Employees in global workplaces commonly suggest they are being failed by trade union representatives that betray the political ideals of their institutions. The tenacity of this discourse requires interrogation, since the notion persists even in contexts that lack evidence of such practices occurring. Based upon a comparison of Kazakhstan and India, we suggest that there is a fundamental slippage between the emotive aspect of union politics and the banal realties of institutional processes. We explore how conservative and radical trade unions alike rely upon appeals to an affect of struggle, in order to rationalise their work as part of an international and historically continuous political project. The paper explains why it is in the bureaucratic nature of trade unions to betray such an affect.
Earlier analyses have demonstrated the loss of industrial worker autonomy and the rise of deskilling after production is automated. But what happens to autonomy and skill in times of austerity, when automation breaks down? Through studying the labour process in a Kazakhstani coal processing plant, I explore how the lack of investment in machinery and staff influences the way female workers conduct their everyday work. Workers are simultaneously reskilled and exhausted by invisible extra maintenance work, with their gendered dispositions drawn on as a resource. Ethnographies of the economic crisis and austerity have so far paid little attention to the transformation of everyday industrial work. This ethnography makes a distinctive contribution by shifting the focus on to an embodied and detailed analysis of industrial work in austerity, developing ideas of gendered maintenance, repair, and skill.
In this article, I look at Russian-speaking miners' perception of their position in Estonian society, along with their moral economy. Former heroes, glorified for their class and ethnicity, they feel like a racialized underclass in neoliberal Estonia. Excluded from the nation on the basis of ethnicity, they try to maintain their dignity through the discourse of hard work as a basis for membership in society. Based on the longer-term analysis of Estonian history, I argue that the current outcome for the Russian-speaking working class is related to longer historical processes of class formation whereby each period in the Estonian history of the twentieth century seems to be the reversal of the previous one. I also argue for analysis of social change in Eastern Europe that does not focus solely on ethnicity but is linked to class formation processes.
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