Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
In this important book, Gallas asks what strikes in non-industrial sectors mean for class formation, a critical question which has been largely unaddressed by the current literature on global labour unrest.
A mapping of strikes around the world and case studies from Germany, Britain and Spain cast new light on class relations, struggles around waged and unwaged work and labour movements in contemporary capitalism to brings class theory back to labour studies.
This is a valuable resource for academics and students of employment relations, sociology and politics.
In this important book, Gallas asks what strikes in non-industrial sectors mean for class formation, a critical question which has been largely unaddressed by the current literature on global labour unrest.
A mapping of strikes around the world and case studies from Germany, Britain and Spain cast new light on class relations, struggles around waged and unwaged work and labour movements in contemporary capitalism to brings class theory back to labour studies.
This is a valuable resource for academics and students of employment relations, sociology and politics.
This second volume focuses on strike research from a global angle and a Western European angle.
In the preceding chapter, I argued that there is a normative foundation of global labour studies, which remains implicit in recent contributions to the field. I explained why there are sound reasons for global labour scholars to take a pro-worker stance, and that this means being in favour of workers exercising their collective power to undermine class domination. What I have not discussed so far, however, is what taking this stance means in practice. In other words, I have not examined how global labour scholars should operate if they take the normative foundation of their field seriously. This is what I will do in this and the next chapter. There is an obvious starting point for the how-question. If ‘being on the side of workers’ means supporting them in their efforts to contest capitalist class domination, this means supporting organized labour broadly understood, that is, any attempts of workers to organize and mobilize. In a nutshell, siding with workers means supporting workers’ struggles. If one considers that scholars are professional handlers of knowledge, this suggests that scholars with a pro-worker stance should make available knowledge to workers that is useful for their struggles – and that helps them make good strategic decisions. The theoretical critique of social domination needs to be articulated with forms of practical critique – collective practices that contest social domination. In the bellicose language of the young Marx, ‘[t]he weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon’ (2009a). These observations raise two questions: How can global labour scholars make useful strategic knowledge available for workers? And what kind of research designs do they need for this purpose?
Karl Marx famously argued that the historical emergence of the working class as a collective actor resulted from acts of resistance against the continuous extension of the working day, which occurred in the context of the Industrial Revolution and was driven by capitalist competition. In an age where parts of the world experience sustained processes of deindustrialization, this raises the question of what happens to working classes when the factory gates are shut for good. It is possible to address this issue by resorting to strike research and focusing on the service and public sectors. Accordingly, the research question addressed in this book is this: What are the class effects of non-industrial strikes – or how far do they contribute to working-class formation? The author addresses it by taking three steps. First, he shows that the existing global labour studies literature insufficiently engages with class theory; second, he addresses this shortcoming by conceptualizing class and class formation from a critical-realist and materialist angle; and third, he conducts an incorporated comparison of non-industrial strike action around the globe in the age of the Great Crisis by (a) mapping 387 strikes in the service and public sectors from 56 countries and autonomous territories and (b) by zooming in on the railway strikes in Germany, the junior doctors’ strikes in Britain and the general strikes against austerity and the feminist general strikes in Spain.
This chapter details the period beginning with the election of the Labour Government in 1997, which brought into office a fraction of the political elite willing to raise public spending and overhaul the state apparatus to stabilise and complete the development of a more competitive liberal market order (Gallas, 2016). In labour market policy and governance this was marked by a progressive version of the two-nation governing approach. Poverty and social exclusion were identified as problems requiring greater state support, and interventions to open up the labour market to all, irrespective of ascribed social characteristics. However, the promotion of inclusion remained located within a disciplinary framework geared towards curtailing claimant autonomy, and market-managerialism was deepened as ministers sought to better cohere the state apparatus to serve flexible labour market goals (Wiggan, 2007a). New Labour’s modernisation of the state to improve control over claimant behaviour and raise individual employability cohered neatly with a new extensive labour-utilisation approach to accumulation (Koch, 2006), rooted in maximising activation of unemployed people, and reaching into the non-employed claimant population. The orientation of labour market policy is understood here then as a form of progressive market liberalism.
This chapter begins with a brief discussion of full employment and the policies, institutions and class relations that accompanied this; subsequently noting the abandonment of this position and its replacement by an embrace of ‘full employability’ (Finn, 2000). Accompanying the latter has been a turn towards more active labour market policies, as governments remade the policies and governance of social security and employment services to foster labour market participation, and gradually expanded their focus from unemployed claimants to include the broader non-employed claimant population (Clasen and Clegg, 2012; Griggs et al, 2014).
Explanations advanced to account for these developments are then elaborated, including Aufheben’s argument that the social democratic state facilitated a ‘dole autonomy’ that hampered labour commodification and provided resources for contesting authority that the state sought to eliminate.
The final section briefly elaborates on how tracing and unpacking the class and economic order politics (Gallas, 2016) of British governments will be used to unpack and periodise labour market policy orientations. The intention is to identify how the shifting emphasis on domination and accumulation over time has been informed by, and informed the exercise of claimant and worker autonomy, and the changing composition of labour.
From a North Atlantic vantage point, it may be tempting to think that strikes are a relic from the industrial revolution, and that they share the fate of food riots or machine wrecking and play a marginal role as a mode of protest in contemporary societies. A superficial look at existing data suggests that there has been a steep decline in strike activity in Europe and the US in recent decades. According to the European Trade Union Institute, the weighted European average of days not worked due to industrial action was 62.7 per 1,000 employees in 2000 and 26.4 in 2020. Likewise, numbers for the US from the Bureau of Labor Statistics say that ‘days of idleness’ due to strikes were 34 times higher in 1970 than in 2021 (see also Brecher, 2009: 75). It is tempting to conclude that workers rarely choose the strike weapon as means of negotiating of wages and working conditions or of protesting more generally. In fact, some commentators suggest that labour relations have been pacified (Pakulski and Waters, 1996: 86; Meyerson, 2012), rendering the collective act of refusing to work meaningless. Unsurprisingly, scholars sympathetic to labour disagree with this assessment.
An unfolding economic crisis marked by rising unemployment, inflation and labour militancy presented a challenge for the Labour Government. Pressure on public spending limited scope for expansion of the public sector, and fearful of the negative impact on inflation, the Government remained unwilling to pursue demand-side reflationary economic measures. It was in this context that ministers turned to expansion and development of a suite of employment and training programmes (King, 1995).
This chapter makes the case for regarding the emergence of active labour market programmes as a defensive political step by state managers committed to a one-nation governing approach and corporatist state strategy. The Special Employment Measures were concessions to conciliate trade union leaders under pressure from their own members and stabilise an anti-inflation strategy which sought wage repression as the means to improve the conditions for accumulation. In this social democratic-pacificatory orientation, economic ‘functions’ of labour market policy – in terms of fostering skills and labour mobility to create space for higher economic growth in the medium term – was a secondary concern.
This chapter introduces core Marxist concepts concerning value creation, extraction and the accumulation of capital, and how these relate to the labour market. A discussion on the relationship between the reserve army of labour and relative surplus population (Marx, 2013) follows, along with discussion of the autonomism’s identification of the threat labour autonomy poses to capital (Burgmann, 2013) and how this links to notions of the technical and political class composition of labour.
Finally, the chapter outlines the concept of class politics and economic order politics developed by Gallas (2016) to interrogate the strategies and concerns of state managers, and the offensive, defensive and consolidationist steps in class struggle they accompany. These concepts are utilised in chapters 4 through 11 to analyse the form and tempo of class struggle and how the articulation of class and economic order politics informed the development of particular orientations in labour market policy.
This chapter contextualises the shifting orientation of social security and employment services by detailing the changes in employment and unemployment since the 1970s, which dissolved the technical and political class composition of labour inscribed within the post-1945 settlement, and from which the industrial and political wings of organised labour drew their strength.
The rise of labour intensive service sectors, particularly in activities related to the social reproduction of labour, and polarisation of the labour force between ‘high’- and ‘low’-wage jobs are mapped out, alongside shifts in unemployment and inactivity. Together this establishes the general nature of change and continuity in the segmentation and stratification of the labour force and labour supply. Finally, the transformation in the political composition of labour is touched upon with consideration of the changing density and militancy of organised labour.
