This article rethinks solidarity as a “Slow Memory” concept, drawing on life-story interviews with retired trade unionists across Europe. While often framed as a cornerstone of labor history, solidarity has never held a singular meaning; its uses have shifted across ideological traditions and historical contexts. The article combines conceptual history with the framework of a Slow Memory approach, emphasizing how meaning emerges incrementally through lived experience, affect, and embodied recollection. It identifies how solidarity is remembered both as collective resistance and mutual support, and how its changes are reflected upon across varied working milieus. By framing solidarity as a Slow Memory concept, the article contributes to methodological debates of memory studies more broadly. It invites scholars to move beyond institutionalized and event-centered understandings of memory and foreground the multisited, affective, embodied, and practice-based ways in which memory sustains socially important values amid structural changes.
Wawrzyniak et al. (Wed,) studied this question.