On the Job, Off the Books: Organizing Against Worker Misclassification in the Neoliberal Era

Worker misclassification is a form of precarious employment in which employers illegally designate their employees as ‘independent contractors’ to cut labor costs. Non-standard employment arrangements and the emergence of the misclassification problem are expressions of neoliberal economic reform and attendant shifts in managerial strategy. Although scholars and government statisticians have documented the prevalence of worker misclassification, extant research on labor-organizing campaigns in response to this practice is lacking. This paper presents case studies of two successful organizing campaigns against worker misclassification: (1) a United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America (UBCJA) effort in the Northeastern construction industry and (2) a Teamsters campaign focused on the West Coast port trucking industry. Both campaigns employ similar frames highlighting competition, free markets, and the necessity of industrial change to achieve these ideals. We conclude with a discussion of the prospects and limitations of these organizing strategies given the countervailing political and economic headwinds posed by neoliberal restructuring.

Love vs. money: Understanding unique challenges in care workers’ labor organizing

Care work pays less than it should, given the characteristics of the jobs and the qualifications of its workers (England et al., 2002). Care workers also face unique challenges as they organize for better working conditions, including better pay, because they do not want to threaten to withhold care from those in their charge (England, 2005). We propose that care workers face an additional challenge in organizing because, for some observers, it highlights that care workers are paid to care. To investigate this question, we examine how people respond to the organizing efforts of care workers through the lens of the Sacred Values Protection Model (SVPM; Tetlock et al., 2000). According to the SVPM, there are certain values that people assume to be sacred and unquestionable (e.g., love, justice). When we are forced to consider pitting a sacred value, like love, against a secular one, like money, the tradeoff is seen as taboo. As a result, people react with outrage, and the desire to see those who have engaged in the taboo tradeoff reaffirm the sacred value. In this chapter, we will argue that people’s opposition to care workers’ labor organizing can be partly explained by how much they view engaging in care work as trading love for money. For some, care work may be perceived as a taboo tradeoff, blurring the divide between activities performed out of love and those performed for pay. We suggest that labor organizing can inadvertently highlight this tension.

Bricolage in labor organizing practices: Spanish and Italian migrant activists in Berlin

This article analyzes how Southern European workers create bricolage by combining creatively organized practices of collective action, such as those of conventional labor unions, with self-created practices when facing oppressive labor relations and widespread downgrading of social mobility. We compare two cases of networks formed by Spanish and Italian migrant workers in Berlin: the Grupo de Acción Sindical and Berlin Migrant Strikers. Drawing on an ethnographic study of these groups, the article argues that the networks have different logics of action and political strategies. Their dissimilarities are manifested in different outcomes and organizational dimensions. Key factors include their founding members' social and activist backgrounds and leaders' countries of origin. It can be argued that, through these networks, migrants produce and reproduce political practices and collective actions, shaping a transnational social space that connects migrants and non-migrant individuals and organizations from both origin and destination countries.

Lebanon’s October 2019 Revolution

In a world dominated by neoliberalism, there is renewed attention to labor organizing and radical forms of action outside the institutional framework. In Lebanon, the October 2019 Revolution brought to the forefront the capacity of labor to recompose its power in the face of the longstanding capitalist effort to decompose it. In this essay, I first examine the outbreak of social unrest in 2019 that accompanied the failure of neoliberal policies. Second, I explain the absence and silence of the labor movement amidst the 2019 Revolution by state interference and at the service of a longstanding laissez-faire economy. I finally conclude by examining recent attempts of professionals to organize from within the October revolution and the challenges they currently grapple with.

From Insurgency to Movement: An Embryonic Labor Movement Undermining Hegemony in South China

This article provides a new analysis of Chinese labor politics. Most scholars suggest that China has no labor movement because Chinese labor protests are apolitical, cellular, and short-lived, and thus inconsistent with the properties of social movements identified in the political process model. By contrast, the author draws on Antonio Gramsci’s ideas regarding movements undermining hegemony and on ethnographic and archival research to demonstrate that the activities of movement-oriented labor nongovernmental organizations (MLNGOs) coupled with associated labor protests since 2011 constitute the embryo of a counterhegemonic labor movement. MLNGOs have reworked the hegemonic labor law system to undermine the regime’s legal fragmentation of workers, nurtured worker leaders who speak for and represent migrant workers to temporarily substitute for impotent workplace unions, and developed alternative organizational networks of labor organizing that challenged the union’s monopoly. This incipient counterhegemonic movement persisted several years after state repression in late 2015 but was curtailed by another wave of repression in January 2019. The very severity of state repression suggests that a movement countering hegemony has been formed.

On the Strike and Democratic Protest

Many people recognize that strikes have important instrumental or indirect democratic benefits, especially ones resulting from their effect on economic and political inequality. Meanwhile, some theorists have made robust arguments recently for the republican value of strikes, showing how strikers’ cessation of labor resists two forms of domination linked to employment. In this chapter, I push beyond both these arguments to show that strikes are in themselves democratically valuable forms of collective action—and that they are illustrative, even exemplary, of important things we should remember about all forms of democratic protest. The democratic case for the strike, I contend, rests on recognizing the strike as more than just cessation or refusal—as a positive statement about the effort, skill, and agency of workers, and as a multifaceted collective action of a particular egalitarian kind. Strikes consist of workers striving to act together, on equal terms, building horizontal relations with each other, to resist economic domination and to achieve some rough sort of collective management of the terms of labor. And reflection on strikes and labor organizing reminds us of the significance of recognizing democratic protest as skillful and difficult political work.