PART I Global Labour Studies: Conducting Research on the Side of Workers
The normative gap in global labour studies Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously ended the Manifesto of the Communist Party with a call to arms – ‘ Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch! ’ [Proletarians of all countries, unite!] ( 1959 : 493; emphasis in the original). Ever since, the issue of transnational solidarity and labour internationalism has formed part of the debates on the strategies and aims of labour movements. And through the ages, these debates have been of concern to scholars, who have not just discussed the prospects for solidarity
Throughout this first volume of my book, my intention has been to put forward an argument for the continued relevance of class – both as a relation of social domination pervading contemporary societies, and as a category of social analysis broadly understood. In the first part, I was concerned with global labour studies as a research field. I argued that global labour scholars tend to take ‘the side of workers’. This is visible in key contributions to the literature, which contain a normative-critical subtext. According to it, neoliberalism and capitalism
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.
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.
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.
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.
A low-threshold research approach If we take the normative foundation of global labour studies seriously, the aim is to produce knowledge that is strategically relevant for workers. Consequently, it makes sense to focus on their collective agency, that is, on their capacity to actively shape the social world through joint action. The strike weapon is risky to use but forceful. Workers across the globe are resorting to it time and again – and have done so since labour movements emerged in the context of early industrialization. As such, it is of high
the mutually transformative mechanisms of economic change that are simultaneously affected by and directly affect workers across the global economy. Moreover, labour regime analysis can also be situated in the wider global labour studies tradition, which ‘seeks to map out precisely these kinds of relationships to analyse their contrasting implications for the actors involved at each node’ ( Taylor and Rioux, 2017 : 3). As a field, it is essential for capturing the distinctive dynamics and histories of labour, offering novel ways for understanding the distinct
