Putting Able Hands to Work: Skill, Organization, and the Cooperative Market in Jamaica

Abstract

This article explores how participation in cooperatives seeks to accomplish an ideal form of the market through the constitutive ethics of organization and skill development. It does so by exploring the cooperative processes and practices of the Jamaica Indigenous Artisans Cooperative, or JAMIA, a small group of 35 vendors and artisans formed in Montego Bay in 2010. Through their employment of a rhetoric, which emphasizes the importance of skill development and organization as a means of accomplishment, JAMIA demonstrates to what extent cooperative ideologies, or imaginaries, serve to legitimize, console, or even frustrate the economic position of cooperative membership.

The Ambivalence of Autonomy: Skills, Trust, Tactics, and Status on a Construction Site in Belize

“…As seen in the previous section, workers position themselves and understand themselves through skill. With skill, practitioners also learn values, as shown in the anthropological literature on the subject (Argenti 2002; Lewis 2016; Simpson 2006; Marchand 2008; Venkatesan 2010).…”

Labor Unions and the Making of Class in a (Supposedly) Post‐Class World Hard Sell: Work and Resistance in Retail Chains Peter Ikeler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016) The Social Life of Politics: Ethics, Kinship, and Union Activism in Argentina Sian Lazar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017) The Making of an African Working Class: Politics, Law, and Cultural Protest in the Manual Workers' Union in Botswana Pnina Werbner (London: Pluto, 2014)

“…The increasingly precarious position of labor both in the developed and developing world continues to spark interdisciplinary debates and fuel conversations beyond the academy (Ong 2008;Milkman 2014). Unionization of workers is an increasingly important element in these discussions about how to address pervasive precarity and inequality, alongside universal basic income (Graeber 2018), and promotion of worker-owned enterprises (Lewis 2016). Indeed, many anthropologists will be aware of efforts by non-tenured faculty and staff to pursue labor organizing on American college campuses, while graduate students remain mired in struggles for union recognition following a controversial decision by the National Labor Relations Board in 2016 that granted student workers the right to unionize (Columbia University, 364 NLRB No.…”