Theorizing Wisconsin's 2011 protests: Community‐based unionism confronts accumulation by dispossession

Abstract

Recent waves of social‐movement protest in Wisconsin challenge conventional understandings of labor activism, as they have responded not only to rollbacks of labor rights but also to privatization of state programs and resources and budget cuts that target poor and working families. Drawing from participant‐observation, I explore the question of whether the movements that arose in Wisconsin in early 2011 represented an expansion of union‐based activism struggling within the “expanded reproduction” of capital or a broader struggle against what New Enclosures Movement scholars have conceptualized as capital's ongoing primitive accumulation strategies. I examine the implications of the answer to this question for community‐based labor movements in Wisconsin and beyond. [community‐based unionism, labor, accumulation by dispossession, social movements, social protest]

Transformative cities

“…In the organizing in Wisconsin, or Oakland, California, where the port was shut down by the cooperation of Occupy and the unions, or in France where the unions cooperated with broader demonstrations against the raising of ages for pensions, unions joined with other protesters. In Wisconsin, service pro viders such as teachers, firefighters, and nurses joined with the users of services, often members of the same families, to maintain the right to collective bargaining (Collins 2012). In order to take account of these collaborative social movements, we suggest a broader approach that would bring labor organizing together with the redistribution of resources through collective consumption and public services as the first form of urban commons.…”

“…If this is accurate, obstacles are still many. In many urban areas shifting from an industrial to service economy, the stability of employment has been eroding, dividing the work force into categories differentiated by their contractual relationship to their employer (Collins 2012). As Bridget Kenny (2004) shows well, there is not much solidarity between regularly employed workers and more casual employees who have a hard time asserting their belonging to the workplace as a productive workforce.…”

“…In order to take account of these collaborative social movements, we suggest a broader approach that would bring labor organizing together with the redistribution of resources through collective consumption and public services as the first form of urban commons. Women are central to this formulation, as they are involved on all fronts: or-ganized labor, public services, reproduction of neighborhoods, domestic care, and consumption (Bookman and Morgen 1998;Buechler 2004;Kaplan 2004;Collins 2012).…”

The makeshift city

“…If precarity serves, in this way, as a useful placeholder for describing the conditions of late-capitalist work in Europe and North America, recent scholarship has also documented a more expansive attunement to how a set of factors including economic uncertainty and the loss of social welfare, but also new forms of violence, marginalization and injustice, have prompted people in many parts of the world to question the enduring possibility of 'life itself' (Muehlebach, 2012: 298). As Andrea Muehlebach has argued, from political activists in Slovenia to marginal workers in Thailand's informal economy, from survivors of the recent protests in Egypt to union activists in Wisconsin, a sense of insecurity as a 'more general existential state' has acquired a global distribution (2012: 298; see Collins, 2012;Hamdy, 2012;Johnson, 2012;Razsa and Kurnik, 2012). This is not to say that such a 'structure of feeling' appears or is apprehended in the same form everywhere.…”

Introduction

“…Because of the assault on the welfare state, issues with respect to the fi rst urban commons, which combines the questions of production and reproduction, such as those documented in Wisconsin (Collins 2012) and the tax protests discussed by Sandra Morgen and Jennifer Erickson in this issue, come to the fore. We also refer specifi cally to examples such as the commoning during Occupy Wall Street (OWS) in 2011 when the use and control of Zuccotti Park became the object of struggle around which a new collective identity could be forged.…”