Historically, workers’ struggles have improved labour conditions at the workplace, challenged workers’ broader subordination in the labour process and have shaped State policies and legislation that protect workers’ rights. Informed by Katz’s (2004) conceptualisation of resistance, we analyse recent examples of such struggles that challenge workers’ precarity in agro-food chains. ...
(Show more)Historically, workers’ struggles have improved labour conditions at the workplace, challenged workers’ broader subordination in the labour process and have shaped State policies and legislation that protect workers’ rights. Informed by Katz’s (2004) conceptualisation of resistance, we analyse recent examples of such struggles that challenge workers’ precarity in agro-food chains. Katz (2004) seeks to develop a nuanced understanding of practices that “[…] respond effectively to the massive disruptions in productions of space, nature and social life that pierce people’s everyday lives in the course of capitalist development” (Katz 2004: 242). Specifically, we ask how workers’ resistance arises. We enrich Katz’s (2004) framework with insights of the power resources approach initially formulated by Wright (2000) and Fraser’s (2010) notion of citizenship in transnational political spheres.
The experience of worker representatives involved in different forms of resistance constitutes the empirical core our analysis. Positioning ourselves in a tradition of activist scholarship in labour studies, we compare the Florida-based migrant farmworker organisation Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW’s) effort to re-negotiate the terms of workers’ inclusion in the capitalist labour process (Siegmann et al. 2016) with the rural cross-class association SOS Rosarno that unites migrant farmworkers and small farmers’ in Southern Italy’s citrus and olive cultivation as an alternative economic model from below (Iocco and Siegmann 2017).
Based on our comparative analysis, we argue that, beyond workers’ economic roles, resistance needs to be understood as moves towards fuller citizenship. The analysis also highlights how different forms of resistance connect to and build on each other. Workers’ associational power plays a foundational role here, catalysing the critical consciousness necessary to understand and address structures that marginalise workers. The collaboration with allies able to intervene in spaces other than the workplace reduces workers’ vulnerability. This use of ‘coalitional power’ (Brookes 2013) re-establishes the citizenship of both workers and consumers. Last but not least, we bring out the ambiguous role of frames that are shared among diverse members of workers’ coalitions: While unifying frames - or what Chun (2009) terms ‘symbolic power’ – enables the forging of alliances, they may simultaneously involve the risk of reproducing, e.g. racial and gendered, social hierarchies that marginalise workers.
References
Brookes, M. (2013) 'Varieties of Power in Transnational Labor Alliances: An Analysis of Workers’ Structural, Institutional, and Coalitional Power in the Global Economy', Labor Studies Journal 38(3): 181-200.
Chun, J.J. (2009) Organizing at the Margins. The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.
Fraser, N. (2010) 'Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postwestphalian World', Antipode 41: 281-297.
Iocco, G. and K.A. Siegmann (2017) ‘A Worker-driven Way out of the Crisis in Mediterranean Agriculture’. Global Labour Column 289. Johannesburg: Global Labour University.
Katz, C. (2004) Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Siegmann, K.A., Knorringa, P. and Merk, J. (2016) ‘Civic Innovation in Value Chains: Towards Workers as Agents in Non-governmental Labour Regulation’, in K. Biekart, W. Harcourt and P. Knorringa (eds) Exploring Civic Innovation for Social and Economic Transformation. London: Routledge.
Wright, E.O. (2000) 'Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests, and Class Compromise', American Journal of Sociology 105(4): 957-1002.
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