Displaying power, but altering identity: how Danish unions managed to organize the transnationalised Copenhagen Metro construction project

Experiences from large-scale European construction projects with highly transnational labour forces have shown that national institutions and unions often are unsuccessful in including the transnational workers and companies in national IR systems. However, this article shows how Danish unions have been rather successful in organising the transnational construction project of a city metro ring in Copenhagen. This has happened despite a highly fragmented, transnational workforce and several of the sub-contracting firms initially trying actively to avoid the unionisation of their transnational workforce and to bypass the Danish labour market regulation. The article proceeds to discuss the explanations of the apparent success of the unions, which include a combination of multiple factors of which the two most important are the strong political support from the public owner of the construction project and a huge effort by the national union which secured visible gains and improvements for the involved migrant workers.