This article attempts to explain how corporate governance and macroeconomic policies have impacted on the role of workers and their representatives in the corporate environment and to consider how this has affected their capacity to protect themselves in the context of the financial crisis. It also considers the strategies they might adopt to strengthen their position in the future. It argues for the need to reposition labour law in the legal hierarchy as a first condition but also, and more importantly, that for democratic reasons, trade unions need to work collectively with other civil society and protest movements to hold corporations, national governments, and European institutions to account and, internally, to develop the class consciousness of old and new members.