{"title":"Labor Contestation at Walmart Brazil: Limits of Global Diffusion in Latin America","authors":"Gabriel Juncal","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5536","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5536","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081715","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Challenges and Prospects of the Independent Labour Movement in Post-Crisis Belarus","authors":"Raman Yerashenia","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5626","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5626","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081720","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article contributes an understanding of mutualism as a foundational element in emergent worker collectivism. We challenge mainstream institutionalist accounts in industrial relations, especially from the Global North, that downplay processes of bottom-up regeneration of working-class organisation. We discuss compositional accounts of class formation and examine previous understandings of mutualism, then apply our conceptual framework to evidence from international literature and our own research on platform work in Italy and the UK. Three important themes emerge in understanding worker self-organisation: the demographics of the workforce, including migration backgrounds and social ties beyond the workplace; the existence of social relations in the ethnic/political/local community; and the relevance of free spaces of resource sharing and recomposition in the absence of a fixed place of work. We conclude that an understanding of mutualism can help to grasp emergent solidarities among new groups of workers within and beyond both platform work and trade unions.
{"title":"Mutualism, class composition, and the reshaping of worker organisation in platform work and the gig economy","authors":"Gabriella Alberti, Simon Joyce","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5332","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5332","url":null,"abstract":"This article contributes an understanding of mutualism as a foundational element in emergent worker collectivism. We challenge mainstream institutionalist accounts in industrial relations, especially from the Global North, that downplay processes of bottom-up regeneration of working-class organisation. We discuss compositional accounts of class formation and examine previous understandings of mutualism, then apply our conceptual framework to evidence from international literature and our own research on platform work in Italy and the UK. Three important themes emerge in understanding worker self-organisation: the demographics of the workforce, including migration backgrounds and social ties beyond the workplace; the existence of social relations in the ethnic/political/local community; and the relevance of free spaces of resource sharing and recomposition in the absence of a fixed place of work. We conclude that an understanding of mutualism can help to grasp emergent solidarities among new groups of workers within and beyond both platform work and trade unions.","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081893","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of John Womack Jr. Edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek Labor Power and Strategy.","authors":"Clara Marticorena","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5540","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The following article aims to provide a conceptually rooted introduction to the articles in the internationally coordinated themed collection on Labour Conflict, Class and Collective Organization, an initiative which has involved four journals focusing on labour studies from different geographical angles and academic traditions: Economic and Labour Relations Review (ELRR); Global Labour Journal (GLJ); Partecipazione e Conflitto (PACO); and Revista Latino Americana de Estudios del Trabajo (RELET). The contributions across the four journals are diverse, both in terms of geographical focus, disciplinary perspectives and sector of analysis. This diversity is very welcomed and represents a fertile soil for conceptual considerations, because it corresponds to the manifold forms in which labour conflict expresses itself in the reality of capitalism. What’s the abstract unity of these concrete empirical realities, as Marx would have put it? In the following introduction, we focus on two general theoretical issues we consider fundamental and mutually interrelated: a rethinking of workers’ collective forms of organization within and beyond trade unions; and the framing of these forms and of labour conflict in the broader historical dynamics of working classes formation. With this, we hope to provide a lens of analysis for the articles in the international special issue and, more generally, methodological guidance to future studies on labour conflict.
{"title":"Locating labour conflict and its organising forms in contemporary times: between class and the reproduction of capitalism","authors":"Maurizio Atzeni, Devi Sacchetto","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5624","url":null,"abstract":"The following article aims to provide a conceptually rooted introduction to the articles in the internationally coordinated themed collection on Labour Conflict, Class and Collective Organization, an initiative which has involved four journals focusing on labour studies from different geographical angles and academic traditions: Economic and Labour Relations Review (ELRR); Global Labour Journal (GLJ); Partecipazione e Conflitto (PACO); and Revista Latino Americana de Estudios del Trabajo (RELET). The contributions across the four journals are diverse, both in terms of geographical focus, disciplinary perspectives and sector of analysis. This diversity is very welcomed and represents a fertile soil for conceptual considerations, because it corresponds to the manifold forms in which labour conflict expresses itself in the reality of capitalism. What’s the abstract unity of these concrete empirical realities, as Marx would have put it? In the following introduction, we focus on two general theoretical issues we consider fundamental and mutually interrelated: a rethinking of workers’ collective forms of organization within and beyond trade unions; and the framing of these forms and of labour conflict in the broader historical dynamics of working classes formation. With this, we hope to provide a lens of analysis for the articles in the international special issue and, more generally, methodological guidance to future studies on labour conflict.","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the widespread protest actions carried out by gig workers, especially actions using the wildcat strike, with case studies from Indonesia. During the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020 to March 2022), a total of 47 wildcat strikes were carried out by platform drivers in Indonesia. Why were most of the protests by gig workers in Indonesia carried out through wildcat strikes? Can these wildcat strike actions win workers’ demands? Unlike the claims of several scholars that wildcat strikes tend to appear in authoritarian state labour control regimes, becoming, in these cases, an effective form of movement in winning demands, in Indonesia a despotic labour market, repressive employers’ actions, platform drivers’ distrust of existing driver organisations and the obstacles to organising can explain the emergence of wildcat strikes. Though these tend to be effective in responding quickly to specific problems at the local level, they have limitations, being unable to win their demands in national or wider contexts.
{"title":"Wildcat Strike Season: The Origin and Limits of Platform Driver Protests during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Indonesia","authors":"Arif Novianto","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5310","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the widespread protest actions carried out by gig workers, especially actions using the wildcat strike, with case studies from Indonesia. During the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020 to March 2022), a total of 47 wildcat strikes were carried out by platform drivers in Indonesia. Why were most of the protests by gig workers in Indonesia carried out through wildcat strikes? Can these wildcat strike actions win workers’ demands? Unlike the claims of several scholars that wildcat strikes tend to appear in authoritarian state labour control regimes, becoming, in these cases, an effective form of movement in winning demands, in Indonesia a despotic labour market, repressive employers’ actions, platform drivers’ distrust of existing driver organisations and the obstacles to organising can explain the emergence of wildcat strikes. Though these tend to be effective in responding quickly to specific problems at the local level, they have limitations, being unable to win their demands in national or wider contexts.","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Teri Caraway and Michele Ford (2020) Labour Politics In Indonesia","authors":"Ben Scully","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5630","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5630","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081731","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
From COVID-19 to the so-called labour shortage of late 2021, the past three years have revealed a renewed discourse on labour markets and working conditions. Alongside this discourse, workers in a variety of industries have been organising to fight the rollbacks, redundancies and concessions imposed in response to the pandemic and its related financial crisis. From Amazon warehouse workers to hospitality workers to informally employed platform workers, the global precarious are rising up. In addition to traditional labour movement tactics, one tool that has proven powerful and flexible in the COVID period is the autonomous solidarity network. Built from the model of the worker centre, a labour solidarity network is conceived of as a decentralised grouping of workers, organisers and allies, usually operated virtually and at arms-length from formal union structures. Following the methodological foundation of workers’ inquiry and using the tools of strategic labour research and participatory action research, this article reports on interviews with workers and organisers involved with worker centres and solidarity networks, distilling their experiences and observations into a set of common practices that characterise worker organising efforts taking place in a number of Canadian workplaces, including hospitality, migrant work programs, platform services and artisanal industries. In addition to traditional labour movement tactics, one tool that has proven powerful and flexible in the COVID period is the autonomous solidarity network. Built from the model of the worker centre, a labour solidarity network is conceived of as a decentralized grouping of workers, organizers and allies, usually operated virtually and at arms-length from formal union structures. Following the methodological foundation of workers’ inquiry, this article reports on interviews with workers and organizers involved with worker centres and solidarity networks, distilling their experiences and observations into a set of common practices that characterize worker organizing efforts taking place in a number of Canadian workplaces, including hospitality, migrant work programs, platform services, and artisanal industries.
{"title":"Building Autonomous Power: Solidarity Networks in Precarious Times","authors":"Benjamin Anderson, John Jenkinson","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5328","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5328","url":null,"abstract":"From COVID-19 to the so-called labour shortage of late 2021, the past three years have revealed a renewed discourse on labour markets and working conditions. Alongside this discourse, workers in a variety of industries have been organising to fight the rollbacks, redundancies and concessions imposed in response to the pandemic and its related financial crisis. From Amazon warehouse workers to hospitality workers to informally employed platform workers, the global precarious are rising up. In addition to traditional labour movement tactics, one tool that has proven powerful and flexible in the COVID period is the autonomous solidarity network. Built from the model of the worker centre, a labour solidarity network is conceived of as a decentralised grouping of workers, organisers and allies, usually operated virtually and at arms-length from formal union structures. Following the methodological foundation of workers’ inquiry and using the tools of strategic labour research and participatory action research, this article reports on interviews with workers and organisers involved with worker centres and solidarity networks, distilling their experiences and observations into a set of common practices that characterise worker organising efforts taking place in a number of Canadian workplaces, including hospitality, migrant work programs, platform services and artisanal industries. In addition to traditional labour movement tactics, one tool that has proven powerful and flexible in the COVID period is the autonomous solidarity network. Built from the model of the worker centre, a labour solidarity network is conceived of as a decentralized grouping of workers, organizers and allies, usually operated virtually and at arms-length from formal union structures. Following the methodological foundation of workers’ inquiry, this article reports on interviews with workers and organizers involved with worker centres and solidarity networks, distilling their experiences and observations into a set of common practices that characterize worker organizing efforts taking place in a number of Canadian workplaces, including hospitality, migrant work programs, platform services, and artisanal industries.","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper discusses the role of labour regulation and trade unions in collective organisation of workers in non-standard, diffuse and informal labour relations in the Global South. The central argument is that labour institutions interlink with and co-create different configurations of informality and hence possibilities for collective organisation. This argument responds to calls in global labour studies for new conceptions of labour struggles that go beyond Eurocentrism and a narrow focus on traditional tools and institutions of workers’ power in the global context. Challenging the formal-informal dualism, the empirical material presented in this paper suggests a more nuanced understanding of the role of labour regulation and trade unions as sites for both the production and the contestation of the category of informal work. This is illustrated by efforts for collective organisation of hard-to-reach workers in the two dissimilar sectors of street vending and domestic work in Tanzania. Using the power resources approach as a conceptual framework for structuring the analysis, the paper examines how collective organisation interlinks dynamically with specific configurations of labour informality which derive from the labour and employment relations, labour legislation, trade union strategies, and public discourses in each sector.
{"title":"Labour institutions and the dynamic production of informality: collective organisation of hard-to-reach workers in Tanzania","authors":"Ilona Steiler","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5330","url":null,"abstract":"This paper discusses the role of labour regulation and trade unions in collective organisation of workers in non-standard, diffuse and informal labour relations in the Global South. The central argument is that labour institutions interlink with and co-create different configurations of informality and hence possibilities for collective organisation. This argument responds to calls in global labour studies for new conceptions of labour struggles that go beyond Eurocentrism and a narrow focus on traditional tools and institutions of workers’ power in the global context. Challenging the formal-informal dualism, the empirical material presented in this paper suggests a more nuanced understanding of the role of labour regulation and trade unions as sites for both the production and the contestation of the category of informal work. This is illustrated by efforts for collective organisation of hard-to-reach workers in the two dissimilar sectors of street vending and domestic work in Tanzania. Using the power resources approach as a conceptual framework for structuring the analysis, the paper examines how collective organisation interlinks dynamically with specific configurations of labour informality which derive from the labour and employment relations, labour legislation, trade union strategies, and public discourses in each sector.","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081433","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Agarwala, Rina (2022) The Migration-Development Regime: How Class Shapes Indian Emigration","authors":"S. Irudaya Rajan","doi":"10.15173/glj.v14i3.5629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5629","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44737,"journal":{"name":"Global Labour Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135081886","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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