Psyche Matters: Resistance from the Chinese Sweatshop of the World

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 217-236
Author(s):  
Jake Lin
Keyword(s):  
Labor Movement ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
The World ◽  
Chinese Workers ◽  
Chinese Labor ◽  
Contemporary Chinese ◽  
Technological Fix

Abstract Why has the contemporary Chinese labor activism failed to engender transformative social and political change? One obvious answer is the authoritarian state’s neoliberal and technological fix and continuously ramped up efforts to stifle labor movements. This article, however, takes the focus back to workers themselves. Drawing from fieldwork studies, it examines workers and activists’ resistance, focusing on their everyday interpretation of the source of their problems, prospects for a labor movement, and their sense of solidarity. It argues that Chinese workers have not acquired sufficient cognitive strength to become the much-hoped-for agent of political change.

scholarly journals Feminization of Resistance: Reclaiming the Affective and the Indefinite as Counter-Strategy in Academic Labor Activism

Publications ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Aslı Vatansever
Keyword(s):  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Labor Market Participation ◽  
Decent Work ◽  
New Faculty ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Academic Labor ◽  
The Us

‘Feminization’ is used either quantitatively to indicate an increased female labor market participation or qualitatively to refer to labor devaluation and to types of work that supposedly require “feminine” skillsets. This article cautiously hews to the qualitative interpretations but suggests an affirmative reconstruction of the concept in the context of collective action. It argues that contemporary grassroots academic labor movements rely more explicitly on collective emotions and aim at building long-term bases of solidarity, instead of performative activism and mass mobilizations. This ‘affective turn’ in academic labor activism is argued to signal a “feminization of resistance”, characterized by a pronounced propensity for affective and relational groundwork. This argument is substantiated in view of the Network for Decent Work in Academia (NGAWiss), a nation-wide precarious researchers’ network in Germany, and the New Faculty Majority (NFM), an adjunct advocacy group in the US. The aim is twofold: first, the article contributes to a better understanding of contemporary labor activism by elucidating the precarious collective’s incremental achievements, often ignored by the outcome-oriented labor movement literature. Second, by reframing it as a mode of affective resistance, the article extends the analytical scope of the term “feminization”.

Why the Global Labor Movement is in Crisis

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Marcel van der Linden
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
The North ◽  
The World

Abstract One of the great paradoxes of the current era is that the world working class continues to grow, while at the same time many labor movements are experiencing a crisis. How can we explain this paradox? The global simultaneity of the crisis suggests that the failure of individual organizational leaderships is not the main cause, but that more general factors play an important role. The article argues and attemps to partly explain why the first wave of founding workers‘ organizations (mainly in the North, from the 1860s until the 1920s) was not repeated elsewhere after World War ii; and why many movements in the North declined since the 1980s.

scholarly journals Gewerkschaften in China und den USA an einem Wendepunkt der globalen neoliberalen Ökonomie

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (156) ◽  
pp. 483-500
Author(s):  
Ellen David Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Social Security ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
The Us ◽  
Global Regime ◽  
Chinese Labor ◽  
Social Security Benefits ◽  
The U.S

The pattern of systematic labor degradation created by the global regime of neoliberalism has brought crisis to labor movements in both the U.s. and China. As predatory capital has advanced - supported for nearly 30 years to accumulate profit in a largely unregulated environment (China) or deregulating environment (US and EU) - the formal labor movement has responded weakly. But, quite unexpectedly, it can be argued trends within Chinese society are emerging that could counter the hegemony of foot-loose capital... while, by comparison, US workers are ever more unprotected and powerless. Chinese labor law, for example, is being systematically strengthened, and wage packets and social security benefits are rising (as compared, notably, to those of western industrial economies). This article will briefly examine the nature of both the US and Chinese labor movements during defining periods of the 1950s-70s, the 80s-90s and the current decade, drawing many frequently unrecognized - parallels.

Renewed Activism for the Labor Movement: The Urgency of Young Worker Engagement

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 391-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maite Tapia ◽  
Lowell Turner
Keyword(s):  
Leadership Development ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Young Workers ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Movement Building

In this article, the authors consider the findings of a multi-year, case study-based research project on young workers and the labor movement in four countries: France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The authors examine the conditions under which young workers actively engage in contemporary labor movements. Although the industrial relations context matters, the authors find the most persuasive explanations to be agency-based. Especially important are the relative openness and active encouragement of unions to the leadership development of young workers, and the persistence and creativity of groups of young workers in promoting their own engagement. Embodying labor’s potential for movement building and resistance to authoritarianism and right-wing populism, young workers offer hope for the future if unions can bring them aboard.

scholarly journals Toward a General Theory and Global History of Workers’ Education

2016 ◽  
Vol 90 ◽  
pp. 5-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Merrill ◽  
Susan J. Schurman
Keyword(s):  
General Theory ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
Democratic Education ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Global History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
New Generation

AbstractWorkers’ education, understood to mean the education of workers by workers for purposes they themselves determine, has always been highly contested terrain, just like work itself. If there is to be an adequate global history of workers’ education, it will need to be guided by a suitable general theory. Hegel most expansively and Durkheim most persuasively argued that societies are cognitive and moral projects, of which education is constitutive: knowing and social being are inextricably bound up with one another. In the global democratic revolutions of the last 250 years, the labor movement distinguished itself as simultaneously a social movement, an education in democracy, and a struggle for a democratic education. The history of workers’ education is a history of workers striving to remake their communities into democracies and themselves into democrats. This brief essay introduces a collection of essays representative of a new generation of scholarship on the history of workers’ education, which we hope will help both traditional and emerging labor movements understand their past and think more clearly about their future.

Trusteeship Council

2008 ◽  
pp. 148-159
Author(s):  
Ralph Wilde
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
The Caribbean

This article examines the Trusteeship Council, a principal organ whose work was essential to the settlement arising from World War II. It involved establishing procedures for the independence of the defeated powers' colonies. This article details the pioneering efforts of the UN at facilitating the decolonization of trust territories. This is part of the world organization's contribution to the processes of self-determination for peoples in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. It also reveals that the work of the Trusteeship Council was linked to what may have been the most important political change of the twentieth century.

The sociological canon reconfigured: Empire, colonial critique, and contemporary sociology

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 545-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anaheed Al-Hardan
Keyword(s):  
Political Change ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Contemporary Sociology ◽  
The World ◽  
Structural Relations ◽  
Modern Experience ◽  
Relations Of Power ◽  
Important Shift

The essay reviews three books that were published consecutively in the last three years, and argues that they represent an important shift in sociology that could potentially reconfigure the discipline and the discipline’s theoretical canon. This is because these books make the modern experience of European empires, colonialism, and, in many instances, incomplete decolonization central to sociology. They also question the discipline’s origin narratives and these narratives’ implications in colonial modernity. Thus, the books hold up a mirror reflecting back onto the discipline of sociology its own implication in European empires and colonization and demonstrate how sociology’s imperial episteme continues to shape the discipline today. This article reviews these books and focuses on how they engage in the double task of the deconstruction of sociology’s complicity in empire and the construction of a colonial critique-centered sociology. This is a sociology, the essay argues, which is invested in analyzing structural relations of power in view of the legacies of empire and colonialism. It is also one that asks questions relevant to contemporary realities for the purposes of effecting political change in the world.

“Their Side of the Case”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keona K. Ervin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Domestic Workers ◽  
Household Labor ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Labor Activism ◽  
Labor Legislation ◽  
The World ◽  
Contractual Agreements ◽  
Working Class Women

Chapter 2 maps the labor activism of St. Louis’s largest segment of black working-class women as they mounted a labor reform program that anticipated and challenged New Deal labor legislation. With progressive black women staffers who led the St. Louis Urban League’s Women’s Division and progressive Jewish clubwomen who developed important ties to black communities, domestic workers designed and enforced standardization and rationalization policies to make dignity tangible in their contractual agreements. A predominant female constituency marked the Urban League as a women’s organization during a “radical” phase that extended into the late 1940s. As domestic workers made moves to “industrialize” household labor, they laid the groundwork for black women’s economic battles during the World War II period.

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