and legal knowledge, they played an important role in the process of change. Conversations with trade unionists thus allow us to grasp the significance of the changes in the working world from the perspective of key custodians of social memory of the industrial era and its transformations.
The project was carried out by an international and interdisciplinary research group based in the COST Network Slow Memory: Transformative Practices for Times of Uneven and Accelerating Change (https://www.slowmemory.eu/).
