Wildcat Homers, Gamifying Work, and Workplace-Whānau in the Meat Industry: Re-Examining the Subversiveness of Informal Workers' Resistance

Abstract

Studies of labor struggle often concentrate on overt resistance, such as strikes, and neglect the rich variety of subterranean acts of workplace dissent. The few studies of this informal resistance that exist are largely a‐historical and Eurocentric micro‐studies that generally argue such dissent lacks radical content. Drawing on two unorthodox Marxist currents, including “autonomist Marxism”, this article presents a historical study of everyday resistance by meatworkers in Aotearoa New Zealand during the 1970s. It is asserted these struggles often hampered profits and production, complemented overt resistance, and were frequently collective rather than individualistic in nature—indeed, in many plants dissent was based on informal work groups of workplace‐whānau. These were multiethnic extended family‐like informal groupings that were influenced by Māori culture. While capital comprehensively restructured the meat industry in the 1980s and 1990s, it has not meant the “end of resistance” today.

Gaming the System: Tactical Workarounds and the Production of Antagonistic Subjectivities among Migrant Platform Workers in Italy

“…Our main argument here is that gaming the system is a form of everyday resistance. As expressions of misbehaviour, or “anything you do at work you are not supposed to do” (Ackroyd and Thompson 1999:2), the practices we describe in this article reveal the subversive significance of a “communal shop floor counter‐culture” revolving “around informal work groups” (Boraman 2017:480). By examining how, through gamification, food delivery platforms construct the couriers as entrepreneurial and productive subjects, we show that the disarticulation and repurposing of these management mechanisms both address survival needs and signal a still fledgling, but potentially vibrant, space of labour activism.…”