The State, Trade Union Freedoms and the Impasse of Working-Class Power in Canada

2021 ◽  
pp. 223-246
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
The State ◽  
Class Power

Harmonious Insurrections

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-72
Author(s):  
Shaun S. Nichols
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
Class Power ◽  
Labor Protest ◽  
American Progressivism

Exceptionalism has long defined our understanding of the rise of progressive politics in the early twentieth-century United States. While industrialized European nations blazed the path of social democracy, in the United States, it is argued, “progressivism” merely legitimized middle-class cultural hegemony, social engineering, and the subversion of working-class power. In this era, however, social reform was a distinctly state-led phenomenon, only rarely taken up by the federal Congress. As such, by analyzing labor protest at the level of the state—in this case, Washington—a different interpretation emerges. American “progressivism” was neither exceptionally repressive nor of little interest to labor. In fact, espousing a language of progress, the common good, and the duty of the state to promote “social harmony,” Washington workers actively drew on “progressive” ideas in their struggles to tame the excesses of industrial capitalism. This ideology of “labor progressivism” became the foundation for unprecedented working-class power.

Film and the Politics of Negative Community. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dialectic in the Late 1970s Polish People’s Republic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Leppla
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
The State ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Organizing ◽  
Political Imaginary ◽  
Krzysztof Kieslowski

Polish People’s Republic (PRL) in the late 1970s saw an increased alliance among, and indeed, a blending of, workers and intellectuals, young and old, women and men, actively struggling against the state. A new kind of solidarity emerged that threw off tired notions of what constituted the working class. The preeminent filmmaker of this time, Krzysztof Kieślowski, is often seen as increasingly depoliticized as he moved into fiction, but in this paper the author argues for the dialogic value of his work with respect to political organizing. Kieślowski’s documentarist sensitivity to registering Polish reality and the intimacy of human engagement with the world led him to question the prevailing mode of representing these shifts in politics and class. His feature films, in articulating failures of representation, challenge a “realism” that purported to be universal, but instead reified a certain historical anxiety in the Polish political imaginary (workers vs. intellectuals, urban elites vs. peasantry), or precisely that which was being unraveled by the praxis of the late 1970s. Further, they refuse to cordon off interests of individuals from the very state shown to be oppressing them. Here we have a filmic counterpart to the immanent praxis of workers and intellectuals that turned one of the engines of the state—the trade union—into the greatest weapon against it. The author shows how this functions, in negative terms, in Kieślowski’s first feature, Blizna/The Scar (1976), in which class solidarity is felt stylistically as aporia, and is further developed in Amator/Camera Buff (1979), which expresses the personal as political in the tension between the desire for spokój (peace and quiet) and czegoś wiecej (something more). Rather than a retreat, we should see this in correspondence with the revolutionary consciousness being inscribed in individual Poles by the collective labor action of Solidarity in 1980.

Unification and Its Discontents

2016 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-16
Author(s):  
Brian Kovalesky
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
School District ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
School Districts ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Los Angeles County ◽  
The State ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
City Schools

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the height of protests and actions by civil rights activists around de facto school segregation in the Los Angeles area, the residents of a group of small cities just southeast of the City of Los Angeles fought to break away from the Los Angeles City Schools and create a new, independent school district—one that would help preserve racially segregated schools in the area. The “Four Cities” coalition was comprised of residents of the majority white, working-class cities of Vernon, Maywood, Huntington Park, and Bell—all of which had joined the Los Angeles City Schools in the 1920s and 1930s rather than continue to operate local districts. The coalition later expanded to include residents of the cities of South Gate, Cudahy, and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, although Vernon was eventually excluded. The Four Cities coalition petitioned for the new district in response to a planned merger of the Los Angeles City Schools—until this time comprised of separate elementary and high school districts—into the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The coalition's strategy was to utilize a provision of the district unification process that allowed citizens to petition for reconfiguration or redrawing of boundaries. Unification was encouraged by the California State Board of Education and legislature in order to combine the administrative functions of separate primary and secondary school districts—the dominant model up to this time—to better serve the state's rapidly growing population of children and their educational needs, and was being deliberated in communities across the state and throughout Los Angeles County. The debates at the time over school district unification in the Greater Los Angeles area, like the one over the Four Cities proposal, were inextricably tied to larger issues, such as taxation, control of community institutions, the size and role of state and county government, and racial segregation. At the same time that civil rights activists in the area and the state government alike were articulating a vision of public schools that was more inclusive and demanded larger-scale, consolidated administration, the unification process reveals an often-overlooked grassroots activism among residents of the majority white, working-class cities surrounding Los Angeles that put forward a vision of exclusionary, smaller-scale school districts based on notions of local control and what they termed “community identity.”

The State of Labour and Working Class History in Europe

Brood & Rozen ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludwine Soubry ◽  
Geert Van Goethem ◽  
Paule Verbruggen
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The State ◽  
Working Class History

Step It Up and Go

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Menconi
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
The State ◽  
College Town ◽  
American Idol ◽  
Recorded Music ◽  
American Popular Music ◽  
The Many ◽  
Nina Simone

This book is a love letter to the artists, scenes, and sounds defining North Carolina’s extraordinary contributions to American popular music. David Menconi spent three decades immersed in the state’s music, where traditions run deep but the energy expands in countless directions. Menconi shows how working-class roots and rebellion tie North Carolina’s Piedmont blues, jazz, and bluegrass to beach music, rock, hip-hop, and more. From mill towns and mountain coves to college-town clubs and the stage of American Idol, Blind Boy Fuller and Doc Watson to Nina Simone and Superchunk, Step It Up and Go celebrates homegrown music just as essential to the state as barbecue and basketball. Spanning a century of history from the dawn of recorded music to the present, and with sidebars and photos that help reveal the many-splendored glory of North Carolina’s sonic landscape, this is a must-read for every music lover.

Roundtable discussion: Organising cleaners in the context of Covid-19

2021 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-163
Author(s):  
Heather Wakefield ◽  
Helen O’Connor ◽  
Marjorie Mayo ◽  
Jonathan White
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Step Change ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Roundtable Discussion ◽  
Migrant Communities ◽  
The Status ◽  
Part Time ◽  
Minority Ethnic

People working as cleaners represent a substantial part of the modern British working class. Low-paid, often part-time, disproportionately female and, more recently, from black and minority ethnic and migrant communities, this workforce has historically been seen as hard to organise. Yet the Covid-19 crisis has elevated the status of cleaning as a key part of maintaining public health. In this article, trade union organisers with experience of working with cleaners discuss the possibilities of the current conjuncture for effecting a step change in both unionisation and the reconstruction of public services.

The community strike: From precarity to militant organizing

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
Marcel Paret
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Informal Settlements ◽  
The State ◽  
A Site ◽  
Collective Actor

How do insecure layers of the working class resist when they lack access to power and organization at the workplace? The community strike represents one possible approach. Whereas traditional workplace strikes target employers and exercise power by withholding labor, community strikes focus on the sphere of reproduction, target the state, and build power through moral appeals and disruptions of public space. Drawing on ethnography and interviews in the impoverished Black townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I illustrate this approach by examining widespread local protests in South Africa. Insecurely employed and unemployed residents implemented community strikes by demanding public services, barricading roads and destroying property, and boycotting activities such as work and school. Within these local revolts, community represented both a site of struggle and a collective actor. While community strikes enabled economically insecure groups to mobilize and make demands, they also confronted significant limits, including tensions between protesters and workers.

scholarly journals Trade unions in transnational automotive companies in Russia and Slovakia: Prospects for working-class power

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hinz ◽  
Jeremy Morris
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Structural Power ◽  
Institutional Power ◽  
Class Power ◽  
Unconventional Methods

This article compares industrial relations in production sites in Slovakia and Russia owned by a single transnational automotive firm, Volkswagen. We analyse the empirical data using a working-class power approach. In Slovakia, associational and institutional power is well developed and influenced by the model of German work councils, but structural power is weakly exercised and unions rely on non-conflictual engagement with management. In Russia, structural working-class power remains strong, but the opportunities for transforming this into lasting associational, let alone institutional power, remain limited; thus, new unions make use of unconventional methods of protest to promote worker interests.

scholarly journals A imprensa operária e a História da Educação: uma análise das contribuições dos jornais O Labor e O Confederal para a História da Educação nos anos iniciais de Belo Horizonte

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 94
Author(s):  
Renata Garcia Campos Duarte
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Minas Gerais ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Education For All ◽  
Education History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Belo Horizonte ◽  
Educational Field

Este artigo tem como objetivo discutir a importância da utilização de impressos operários enquanto fonte para as pesquisas em história da educação, analisando alguns debates e ideias educacionais presentes em dois jornais operários de origem associativa: O Labor, da Confederação Auxiliadora dos Operários, e O Confederal, do Centro Confederativo dos Operários. As associações responsáveis pelos periódicos foram constituídas nos primeiros anos de existência de Belo Horizonte, cidade construída para sediar a nova capital do Estado de Minas Gerais. Os impressos operários, por sua vez, são entendidos em suas particularidades tendo-se em vista as suas características, os quais divulgavam algumas ideias e debates, como os referentes ao campo educacional. A partir da análise dos jornais foi apurada a existência de demandas e propostas por educação para todas as classes sociais, visto que o ensino em Belo Horizonte não era ofertado a todos, ou se era oferecido, não alcançava as classes sociais menos favorecidas.The working class press and the History of Education: an analysis of the contributions of the newspapers The Labor and The Confederal to the History of Education in the initial years of Belo Horizonte. This article aims to discuss the importance of the use of working class press as a source for research in the history of education, analyzing some debates and educational ideas present in two workers' newspapers of associative origin: The Labor, of the Auxiliary Confederation of Workers, and The Confederal, of the Confederative Center for Workers. The associations responsible for the periodicals were constituted in the first years of existence of Belo Horizonte, city built to host the new capital of the State of Minas Gerais. The working class periodicals, in turn, are understood in their particularities in view of their characteristics, which disseminated some ideas and debates, such as those concerning the educational field. From the analysis of the newspapers, the existence of demands and proposals for education for all social classes was verified, whereas the education in Belo Horizonte was not offered to all, or if it was offered, it did not reach the less favored social classes. Keywords: Workers associations; Belo Horizonte; Education; History of education; Working class press.

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