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Socio-Environmental Restructuring and Factory Regimes: Labour Dispute over an Operating Permit for Liège Airport

par Sepulchre, Douglas ;Erdinc, Isil
Référence Relations industrielles, 81, 1
Publication Publié, 2026-09-15

Article révisé par les pairs

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Résumé :

We examine a socio-environmental conflict over the renewal of an operating permit for a major cargo airport in Wallonia (Belgium) in 2022–2023. Our aim is to understand how alliances between employers and unions are forged in opposition to socio-environmental restructuring, and what mechanisms enable these coalitions to shape policy outcomes. To do so, we draw on the concept of brown corporatism—a form of institutional alignment between labour and capital that supports environmentally harmful practices—and situates it within the broader theoretical framework of factory regimes, hegemonic despotism and political intermediation. We build on long-term qualitative fieldwork conducted since 2023, first by discussing how the concepts of hegemonic despotism and political intermediation can help us analyze socio-environmental restructuring. We then detail the various stages of the socio-environmental dispute at Liège Airport, where the renewal of the operating permit was contested between 2022 and 2023. We show how the interests of economic, labour and political actors converged to produce a compromise on environmental regulations within companies. The labour dispute at Liège Airport thus serves not only to illustrate the concept of factory regime but also to clarify the model of negotiation on environmental issues referred to as brown corporatism.