Everyday barricades: bureaucracy and the affect of struggle in trade unions

Kesküla, Eeva; Sanchez, Andrew

doi:10.1007/s10624-018-9535-4

Cited by 12 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…Inspired by Lazar (2017 andKeskula and, several of our papers use ethnography to explore unions as collective ethical-political projects, while unpacking the norms and cultures from which these projects emerge. For instance, Soul (this issue) scrutinizes the often naturalized concept of 'union membership'.…”

Section: Anthropologies Of Unionism and Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We detail the union activities that occur in the small, poorly-funded offices where local union staff tend to the daily needs of members and the incidents on the shop-floor that lead to workers describing their unions as corrupt or useless (c.f. Keskula and Sanchez 2019). Our ethnographies explore how these, often banal, activities shape how workers and community members understand unions' potential for political action and how they form their worker identities.…”

Section: Anthropologies Of Unionism and Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

McNamara

Spyridakis

2020

Dialect Anthropol

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This special issue seeks to understand how unions resist and are reshaped as they confront global capital and neoliberal austerity. It was born out of panels at the annual conferences of European Association of Social Anthropologists and the American Anthropology Association and through ongoing conversations about the similarities and differences between the challenges unions face from austerity in the Global North and from Global South aspirations for national 'development'. The papers explore unions' interactions with 'actually existing neoliberalisms', where the state and other actors express extreme faith in markets as policy devices, and in the superior efficiency of the private sector (Rizzo 2017). We describe unions responding to the growing criticism (from the right) that they imped the economic growth that would assist all of society and (from the left) that they represent a privileged and increasingly irrelevant minority of workers. While we explore unions' attempts to dispute these narratives, our special issue is equally invested in detailing how unionism is re-constructed inside a community and, through this, how unions respond to, and co-create, legal, economic and cultural structures. In analysing how unionism shapes and responds to economic practices and workplace subjectivities, we foreground that the obligations and entitlements of being a 'unionist' and a 'worker' are negotiated through intra-community expectations and political histories. We therefore link unions to recent breakthroughs in the anthropological study of capitalism, where political economies are enacted through sociality and subjectivity (cf. Bear et al. 2015 andHann andParry 2018). Unionism is only beginning to be analysed using this framework, yet we show that unions are crucial to the concepts of self and relationships that shape and enable intra-national capitalisms (c.f. Kasmir 2014 and Lazar 2017). We explore how unions guide and respond to what it means to be a miner, steelworker or longshoreman, while simultaneously influencing what it means to be Zambian, Congolese, Greek or Dialectical Anthropology

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Section: Anthropologies Of Unionism and Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Anthropologies Of Unionism and Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

McNamara

Spyridakis

2020

Dialect Anthropol

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“…By this term, I refer to a range of processes and institutions that are valued by people because they can impact the world around them. Many of these technologies are collective and, under the right conditions, can include trade unions and political parties (Kesküla and Sanchez 2019). As broadly feminist research on factory employment has revealed, even in contexts of social marginalization employees may find their labor satisfying when it is regarded as part of a collective project of meaningful transformation (Lynch 2012;Ngai 2005;Plankey-Videla 2012;Wright 2006).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work

Sanchez

2020

Social Analysis

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This article suggests a new conceptual framework for understanding why some types of work are experienced in more satisfying ways than others. The analysis is based on research in an Indian scrap metal yard, where work entails disassembling things that other people no longer want. In spite of the demanding conditions of the labor and the social stigma attached to it, employees express satisfaction with the work process. This observation raises questions about theories of labor, which see satisfaction as arising from work that is creative, skilled, and task-based. The article argues that transformation is a social process that should be used as the primary analytic for explaining work satisfaction. Theories of creativity, skill, and task are secondary analytics that describe subsets of transformative action.

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“…Nash issued a critique of corporate hegemony (Nash 1989). She did not use these terms but she would have recognized the "kinning practices" of the union and also the corporation, and she would have considered unions to be an "ethical-political project" as contemporary scholars term them (McNamara and Spyridakis this issue, see Kesküla and Sanchez 2019;Lazar 2018).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The “urgent anthropology” of labor unions

Kasmir

2020

Dialect Anthropol

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A propsectivist anthropology should be concerned first of all with a kind of 'urgent anthropology' that consists of understanding the social forms into which we may be about to move. Nash and Hopkins 1976 These co-authored words of feminist anthropologist June Nash are a fitting coda for this set of ethnographic articles on labor unions of miners in Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo, maquila and agricultural workers on the U.S.-Mexico border, steelworkers in Argentina, and ship workers in Greece. June Nash was a pioneer in the anthropology of unions. She saw them embedded in community life and as agents of social and political change. She understood that unionsmembership in them, identification with them, and the subjectivities they make-combine local social structures, rituals, and belief systems with ideologies, organizational structures, and political aspiration that are authored in national and international arenas. She mapped how unions are connected to uneven capitalist accumulation at a world scale, whether that manifests as the reimposition of colonial capitalist extraction after the 1964 coup in Bolivia or deindustrialization in a New England U.S. city in the 1980s. Nash was a dedicated fieldworker, and she wrote eloquently about what unions meant to her informants. She dealt in affect, social relations, and politics, and she had her eye on labor and capital at local and global scales. I offer comments on this special issue as a tribute to June Nash who died in the last weeks of 2019 at the age of 93. We would not have such a developed anthropology of unions today without her foundational scholarship. Her legacy should remind us of the importance of both close ethnography and world historical anthropology for understating the role of unions in the contemporary moment. The epigraph is taken from Nash's co-edited Popular Participation in Social Change: Cooperatives, Collectives, and Nationalized Industry (Nash and Hopkins 1976). Her own contribution was a chapter on workers' control in Bolivia during the Revolutionary Nationalist

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Everyday barricades: bureaucracy and the affect of struggle in trade unions

Cited by 12 publications

References 47 publications

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

Introduction—trade unions in times of austerity and development

Transformation and the Satisfaction of Work

The “urgent anthropology” of labor unions

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