New Form and Conflict at Work

New Forms and Expressions of Conflict at Work
Also by Gregor Gall

THE MEANING OF MILITANCY? Postal Workers and Industrial Relations
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SCOTLAND: Red Scotland? Radical Scotland
SEX WORKER UNION ORGANIZING: An International Study
LABOUR UNIONISM IN THE FINANCIAL SERVICES SECTOR: Struggling for
Rights and Representation
MAKING AND KEEPING THE CONNECTION – a History of the Connect
Telecommunications Union and its Principal Predecessors
TOMMY SHERIDAN: FROM HERO TO ZERO? A Political Biography
AN AGENCY OF THEIR OWN: Sex Worker Union Organising
UNION ORGANISING: Campaigning for Trade Union Recognition
UNION RECOGNITION: Organising and Bargaining Outcomes
IS THERE A SCOTTISH ROAD TO SOCIALISM?
UNION REVITALISATION IN ADVANCED ECONOMIES: Assessing the
Contribution of ‘Union Organising’
THE FUTURE OF UNION ORGANISING – Building for Tomorrow
New Forms and Expressions
of Conflict at Work
Edited by
Gregor Gall
University of Bradford, UK
Selection and editorial content © Gregor Gall 2013
Individual chapters © the contributors 2013
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First published 2013 by
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables ix

Notes on Contributors xi
1 Introduction – Themes, Concepts and Propositions 1

Gregor Gall
2 Conflict and Contestation in the Contemporary World of
Work: Theory and Perspectives 7
Jacques Bélanger and Paul Edwards
3 A Theory of Workplace Conflict Development: From
Grievances to Strikes 26
Robert Hebdon and Sung Chul Noh
4 A Working Death? Contesting Life Itself in the Bio-Political
Organization 48
Peter Fleming
5 The Re-Emergence of Workplace-Based Organization as the
New Expression of Conflict in Argentina 66
Maurizio Atzeni and Pablo Ghigliani
6 The Collective Expression of Workplace Grievances
in Britain 86
Gregor Gall and Sheila Cohen
7 New Dynamics of Industrial Conflicts in China:
Causes, Expressions and Resolution Alternatives 108
Fang Lee Cooke
8 Egyptian Workers Rediscover the Strike 130
Anne Alexander
9 Direct Action in France: A New Phase in Labour–Capital
Conflict 152
Sylvie Contrepois
10 Violent Industrial Protest in Indonesia: Cultural
Phenomenon or Legacy of an Authoritarian Past? 171
Michele Ford
vii
viii Contents
11 Conflicts at Work in Poland’s New Capitalism: Worker

Resistance in a Flexible Work Regime 191
Adam Mrozowicki and Małgorzata Maciejewska
12 Minjung Tactics in a Post-Minjung Era? The Survival of
Self-Immolation and Traumatic Forms of Labour Protest
in South Korea 212
Jamie Doucette
13 Striking Out in America: Is There an Alternative to
the Strike? 233
Kim Moody
Index 253
List of Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1 Two dimensions of workplace conflict 31

3.2 A process model of conflict development 38
3.3 Relationship between grievance and quit rate 41
3.4 Relationship between grievance/quit rate and job action 41
3.5 Relationship between job action and strike 42
3.6 Overall relationship among three forms of workplace
conflict 42
3.7 Union and non-union job actions 43
3.8 Slowdowns – union and non-union 43
8.1 Strikes and all forms of workers’ collective action,
2004–8 144
Tables
6.1 Strike activity, 1981–2010 90

6.2 Industrial action activity, 1980–2004 92
6.3 Incidence of overtime bans, 1995–2000 92
6.4 Incidences of industrial action short of a strike, 1994–2004 93
6.5 Incidences of industrial action short of a strike, 2000–10 93
6.6 Unofficial strikes in Britain 1990–2010 96
6.7 Trade Union Trends surveys – industrial action by
status 97
6.8 Balloting incidences and outcomes 99
6.9 Ballots for strikes and industrial action, 2002–10 101
6.10 Balloting and threat of balloting, 1996–2004 101
6.11 Collective disputes received by ACAS 103
7.1 Labour disputes and resolutions, 2007–9 110
7.2 Forms of conflict expressions adopted by workers 113
ix
x List of Figures and Tables
8.1 Numbers of episodes of workers’ collective action, 2004–11 145

10.1 Collective violence in fourteen Indonesian provinces,
1990–2003 173
11.1 Strikes in Poland, 1990–2011 194
12.1 Monetary amounts of pending damage claims and
provisional seizure of assets 226
13.1 Average annual private sector union membership, density,
strikes, and duration 235
13.2 Strike threats, strikes, threats of replacements, use of
replacements in collective bargaining, 1996, 1999,
and 2003 (union answers) 239
Notes on Contributors
Anne Alexander is Buckley Fellow at the Centre for Research in the

Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.
Her current research focuses on the role of the workers’ movement in
the Arab revolutions and the use of digital media by activists in move-
ments for social and political change. Her recent publications include a
number of chapters in anthologies and articles in Work, Employment and
Society and the Journal of North African Studies.
Maurizio Atzeni is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of

Loughborough and at the Conicet’s Centro de Investigaciones Laborales
(CEIL) based in Buenos Aires. He has published widely on the issues of
labour unionism in Argentina, on mobilization theory and collective
action and on workers’ self-management. He is currently involved in
an EU-sponsored project on workers’ organization and collective action
among informal workers in Buenos Aires.
Jacques Bélanger is a Professor in the Département des Relations Indus-

trielles at Université Laval, in Quebec City. His research has focused on
workplace relations and, more generally, on the evolution of employment
relations. The results of his field studies, often within multinational
firms, have appeared in industrial relations and sociological journals,
including the British Journal of Industrial Relations, Revue Française de
Sociologie and Sociologie du Travail. His current research focuses on
service work and its implications on the theoretical foundations of
the field of study of employment relations. He is co-director of the
Centre de Recherche Interuniversitaire sur la Mondialisation et le Travail
(CRIMT).
Sheila Cohen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Work and Research

Unit (WERU), University of Hertfordshire, where she has taught on
related topics. Her main publications are Ramparts of Resistance: Why
Workers Lost Their Power and How to Get It Back (2006) and The Everlasting
Staircase: A History of the Prison Officers’ Association (co-author, 2009).
She is currently working on a history of the main trade union branch
at Ford’s Dagenham and a theoretical overview of trade unionism titled
‘A Minority Movement…?’ She has also published in Labor History and
Capital and Class and contributed to a number of edited collections on
xi
xii Notes on Contributors
unions. She is also the author of numerous pamphlets and magazine

articles on labour unionism.
Sylvie Contrepois is a Reader at London Metropolitan University’s

Working Lives Research Institute. Her research is based in France, where
she is a member of the CRESPPA-GTM CNRS Institute in Paris. She is
a specialist in French industrial relations. In 2003, she published her
PhD on the practices and strategies of French unions, titled ‘Syndicats,
la Nouvelle Donne. Enquête au Coeur d’un Bassin Industriel’. She
recently co-edited Globalizing Employment Relations: Multinational Firms
and Central and Eastern Europe Transitions (2010) and Changing Work and
Community Identities (2012).
Fang Lee Cooke is Professor of Human Resource Management and

Chinese Studies at the Department of Management, Faculty of Business
and Economics, Monash University. Previously, she was a Full Professor
at the University of Manchester. Her research interests are in the area of
employment relations, gender studies, diversity management, strategic
HRM, knowledge management and innovation, outsourcing, Chinese
outward FDI and employment of Chinese migrants. Fang has published
over one hundred book chapters and refereed journal articles. She is
the author of HRM, Work and Employment in China (2005), Competition,
Strategy and Management in China (2008) and Human Resource Management
in China: New Trends and Practices (2012).
Jamie Doucette holds a PhD in Human Geography and was a researcher

in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia
before taking up a lectureship at the University of Manchester. He has
been a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Research
Fellow at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo and a visiting researcher at the
Democracy and Social Movements Institute at Sungkonghoe University,
Seoul. His primary research interests are concerned with understanding
how Korean social movements have contested the economic institutions
associated with export-oriented East Asian economic development, with
a specific focus on labour and financial markets. His work has appeared
in the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Journal of Contem-
porary Asia, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus and in the book Missing
Links in Labour Geography amongst others.
Paul Edwards is Professor of Employment Relations in the Business School,

University of Birmingham. He is the editor of Industrial Relations: Theory and
Practice (1995, 2003) and co-author of The Politics of Working Life (2005).
Current research interests include employment relations in migrant and
ethnic minority businesses. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Human Relations.
Notes on Contributors xiii
Peter Fleming is Professor of Work and Society at Queen Mary College,

University of London. His research focuses on the political economy
of corporations and the relations of power that underlie them. One
line of investigation explores the way in which conflict and resistance
constitutes the formal corporate form currently dominating Western
economies. Another area of interest is the cultural politics of work
organizations, and the modes of ideological control that operate to
enlist the participation of labour. He also researches corporate cor-
ruption and the social dynamics that characterize it. He is author a
number of books, including Contesting the Corporation (2007), The End of
Corporate Social Responsibility (2012) and Dead Man Working (2012).
Michele Ford is Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre and

Associate Professor in the Department of Indonesian Studies at the
University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the Indonesian labour
movement and organized labour’s responses to temporary labour
migration in East and Southeast Asia. She is the author of Workers and
Intellectuals: NGOs, Trade Unions and the Indonesian Labour Movement
(2009); editor of Social Activism in Southeast Asia (2012); and co-editor
of Women and Work in Indonesia (2008), Women and Labour Organizing
in Asia: Diversity, Autonomy and Activism (2008), Indonesia Beyond the
Water’s Edge: Managing an Archipelagic State (2009), Men and Masculinities
in Southeast Asia (2012) and Labour Migration and Trafficking in Southeast
Asia: Critical Perspectives (2012).
Gregor Gall is Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of

Bradford. He was previously Research Professor of Industrial Relations and
Director of the Work and Employment Research Unit at the University
of Hertfordshire. His latest books are Tommy Sheridan – from hero to zero?
A political biography (Welsh Academic Press, 2012) and An Agency of their
Own: sex worker union organising (Zero, 2012). Along with Tony Dundon,
he is editor of Global Anti-unionism: nature, dynamics, trajectories and
outcomes (Palgrave, 2013) and the author of the forthcoming Sex worker
unionisation: global developments, challenges and possibilities (Palgrave).
Pablo Ghigliani is a full-time Researcher at the Consejo Nacional

de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), member of the
Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales (IdIHCS)
and Professor of Social History at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata,
Argentina. His main areas of research are labour relations, unions and the
social history of the Argentinean working class. He is the author of The
Politics of Privatisation and Trade Union Mobilisation: The Electricity Industry
in the UK and Argentina (2010).
xiv Notes on Contributors
Robert Hebdon is a Professor in the Desautels Faculty of Management,

McGill University. He is also Chair of the Faculty Program in Industrial
Relations in the Faculty of Arts. His main research interests are in
the areas of workplace conflict and privatization. He has published
widely in these fields in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial
Relations, Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations, Relations Industrielles,
American Economic Review, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management,
Journal of Environment and Planning C – Local Government and Policy and
Local Government Studies.
Małgorzata Maciejewska is a PhD student at the Institute of Sociology,

Faculty of Social Sciences, Wroclaw University, Poland. Her research
interests include gendered labour regimes, the care economy and wel-
fare state restructuring and foreign direct investment in Poland. She has
published in the Feminist Think Tank On-line Library.
Kim Moody is Senior Research Fellow at the Work and Employment

Research Unit, University of Hertfordshire. He is author of US Labor in
Trouble and Transition (2007), From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime
Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present (2007) and of recent articles
published in the British Journal of Industrial Relations and Capital & Class.
His current research interest is in the relationship of technological
change and work reorganization to trade union growth.
Adam Mrozowicki is an Assistant Professor (adiunkt) at the Institute

of Sociology, University of Wrocław, Poland. He collaborates with the
European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the Institute of Public Affairs
(ISP, Poland), European Industrial Relations Observatory (EIRO) and the
Central European Labour Studies Institute (CELSI, Slovakia). His main
research interests include comparative labour relations and trade union
revitalization in Eastern Europe. He defended his PhD thesis at the
Centre for Sociological Research at the Catholic University of Leuven in
2009. He was awarded a scholarship by the Polish Ministry of Science
and Higher Education for 2011–13. He has published in the European
Journal of Industrial Relations, Work, Employment and Society, EMECON and
Economic and Industrial Democracy. His most recent book is Coping with
Social Change: Life Strategies of Workers in Poland’s New Capitalism (2011).
Sung Chul Noh is a doctoral candidate at the Desautels Faculty of

Management, McGill University. His current research interest is in
exploring grievance procedures in non-union contexts and their conse-
quences in workplace conflict.
1
Introduction – Themes, Concepts
and Propositions
Gregor Gall
This collection of chapters on new forms and expressions of conflict

at work came about as a result of an intermittent series of thoughts
about, reflections upon and responses to reports in the popular and
specialist media and discussions during teaching transnational employ-
ment relations. Continually, it seemed – if only on an anecdotal and
sporadic basis – that forms of conflict about work and employment in
and around the workplace were recurring and re-occurring. Yet at the
same time, and most obviously with regard to the strike and its appar-
ently declining usage, it also seemed paradoxically that workers in the
developed economies of the global north were not engaging in the kind
of innovations in (other) forms of tactics and weapons of collective
conflict expression that might have been expected given the decline in
strikes. The most obvious sectors this pertained to were those of private
services where emotional and aesthetic labour have become paramount
and, more generally, where the use of information technology is now
central to the production, distribution and exchange of goods, services
and information. The importance of emotional and aesthetic labour
may be regarded as having provided a new foundation upon which
worker resistance could rest – such as the smile strike. Similarly, the cen-
trality of information technology may be considered as provided a basis
for the acting out of cyber-wars against employers, if not a return to old-
fashioned forms of sabotage. And so it seems, on the one hand, many of
the old ways of making conflict by workers persist. In this sense, there
continues to be a manifest quantitative dimension to the expression of
conflict. But, on the other hand, and given the decline of the old ways,
there seems to be a gap in the qualitative dimension, whereby new ways
of organising work and employment under capitalism do not appear to
be bringing forth new ways of workers making conflict. These notions
1
2 Introduction
of method displacement, method adaptation and method innovation

permeated the aforementioned thoughts and discussions. Consequently,
the initiative was taken to provide an extended consideration of some of
these issues by drawing upon the work and understanding of a number
of academics.
Various implicit propositions underlie many of the chapters. The first
is that in examining ‘new’ forms of conflict at work within and under
capitalism, there is likely to be little that is fundamentally new in the
sense of never before having occurred. This should not come as particu-
larly surprising or shocking for the reason that not only is capitalism
not a new system of organising economy and society, but the very con-
tinuation of this socio-economic system (despite periods of war, revolu-
tion and depression) is likely to give rise to a continuity of responses
from wage-labourers in the forms of conflict at work. The second is that
as capitalism is now a more globalised system of organising society than
ever before, the prospect exists that forms of conflict at work over the
terms of wage labour may be variations and replications of already well-
established themes. In this sense, we may view forms of conflict as new
in that they have been a) used by particular groups of workers for the
first time in one particular part of the world, and b) rediscovered by dif-
ferent groups of workers for the first time in a long time. Collectively
then, the forms are re-occurring phenomena but now on a global scale.
The third is that some minor innovation within existing forms should
be anticipated for the way in which capital has globalised itself, and
the way it organises and re-organises itself – sometimes in response to
challenges from labour – may find its match in the way labour organises
itself and responds to capital. This would be to anticipate new spatial
and temporal dimensions of labour conflict rather than new forms of
labour conflict per se. The fourth is that, because capitalism has not – for
a number of reasons – become truly standardised and uniform in the
way it operates on this ever more global scale, different countries and
regions may retain something of their own particularities, specificities
and idiosyncrasies by virtue of varying political and legal cultures and
structures, and these will impact upon and influence forms of labour
conflict. Consequently, while a tendency towards convergence of forms
of labour conflict may be apparent, continuity of difference and diver-
gence are also possible and probable. The final implicit proposition is
that if workers’ collective power in the workplace has waned, then it is
likely – with the fundamental source of antagonism in work remain-
ing under capitalism – that the organising locus moves to outside the
workplace and into areas of public space. This is premised on the desire
Gregor Gall 3
to avoid de facto acquiescence in the terms of exploitation by finding a

more external means of contesting them. All the five propositions are
articulated deliberately as propositions – and not hypotheses – not only
because they underlie the chapters rather than exist as being established
to then be consciously tested in search of a null hypothesis or not, but
because the data to test them does not often exist (and cannot be cre-
ated to do so).
These propositions can be summarised thus – little is fundamentally
new; variations take place on already established themes; minor innova-
tion takes place within existing forms; varying political cultures impact
upon forms of conflict; and extra-workplace conflict may be a new locus.
There is anecdotal evidence that workers have not sought to reinvent
the wheel of collectively withdrawing their willingness to work, nor to
develop alternatives to it. What may make forms and expressions look
‘new’ is the context, way and frequency in which they are used as well
as the way in which workers use them. A number of examples highlight
this. Thus, one of the first recorded uses of transport workers working
but not collecting fares as a form of industrial action took place in the
United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Without knowl-
edge of that, the few cases of such action in recent times would seem
to be radical innovations (particularly given their usage as part of alli-
ances with members of the travelling public against austerity measures).
Similarly, workplace occupations are far from being new. Indeed, the
first modern occupation or ‘sit-down’ strike was recorded in 1906 at
General Electric in the United States followed by usage in the 1930s in
the same country and elsewhere in Italy (1919–1921) and Spain (1936).
In this sense, we are locked into both ‘back to the future’ and ‘forward
to the past’. The spate of bossnappings in France, however, does appear
to have a more recent genesis. It suggests that genuine innovation as
per the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ work-in of 1971–1972 or the Lip clock
factory work-in in France from 1973–1974 and 1976–1977 is rare – and
the instance of the work-in has very seldom been repeated in the global
north despite its potential purchase, nor has it evolved into something
more potent like a community of work-ins acting as cooperatives. Put
together, we can begin to understand why such various aforementioned
actions are, in effect, often militant means being used for moderate
ends (see Kelly 1996) where the militancy of the modus operandi takes
centre stage and compels wider interest. The prevalence of the general
strike as a form of generalised political – rather than economic – action
which may or may not directly concern matters of work and employ-
ment dates back to its first use by the Chartists in Britain in 1842. Since
4 Introduction
then, it has been used in a diverse array of countries of the global north
and south, and in western Europe its usage has increased in recent years
(Gall 2013). Yet the deployment of the general strike seventeen times in
Greece in a mere two years (2010 and 2011) may suggest that it is not
the knockout blow that it might have been thought to be. This does not
seem to be wholly dependent upon such actions being discontinuous,
that is taken for one or two days, rather than being continuous.
However, and given that production, distribution and exchange
remain necessarily highly integrated under globalised capitalism – and
in horizontal and vertical as well as spatial and temporal ways – but that
these systems are now also more fragile than ever before, this provides
the potential lever for workers to not so much develop new tools as
finesse old ones. But the opportunities afforded by lean and just-in-time
supply chain systems, as well as the extent of the contracting out and
outsourcing of activities so that individual companies provide key serv-
ices to many other companies, do not appear to be being taken up. The
strike by Ford workers in Britain in 1988 – which brought Ford produc-
tion in other parts of Europe to a halt as a result of a just-in-time supply
chain – does not seem to have become a template for others. Moreover,
with the centrality of information technology, it seems the absence of
a revival or re-appearance of widespread sabotage has become increas-
ingly noticeable. This may be taken to suggest that the very rationale of
this collection is ill-founded. Whatever the case, the situation demands
that the salient questions are asked and investigated in order to generate
analysis of what has happened and why, for the presence or absence of
phenomenon warrant explanation.
Turning to the chapters themselves, Jacques Bélanger and Paul Edwards
begin the collection by discussing the wider meaning of conflict at work
as a phenomenon of contestation of the will and power of capital in the
employment relationship. They then move to chart some of the issues
that others examine in more depth and in particular contexts later in
the collection. Following on from this, Robert Hebdon and Sung Chul
Noh review the extant literature on conflict at work theory in order to
advance our understanding in a more rounded, integrated and compre-
hensive manner. They then seek to deploy this in order to understand
the relationship between different forms or methods of conflict making,
laying particular emphasis on a processual perspective. Peter Fleming
then provides a thought-provoking essay on workers’ responses to the
ever more encompassing and ensnaring experience of capitalist work
and employment. He is not concerned as much with flight as fight, and
with alternatives to work outside capitalism as within it. These first three
Gregor Gall 5
chapters form a foundation for a number of country- and issue-specific

examinations.
In their chapter on Argentina, Maurizio Atzeni and Pablo Ghigliani
document and explain how workplace assemblies and delegate com-
mittees have emerged in recent years as alternatives to the established
unions, and it is these grassroots bodies which are the main protago-
nists in the taking of collective industrial action, and often quite radical
action at that. Following this, Gregor Gall and Sheila Cohen show that
in Britain, and notwithstanding the limitations of available data, there
is little evidence to suggest that a displacement effect has taken place
as the strike weapon has receded in frequency and not been replaced
by other collective means of seeking to express and resolve collective
grievances. In her chapter, Fang Lee Cooke surveys and analyses the
emerging forms of conflict at work in China. In a situation where state
ideology (and consequent legal regulation) did not envisage the need
for – nor permit – the right to strike or independent forms of collec-
tive organisation (Au and Bai 2010), the forms of resistance have been
varied and stratified along a number of axes. After this, Anne Alexander
demonstrates that the rediscovery of the strike in Egypt has its roots in
the wider political economy of the restructuring of capital and state.
Again, the particular trajectory has common elements to those found
elsewhere, but its distinctive spatial and temporal dimensions are very
much related to changes in Egyptian society (see also Totonchi 2011).
Sylvie Contrepois then presents a historical analysis of contemporary
industrial conflicts in France in order to explain how and why these
contemporary conflicts can be characterised as ‘radical’ compared with
past struggles. In her study of Indonesia, Michele Ford explains that
the use of different forms of violence by workers, especially the riot,
reflects a particular dynamic combination of tradition of protest, high
levels of labour exploitation, paucity of rights and under-developed
institutionalisation. The corollary has been that workers are relatively
open to the use of forms of political protest and activity (see Lane 2010)
because certain avenues have been shut off, closed down or limited. In
their chapter, Adam Mrozowicki and Małgorzata Maciejewska examine
the resistance to the control of capital at the ‘bottom end’ of the labour
market in Poland, where a burgeoning stratum of workers perform their
labour under conditions of insecure employment and intensified work
regimes. Although of a relatively modest depth and extent, the mes-
sage emerging is that resistance is possible and not futile. Next, Jamie
Doucette examines the origins, contours and dynamics of the use of
self-immolation and suicide in South Korea as a tool in the struggle for
6 Introduction
social justice in the workplace. Alongside other tactics like occupation,

the suicide tactic reflects much that is particular about South Korean
society. Finally, Kim Moody examines why, in the United States, the
strike weapon has experienced such considerable decline but has still
not been trumped by other alternatives or substitutes. Hence, he returns
to the issues of which contextual situations might see the renewal and
arising of the strike weapon again.
The collection offers substantive, sometimes theoretical, insights into
many of the salient issues about the contemporary nature of the forms
and expressions of how workers ‘make conflict’ – or return the gesture –
in the prosecution of their collective interests at work. What remains
to be explored across a wider terrain and in more probing depth is the
significance of these insights across the contexts of time and space.
Some of this cannot be done until more time has elapsed in as much
as the benefit of hindsight is required, but much else of this cannot be
carried out until policy-makers and research funders discontinue their
view that workers making conflict is dysfunctional, illegitimate and
counter-productive.
References
Au, L-Y. and Bai, R. (2010) ‘Contemporary labor resistance in China, 1989–2009’
WorkingUSA: A Journal of Labor and Society, 13/4: 481–505.
Gall, G. (forthcoming) ‘Labour quiescence continued? Recent strike activity in
Western Europe’ Economic and Industrial Democracy.
Kelly, J. (1996) ‘Union militancy and social partnership’ in P. Ackers, C. Smith
and P. Smith (eds) The New Workplace and Trade Unionism: critical perspectives on
work and organisation, Routledge, London, pp. 77–109.
Lane. M. (2010) ‘Indonesia and the fall of Suharto: proletarian politics in the
‘planet of slums’ era’ WorkingUSA: a journal of labor and society, 13/2: 185–200.
Totonchi, E. (2011) ‘Laboring a democratic spring: the past, present, and future
of free trade unions in Egypt’ WorkingUSA: A Journal of Labor and Society, 14/3:
259–83.
2
Conflict and Contestation in the
Contemporary World of Work:
Theory and Perspectives
Jacques Bélanger and Paul Edwards
Introduction
The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the meaning

of ‘conflict’ together with some tools of analysis. The word ‘conflict’
has two distinct senses, namely, underlying antagonisms or clashes of
interests, and concrete actions such as strikes. This edited collection
addresses primarily the latter, and our purpose here is not to rehearse the-
ory on the former, though we do need to make one fundamental point
(in the first section below). The aim, rather, is to lay out some themes in
the understanding of conflict in its concrete sense and to suggest ways of
tracing it back to more fundamental principles. To underline the focus on
the concrete, we use the word contestation. This chapter performs five
tasks. First, it defines the focus in terms of contestation. Second, it sug-
gests one way to think about changing patterns of contestation, namely,
the idea that it can have alternative forms. Third, it looks at another idea,
that of shifts geographically and how we might think of these shifts in
terms of the strategies of key actors. Fourth, it turns to the level of the
workplace to consider some of the causal influences on patterns of con-
test. Finally, it illustrates these influences through the example of call
centres. Tying these themes together is the idea of locating contestation
in underlying causal processes within the organization of work.
Contestation, antagonism and resistance
Tilly (2004: ix) defined contestation as ‘how, when, where and why ordi-
nary people make collective claims on public authorities, other holders
of power, competitors, enemies, and objects of popular disapproval’. We
follow this definition with delimitation, elaboration and justification.
7
8 Conflict and Contestation in the Contemporary World of Work
The delimitation is that we are interested in the employment relation-

ship, rather than all areas in which subordinate groups can make claims
on the powerful. Claims are most likely to be directed to employers.
However, where the state plays a role in the terms of employment,
action may be directed against it; protests in several countries against
public pension reform would be an instance. The elaboration makes the
fundamental point highlighted above. Contestation can be observed in
many areas of social life, so what makes the employment relationship
distinctive? The answer, rehearsed in many places (e.g. Thompson and
Smith 2009), is that conflict in the sense of an organizing principle
underlies the employment relationship. The term a ‘structured antago-
nism’ is often used to capture this idea, and sometimes traced back to
its origin (Edwards 1986: 5). We are not concerned here with why such
antagonism exists. But the fact of its existence has two crucial implica-
tions. First, it makes no sense to ask whether conflict has disappeared,
for it necessarily underpins the organization of employment relation-
ships. The more sensible question that informs this edited collection is
what strategies employers and workers use to manage the antagonism
and why contestation takes particular forms in particular times and
places. Second, some scholars like to argue against what they see as a
privileging of the capital–labour relation (e.g. Dick 2008). Their grounds
for this are that ‘resistance’, as they term it, occurs in many spheres and
not just this relation. It is true that resistance can be found in many
places, but the employment relation is distinct because antagonism is
inscribed into it. This allows us to ground contestation in a view of what
that contestation is about, namely, the terms on which work effort is
exchanged for pay and other rewards. The relation can be ‘privileged’
because of its distinct properties. This brings us to the justification,
which is a second reason for privileging the employment relationship.
The anthropologist Michael Brown (1996: 729) complained about the
use of the term resistance: almost anything had come to be included
as a form of ‘cultural resistance’ including ‘cross-dressing, tattooing,
women’s fashions, dirty jokes and rock videos’. There is, thus, no defini-
tional focus. Moreover, he went on, something that the observer chose
to identify as resistance was elevated into a high-minded political action.
This is to replace analysis with assertion. This edited collection, by con-
trast, has a grounded view of what contestation is, and it is aware of the
complex issues involved in inferring political and other motivations
from some concrete form of behaviour.
As to what to study, some scholars of resistance pursue the point
about privileging some actions. For Gabriel (2008: 319), ‘modernist forms
Jacques Bélanger and Paul Edwards 9
of work resistance’ such as strikes have declined, to be replaced by a

‘bewildering range of [worker] responses that qualify, subvert, or dis-
regard managerial calls for flexibility, commitment and quality’. This
reflects, he argues, a change in the nature of the organization from an
iron to a glass cage in which people are, in fact, trapped while having an
illusion of choice. Controls on workers are imposed by processes includ-
ing culture, ideology and the supervisory gaze, and exit is a key form of
resistance (Gabriel 2008: 321). Several features of this are questionable:
a) the generation of an image of a wholesale shift from iron to glass

cage, which is not based on any specific detailed research on organi-
zations and which presumes a very direct linkage between this image
as a macro phenomenon and micro level forms of behaviour;
b) a stark contrast between ‘modernism’ and something else, as though
all workers in the past were ‘class warriors’;
c) assertion in place of evidence; there is no evidence that quit rates
have risen or that quitting is being used to signal resistance; and
d) a neglect of variation and multiple patterns.
Like some other scholars, Gabriel is excited by whistle-blowing as a

form of resistance to organizational expectations. But this is to neglect
the fact that whistle-blowing often reflects super-conformity, namely,
an effort to get organizations to run as they are supposed to run, with
the ‘resistance’ being against perceived deviation from correct practice
(see, for example, van Buitenen’s (2000) account of his efforts to rem-
edy financial malpractice in the European Union). The key point is that
workers do not simply counter managerial calls for commitment: work-
ers can be committed to some aspects of the job while being unhappy
about others, and new forms of work simultaneously offer benefits for
and new challenges to workers. This collection’s interest in new forms
of conflict means that it is sensitive to the possibilities of non-strike
actions. But we need to think in more nuanced ways than Gabriel’s
approach permits.
Alternative forms
One approach is to consider the different forms in which contestation

can occur. Has quitting replaced strikes? Testing the idea has, however,
proved difficult, in part because some forms of action are necessarily
hard to measure but also for more fundamental conceptual reasons.
Consider for example going absent from work, which is often seen as
the archetypical ‘individual’ form of action in contrast to strikes. It is

something amenable to measurement. It ‘may happen to be the case
that absence and strike rates tend to be inversely related [but] such
correlations do not explain why the two forms of behaviour might be
alternatives’ (Edwards 1986: 261). We need to consider the ‘pattern of
control’ in a workplace, which may mean that there is no such inverse
association. For example, studies of lean production have documented
very tight managerial control regimes that constrain both strikes and
absence (Delbridge 1998).
Two very detailed studies help us to see what a ‘pattern of control’
means. Hebdon and Stern (1998) examined public sector workers in
Ontario whose use of the strike was constrained by no-strike laws.
They showed that rates of grievance arbitration were relatively high
and argued that the use of arbitration may have been an alternative to
strikes. Yet this shows only that when one particular route is directly
closed off, workers find other means to say things that they would oth-
erwise say through that route. And, of course, their doing so depends on
the fact that they have the means, through unions, to mobilize. In other
words, this quasi-experiment is convincing precisely because it can hold
other factors constant. But we cannot conclude that any wider link
between forms of conflict is as simple. In particular, what may be true
cross-sectionally need not be true over time. This comes out strongly
in Sapsford and Turnbull’s (1994) study of British docks. This adopts
the neat metaphor of balloons and icebergs: conflict is like a balloon
if, when you squeeze at one point you get an expansion somewhere
else, and it is like an iceberg if one form, such as strikes, acts as the tip
of the iceberg representing other forms of conflict that move in the
same way. It concludes that strikes and absence act as part of a balloon.
Its method for doing so is subtle, for it does not assume a mechanical
link at the level of these particular phenomena but instead looks at
the causal mechanisms generating strikes and absence and the ways in
which these are related. Mechanization, for example, tended to increase
strikes and to reduce absence, for further reasons connected to the social
organization of the labour process which cannot be pursued here. Yet
Sapsford and Turnbull (1994) were at pains to stress that on the docks,
unlike in most other industries, absence was, indeed, a targeted action
against management. It made sense to compare its rates with strike rates
but not necessarily elsewhere. They also show that, over the period
1955–1988, absence levels generally fell while strikes increased and
then declined (Turnbull and Sapsford 1992) and that these patterns
related to the organization of work, in particular the ways in which the
regulation of casual work on the docks changed. In the longer term,

conflict was removed from the system through mechanization and the
drastic re-organization of the industry in 1989, in which the National
Dock Labour Scheme was abolished and a new regime of managerial
control was introduced (Turnbull and Sapsford 2001).
In short, when other things remain constant and when the relevant
mechanisms are in place for shifting the expression of conflict from
one form to another, the hypothesis of forms as substitutes holds. By
relevant mechanisms, we mean the means to organize protest and also
the fact that there are sources of discontent that call these means into
play. Consider a well-known study consistent with the balloons thesis –
that of Turner et al. (1967) in the car industry in Britain. This shows
that at Ford managerial suppression of strikes was followed by a rise
in quitting and absence. But the explanation is, first, that this was a
very specific squeeze on part of the balloon and, second, that worker
organization was otherwise unchanged; there was the sense of militancy
and the tradition of action that allowed other forms of conflict to be
deployed. In other conditions, such a relationship would be absent.
And the subsequent history of the industry has been marked by a mas-
sive decline in strike rates with certainly no increase and, probably,
a decrease in absence levels.
These other conditions seem increasingly common. If we reflect on
trends of conflict in a sector like the docks several facts stand out. First,
even in the pre-mechanization era when dock work was casualized in
most countries and the image of the militant docker was a common
one (as reflected of course in the celebrated and profoundly inaccurate
image of the isolated mass), patterns of conflict varied considerably
(Turnbull and Sapsford 2001). This reflected the ways in which casual
work was organized and regulated. In other words, waterfront work is
not all the same, and the strikes–absence association in the UK may well
not hold under other conditions. Studies of other forms of individual
action reach complementary conclusions. Jefferys (2011), for example,
studied strikes and the pursuit of grievances in labour courts in five
European countries. He found differing relationships between collec-
tive and individual action, which he explained in terms of the national
institutional regime of each country. In France, for example, the right to
protest is embedded in legal institutions. Such contextual factors shape
how collective and individual actions are connected.
A complementary take on this issue comes from a study at the level
of the workplace (Roscigno and Hodson 2004). This identifies three
different kinds of workplace regime. In contentious workplaces, strikes
and individual expressions of conflict go together, and unionization

promotes these activities. In unorganized workplaces, there is an emphasis
on individual resistance, reflecting stress and work pressures, but little
organized resistance. And in cohesive workplaces, there is little underlying
management-worker conflict and here unionization has a negative associ-
ation with indicators of contestation. In short, patterns of control matter.
Has contestation moved elsewhere?
A related view is that the balloon has been squeezed in a different way:
overt contestation may have declined in advanced economies but risen
in other countries. There is some evidence that strikes have moved from
the advanced industrial nations to the developing countries, though it
is hard to test the idea given that several countries, Brazil and China for
example, report no data, while data on other countries are likely to be
highly unreliable. But available data are indicative. If we take Canada
and Britain as examples of developed economies with high and average
strike rates, they have mean figures, respectively, of 165 and 25 days
‘lost’ per 1000 workers over the period 1999–2008 (see <http://laborsta.
ilo.org/STP/guest>). South Africa has a figure of 217 while in Argentina,
for the five years on which data are reported, the average was 1041.
Mexico, by contrast, appears to have rates well below that of Britain.
Strikes have not disappeared but nor have they simply shifted elsewhere –
their dynamics in these countries are considered further below.
The most substantial analysis of these arguments comes from Silver
(2003) where she draws upon a database of mentions of labour unrest
in two newspapers – a methodology with a long and established his-
tory. Her focus is labour unrest, defined as resistance to being treated
as a commodity, whether in the workplace or the labour market. This
includes all open protests and any of the more hidden ones that become
widespread and collective (Silver 2003: 187–188). The headline figures
are in three charts showing global trends and trends in metropolitan
and other countries over the period 1876–1996 (Silver 2003: 126–128).
These indicate an overall rise in unrest that peaked in the late 1940s
followed by a decline, and also a shift towards the non-metropolitan
countries. More detailed analyses in the car industry show a very clear
move in the location of conflict as the industry has moved to countries
such as Brazil, South Africa and Mexico.
There are two interpretations of these data. Notwithstanding Silver’s
best efforts, one is that conflict has, in fact, declined. Not only have
overall mentions of conflict gone down, but the counting of them is
not corrected for the size of the working population. The other, which is
Silver’s own though she does not put it in these terms, is that measured
unrest is the result of two forces. The degree of organized discontent
shapes how much workers feel a desire to go on strike. Their ability
to do so depends on the extent to which this discontent is prevented
from expression, which breaks down into two categories: repression, and
management and regulation. Silver stresses that the bargaining power
of workers in industrializing countries – a key driver of the ability to
supply organized discontent – is low, while they are also aware of the
extent of repression. We can conclude with Silver that there has been
a shift in the locale of labour unrest but that the extent of it depends
on the balance between discontent and measures to control it. These
measures have meant that conflict has to a degree been suppressed, as
discussed further below, rather than its having disappeared with the
decay of ‘modernity’.
A study relying on official strike statistics in 15 countries helps to
develop this point. Dribbusch and Vandaele (2007) note a general decline
in strikes, albeit with major upsurges around moves to democratization
in such countries as Argentina and South Africa. They also identify
labour market conditions that limit the value of strikes, such as the
size of the reserve army of labour in the latter country. State strategies
are also important. For example, state corporatism in Mexico creates
strong links between government and the official unions, and social
benefits act to contain industrial protest (Schaffeld 2007). In short,
concrete events such as strikes reflect multiple causal influences. These
forces have tended to combine to reduce the desire to engage in strikes
and the effectiveness of the action. It is also, of course, true that the
strike is weapon of the industrial worker, and that the decline of mass
manufacturing in advanced countries has reduced the population of
such workers. And, though relevant production has moved to other
countries, the ways in which this production is organized does not copy
the conditions of the advanced countries. The strike remains potentially
important in newly industrializing countries, but its form reflects some
very specific conditions.
A study of China drawing on Silver’s work helps to develop these
ideas. Lee (2007) looks at two contrasting regions, one dominated by old
industries and one by new, and finds evidence of mass protests in both
despite the evident difficulties of mobilization. Workers in China are
plainly not abandoning the idea of unrest and struggle. Three analytical
features of the study stand out. First, workers’ abilities to stage protests are
considered, and it is argued that in comparative terms Chinese workers
lack resources in three respects: weak community-based forms of asso-

ciation; limited leverage, via skills, in the production process; and lim-
ited competition between political elites, which in turn limits workers’
ability to exploit divisions within ruling groups. Second, workers express
protest in varying terms including those of class, citizenship and sub-
altern stratus. Lee’s analysis is clear that the languages are used within
the context of the struggles arising from workers’ subordinate economic
position – an analytical point also made by Silver and one that can be
traced back to the work of Thompson (1991), who was clearly very
sensitive to language and highly localized identities while not forget-
ting that these identities are expressions of material subordination and
are deployed in bargaining about the terms of labour. Third, protests
in the newly modernizing region of Guangdong are seen as ‘protests of
discrimination’ in which workers use law suits to pursue legal rights,
followed by collective protests if the aims are not achieved. Subsequent
studies have addressed the emerging legal regime in China, pointing to
efforts to contain and regulate conflict by individualizing it through the
granting of legal rights (Friedman and Lee 2010).
Several comparative lessons stand out. First, protests of discrimina-
tion can have the effect of reducing the more collective forms of action,
though this effect will depend on the nature of the wider regime govern-
ing the expression of conflict (Jefferys 2011). Second, this line of analy-
sis connects with studies of the strategies of states in containing labour
conflict. Frenkel and Kuruvilla (2002) identify three elements of such
strategies, namely, seeking industrial peace, promoting competition and
providing employment and income security. Comparing four developing
countries, they explain variation in the use of these elements in terms
of such things as union strength, ‘government responsiveness to worker
expectations’ and the nature of the economic development strategy
adopted (Frenkel and Kuruvilla 2002: 388).
The second is reflected in Lee’s focus on the structure of political elites.
Underlying these specific strategies, we might go back to the celebrated
work of Offe (1975), which stressed that states pursue two strategies
which are necessarily in tension with each other, of promoting capital
accumulation and securing legitimacy for the current order. These,
we might say, are the fundamental strategies, of which Frenkel and
Kuruvilla’s three are particular concrete manifestations, with the first
and third falling under ‘legitimation’ and the second under ‘accumula-
tion’. We might also expect other concrete forms at different places and
times, but as long as they can be traced back to the fundamental two
then Offe’s analysis holds. The point of analysis in these terms is thus.
First, it underlines that contestation has to be actively managed. Even

if strikes appear to have withered away, a failure of legitimation can
mean that overt conflict re-emerges, and possibly in ways that are hard
to contain. Second, accumulation and legitimation are not poles on a
continuum. Consider the very similar idea which operates at the level
of the labour process rather than the state, of two, and only two, strate-
gies driven by granting workers ‘responsible autonomy’ or subjecting
them to direct control. Its author tended, and probably still tends, to
see the strategies as opposites (Friedman 1977, 2004). But they are to a
degree orthogonal. For example, a regime based on strong performance-
management principles will tend to combine high levels of autonomy
in the conduct of a task with close control of the targets to which those
tasks are directed (Edwards 2005). In the same way, states can promote
both accumulation and legitimation. A good example is the success-
ful social democratic regimes of Scandinavia, where up to the 1970s,
a welfare state stressing legitimation co-existed with active labour mar-
ket policies aimed at accumulation (even though this apparent success
came under challenge from the 1980s by employers fearing that accu-
mulation and profitability were endangered under intensifying global
competition). The relations between accumulation and legitimation are
necessarily in contradiction, but the two are not opposites. In the case
of China, the state has pursued accumulation strategies while having to
have some sensitivity to legitimation, at least in the negative sense of
actively containing dissent and using rural workers as a reserve army
of labour. The wider analytical implication here is that changing pat-
terns of contestation need to be understood in terms of the strategies of
states, employers, and workers and unions. Observed patterns have to be
explained in light of the underlying dynamics.
Structuring influences on patterns of contestation
We now relate these macro-patterns to the level of the workplace by

looking at influences on the organization of contestation (and through
drawing upon Edwards et al. (2006) and Bélanger and Edwards (2007)).
A first step consists in establishing how different workplace regimes,
or different patterns of contestation and cooperation, can be accounted
for theoretically. The notion of ‘concerns’ is used instead of the usual
notion of ‘interests’ to move away from any conception of a pre-
determinate or pre-defined set of benefits or objectives on the part of
labour or management. The point is that the orientations and objectives
of the agents are constructed through the evolution of the employment
relationship, a social structure that is shaped by the antagonism and

asymmetry between capital and labour. An analytical distinction is intro-
duced between control and developmental concerns. The former relate
to the effort bargain and the concrete matters relating to the frontier
of control, at the point and at the time of production. The latter relate
to potentially shared objectives and longer-term considerations, such as
investment in technology or mandates for strategic lines of products,
which may foster the reproduction of the employment relationship
over time. These conceptual tools lead to the construction of a matrix
by which different patterns of workplace relations can be portrayed.
This makes possible a second step, in which the structuring conditions
leading to one pattern or another are defined, hence pointing out the key
sources of diversity among workplace regimes (Bélanger and Edwards
2007). These sets of influences have to do with technology, product
markets and institutional regulation.
There is a rich tradition in industrial sociology that placed technol-
ogy as a central influence in the study of work relations (Bélanger 2006:
328–36). Ethnographic studies have shown how patterns of social con-
trol at work are tied to the production process (Burawoy 1979, Edwards
and Scullion 1982). Hence we see technology as a key structuring factor
because it is neither deterministic nor neutral. Rather, it sets a more
or less favourable ground for distinct patterns of control and conflict.
While social relations prevail, they are conditioned to some extent by
technology. We will see for instance in the case of call centres that indi-
vidualized work stations hinder social cohesiveness.
Product markets, the second set of structuring influences, have obvi-
ous implications on workplace regimes. We pay particular attention to
two dimensions, namely the constraints on the organization of produc-
tion and the stability of employment (Bélanger and Edwards 2007: 718).
On the former, it is well known that the position in the value chain,
or the dependency upon a few large customers in a given niche of the
market, may unsettle the management of production and add pressure
on the shop-floor. On the latter, a key factor is the extent to which the
production unit is insulated from the winds of competition, a situa-
tion that is more conducive to developmental concerns and positive-
sum compromises between capital and labour. Such relative market
immunity (from the perspective of local agents) is sometimes observed
in highly competitive sectors, such as aluminium production. This is
explained mostly by the high extent of immobile capital investment
and the fact that competition occurs at the global stage. The situation
is expected to be different, and may be contrasting, when we look at
call centres. A recurring theme in the recent stream of research on

partnership at work was that harsh competition, short-term corporate
objectives and the financialization of the economy were hampering the
development and continuity of cooperation arrangements. As noted
by Thompson (2003: 371) in his analysis of ‘disconnected capitalism’,
‘employer objectives in the labour process and employment relationship
are frequently at odds under the inter-related impacts of globalization,
the shift to shareholder value in capital markets and systematic ration-
alization across the whole value chain of firms’. In his analysis of the
characteristic features of contemporary capitalism, Streeck (2011: 151–
152) singles out one aspect as ‘competition privileged over solidarity’,
pointing out that ‘not only workers, but also capitalists have tried again
and again to forge social compacts protecting them from market entry
by outsiders and from the attacks of insiders. Especially among capital-
ists, however … success always remained precarious’.
Attention here is primarily focused upon social relations between
management and labour at the point of production, but these agents do
not operate in an institutional vacuum. The influence of institutions on
workplace regimes is acknowledged by all, but it is important to specify
what we mean by institutional regulation. Too many accounts of insti-
tutions are static, and the key here is how workplace agents make use of
institutions as leverages to improve their strategic position (Kristensen
and Zeitlin 2005). We need to look at institutions through the inter-
connections between macro- and micro-levels. Thus, Burawoy (1985)
compared ways by which state institutions influenced the construction
of different ‘factory regimes’. And in the context of the United States
collective bargaining system, he conceptualized the ‘internal state’ as
‘the set of institutions that organize, transform, or repress struggles over
relations in production and relations of production at the level of the
enterprise’ (Burawoy 1979: 110). However, the analysis has to be even
more specific to account for so much diversity within any national set
of rules. Why is it that, within a given institutional framework, some
agents find much room for co-operation while others do not? We sug-
gest that technology and product markets are the primary sets of factors
to consider here. But beyond that, it remains an empirical question.
The study of a workplace regime has to consider the actual ways by
which the union, or other forms of social cohesiveness that may exist
among employees, plays a role in supporting or containing employee
opposition. In short, national institutions play a significant role in fos-
tering general patters of relations between capital and labour, and some
international comparisons do highlight these overall patterns. However,
the diversity of workplace regimes remains a challenge for research.

In-depth observation of workplace relations is necessary to understand
and account for the social processes by which workers do or do not organ-
ize to voice frustration and concerns and to support concrete actions.
Illustration: call centres
Call centres provide a useful illustration. National institutional con-

texts in neo-liberal countries impose few constraints upon managers.
Technology allows for close monitoring. And competitive product mar-
kets limit managerial toleration of informal resistance. Though some
early analyses assumed that open contestation was thereby prevented,
the research literature has consistently been more nuanced. From the
early labour process studies (e.g. Bain and Taylor 2000) to more recent
reviews (Russell 2008, Taylor 2010), research provides rich evidence that
impressionistic accounts of an ‘electronic panopticon’ are grossly exag-
gerated and documents how customer service representatives (CSRs)
create some space for agency and resistance, in spite of significant work
constraints. These oppositional practices cover a broad range of behav-
iour, from cynicism to inventive ways to regain some control over work-
ing time. Technology certainly sets limits to this space (Bélanger 2006:
340–343). The information and communication technologies that under-
pin call centre operations are becoming more and more sophisticated,
both in supporting the process and in generating further information
(Russell 2009). Still, from a managerial perspective, the ‘problem’ lies
elsewhere. Contrary to stereotypes, and except in the most mundane
types of encounters, where CSRs simply have to ‘follow the script’, cus-
tomer service work is not as simple, prescribed and regimented as often
assumed, and management has to allow some latitude and discretion to
employees so that they engage with the customers and meet the sales
and production targets (Frenkel et al. 1999, Russell 2009). Although
management would like to standardize work and to tighten control
even further, the contradictory tendency is that sales and service rela-
tionships require a set of social competencies and technical know-how
that makes management vulnerable to ‘bad attitudes’ (Callaghan and
Thompson 2002, Mulholland, 2004) and to various forms of cynicism
and lack of engagement with customers.
The effort bargain in call centres has a distinctive character:
what impresses the observer most is not so much the intensity in

call-centre work but rather its relentlessness. This distinction becomes
clearer if we distinguish between control over the job cycle – that is,
over individual calls – and control over work flows – that is, control
from call to call or over whole blocks of time. In most interactional
encounters, workers exercise some control over individual calls, includ-
ing their duration and content … But at the same time, CSRs do not
have the autonomy to vary the pace of their work over the course of
a working day. Info-service workers do not generally have the ability
to not be available once they are rostered onto the phones. (Russell
2009: 107–108, emphasis original)
This distinction is revealing in clarifying what is distinct from most

industrial work. CSRs often have significant autonomy in the course of a
given interaction with a customer. However, there is no re-appropriation
of time in the course of the shift, and no control over the sequence of
operations. In contrast with most industrial work and, for that matter,
with many service jobs supported by information technology, there is
no accumulation of breathing time here. Moreover, the insulation of
each CSR on a single work station, and the fact that s/he interacts with
a single customer through electronic equipment which is exclusive to
each employee but connected to the mainframe, sets material condi-
tions for both individualization and the close monitoring of individual
performance.
Field research from different countries documents the means by which
call centre employees seek to regain some control over time (Buscatto
2002, Mulholland 2004, Russell 2009). These practices go from the most
classic, like extending the conversation with an easy customer, remain-
ing on line after the conversation is complete and pretending to be
‘on line’ by faking it, to more inventive forms of cheating. As noted
by Russell (2009: 240): ‘CSRs may soldier on the job by remaining in
an occupied mode, while getting a precious breather from a relentless
queue of calls; or they may use such fiddles in order to take non-rostered
breaks away from the workstation’. But ‘they cannot choose to “bank”
their work or otherwise vary their effort by working with greater or less
diligence over the course of the shift’ (Russell 2009: 108). Individual
actions such as fiddling time require a minimal degree of social cohe-
siveness, at least by not allowing management to victimize offenders in
ways that would be seen as illegitimate, or beyond accepted norms in
a given workplace.
Such a dynamic of control and contestation is documented by
Mulholland in an Irish call centre. The study details how CSRs could get
around the control system and cheat the sales-bonus incentive scheme.
Her key point is that even individual forms of opposition should not
be interpreted from a purely individualistic perspective. Hence: ‘the
experience of taking part in acts of opposition resulted in the emergence
of informal collective practices … the distinguishing feature of these
practices is the subtlety of the tacit alliances, as in the case of cheating,
when workers stayed silent under questioning’ (Mulholland 2004: 721).
This point about the social cohesiveness – which often supports the
individual effort bargain in call centres – is a recurrent theme in field
studies (Russell 2009: 235–243). On the basis of observation, Bain and
Taylor (2000: 5, 15–16) contest the notion that the possibilities for
resistance are purely ‘individualistic, fragmentary, never collective’, and
they analyse the processes by which activists sustain social organization
(Taylor and Bain 2003).
While the necessary conditions of social cohesiveness and institutional
support often exclude the opportunity for union representation, cyni-
cism appears to be a broader phenomenon in call centre work. Fleming
and Spicer (2003, 2007) note how cynicism was portrayed as a major
phenomenon in organizational studies in recent decades, especially in
call centres and other service organizations. They see cynical behaviour
as part of process of ‘dis-identification’ that should not be written off
as non-significant in that it does contribute to the undermining of the
hegemonic discourse constructed by management. They assert that this
has implications for power and patterns of control and ‘may also be
an important way of facilitating other forms of opposition rather that
undermining them’ (Fleming and Spicer 2007: 83, emphasis original).
From a different perspective, Taylor and Bain (2003) show how humour
had a subversive character in call centres, by fostering countercultures
and social cohesiveness. They argue that ‘the efflorescence of humor-
ous activities at a subterranean level, that is, beneath the organizational
surface, delivers a further blow to those who liken the call centre to an
electronic prison’ (Taylor and Bain 2003: 1507). Call centres represent
a highly constraining work environment and can therefore be taken as
a ‘critical case’ for testing ideas about the development of alternative
forms of contestation. The empirical evidence is that CSRs do find ways
to express discontent, often by cynicism but also through various forms
of concrete action that would not be sustainable without some degree
of social cohesiveness. What comes out of field research is that call cen-
tre employees face severe constraints but, overall, they have not been
‘socially atomized’ to use the phrase of Granovetter (1985: 483–487).
Two further points can be highlighted regarding alternative forms of
contestation. First, unions are sometimes involved in supporting col-
lective action in call centres, although union organization is often very
hard to sustain. Second, the absence of a union does not mean that
contestation is purely individualistic. Clearly, as noted above, there is a
need for sociologists to better understand and conceptualize the forms of
social organization, such as the ‘tacit alliances’ and ‘informal collective
practices’ observed by Mulholland, that do not fit into the traditional
category of collective organization. Especially in front-line service work,
there are many facets of the dynamics of control and contestation that
are not accounted for with a binary and simple distinction between the
‘individual’ and the ‘collective’. In short, institutions, be they unions
or less formal groups, play some role. The technology is strongly – but
not wholly – constraining. And, the product market creates two kinds
of space for workers. Relations with customers allow relentless demands
from the work flow to be moderated. And some call centres pursue
markets for complex products that require lengthy engagement with
customers; this in turn means that managers depend on workers’ skills
and that some work autonomy can be generated. Even here, contesta-
tion has been re-configured and not eliminated.
Conclusions
We have offered three lines of analysis to consider the reconfiguration

of conflict. On the first, that contestation may take alternative forms,
convincing data on overall trends are lacking. More importantly, such
trends have to be considered, not at the level of concrete phenomena,
but in relation to patterns of workplace control. It is rare for changes in
the use of one form to be balanced directly by another; each form has
its own causal dynamics, which can mean that different forms correlate
with each other in shifting ways. The same idea informs the second
issue, that collective contestation may have shifted geographically
rather than disappearing. The data here are more plentiful. They sug-
gest some geographical shifts within a general pattern of decline but not
disappearance. These trends reflect the balance between workers’ desire
and ability to contest systems of labour control, on the one hand, and,
on the other, the degree to which managements and states regulate con-
testation through repression, concessions or some balance of these two
strategies. The third line of analysis, consideration of call centres, illus-
trated the dynamics around this balance at the level of the workplace.
We now offer some wider conclusions linking these ideas together. Call
centres are an appropriate place to start. In a synthesis of field research
in Britain and India, Taylor (2010) shows the interconnections between
call centres in the two countries and the logic underlying corporate
decisions to offshore some of this work to India over the last decade.
He explains how the understanding of this trend ‘must take account of

the political and economic environments of deregulation, organizational
restructuring, financialization and the broader thrust of neoliberalism’
(Taylor 2010: 252). He also rejects the notion that call centres ‘can be
located anywhere’, independently of social forces. As he points out,
‘labour has attributes that make India attractive as a location. … Yet, no
attempt by capital to use remote location, no “spatial fix”, can overcome
the problem of the indeterminacy of Indian call centre labour power’
(Taylor 2010: 263). The possibilities of contestation are thus inscribed
in the labour process, and managements may well experience unexpected
problems such as high quit rates if they develop a regime that workers
resent and if alternative employment options are available. The search
for new locations of production is likely to be a continuing one, in this
industry and more generally. In China, for example, the initial expan-
sion of coastal cities has been followed by a shift of manufacturing firms
to inland regions as firms seek new sources of cheap labour.
This search for cheap and compliant labour has marked out capitalism
since its inception. It has two elements: the import of labour to metro-
politan countries, as in the influx of Irish workers to Britain during the
early nineteenth century or the mass migration of eastern Europeans
to the United States during the latter half of the century, together with
more recent waves of migration within Europe and from Mexico to the
United States; and the shift of production to peripheral countries. These
two processes have ebbed and flowed but have displayed great long-run
persistence. There is no reason to expect them to falter in the immedi-
ate future.
The ebb and flow is shaped by political processes. These processes are
connected to labour regulation in varying degrees of directness. Examples
of a direct connection are state policies to attract capital by weakening
labour protection. Less direct connections exist around such policies as
the attraction of multinational companies: such policies do not necessar-
ily imply a particular kind of labour regime, but they make states pursu-
ing them potentially dependent on the multinationals. The weakening
of established forms of labour protection in several countries can be
attributed in part to demands, explicit or implicit, from these companies.
There are even fewer direct connections where a state’s policy is driven
by matters outside the labour agenda, for example where migration is
restricted on racist or other exclusionary principles. But policies, both
direct and indirect, have consequences for labour control regimes. In the
last example, restrictions will, other things being equal, give workers in
the country more bargaining power than they would otherwise have.
It is impossible to predict future levels of contestation. Periods of qui-

escence have been followed by upsurges of new and unpredictable forms
of industrial action; equally, labour militancy has often not maintained
itself. What can be suggested, however, are some of the factors that
may affect these levels. The success of capital in finding new sources
of labour and the form of the institutional regime of labour control are
two overarching influences. Within these, managements have to balance
the minimization of labour costs against the need to secure a degree of
worker consent. Such balancing will have different dynamics accord-
ing to the nature of the production system. To pursue the call centre
example, some centres offering very simple services are likely to focus
on highly regimented labour control strategies and cost minimization,
while those with more complex production systems will be more likely
to offer a degree of employee empowerment. Such structural factors are
then mediated by the choices of actors. These choices are then inscribed
in workplace traditions: where contestation has established a presence,
an oppositional tradition can become embedded, whereas in workplaces
without such a history employees will lack the habits and language of
opposition. Contestation is, thus, shaped by forces from the very general
to the very particular. Tracing out how these forces interact is a task on
which, we have argued, progress has already been made and to which
this book makes a further contribution.
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3
A Theory of Workplace Conflict
Development: From Grievances
to Strikes
Robert Hebdon and Sung Chul Noh
Introduction
Relatively little is known about the complex inter-relationships between

the various expressions of workplace conflict. This is an important topic
because a full understanding is necessary for successful dispute resolu-
tion, to predict future developments such as form or method displace-
ment, and perhaps most significantly, to develop conflict theory. Thus,
a key purpose of this chapter is to build theory by examining the rela-
tionship between expressions of conflict. Conflict at work (or workplace
conflict) has been broadly defined to include such forms as absentee-
ism, theft, sabotage, turnover, grievances, job actions and strikes. The
most studied expressions are undoubtedly grievances and strikes but we
know very little about their inter-relationship. Are they complemen-
tary or competitive? Are they alternatives or substitutes? The literature
provides only anecdotal evidence of their relationship and no theory.
Consequently, this chapter develops and tests, at least in an introduc-
tory fashion, a theory of workplace conflict that will provide hypotheses
about expression relationships. To date scholars from various disciplines
have conducted conceptual and empirical studies to address whether,
and how, conflict can be managed or resolved (see, for example, De Dreu
2008, Jehn 1997, Morill et al. 2003, Wheeler 1985). But to address these
issues, enquiries must be conducted into the nature of workplace con-
flict and its dynamics. To better understand these latter two issues, it is
necessary to consider the literatures on workplace conflict from several
disciplines and then integrate their findings into a comprehensive
theory (Bendersky 2003, Feuille and Wheeler 1981).
Much of the organizational behaviour literature has addressed behav-
iours that could be considered workplace conflict at the individual
26
Robert Hebdon and Sung Chul Noh 27
level: absenteeism, turnover, grievance and misbehaviours. However,

it has been criticized for overlooking the nature of conflict embedded in
the broader context of employment relations (Fortado 2001, Meyerson
1998). The bias inherent in this approach has led organizational behav-
iour scholars away from considering structural and macro-level factors
surrounding workplace conflict, basing concepts of absenteeism and
turnover, for example, on the notion of the individual as autonomous
and acultural. In contrast, theorists in industrial relations link the sources
and manifestations of workplace conflict to broader socio-political struc-
tures, viewing them as something fundamental to the employment rela-
tionship in a capitalist economy (Godard 2011). For example, Hyman
(1972) pointed out such underlying sources of conflict in capitalist
labour relations as asymmetrical power relationships and managerial
control over the labour process. However, most scholars in industrial
relations have tended to be preoccupied with more visible and com-
bative expressions of conflict between labour and management such as
strikes. Consequently, this singular focus has caused some scholars to
misinterpret the decline in strike rates as evidence of the lack of work-
place conflict (Gall and Hebdon 2008).
Overall, this narrowness of focus found in both organizational behav-
iour and industrial relations has limited researchers’ understanding
of the dynamics of conflict expressions in the workplace due to the
lack of multi- and cross-level studies in the field (Barbash 1980). This
chapter argues that workplace conflict should inherently be thought
of as a phenomenon for which individual motivation, working condi-
tions and labour-management relations combine to shape its dynamic
character within an organization. Consequently, this chapter aims to
contribute to the stream of research on workplace conflict by taking a
holistic approach in which psychological (organizational behaviour),
technological-structural (HRM), and socio-political (i.e. industriaI rela-
tions) perspectives are brought to bear. It focuses more upon industriaI
relations workplace conflict between employees and management, and
not upon organizational behaviour interpersonal conflict. In particular,
our interest lies in the process by which workplace conflict develops
from individual expressions into its most advanced forms, job actions
and strikes. By doing so, our chapter extends existing theories on work-
place conflict in several ways. First, while many industrial relations
scholars have defined industrial conflict as a collective phenomenon
and analysed it at the level of collective action (Edwards 1986, Wheeler
1985), we highlight the role of individual and covert forms of workplace
conflict acting as a preliminary and latent form of collective conflict
28 A Theory of Workplace Conflict Development
by incorporating insights from the organizational behaviour litera-

ture. Second, we shed light on conflict in both union and non-union
workplaces. Finally, we add to the understanding of the dynamics of
workplace conflict by incorporating a temporal dimension, using a large-
scale longitudinal data set rarely found in this stream of research. To
perform these tasks, relevant research on workplace conflict from vari-
ous disciplines is first reviewed and compared, followed by theoretical
development around the role of voice mechanisms which mediate the
complex interplay among different forms of conflict expression such as
turnover, grievances, job actions and strikes. We conclude with implica-
tions of the startling Canadian evidence showing relatively high levels
of job actions in non-union firms and then suggest avenues for future
research.
Theoretical approaches
Our initial observation about workplace conflict is that it has two dis-
tinct dimensions. First, in the context of labour and management rela-
tions, it is an outcome of their interactions. This is due to a fundamental
and inevitable conflict of interest over the wage-effort bargain that is
augmented by an imbalance of power. Second, collective conflict has
an agency element where actors may attempt to not only obtain wage-
effort advantages but to alter the balance of power (Gall and Hebdon
2008). Typically, we think of the agent as a union or, possibly in some
European countries, a works council. Employee organizations have the
potential, at least, to mobilize workers and shift the power balance. We
note in passing, however, that there were a surprising number of job
actions (e.g., working to rule, banning overtime, slowdowns) in our
Canadian data from firms that were identified as non-union.
Workplace conflict is a multi-faceted phenomenon, the definition of
which is broad and varies across different disciplines (Feuille and Wheeler
1981). As briefly described in the previous section, two disciplines –
industrial relations and organizational behaviour – have taken different
approaches to workplace conflict based on their contrasting views on
social order (Scott and Davis 2007). According to the Marxist viewpoint,
social order can be seen as something that is achieved and maintained by
the dominant group’s suppressing interests of the subordinate through
various forms of control mechanisms (Barker 1993, Braverman 1974,
Burawoy 1979). Extending this view to the employment relationship
under modern capitalism, most industrial relations scholars propose
that organizations be better understood as a contested terrain of power

between workers and managers (Knights and Vrudubakis 1994). Since
their relationship is innately hostile, the status and self-respect of both
groups rest on their ability to outwit or control the other. Consequently,
workplace conflict emerges from the power struggles due to the sup-
pression or diversion of worker dissatisfaction and to worker resistance
to control and domination. Thus, according to this view, workplace
conflict may have a collective and inevitable nature embedded in the
capitalist labour relationship. This led industrial relations scholars
traditionally to focus more on the visible forms of conflict expression
mobilized by a union (Gall and Hebdon, 2008). In contrast, the major-
ity of organizational behaviour and HRM scholars tend to emphasize
social consensus among organizational members as a basis of social
order. Based upon this unitarist view of employment relations, they
deny the existence of workplace conflict which, according to others, is
universal and inherent in the relationship between management and
labour (Godard 1992). Instead, it is argued that the cause of workplace
conflict depends on the local entities such as task characteristics or
interpersonal relations among employees. As a result, workplace con-
flict has been thought of as negative, and to be overcome by the appro-
priate management practices and policies (Morgan 1986). For example,
Latané et al. (1979) coined the term ‘social loafing’ which refers to the
reduction in effort of employees working collectively as a social disease
(Sheppard and Taylor 1999).
We have presented the two extreme views on workplace conflict,
Marxist and unitarist, which can be seen as representing opposite poles
in a theoretical continuum. They can serve as a starting point for a more
integrative framework on workplace conflict. For example, given the bias
against collective conflict and the decline in strikes, individual-covert
forms of conflict such as misbehaviours are receiving more attention
as a form of resistance on the part of workers (see, for example, Ackroyd
and Thompson 1999, Ambrose et al. 2002, Robinson and Bennett 1995,
Vardi and Wiener 1996). Also, recent studies in social psychology are
shifting attention towards the positive aspect of workplace conflict in
the context of increasing diversity within an organization (De Dreu
2008, Tjosvold 2008). They regard workplace conflict as a socialized
process in which a variety of individuals and social groups from different
backgrounds close the gap between different and sometimes conflicting
interests in order to accomplish organizational goals. Overall, scholars
seem to be approaching a consensus that conflict can be managed to a
greater or lesser degree but not abolished within the existing social struc-
ture of society and organizations (Gall and Hebdon 2008). Accordingly,
analytical attention is shifting from the appearance of consensus to the
reality of an ever-present conflict dynamic that provides a basis for under-
standing the underlying instability and strains within an organization.
On this basis, in the next section, the chapter outlines various types of
workplace conflict as a necessary step toward generating hypotheses on
the dynamic relationship between expressions.
Workplace conflict dichotomies
As a first step toward a comprehensive theory, scholars have viewed

workplace conflict through the lens of several dichotomies: realistic/
non-realistic, latent (hidden, covert)/manifest (open, overt), organized/
unorganized, substantive/procedural and individual/collective (Gall and
Hebdon 2008, Edwards 1986, Hyman 1975, Fox 1966, Kornhauser 1954,
Coser 1965). Coser (1965: 172) defined two kinds of conflict, realistic
and non-realistic:
Conflicts which arise from frustration of specific demands within

the relationship and from estimates of gains of the participants, and
which are directed at the presumed frustrating object, can be called
realistic conflicts, insofar as they are means towards a specific result.
Non-realistic conflicts, on the other hand, although still involving
interaction between two or more persons, are not occasioned by the
rival ends of the antagonists, but by the need for tension release of
at least one of them.
Non-realistic conflict may be more difficult to channel or regulate

since satisfaction is derived from the aggressive act itself. On the other
hand, realistic conflict is more easily channelled into less aggressive
means if they appear more effective in achieving the desired goal.
In his definition of industrial conflict, Fox (1966: 8) included indi-
vidual expressions of conflict that he labelled as ‘unorganized conflict’:
labour turnover, absenteeism, poor time-keeping and discipline, and
negative attitudes. Conventionally, unorganized conflict has referred to
individual expressions whereas organized conflict has involved collec-
tive ones (Gall and Hebdon 2008). Also organized conflict is more likely
to be associated with a dispute settlement process (e.g., grievance pro-
cedure) but unorganized conflict would not normally have such a route
(Scott et al. 1963). Workplace conflict may also be distinguished by
the type of issue in dispute. Substantive issues are those affecting pay
and benefits, while procedural are those affecting the processes of
labour-management relations, such as grievance procedures, mediation
and arbitration. Finally, a common way of examining conflict is to con-
struct a continuum from individual to semi-individual/semi-collective
to collective expressions. This range of conflict forms contemplates
those that are hybrid individual and collective. An example might by a
group or union grievance filed on behalf of a particular group or by the
union for the entire bargaining unit. Also some grievances may appear
to be individual and unconnected but could be part of a larger job action
and as such more collective than individual (Dowding et al. 2000, Kelly
1998, Morill et al. 2003, Gall and Hebdon 2008). If a dynamic relation-
ship exists between the outbreak of one form of conflict and another,
we may assume the presence of underlying dimensions of workplace con-
flict (Edwards 1986). We suggest two dimensions of workplace conflict
as depicted in Figure 3.1 below: overt-covert and individual-collective
continua.
Covert forms of workplace conflict point to less visible and more
indirect expressions of discontent that take place within the everyday
worlds of organizations. They are often unplanned, spontaneous and
even hidden in nature. In contrast, overt forms of workplace conflict
refer to conflict expressions that typically entail explicit and visible
worker protests such as strikes and output restrictions. Overt forms of
Overt
Turnover Strike
Grievances
Union
Absence Grievances
Individual- Collective-
level conflicts level conflicts
Theft Work-to-
rule
Wildcats
Sabotage
Shirking Job
Action
Covert
Figure 3.1 Two dimensions of workplace conflict

workplace conflict can be seen either as the expression of latent conflict

or conflict expressions through institutionalized channels. Collective
forms of workplace conflict refer to any kind of organized expression of
collective discontent with managerial initiatives. In general, they stem
from management’s unwillingness to acknowledge such entitlements
as an employees’ right to participate in decisions affecting their work
environment (Godard 1992). Working to rule is a typical form of collec-
tive resistance by restricting output through strictly following organiza-
tional rules and procedures (Morill et al. 2003). Conversely, individual
forms of workplace conflict include expressions of dissatisfaction which
are usually unorganized and to some extent more personal or interper-
sonal. Theft and sabotage are examples (Robinson and Bennett 1995,
Fortado 2001).
We argue that these forms of workplace conflict are intimately con-
nected to one another in the sense that the emergence of a dominant
form of conflict is employed from day-to-day through various institu-
tional means such as unions or formal grievance procedures. For instance,
instead of strikes, other collective or organized forms of conflict expres-
sion such as slowdowns, wildcat strikes and overtime bans have started
to gain more attention from both practitioners and scholars as union
influence has declined in both private and public sectors. Therefore, it
is necessary to examine under which conditions a covert form of work-
place conflict appears in an overt fashion or individual forms of conflict
develop into more organized/collective forms of conflict.
Strike – the dominant expression

Whether in a firm or industry, strikes are not only the most visible form
of conflict but also represent the most severe in terms of a shutdown of
production or services. Normally, strikes require a high level of organi-
zation and mobilization by a union. The availability of data and wider
public interest in strikes has meant that they have been the most stud-
ied expression. Now that they are in decline in the industrialized world,
it is more imperative than ever that researchers study alternative forms.
Unfortunately, other than grievances, very little research exists on such
forms as job or industrial actions (overtime bans, work-to-rule campaigns
etc.), sabotage, theft, vandalism, absenteeism, turnover, health and safety
complaints, filing unfair labour practices, law suits and political actions
(Gall and Hebdon 2008, Edwards and Scullion 1982). The choice of level
of analysis has been an important factor in researchers’ agenda. When
the level is the individual, the focus has been upon the ‘perceived loss
of control’ and wage-effort bargain (Morill et al. 2003, Gall and Hebdon
2008). If the organization is the level of study then, as Gall and Hebdon
(2008: 596) point out, the focus is upon:
‘substitution’ and ‘complementarity’ hypotheses … The substitution

hypothesis predicts formal structures that facilitate ‘voice’ will reduce
covert conflict and the complementarity hypothesis predicts that
formally enabling voice is associated with ‘corresponding increases
in other forms of … [submerged] conflict’. … Empirical research reveals
support for the substitution hypothesis.
Relationship between strikes and grievances

Strikes and grievances are those conflict expressions that have received
the most scholarly attention. They are the pillars of the field of industrial
relations. Yet we know little about their relationship. In fact, there are
divergent views in the industrial relations literature over their expected
relationship. Since the primary function of the North American griev-
ance system is to bring labour peace during the term of the agreement
(Hebdon and Brown 2011), theorists posit an inverse relationship between
strikes and grievances whereby the exercising of the voice/grievance
mechanism reduces conflict in the form of strikes. On the other hand,
several authors describe grievances as influencing collective bargaining
and, possibly, strikes. For example, Lewin and Peterson (1988) portrayed
several instances of grievances leading to job actions and eventually
changes in the agreement. This implies that grievances and strikes are
complements. Gandz (1979) describes the tactical and strategic use of
grievance filing by unions as an extension of the bargaining process.
Grievances may also perform the multiple role of producing an agenda
of issues for future collective bargaining, adjusting daily problems
(where relations are good) and serving as a battleground (where rela-
tions are poor) (Reynolds et al. 1991). Thus, there are conflicting views
in the industrial relations literature over both the causality and expected
relationship between collective bargaining and strikes on the one hand,
and grievances on the other. This confusion may be explained, in part,
by the lack of theory.
Conflict expression dynamics
In this section, we review previous theoretical works that provide insight

into the dynamic linkages between different forms of conflict expressions
in order to generate several sets of hypotheses reflecting different struc-

tural conditions in both union and non-union settings.
Exit–voice framework
A simple framework for understanding the relationship among various
forms of conflict expression has developed based upon the exit–voice
model by Hirschman (1970). Depending on their loyalty, employees
dissatisfied with their employer will either leave the employment rela-
tionship or attempt to express their opinions in order to effect change
on the source of dissatisfaction. The exit–voice framework has been
applied directly to the workplace in a number of studies. It provides
a theoretical foundation for understanding the relationships among
temporary exit (e.g., absenteeism, tardiness, reduced effort), permanent
exit (e.g., turnover, transfers) and various forms of voice ranging from
whistle blowing (Miceli et al. 1991, Near and Miceli 1995) to filing
grievances, and to silence (Morrison and Milliken 2003, Perlow 2003).
In the relationship among exit, voice and loyalty, the existence of a
voice channel comes into play as employees make decisions to express
their dissatisfaction with their organization. Hirschman argues that
employees who have a high level of loyalty to the organization will
attempt to remedy the problem rather than to leave the organization,
but only when they have formal avenues for speaking out. This leads
to our first hypothesis regarding the relationship between voluntary
turnover and filing grievances:
H1. There will be a significant negative relationship between grievance and

turnover rates in both union and non-union workplaces.
One of the limitations of the exit–voice framework is that it offers little

insight into the occurrence of collective forms of conflict (Dowding et al.
2000, Gall and Hebdon 2008). Filling this gap, several studies have
attempted to examine the relationship between individual and collec-
tive forms of conflict. Two competing models have emerged.
Substitutes versus complementary models

In their research on the relationship between strikes and absenteeism on
the British docks in the post-war period, Sapsford and Turnbull (1994)
reviewed two competing hypotheses about the relationship between
collective and individual forms of conflict expression: the substitutes
(balloon) and the complementarity (iceberg) hypotheses. The substitu-
tion hypothesis suggests that reduction in one form of conflict expression
is likely to lead to a corresponding increase in other manifestations of

workplace conflict. It is also called the ‘balloon’ hypothesis since the
mechanism reminds one of a filled balloon which, once squeezed in
one place, expands outward in another location. In support of this
hypothesis, Sapsford and Turnbull (1994) demonstrated an inverse rela-
tionship between strikes and absenteeism. In a similar vein, Turner et al.
(1967) gave anecdotal evidence that collective and individual actions
are alternatives in a way that the suppression of the former in some
forceful way leads to the increase in the latter form of conflict expres-
sion. On the contrary, the complementarity hypothesis proposes that,
once an increase in any form of conflict expression occurs, it induces
corresponding increases in other forms of workplace conflict. This is
also called the iceberg hypothesis in the sense that overt expression of
conflict hides other covert forms of conflict beneath it like the tip of an
iceberg. Several empirical studies provided evidence for this hypothesis
demonstrating that collective and individual actions go together. For
example, higher absenteeism rates have been found among employees
who file more grievances than those who did not (Klaas et al. 1991,
Lewin and Peterson 1999).
There have been several efforts to develop a theoretical framework
for integrating these seemingly contradictory models. Most notably,
Hebdon and Stern (1998) demonstrated that suppressed strikes brought
about an increase in the rate of grievance arbitrations by comparing
grievance arbitrations in strike and no-strike subsectors of health care
and government. Extending their study, Hebdon and Stern (2003)
examined the impact of no-strike laws on the emergence of more cov-
ert forms of conflict such as job actions, grievance delays, unfair labour
practices and political actions at the municipal level of government.
The findings of these studies seem to support the trade-off (balloon)
model between individual and collective forms of conflict expression.
However, the implication of their findings is still limited to unionized
workplaces and structural factors such as no-strike laws. So the current
literature has yet to conceptually and empirically deal with why, and
under which circumstances, a complementary or trade-off relationship
prevails among different forms of workplace conflict at the organiza-
tional level.
Unionized workplaces
The role of unions as a voice mechanism for employees is twofold (Batt
et al. 2002). First, as a representative for employees’ economic inter-
est, it enables workers to gain higher wages than those in non-union
workplaces. Second, unions provide workers with political voice chan-

nels to influence the managerial decision-making process on working
conditions. In a similar vein, Aram and Salipante (1981) identified two
aspects of organizational due process for which unions take responsibil-
ity. Procedural due process concerns employee rights, while substantive
due process relates to organizational resource distribution. Sheppard
et al. (1992) also suggest two functions of unionized voice mechanisms:
remedial and preventive voice channels. A remedial voice channel
is designed to hear employee objections and challenges to organiza-
tional decisions that have already been made. The preventive voice
channel allows employees to offer their inputs into as decisions before
they are made.
By a combination of the remedial and preventive mechanisms, it has
been said that conflict resolution through formal grievance procedures
has been one of the major attractions of a union in the US (Lewin
and Peterson 1999). As a result, most empirical studies of unionized
workplaces based on the exit–voice framework acknowledge the effec-
tiveness of formal voice channels backed by a union and its positive
effect on conflict expressions. For instance, Freeman and Medoff (1984)
hypothesized that union exercise of voice on behalf of employees reduces
their exit or quit rates compared to those of non-union employees.
In their study of worker resistance in the US and UK over a 160-year
period, Roscigno and Hodson (2004) found that the combination of a
unionized, high-strike, and bureaucratic environment was associated
with lower levels of individualized forms of worker resistance. On the
other hand, workplaces without a collective action legacy suffered
more work avoidance, absenteeism and theft.
Escalation theory of conflict

Escalation theory of conflict has been mainly developed by social psy-
chologists who defined it as the increase in the severity of aggressive
means used in a given conflict and the consequences of using such
means (Winstok et al. 2004). It provides a processual view on workplace
conflict which shifts the focus of inquiry from isolating each form of
workplace conflict to the processes by which they emerge from other
forms of conflict (Andersson and Pearson 1999). It is suggested that the
outbreak of one form of conflict is rarely a spontaneous act but more
often the manifestation of escalating patterns of negative interaction
between actors. Thus, in this theoretical framework, different forms of
conflict expression have an interdependent relationship in such a way
that conflict launched at one level is likely to stimulate other levels.
Extending the micro-level theory to employment relations, we contend

that a full-blown strike is very unlikely to happen without some build-up
of pressure leading to collective action. Strikes normally require motiva-
tion and mobilization. The build-up period starts with various forms of
individual conflict expression and if the problems persist could lead to
softer forms of collective action (e.g., noon hour picket, work-to-rule,
slow down). We see the selection of conflict expression as a relative
function of the mobilized state of worker unrest. This leads to a stepwise
process of conflict development from individual expressions to softer
collective expression to strikes. Thus, we have a development process
where each step is dependent on the completion of the previous one.
Of course there will be exceptions as the case below illustrates:
Around 200 workers, or close to the entire shift, walked out of the store
in Hialeah Gardens at 9am Monday. A schedule was posted which
cut hours from 40 to nine per week for some members of staff. …
Around 50–60 workers were still protesting outside the store that
afternoon, with one holding a hand-made sign saying: ‘Wal-Mart, we
are human, we want respect.’1
A number of observations may be useful at this juncture. The exist-

ence of a union is clearly not a necessary condition for some forms of
collective action. Although, if media reports are indicative, the type
of (seemingly) spontaneous combustion described in the Wal-Mart
case above would appear to be quite rare. In addition, the significant
number of non-union job actions in the Canadian data may be a
sign of method displacement as private sector unionization falls (see
Godard 2011). Recall that previous research on conflict has shown
what Gall and Hebdon (2008) termed ‘method displacement’, where
the inability to express grievances and discontent through strikes may
find expression through other alternative or covert means. Collective
expressions of conflict differ in important ways from individual con-
flict. As forms of resistance to capitalism, they would normally require
the construction and mobilization of social agency (Gall and Hebdon
2008).
We suggest a rough hierarchy of conflict expressions as set out in
Figure 3.2. According to this model, conflict expressions should be hier-
archically ordered, with individual actions at one end, followed by spon-
taneous collective actions, and with organized industrial conflicts at the
other end. Each form of workplace conflict is assigned a relative degree
of collectivity and organization. However, it is more than just a ranking
Organized
Collective
Action
Collective Strikes
Action
Early
Job Action
Collective
Actions
Formal Noon-hour
Complaints Picketing
Written
Informal Grievance
Complaints
Vol. Turn Over

Absenteeism
Figure 3.2 A process model of conflict development
because we see each higher level of conflict dependent on the comple-

tion of the previous level.
Formal grievance procedure: channelling workplace conflict
Given our conflict escalation theory, we can identify several hypoth-

eses about the relationship between expressions as follows:
H2. In all workplaces, grievances will be positively associated with job actions.
H3. In all workplaces, job actions will be positively associated with strikes.
H4. In all workplaces, grievances will have no statistical relationship with strikes.
Our theory suggests that, on average, grievances do not lead directly to

strikes but to softer expressions such as work-to-rule or slowdown actions.
Method
Sample
This study uses data on 6,000 establishments drawn from the Canadian
Workplace and Employee Survey (WES), which is conducted by Statistics
Canada to examine a broad range of issues relating to employers and

their employees.2 It is a sample survey with a longitudinal design, allow-
ing for a clearer understanding of changing patterns in labour market
and employment relations of Canada over time. Establishments were
selected from all employers in Canada with paid employees, except
for those in the Yukon, Nunavut and Northwest Territories and those
in farming, fishing and trapping, religious organizations and public
administration. The survey was conducted from 1999 to 2006 with
general managers for smaller workplaces and with HR managers for
larger workplaces. Since the sample workplaces are mandated by a gov-
ernment agency to respond to the survey, the response rates were high
enough (e.g., 90.9% in 2000) to say that samples represent Canadian
workplaces with a minimum level of non-response bias. For analytical
purposes, smaller establishments are dropped from our sample. The rea-
son for doing this is to reduce the influence of high variability in annual
grievance rates and turnover rates in small establishments arising from
the small denominator in the equation for the both rates.
Key variables
Grievance rate – This measures the ratio of the total number of griev-
ances filed drawn from the question (e.g. in the survey of year 2006),
‘How many disputes, grievances or complaints were filed between
April 1, 2005 and March 31, 2006?’ This number was expressed as a
rate by dividing by the number of people employed in the last pay
period of March 2006.
Job actions – Strikes traditionally reflect union tactics and are official,
organized, large, long and infrequent and have economic objectives.
Job actions, on the other hand, reflect unrest in informal work groups
and are unofficial, spontaneous, small, short and frequent and have
unclear objectives. In this study, job actions measure the ratio of
the total number of collective voice activities including work-to-rule
actions and work slowdowns which took place between 1 April 2005
and 31 March 2006 expressed as a rate with the denominator the
number of people employed in the last pay period of March 2006.
Turnover rate – This was the number of employees who had resigned
between April 1, 2005 and March 31, 2006, over the number of peo-
ple employed in the last pay period of March 2006.
Control variables
Several variables are included to control for workplace characteristics
that might affect the relationship among different forms of industrial
conflict. Workforce size was measured in hundreds of people employed

at the establishment, and we took natural logarithms of the size. Work-
force stability, which might affect the turnover rate and job actions, was
measured by the proportion of full-time and permanent employees (e.g.,
if 75% of the workforce is full-time and permanent, the proportion full-
time and permanent is 0.75). There has been criticism that the exit–voice
framework operates entirely through compensation. For example, Delery
et al. (2000) found that the statistically significant relationship between
quit rates and unionization disappeared when wages and benefits were
taken into account. To address this issue, we also control for average pay
of employees measured in thousands of dollars. We also control for the
industry. Finally, we control for the adoption of various types of high
involvement work practices (HIWP) because they facilitate employee
trust in an organization and increase their sense of control and iden-
tification with it (Locke and Schweiger 1979), which affect the way in
which employees express their discontent. For example, Batt et al. (2002)
show that the extent of employee participation in problem-solving and
self-directed work teams is negatively related to turnover rates.
The WES survey elicits detailed information about work organization,
including the use of HIWP such as teams, suggestion programmes,
feedback, self-directed work and information sharing with employ-
ees. It records who – workers, management or some combined team –
participates in decisions over twelve different aspects of the production
process, including planning of individual work, purchase of machinery,
staffing levels, and new product development. Two variables provided
a measure of the degree to which employees are involved in decision-
making in the workplace. The first of these variables captures individual
employee involvement through a four-item scale measuring the degree to
which individual employees make decisions with respect to: daily plan-
ning of individual work, weekly planning of individual work, follow-up
results, quality control, purchase of necessary supplies, and maintenance
of machinery and equipment. The second of these variables captures
workgroup involvement through a four-item scale measuring the degree
to which work groups make decisions with respect to: daily planning of
individual work, weekly planning of individual work, follow-up results,
quality control, purchase of necessary supplies, and maintenance of
machinery and equipment.
Results3
We schematize our key findings in the following diagrams, which focus
upon the relations among our key conflict variables (grievance rates,
turnover, job actions and strikes) after controlling for organizational

and industry characteristics.
Figure 3.3 depicts the results for all workplaces in our sample. Grievance
and turnover rates were negatively related as predicted in Hypothesis 1
based on the exit–voice framework. This result is consistent with previ-
ous findings (Batt et al. 2002, Olson-Buchanan 1996).
Figure 3.4 demonstrates that grievance and job action rates were sig-
nificantly and positively related after controlling for various characteris-
tics. This supports our escalation hypothesis that individual expressions
are precursors for soft collective actions. The sum and inter-relationship
of Figures 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5 is illustrated in Figure 3.6.
In Figure 3.5, job actions and strikes were positively linked. The rela-
tionship was again highly statistically significant. This positive relation-
ship is consistent with our escalation hypothesis.
Finally, we found no statistical relationship between grievance and
strike rates (or levels). Both regression and path analysis provide support
Individual
Conflict
Grievance Vol. Turn Over

**
Figure 3.3 Relationship between grievance and quit rate
Individual Collective but

Conflict Informal
Conflict
Grievance
+* Job Action
+**
Vol. Turn Over
Figure 3.4 Relationship between grievance/quit rate and job action

Collective but Collective &

Informal formal
Conflict Conflict
***
Job Action
+ Strike
Figure 3.5 Relationship between job action and strike
Individual Collective but Collective &

Conflict Informal formal
Conflict Conflict
Grievance *
+ Job Action
***
+ Strike
+**
Vol. Turn Over
Figure 3.6 Overall relationship among three forms of workplace conflict
for a theory of conflict escalation where grievances are positively linked

to job actions and job actions to strikes but there is no direct statistical
link between grievances and strikes.
Turning to non-union job actions, we were surprised by the level and
growth in non-union job actions over the period 1999–2006. By the end
of the period non-union job actions outnumbered those in the union-
ized sector (Figure 3.7). To our knowledge this is the first research that
has found such a phenomenon. The conflict literature has tended to
assume that the mobilization of collective actions require the existence
of a union.
Since most of the reported job actions were slowdowns and the oth-
ers were working to rule we examined a breakdown of union and non-
union slowdowns over the period (Figure 3.8). Once again, we see a rise
Union Non-union
120
100
80
60
40
20
0
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Figure 3.7 Union and non-union job actions
Union Non-union
100
80
60
40
20
0
1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Figure 3.8 Slowdowns – union and non-union
in slowdowns in the non-union slowdowns and a higher number of

non-union slowdowns than union ones.
Discussion
Despite a wide range of conflict expressions, most studies have attempted

to answer questions about one type of conflict expression at a time
(Hebdon 2005, Hebdon and Stern 1998). Consequently, researchers have
yet to develop a comprehensive theory – or set of theories – regarding
workplace conflict. Previous studies have focused upon how to resolve
and manage workplace conflict, shedding light on the actors which are
directly implicated in conflict situations and the strategies organiza-
tions use to resolve these situations. We know little, however, about the
nature of workplace conflict itself despite its fundamental importance
to conflict management. Studies need to focus upon the dynamics
between different forms of conflict expression. We found support for

the exit–voice trade-off as previously found in the literature. When
workers are dissatisfied with conditions they either choose exit or voice.
This is a confirmatory result that gave us some confidence in our data
and model. The wider theory tested here is that a full-blown strike is
very unlikely to happen without some build-up of pressure leading to
strong collective action. Thus, conflict is a step-by-step process with
the selection of conflict expression as a function of the mobilized state
of worker unrest. We found that after choosing voice over exit, worker
dissatisfaction starts with grievances and is then followed by softer
forms of collective action such as working to rule or slowing down.
High grievance rates did not lead directly to strikes but were linked to
strikes only through these softer forms of job actions. We have devel-
oped a model of conflict escalation that provides testable hypotheses
about expression linkages. More research is necessary to test the robust-
ness of the theory on expressions other than grievances, job actions
and strikes (and in countries other than Canada). What would be the
chosen voice mechanism, for example, if a grievance procedure is not
available in non-union firms? It could be absenteeism, sabotage, theft,
or other expression including some new expression not previously stud-
ied. There are implications of this chapter for the disciplines that study
workplace conflict. Given the high numbers of non-union job actions,
industrial relations and organizational behaviour scholars may have to
review their current research agendas. With the decline of unions, the
industrial relations field may have to examine collective conflict in the
non-union world. The assumption that a union is necessary for collective
action is called into question by our research. Similarly, organizational
behaviour scholars may have to go beyond studies of individual expres-
sions if they want to fully understand conflict within organizations.
This non-union job action phenomenon may provide an answer to the
question of what happened to strikes – a sign of method displacement.
Finally, more qualitative research is needed to understand how collective
action develops, particularly in non-union firms.
Notes
1. http://libcom.org/news/walmart-workers-walk-out-on-wildcat-18102006, 19
October 2006.
2. For more information on WES, see http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/p2SV.
pl?Function=getSurvey&SurvId=2615&SurvVer=1&InstaId=13978&InstaVer=
5&SDDS=2615&lang=en&db=imdb&adm=8&dis=2
3. For the statistical data which supports the representation of results in the
Figures, contact the lead author.
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4
A Working Death? Contesting
Life Itself in the Bio-Political
Organization
Peter Fleming
Introduction
Following in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and the
subsequent widespread discrediting of the neo-liberal political agenda
(and perhaps capitalism itself), the meaning of work for the multitude
labouring in and around the large corporations of the west has arrived
at a peculiar juncture. On the one hand, there has been a massive divest-
ment in the idea of work. Compared to yesteryear when it was one of
the key icons of social good even among a militant workforce – and
usually cast in very masculinist terms – today the ideology of work
holds very little progressive currency or legitimacy. People avoid it
when they can, mainstream movies deride it as a matter of course and
even those in charge of officially sanctioning employed work only do
so with a glint of irony. To quote the sentiments of one senior manage-
ment consultant recently interviewed: ‘work is shit’ (Fleming 2011: 22).
On the other hand, at the very moment work has truly lost its ideologi-
cal shine, it has ironically become a socio-economic force par excellence,
more influential now than ever, determining ever increasing aspects
of our lives both in and outside the formal place of employment (to
the point where even children and the unemployed find themselves
obsessed with it).
At the broader political economy level, we feel this impasse is con-
nected more fundamentally to what Crouch (2011) recently termed the
strange non-death of neo-liberalism. Even its most fervent admirers seem
to agree that the neo-liberal project has fundamentally failed, even on
its own myopic terms, let alone those of capitalism more generally.
Commentators as diverse as Crouch (2011), Marazzi (2011) and Quiggin
(2010) share a bewilderment regarding the way that the moribund
48
Peter Fleming 49
framework of neo-liberal capitalism still appears to have incomparable

sway in governmental policy, corporate strategy, employment law and
the market mechanism. This dead idea haunts us almost completely
without respite, even as its handiwork has led to the obliteration of the
financial markets and the corporate infrastructure of Western society.
But little has been said about the moment of labour itself amidst
this impasse. How does the broader politico-economic impasse noted
above translate into an experience of work at the point of production,
distribution and exchange? In other words, we are now gaining an
understanding of the wider tectonic forces that allow a dead idea to
still govern our lives, but what kind of existential milieu does it engen-
der for the millions who have to still participate in a discursive matrix
that everyone realizes for all intents and purposes is as good as dead?
And what type of labour politics, if any, might emerge from the con-
cretization of this impasse in the myriad corporations and workplaces
that dot the post-industrial landscape in Western societies? Given the
importance of how work is organized and culturally experienced at the
‘point of production’, this chapter sets out to address these questions
in order to offer an analysis of the crisis of neo-liberalism from the
standpoint of labour.
It must be said that neo-liberalism has perhaps always been dead from
the point of view of labour – its birth did, after all, represent a massive
capitalist class offensive (Harvey 2007). But a new experience is emerg-
ing, or perhaps the amplification of an older one. Reporting from the
coalface of a variety of contemporary workplaces, this chapter outlines
a peculiar mindset that stems from the impasse described above. While
the ideology of work is dead and over for so many – it is seen of little
‘worth’ – labour nevertheless has to act as if the superlative credence of
working is alive and healthy. This chapter suggests this engenders a
mindset among the workforce that is qualitatively different to previous
modes of labour politicization. This mindset reflects the strange impasse
observed with respect to the strange non-death of neo-liberalism. Both at
the top and lower rungs of the employment hierarchy, there is a poign-
ant perception that ‘a job’ no longer holds any substantive social value
whatsoever, yet has become a universal social code that has infected
our whole lives (whereby we work at home, on our days off, even in
our sleep). It suggests the living death of neo-liberalism, thus, translates
into a living death of the working subject. As Cederstrom and Fleming
(2012) noted in their research of employment in Europe and the United
States, from the daily tedium of the office, to the humiliating team-
building exercise, to the alienating rituals of the service economy, to the
50 A Working Death?
petty mind games of a passive-aggressive boss, the experience is not one

of dying but neither of living.
But a novel counter-work politics is also afoot that is also quite
distinct from previous modes of workplace struggle. This is where the
traditional boundaries between work and non-work, work and life, are
broken down so that work is no longer something we only do (among
other things), but is something we are. When life itself – our social com-
petencies and intelligence, our artisanal enthusiasm and ability to self-
organize (often outside paid working hours) – is put to work, the power
relations of capitalism change significantly, as we shall soon discuss.
Under bio-political regimes of control, the logic of work comes to colo-
nize all aspects of life. But for the multitude subjected to it, work is still
something that we would rather avoid (like the plague to paraphrase
Marx), but this becomes exceeding difficult when it has integrated itself
inside life as such, even in our dreams.
This chapter suggests this is why ‘life’ is experienced by the bio-
proletariat as a kind of live death. As a response, labour no longer asks
for more work, better work or fairer work, but an escape from work. The
desire to exit and withdraw from an obsolete and unsalvageable ‘totality’
is becoming a significant facet of the political imaginary currently fer-
menting in and around the scattered points of production, distribution
and exchange today. And, the attendant political enactments that this
‘exit wish’ inspires may not always be politically progressive. Indeed,
whether the current recalibration of workplace struggle around the sign
of ‘exit’ or ‘exodus’ represents an effective retort to the demands of late
capitalism is likely to be hotly debated in the near future.
Neo-liberalism at work – or the persistence of a dead idea
Any analysis of the way in which the meaning and legitimacy of hav-
ing a job is being reshaped and recast today might do well to place it
on the backdrop of the ongoing failure of the neo-liberalist model of
capitalism. What is peculiar is not necessarily the economic and ideo-
logical crisis per se, but the way the material forces of neo-liberalism
continue and expand their realm of influence even as widespread opin-
ion has deemed it fundamentally dead. For sure, given the repeated
defeats of neo-liberalism, its failures both as an ideal for the advance-
ment of personal freedom and autonomy as well as the crises that have
done for its scientific and social legitimacy, it remains to be asked why
this brittle corpse not only fails to die but actually extends and deepens
its reign.
Peter Fleming 51
That it has failed on all known measures to further its purported ide-
als of freedom is clear (see, for example, Crouch 2011, Quiggin, 2010).
Over the last thirty years, the working day in the ‘advanced’ economies
has become ever longer as increasingly two salaries are necessary to live
a half-decent life for all but a tiny number of professions, as lower taxes
have meant that what had been considered social goods – such as health
and education – become dependent upon the vagaries of the private sec-
tor job markets and individualized wage deals. The ever-increasing work-
ing day has turned into an ever-longer working week, and increasingly to
the extension of the working life as the almost complete privatization –
individualization – of the costs of old age have been presented as a
natural consequence of an ever-older population. The ideal of the entre-
preneurial individual has had the effect of turning the social into a cost
for individuals (rather than a resource), allowing for the scapegoating of
the very poor, the infirm, migrants etc. by those only a few steps above
them on the income security ladder. The ‘being in this together’ exists
only as a cry for austerity by those who do not have to experience it.
That neo-liberalism has failed in terms of its scientific ideal, as the
promoter of a flourishing free-market economy, perhaps needs even less
argument after the ever more resounding failures of markets over the last
three decades, culminating in the ongoing crisis that began in late 2007
and that caused even that doyen of neo-liberalism, Alan Greenspan,
to admit in 2008 that the legitimacy of the model was at an end. As
he put it, he found a ‘flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical
functioning structure that defines how the world works’.1 Markets not
only fail – their reliability consists in precisely our being able to rely
on them doing so persistently and regularly – but their failure is what
allows for each stage of the next round of dis-assembling of the remains
of the social. Each failure is ‘resolved’ through a further attack on the
social relations and structures that have managed to survive previous
rounds of surplus extraction, which leave an ever-dwindling supply for
further rounds.
What this chapter explores is how the collapse of the model of expla-
nation and legitimation of ‘how the world works’ can co-exist with the
continued operations of that structure – especially in the post-industrial
workhouse. We are left with an increasingly bloodless and gutless struc-
ture, the operations of which are kept in being by the circulation of
pure a-signifying signs around the dead husks of industrial capitalism,
through the corridors of institutions whose raison d’être is now forgotten
but that cannot cease without collapsing what is the mere memory of
social life into anarchic dystopias of a future past. Whereas – as Fredric
52 A Working Death?
Jameson (2011: 21) points out – Marx outlines two sets of languages,
one that of a fetishistic ‘object-ness’ and another ‘a mathematical
process capable of taking the place of those substances and objects, of
translating their inertia into relational laws or inner dynamics of what
turn out to be static in appearance only’, contemporary neo-liberal
capital leaves us with figures on a screen, which translate into unrelated
dead objects. The only thing sustaining the model is the unconscious
memory of the social, the marginal persistence of collectivity – in many
cases mere survivals but in all cases survivals that are both threats and
preconditions for continued surplus extraction.
Universalizing a dead idea? The bio-political workplace
If neo-liberalism is putatively and practically dead, and yet we seem-

ingly must all behave as if it is alive, what does this mean for the way
we approach one of its central institutional pillars – namely, the work-
place? The translation of this ‘living death’ of neo-liberal capitalism
and its deep-rooted currents of crisis into the institutional setting of the
workplace is no doubt complex. It engenders a specific type of anomie –
the feeling that one is languishing in a dead-end job and leading a life
not worth living. But this collective mindset might also be partially
responsible for the strange continuance of the moribund neo-liberal
moment.
That the legitimacy of work is over is now well founded, as the
many accounts of employment today have recorded (including Parker
(2002), Cederstrom and Fleming (2012), Gregg (2011) and Berardi (2009)
among many others). But it is the way the neo-liberal project has bio-
politicized the ideology of work (to paraphrase Gorz (1989)) that is of
most import for understanding the concretization of the crisis, especially
the way the once important boundaries between work and non-work,
labour and play have been severely disrupted, transforming ‘a job’ into
a virus-like totality unlike any previous modality of capitalism. Today,
work is not only something we do among other realms of social activity,
but is also something we are, becoming a kind of warped lifestyle that
we carry around with us in our DNA. Subsequently, the institution of
having ‘a job’ is not only perceived to be bereft of life or social good but
also, and most crucially, almost inexorable in its preponderance over
our imagination and social relations.
What do we mean by the bio-politicization of work? Unlike the clas-
sic bureaucracy that formally banished anything remotely personal or
emotive from the workplace (as Max Weber well documented) or
Peter Fleming 53
the archetypical factory that criminalized anything hinting of non-

employment activities (play, fun, informal banter), today’s employment
settings have significantly displaced the cultural boundary between
work and non-work. As Fleming and Sturdy (2011) highlighted in their
study of a call-centre, today many employees are exhorted by ‘liberation
management’ to express their individuality, unique personalities and
all that is different about them, including their sexual orientation and
hobbies. Personal preferences of the employee of the month – choice of
music, favourite food, and historical heroes – might be presented on a
monitor in the office’s foyer.
The capitalist rationale is clear. The ‘permissive firm’ realizes it is
now merely a machine for reproducing dead labour. It also acknowl-
edges that it desperately needs all of those social and non-commercial
qualities of the worker that so frequently lie outside the structures of
formal economic rationality (and are banished under older modes of
domination found in the classic bureaucracy and factory). Of course,
the management pundits celebrate this shift in managerialism as the
arrival of new employment freedoms. We only have to wander into any
airport bookstore to find titles that proclaim the ‘Seven Day Weekend’
or the ‘Play Ethic’ to note this. Semler (1994: xiii, italics in original),
the author of the best-selling pop-management book Maverick!, goes
so far as to say that ‘control is now per se … now, you are free’. Indeed,
he argues that work and life are today indistinguishable. The blurb on
the back cover of Semler’s (2004) The Seven Day Weekend tells – to the
strains of unbelievable and fantastical hyperbole – of complete and
unregulated worker autonomy, freedom, liberty and choice at work.
Yet indicative of how the firm today aims to enroll living labour – all
of those facets of social intelligence and amateurism including our
propensity for innovation and self-organization – by putting life itself
(or bios) to work. For sure, traditional controls around time and bureau-
cratic regulation still abound (see Fleming and Sturdy 2011). But they
have been augmented by what we would like to call biocracy in which
what employees once considered ‘a life’ outside the office or factory
is now an essential ‘human resource’ to be exploited. Further more,
this not only entails the transposition of life into the workplace as a
regulative principle, but also its obverse – namely, the spread of work
into everyday life beyond the office. Ross (2004) nicely described this
new mode of exploitation in his study of employment in the US. He
found that the non-work signifiers continuously were evoked as the
firm imported ‘lifestyle components back into the workplace’ (Ross
2004: 139). But the process also flowed the other way since management
54 A Working Death?
knew that ‘ideas and creativity were just as likely to surface at home
or in other locations, and so employees were encouraged to work else-
where … the goal was to extract every waking moment of an employee’s
day’ (Ross 2004: 52). But even sleep is now ripe for exploitation under
biocracy. This is vividly captured in a recent biographical essay by
Lucas (2010) called ‘Dreaming in Code’. The computer programmer
described how his life was so integrated into the moment of production
that sleep was even involved, dreaming up solutions to problematic
code conundrums (what he called ‘sleep-working’) in the middle of
the night.
The living death of work … up close
How did it come about that we find ourselves semi-existing in a dead

world under the sign of biocracy? The translation of the living death of
neo-liberal into a kind of existential malaise concerning the meaning
of work has a history. The notion of biocracy is inspired, of course, by
the broader concept of bio-power. In his prescient lecture series pub-
lished in English as The Birth of Bio-Politics, Foucault (2010) convinc-
ingly connects bio-power to the rapid dominance of neo-liberalism.
Now it is not only the formal state that begins to manage life itself but
also the market mechanism. American economists like Becker begin to
speak of ‘human capital’ and ‘human resources’ in which the very life
abilities of an individual can be indexed as an economic utility, extend-
ing the logic of the market into society as a whole.
The weakness of Foucault’s analysis is the downplaying of class strug-
gle and class conflict in the emergence of neo-liberalism. Indeed, it is
remarkable that Foucault theorized its ideological birth without any
mention of the industrial violence and strife that accompanied it –
Thatcherism in Britain, for example. But accordingly, the argument
here is that the current universalization of work (in the form of bioc-
racy) itself was born out of crisis. It was a tactical response to the inbuilt
inadequacies of the capitalist mode of production as it characteristically
ran up against its own limits. Beset by both internal and external socio-
economic shocks during the 1970s and 1980s, the biocratic moment
emerges during that phase of capitalism where it recognizes it cannot
organize itself and so enlists workers to do it instead. This was certainly
a neo-liberal class offensive bent on a major re-expropriation of surplus
value (Harvey 2007). But it was also indicative of a new paradigm of
exploitation in which corporate managerialism understood the coming
need to exploit the informal qualities of workers. Indeed, extending
Peter Fleming 55
workplace regulation into life itself is typical of a kind of capitalism

that is super-reliant on human qualities such as social intelligence,
personality, emotional acumen and collective improvisation. And, as
we noted above, since these aspects of social labour often lie outside
or beyond the logic of economic rationality, we see the importance of
non-work in a wide range of industries, from the call-centre (Fleming
2009) to the management consultancy (Costas and Fleming 2009) and
the textile factory (Land and Taylor 2010). Virno (2004: 203) explains
the rationale succinctly:
The productive cooperation in which labour-power participates is

always larger and richer than the one put into play by the labour
process. It includes also the world of non-labour, the experiences and
knowledge matured outside of the factory and the office. Labour-
power increases the value of capital only because it never loses its
qualities of non-labour.
This biocratic attempt to exploit the riches of non-work may take a

number of forms. We might see the managerialization of the under-
life forged by workers that was always present but previously distrusted
under Fordism. As the classic studies of workplace behaviour including
Roy (1952, 1958) and Burawoy (1979) have demonstrated, employees
have always found ways to relieve boredom, reject authority and inject
an element of humanity back into work notwithstanding the edicts of
formal rules (via play, games, sexuality, humour and even sabotage). But
things are different today. Recent studies have shown how this organic
informality is now actively encouraged and utilized by a more ‘holistic’
kind of human resource management (HRM). Some corporations even
promote what was once deemed ‘organizational misbehavior’ (Ackroyd
and Thompson 1999) under the Fordist model of accumulation. Indeed,
today, amidst widespread incredulity about the importance of work and
a crippling neo-liberal crisis, we see the rise of what Kuhn (2006) calls
the ‘lifestyle firm’. It aims to engage workers by allowing them to just
be themselves (‘warts and all’). The idea is that employees might be more
motivated if they feel comfortable expressing, say, their gay identities or
alternative political views at work, rather than hiding them from view
for fear of chastisement (of course, labour unionism is conspicuously
left of the list of desirable expressions of identity).
But we should not overemphasize the importance of identity and its
free expression. It is the concrete extension of the logic of work into all
facets of life that is the key rationale of biocracy. A good example of this
56 A Working Death?
can be found in Gregg’s (2011) Work’s Intimacy, demonstrating how the

ideology of work literally took over the lives of post-industrial employees
in Australia. In a number of case studies, she investigates the way com-
puter technology in particular created an enviroment of self-entrapment.
With the use of mobile technology, workers could (and often did) work at
home, in the café, in bed, on the weekend, on their days off, at a child’s
football game, and in one extreme case, on an accident and emergency
hospital table – well, someone had to inform the office that they would
not make the meeting!
The never-ending overstimulation outlined by Gregg also represents
what might be called the horizontalization of capitalist power relations.
The management function was embedded in the worker himself or her-
self (as well as having a normal ‘boss’ above them). And this meant the
labour was never ending. For example, there was an enormous amount
of unpaid effort to ‘ready’ or ‘poise’ oneself for the formal moment of
exploitation (e.g., working Sunday night so the Monday morning went
well). Moreover, teams were crucial for concentrating work into an
urgent, ever-pressing ‘problem’ requiring immediate attention. Gregg
(2011: 74) notes: ‘The team becomes hegemonic in the office culture
due to its effectiveness in erasing the power hierarchies and differential
entitlements that clearly remain in large organizations.’ And, more to
the point: ‘Loyalty to the team has the effect of making extra work seem
courteous and common sense’ (Gregg 2011: 85). With the aid of mobile
technology, the quest to ‘keep up’, ‘keep on top’ and not let your team
down overwhelmed employees with a perception of being swamped by
a torrent of endless, useless labour. This is what Gregg calls ‘presence
bleed’ (always being mentally on the job) and ‘function creep’ (increased
time being given up to work). Regarding ‘presence bleed’ she writes
(Gregg 2011: 2):
Communication platforms and devices allow work to invade spaces

and times that were only susceptible to its presence. This is a process
we might describe as the presence bleed of contemporary office cul-
ture, where firm boundaries between personal and professional iden-
tities no longer apply. Presence bleed explains the familiar experience
whereby location and time of work become secondary considerations
faced with the ‘to do list’ that seems forever out of control. It not
only explains the sense of responsibility workers feel in making
themselves ready and willing to work beyond paid hours but also
captures the feeling of anxiety that arises in jobs that involve a never-
ending schedule of tasks that must be fulfilled.
Peter Fleming 57
So, let’s recap. Capitalist work from the beginning was always under-
stood to be tantamount to a social and existential death, no matter how
many industrial psychologists were wheeled out to convince workers
otherwise or how inventive the sub-cultural employee games became
to escape boredom. We have also always known that capitalism accu-
mulates numerical value by subtracting social value, experienced as
alienation, disenchantment and dehumanization. But the formula of
our bio-proletarian malaise, however, is slightly different. Neo-liberal
capitalism is over, yet it continues to determine us like a force of nature.
This impasse is amplified in the workplace. The institution of work is
besmirched even by captains of industry but we, nevertheless, enter
this institution (often with a fake smile) as forcefully as it enters us as
a universal presence. The labour of crisis translates into a moment of
living death, overcoded by the feeling of sheer pointlessness of our job,
a frenetic busyness without end or rationale, slowly poisoning almost
every aspect of our lives on the job and even afterwards when we think
the daily grind is over. But, of course, it is never over. This viral-like logic
of a working crisis has even spread into our most intimate pastimes,
precipitating a novel and inescapable cultural malaise, writ-large by a
complete, irreversible and ominous dead end.
‘Exit work’ and the labour of crisis
If the current neo-liberal crisis is fundamentally exemplified by the

strange persistence of a moribund ideological ideal, precipitating new
modes of capitalist regulation, then the politics of industrial antago-
nism also undergo permutations. For the workers studied, however,
the truly perplexing question is this: how does one resist a workplace
that has gone ‘viral’, assuming a gaseous form that that infects our
very social being, our dreams and imagination. The difficulty here is
perfectly captured by our aforementioned ‘sleep worker’ Lucas (2010:
128), who laments how conventional tactics of proletarian struggle are
simply outflanked when work is not only something we do but also
something we are:
given the individually allocated and project centered character of

the job, absenteeism only amounts to self-punishment, as work that
is not done will have to be done later under increased stress. Given the
collaborative nature of the work, heel dragging necessarily involves a
sense of guilt towards other workers. On the production line, sabo-
tage might be a rational tactic, but when your work resembles that of
58 A Working Death?
an artisan, sabotage would only make life harder … It is only when

sickness comes and I am involuntary incapable of work that I really
gain extra time for myself. It is a strange thing to rejoice in the onset
of a flu.
While the excerpt certainly conveys a sense of hopelessness, it also –

albeit inadvertently – underlines what seems is an emergent paradigm
of worker’s struggle: that of exit. A byproduct of the growing percep-
tion that neo-liberalism is both dead and paradoxically expanding its
reign over our lives is the conclusion that there is something deeply
unsalvageable about working today. This is represented among the ever-
increasing multitude of the bio-proletariat who feel there is actually very
little left to save when it comes to their (dead-end) ‘job’, and a corrupt
state apparatus promises prosperity and a whole range of related institu-
tions (education, family and so-forth). The working and middle classes
know full well that work is a con-job best left to its own self-destructive
devices. Following the wave of corporate corruption scandals from
2002 onwards, most see the corporation as an unreformable, anti-social
institution that is inherently designed to appropriate that which it
cannot provide on its own terms (see Fleming and Zyglidoplous 2009).
They also know that their governments are primary handmaidens
to a nasty corporate elite, making debates about whether the state is
‘semi-autonomous’ which preoccupied previous generations seem laugh-
able today. And for the thousands of university-educated workers who
have found themselves entering the low-paid service sector, best not
even mention the idea of meritocracy that underpins the bourgeois
education apparatus.
The extreme nature of this disillusionment heralds a new labour poli-
tics since it does not seek to be included or recognized by the capitalist
state or corporation. Its tactics are not based upon the old model of
entering into dialogue with power and demanding better work, more
work, or fairer work. It simply seeks to walk and be left alone. While
the labour of crisis outlined in the preceding sections is perhaps an
accomplice to the conservative worldview that work is all there is, this
perception itself engenders an ‘all or nothing’ or ‘zero-sum’ that was
previously the sole reserve of a revolutionary discourse. This suggests
the coming of what we might call a kind of post-recognition politics
that does not want to be counted, heard or included by power, but
in the words of Lucas (2010) above, simply to be ‘left alone’.
Indeed, since many surmise that (neo-liberal) capitalism is now noth-
ing more than a bloated and parasitic corpse, perversely riding on our
Peter Fleming 59
attempts to compensate and cope with its outlandish demands, then

why ask it for anything? Why not just leave? And this brings us back to
the central question underlying the politics of post-recognition in the
current climate of an overworked society – namely, how do we exit work
when it has infiltrated our very mode of social being, over-saturating
our lives so completely?
Failed escape attempts

Fundamentally, many attempts to leave fail because they get it wrong.
They mistake the dead ideology of work for the breathing body, the
manufactured bio-proletarian individual for life itself, and the stulti-
fied ‘human resource’ for living labour. This exit attempt says to itself:
‘If I am the bearer of power, then I will hurt it by hurting myself. I will
incapacitate it by incapacitating myself.’ Deleuze and Guattari (1987)
label this a ‘failed escape’ simply because it concedes life to capital, and
thus resists by resisting life itself. No detachment from work is achieved –
in fact, the opposite. Think again of our ‘sleep worker’ (Lucas 2010)
and the way he rejoiced in the onset of the flu. The incapacitated body
was considered a moment of freedom from the continuous pressure to
work. Indeed, this proactive utilization of illness was first experimented
with in early 1970s. The Socialist Patient Collective urged workers to
‘use illness as a weapon’ and exhorted the proletariat to reconfigure the
damaged body into a beacon of freedom.
As argued elsewhere (Fleming 2011, Cederstrom and Fleming 2012)
self-destruction is an understandable, if misinformed, counter-attack
against bio-political forms of power. The wave of suicides on the job at
France Telecom, Foxconn (in China) and the bankers’ suicides in London
following the financial meltdown can easily be understood in these
terms. Indeed, the ‘big exit’ of death seems to be at the forefront of the
desires among some in the workforce. As a junior management con-
sultant told the author privately: ‘I realized things were bad whenever
I boarded a plane for work; I always prayed it would crash.’ Only in
the hope of an externally imposed and catastrophic death did freedom
become discernible.
But the less dramatic cases of alcoholism and ‘burnout’ are also
indicative of this erroneous conflation of life with the deadness of neo-
liberal capitalism. One fascinating example can be found in Hamper’s
(1992) tragic-comedic account of life in a large automobile factory
that was slowly implementing controls associated with biocracy. To curb
production defects, management took a man off the line, dressed him
up in a garish yellow cat suit and called him ‘Howie, the Quality Cat’.
60 A Working Death?
At first, Howie seemed happy with his newfound freedom. But he soon
became the butt of almost every anti-management joke. One fellow
worker even tried to set him on fire. Soon a dejected Howie began
to look more like a dishevelled stray, sitting for long periods in the
car park smoking cigarettes and drinking hard liquor. The end was
nigh. Howie mistook himself for the bio-regulated human resource he
had become and turned on his own body. From the company’s per-
spective, it was easy to categorize him as yet another post-industrial
stress casualty.
Refusal to work
A more successful mode of repossessing life from capital is the refusal
to work movement currently gaining moment in the west. Unlike other
experiments in this area – most famously Larfargu’s classic ‘right to be
lazy’ – this politics of disengagement is not individualist but collective in
character. In part it involves what Harney (2011) calls social preserva-
tion or ‘social rest’, an escape from the frenetic attention economy of
corporate life. But more substantially, it might also entail the making of
alternative worlds outside of capitalism, as practised by independent-
media groups (Shukiatis 2009) and co-operative working communities
in the large metropolis of the west (see Pasquinelli (2008) for an excel-
lent overview). The notion of self-valorization is central to this social
practice of exit. The rationale goes like this. Under the conditions of
biocracy, we observe firsthand how capitalist exploitation involves a
conspicuous overreliance on those things that it cannot provide itself
and that only we can: creativity, social intelligence, resourcefulness and
open-sharing. Indeed, the bio-proletariat is no better placed to witness
the corporation’s blatant overreliance on those things outside of its reg-
ulative remit: free labour, democratic mutual aid, amateurism, artisanal
free-time and the associatives of non-work. Moreover, the ideology of
work today is about harnessing the non- (or even counter-) capitalist
social relations that yield this wealth, but in a manner that blocks their
full realization, which would be communism. Thus, the emergent labour
politics noted by Shukiatis (2009) and Pasquinelli (2008) seek such a
realization by de-working living co-operation and self-valorizing its evi-
dent wealth. In theoretical terms, Hardt and Negri (2009: 368) call this
exodus:
… by [which] we mean, initially at least, a process of subtraction

from the relationship with capital by means of actualizing the
potential autonomy of labour power. Exodus is not thus a refusal of
Peter Fleming 61
productivity of bio-labour of labour power but rather a refusal of the

fetters placed on its productive capacities by capital.
There are many examples of exodus in and around the formal enter-
prise. We only need to look to the mass of employees who have departed
their jobs – including the so-called ‘downshift movement’ in order to
lead less exploited lives (see Nelson et al. 2007). Hundreds of websites
are available to this end including leavingacademia.com and many
others. We might also think about the multitude of non-workers that
chose never to enter the corporation in the first place (for a discussion
of this see Costas and Fleming (2009)). For example, an ex-consultant
recounted an incident (see Fleming 2012): when he finally chose to
leave the business he himself founded, he was overwhelmed with the
congratulations from colleagues, more so than we he started it. Escaping
the self-entrapment of modern employment was considered a major
achievement.
Becoming imperceptible
We often associate political struggle with being heard, with being
recognized and being counted. However, in the bio-political climate,
becoming visible to power might be counter-productive. Why so? First,
if bio-capitalism is purely parasitical then why even bother speaking to
power? It simply reinforces the idea that capitalism can give us some-
thing (and it can’t and won’t). Many among the bio-precariat worry
that even voicing one’s discontent might simply strengthen the legiti-
macy of the power structure being questioned. Indeed, the ideology of
liberalism has always functioned in this manner. Think of the bizarre
self-referentiality in the reasoning of former president George W. Bush
when he said he felt vindicated by the millions of protesters opposing
his policies because he stood for free speech. More recently, another
example can be found amidst the 2011 anti-corporation protests that
began with an occupation on Wall Street and spread around the world.
While certainly a worthy form of struggle, the corporate world saw it
in a particular light. In the London business newspaper City Life in
2011, a lead article entitled ‘How to Profit from the Protests’ recom-
mended engaging with the protests to find new forms of innovation
and ideas. Once again, the bio-proletariat was brought back onto the
stage of power.
Rather than speaking to power and thus risking falling prey to the
ideological mirror game of recognition politics, some have suggested
simply turning away from the gaze of domination. This strategy of
62 A Working Death?
reclamation of life (through the various detachments we have discussed

above) might be better described as the struggle to be left alone. Some
have achieved this by becoming inscrutable to power, refusing dialogue
and simply disappearing to enact the self-valorization of that which
business ideology seeks to exploit. This is what some have called the
politics of imperceptibility (see Papadopoulos, Stephenson and Tsianos
2009) or a post-recognition politics (see Fleming 2010). But again, it
does not entail disappearing into some kind of private solitude. It is a
very social disappearing. The infamous ‘invisible committee’ (Invisible
Committee 2009) in France is a good example when it comes to anti-
corporate protest and the refusal to work. It explained the rationale
(Invisible Committee 2009: 112–13):
Turn anonymity into a defensive position. In a demonstration, a

union member tears the mask off an anonymous person who has
just broken a window. “Take responsibility for what you’re doing
instead of hiding yourself.” But to be visible is to be exposed, that is to
say above all, vulnerable. When Leftists everywhere continually make
their cause more “visible” – whether that of the homeless, of women
or of undocumented immigrants – in hopes that it will get dealt with,
they’re doing exactly the contrary of what must be done. Not making
ourselves visible, but instead turning the anonymity to which we’ve
been relegated to our advantage, and through conspiracy, nocturnal
or faceless actions, creating an invulnerable position of attack.
Moore (2007) nicely explores this post-recognition politics in the

music industry, which is notorious for capturing the living labour of art-
ists. In the 1990s a thriving network of autonomous culture producers
had developed a unique sub-economy of music in a number of US cities.
These communities often celebrated anti-capitalist independence and
a DIY ethic that dispensed with the need for large commercial labels.
At the same time, however, large music multinationals were making
ever-deeper forays into this sub-culture. While engagement with the
powerful corporates through various forms of ironic and cynical lam-
pooning was and still is common currency (a la Nirvana or Radio Head),
this frequently resulted in artistic ‘sell-out’. In this context, Bikini Kill
(which had considerable underground success with the song ‘Suck My
Left One’) and other ‘riot grrrl’ bands (anti-consumerist, feminist DYI
groups) understood this aspect of commodification, rendering the unmar-
ketable marketable. So these bands practised a politics of impercepti-
bility: ‘riot grrrl participants developed a sophisticated response: a media
Peter Fleming 63
blackout … for the most part the mainstream media were forced to
describe what they could comprehend of the burgeoning scene from the
outer edge of a sweaty mosh pit’ (Moore, 2007: 9).
Conclusion
What does the crisis of neo-liberalism mean for the labouring subject
beyond the economic realities of precarity, fear of unemployment
and debt? And what kind of political possibilities does this conceptual
‘beyond’ harbour? As capitalism enters a phase marked by a kind of
strange living death as the financial and economic crisis deepens, and
as the neo-liberal model of accumulation and exploitation continues
to dominate Western societies even when its legitimacy has reached
an all-time low, the value of work for the multitude too is undergoing
important permutations. First, the world of work has exhausted its cul-
tural kudos to the point where even CEOs and the mainstream media
lampoon it. Second, given its bio-politicization over the last twenty
years in which it has come to be seen as the Siamese twin of life itself,
work has assumed the aura of an almost omniscient totality – forming
what Fisher (2009) termed an irrefutable and self-referential ‘business
ontology.’ And third, given the recognition that work and neo-liberalism
capitalism more fundamentally signify an unsalvageable and parasitical
institutional husk, for better or worse, a post-recognition politics of exit
has appeared among the labour movement.
Is the motif of exit any more useful or desirable than the politics
of voice and inclusion? This remains to be seen, and is perhaps a key
fulcrum for the debates around the best way to resist capitalism, the
corporation and the general tyranny of economic reason today. There
are detractors who feel that even if we are done with power, then that
does not mean power is done with us. Therefore, actively engaging the
central organization of the state or corporate power is still an inevitable
part of contemporary labour politics. Perhaps. And is not the very idea
of somehow exiting capitalism a massive ask, tantamount to re-writing
the flows of global politics on a grand and almost insurmountable scale?
Perhaps. But this might also be part of its mythology that keeps our
current miserable state of affairs intact. By way of analogy, think of the
wave of banker suicides in London (and elsewhere) that followed the
initial jolts of the financial crisis in 2008. From our so-called ‘external’
vantage point, it is easy to say that all these individuals had to do was to
walk away and leave their jobs. Such an insignificant (yet vital) gesture
compared to dying! But that is out of view. Form the inside, for those
64 A Working Death?
experiencing the neo-liberal crisis and the bio-political realities of a life

overtaken by work, it was no small matter. The market, the corporation,
a life of work was everything. This is a key ideological element of work
today that weds us to our own exploitation, the power of self-entrapment.
And it is exacerbated by the ongoing financial crisis, since it aims to
spread the virus of work so that it pre-occupies every facet of society,
even infiltrating the worlds of children and the unemployed. But from
the standpoint of historical materialism all that is required is a modest
political intervention to bring down this useless and parasitical house of
cards. Might not the politics of labour today, then, be the universaliza-
tion of this so-called ‘external’ standpoint that until now has only been
reserved to make sense of a friendless banker’s death?
Note
1. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec08/crisishearing_10-
23.html, 23 March 2012.
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5
The Re-Emergence of
Workplace-Based Organization
as the New Expression of
Conflict in Argentina
Maurizio Atzeni and Pablo Ghigliani
Introduction
Since the turn of the century, labour conflict in Argentina has taken
on a wide and diverse range of forms and expressions influenced by
economic cycles and changing political conditions. In the context of
economic stagnation and unemployment surrounding the 2001 crisis,
workers’ demands were framed within wider patterns of social mobiliza-
tion which saw less significance attached to union-led mobilization. This
was the time of road occupations by the initiative of the unemployed to
demand productive employment, and of the factory occupations – the
so-called ‘recovered factories’ – by which workers defended their jobs
and reinvented it under workers’ control. Both processes gained world-
wide resonance and have been analysed widely in the international
literature (Atzeni and Ghigliani 2007, Bryer 2010, Dinerstein 2002, 2008,
Grigera 2006). However, since the economic recovery of 2003 the return
to more traditional labour conflicts and the revitalization of unions
together with the increase of collective bargaining have taken place.
This renewed strength of Argentinean unions has been explained by a
combination of economic, political and institutional variables, inter alia
economic and employment growth, which resulted in a steady reduc-
tion of unemployment rates (Kosacoff 2010), government emphasis
in employment generation and collective bargaining (Palomino and
Trajtenberg 2006), and the role given to central union confederations in
tripartite bodies (Etchemendy and Collier 2007).
This context has produced fertile soil for the re-emergence of the dem-
ocratic and initiative aspects of unionism which, on the one hand, have
given room to grassroots mobilizations and direct actions that empow-
ered workers at the workplace and, on the other hand, has favoured
66
Maurizio Atzeni and Pablo Ghigliani 67
a renewal of strategies and leaderships, framing these within a more

leftist discourse. Although these can hardly be considered as new phe-
nomena in Argentinean union history, their relevance goes beyond an
assertion of pure novelty. These bottom-up initiatives, even if propor-
tionally few, have nonetheless represented through their emphasis on
participation and democracy a qualitative step forward with respect to
traditional union representation and methods of struggle. In turn, this
has re-instilled in Argentina a debate on union democracy and forms of
workers’ representation while at the same time expressing in everyday
demands the most radical opposition to neo-liberalism. In this sense,
the renewed visibility of workplace-based organizations, the so-called
comisiones internas (shop floor commissions), a distinctive trait in the
structure of labour unionism in Argentina and historically one of the
sources of workers’ power (Atzeni and Ghigliani 2011, Basualdo 2009,
Lenguita and Varela 2011), can be seen as an important and promising
novelty and development in the field of workers’ struggle.
A detailed analysis of some of the emblematic cases and of the practices
adopted by workers, while contributing to discussions about new forms
and expressions of conflict and to existing debates on union renewal
more generally (Fairbrother 2000, Hyman 2004, Phelan 2007, Gall 2009),
also offers the opportunity to engage with debates on i) unions’ nature
as both movements and institutions (Cohen 2006), ii) the never ending
democracy versus bureaucracy debate (Darlington and Upchurch 2012,
Belkin and Ghigliani 2010, Hyman 1975, 1979, Martinez Lucio 2012,
Norris and Zeitlin 1995) and iii) the role of leadership, particularly
left-wing, and workplace collective action (Beynon 1984, Cohen 2011,
Darlington 1994, 2002, 2006, Fantasia 1988, Gall 2003).
Using these theoretical debates as a background, after a section giv-
ing a brief description of key cases, this chapter is structured around
three main areas of analysis in which it focuses upon the following
a) the main determinants in the recurrence of these ‘movement type’
unions, b) the continuing tensions existing between grassroots initia-
tives’ aspiration to democracy and participation and the need to adopt
institutionalizing practices in their everyday functioning and c) the
role of leaders in framing collective action and the tension existing
between this role and internal democracy.
Methodology
The empirical material on which this chapter is structured draws from

different sources. It is based upon an ongoing investigation into the
68 The Re-Emergence of Workplace-Based Organization
issue of union democracy in the Buenos Aires’ underground (Atzeni and

Ghigliani 2010) and previous research on workers’ grassroots collective
action in FATE and Mafissa (Ghigliani and Schneider 2010). The recent
cases of workplace conflict and organization that occurred in Argentina
have achieved public relevance, being the object of several case studies,
articles in national newspapers and the left-wing press, union publica-
tions and workers’ testimonies. These materials have been very useful
in constructing the analysis of the overall cases. The methodological
approach used is clearly inscribed in the field of qualitative studies,
which are known to best capture the dynamics of social processes in
the workplace. In addition, we believe that the variety of primary and
secondary sources used in the chapter allows for a balanced and wide-
spread picture of the events analysed.
Grassroots organizing and organizations
There have been over the last years a number of leading key cases in
which grassroots initiatives ended up challenging both employers and
established union leaderships through democratic narratives and prac-
tices. Indeed, all these processes of mobilization have been characterized
by a discourse based on principles of workers’ democracy in organizing
(with an emphasis upon the centrality of the assemblies in decision-
making, regular elections of workers’ representatives, leaders’ account-
ability) and the actual implementation of practices of direct democracy.
Undoubtedly, the most salient and successful case has been that of
Buenos Aires’ underground workers, who put workers’ democracy at the
centre of a conscious strategy used to strengthen shop-floor organizing.
Since 2000, when winning the shop-floor structure of workers’ repre-
sentation against the official union representatives, the underground’s
workers increased their wages, obtained a 6-hour working day, stopped
outsourcing and improved terms and conditions of employment through
intensive campaigning, combining industrial and direct action with
periods of relative peace and negotiations. Simultaneously, the growing
conflicts between the shop-steward structures and the Unión Tranviarios
Automotor (UTA), the legal union organizing the activity, led in 2009
to a split and the creation of a new union, the Asociación Gremial de
Trabajadores de Subte y Premetro (AGTSyP) (Arias et al. 2011, Atzeni and
Ghigliani 2010, Bouvet 2008, Ventrici 2009). This conflict was perhaps
the most important event in the opening of a public discussion about
the established model of union organization backed by the Argentinean
labour laws.
There have been other democratic and grassroots organizing initia-

tives, challenging employers and, occasionally, established union lead-
erships. In the textile firm Mafissa, located in the Gran La Plata region,
in the midst of the politicized environment following the 2001 popular
upheaval, a tiny group of workers begun gradually and clandestinely
to discuss the need of re-organizing the comisión interna, as the official
union, the Asociación de Obreros Textiles (AOT), did not take action
against falling wages and deteriorating terms and conditions. During
2005, through participatory democratic methods and narratives, activ-
ists organized numerous mass meetings to discuss their salaries and
working conditions. By the end of the year, a decision was taken to
demand a 40% increase. In the face of the difficulties to organize a strike
in a company well-known for its anti-union attitude, workers blocked
the factory’s doors. Management reacted by dismissing 40 workers, with
the conflict further escalating when workers occupied factory premises.
Between 2005 and 2008, the comisión interna confronted management
tactics through grassroots mobilization and increasingly bitter conflicts
(including a lock-out, a factory occupation and police repression) that
led to workers being finally defeated (Ghigliani and Schneider 2010).
In FATE, an important tyre factory in the north of the Buenos Aires’s
province, grassroots organizing was sparked by the conflictive collec-
tive bargaining round of 2006 in the rubber industry, whose focus was
not just on wage increases but also on different terms and conditions
between old and new workers and on the introduction of a productivity
agreement linked to a shared profit scheme. This broad focus opened
different fronts in the conflict with the company. In this context, an
initiative led by leftist activists, advocating mass meetings and direct
actions, in 2007 gained the majority in the election of the comisión
interna. This left victory in the FATE plant derived from intra-union con-
flicts and realignments at both the local union and national level. Soon
after FATE’s comisión interna elections, activists from FATE together with
other left workers’ representatives from Pirelli and Bridgestone-Firestone
won control of the union branch of San Fernando and obtained more
than 40% of ballots in the national election of the Sindicato Único de
Trabajadores del Neumático de Argentina (SUTNA). Since then, however,
this experience has undergone an uneven process of development,
which ended up in electoral divisions (Ghigliani and Schneider 2010,
Varela 2008, 2009). In the multinational food corporation Kraft-Terrabusi,
a conflict in 2009 witnessed a similar process of grassroots organizing
led by left activists, although in this case, it had its roots in the 1990s
and often was in conflict with national union leadership. It was only
after 2001 when this bottom-up building started to deepen and become
more radical. The cause of the conflict was the dismissal of 158 workers,
most of them activists, including five members of the comisión interna
and the majority of the representatives of the Cuerpo de Delegados (shop-
floor delegates assembly), neither of which was recognized by the com-
pany or by the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria de la Alimentación
(STIA). As a consequence, workers went on strike and occupied Kraft’s
premises for 37 days, before being violently evicted by police. However,
because of a judicial decision, Kraft had to recognize delegates and to
reinstall the laid-off workers (Varela and Lotito 2009). At Praxair, an
anti-union US multinational chemical firm, and after a long process
of self-organization, workers mounted a comisión interna which under-
took a bitter conflict in order to get company recognition, and then
several others to improve wages and conditions. By contrast with the
aforementioned cases, this comisión interna established a collaborative
relationship with the official union, Sindicato del Personal de Industrias
Químicas y Petroquímicas (SPIQyP) (Arecco et al. 2009).
These sorts of ways of grassroots organizing have also been taking place
among precarious workers, though usually with less success. Young work-
ers from call-centres attempted to organize grassroots structures through
clandestine methods and networking on the web. Despite some initial
advances, the ferocity of their employers’ anti-union practices along
with structural factors thwarted the attempts (Abal Medina 2011). An
important process of workers’ self-organization occurred in the casinos
of Buenos Aires, producing a highly politicized conflict where workers
faced a yellow union, the employers and political authorities, and were
finally defeated. This experience was led by new, young activists and
leftist party members (Belkin 2010). In a supermarket of the giant chain
Walmart, employees organized a comisión interna appealing to grassroots
democratic narratives and practices. This organization has a complicated
relationship with the Federación de Empleados de Comercio (FEC) for the
difficulties of maintaining high levels of grassroots participation limited
its development, forcing the comisión interna to look for external support.
This led to criticism from some workers. But this case should be still be
seen as a successful one given Walmart’s anti-union stance (Abal Medina
and Crivelli 2011). The most successful grassroots organization of pre-
carious workers is perhaps that of motoqueros (motorbike messengers).
These workers became famous during the 2001 popular upheaval when
they confronted police, helped the injured and supplied logistics to
demonstrators in the midst of bloody repression. In the following years,
the Sindicato Independiente de Mensajeros y Cadetes (SIMeCa), advocating
grassroots democracy and resorting to direct action, developed in size

and implantation. In 2005, the union joined the Central de Trabajadores
de la Argentina (CTA), and although it turned its attention to negotia-
tions and launched a process of institutionalization which ended with
its recognition by the public authorities, it did not eschew direct action
(Barattini and Pascual 2011).
These examples also displayed forms and methods of collective struggle
which exist as alternatives to the traditional union-led strike. Especially
during early clandestine phases, workers often made use of walkouts,
sabotage and work-to-rule to gain visibility vis-a-vis the employer and
the official unions. When companies escalated conflicts by laying off
activists in retaliation, workers resorted to workplace occupations and
roadblocks. The use of these methods has partly reflected widespread
worker dissatisfaction and partly, over the course of time, the adoption
of means to consciously construct an alternative, more representative
and democratic organization when led by members and activists from
far-left parties. At the same time, with the official union keeping to
a negotiating role and its de facto monopoly in the call to a full-scale
strike, these methods have often represented the most direct and viable
way available to workers’ collectives in the workplace. In the predomi-
nant use of direct action, similarity exists between cases with and with-
out union representation. Where successful, these cases brought about
improvements in wages and terms and conditions of employment and tar-
geted outsourced labour through workers’ mobilization and democratic
narratives and practices. In this sense, grassroots experiences stand out
as a form of workers’ more radical response to neo-liberal flexibility of
work. However, their emergence and further consolidation is open to
question, tensions and contradictions; some of these this chapter will
now address.
Explaining the resilience of grassroots mobilization
From the perspective opened up by the union revitalization debate, it

has been argued the renewed strength of the Argentinean union ini-
tiative has its basis the persistence of traditional institutional practices
and channels of representation and conflict negotiation (Atzeni and
Ghigliani 2007, 2008, Etchemendy and Collier 2007). However, much
difficulty remains in explaining the cases in which labour conflict and
workers’ representation have been led by workplace-based organizations
‘rooted in the class needs and demands of the rank and file’ (Cohen
2006: 4). According to Cotarelo (2007), one third of the total labour
conflicts between 2003 and 2007 were launched by alternative union

leaderships based within workplace structures. One way of looking at
this revitalization of union-as-initiatives is to look at ‘episodes of rank
and file resurgence as impelled by economic necessity rather than ide-
alistic aspiration’ (Cohen 2006: 2). From a structural standpoint, it is
the capitalist nature of the employment relation and the labour process
that continuously creates contradictions and conflict between employ-
ers’ interest in profitability and workers’ satisfaction of needs. Moreover,
these contradictions do not just directly affect workers’ wages but also
their working conditions and overall attitude toward work. The work-
place is undoubtedly the site in which these contradictions affecting
the daily conditions of people emerge. Thus, economic motivations and
working conditions are certainly at the roots of unions-as-movement, but
are not sufficient to explain this. Why, in the cases we are analysing,
has workers’ non-conformity with their conditions led them to coalesce
around establishing new and more effective forms of representation
rather than to trust the established ones? Why have these new forms
been inspired by grassroots democratic methods and principles and why
have these been considered as the ones powerful enough to undertake
open confrontation with employers?
The emerging unionism-as-initiative collectives tended to clash against
the ‘formal, bureaucratically structured “representative” counterpart’
(Cohen 2006: 4) exemplifying the logic of the union-as-institution. But
there were also cases where grassroots initiatives did not clash against
existing union structures as a result of filling a vacuum of organs of rep-
resentation and empowering workers in the face of unfavourable power
relations. In this context, democratic decision-making and discussions
were seen as a way of involving the grassroots to build commitment and
solidarity as the tool leading to activity and unity in the daily struggle
on the shop floor. In this sense, unionism-as-initiative can be seen as
the natural process in the collectivization of interests – that is, as an
empirical manifestation of class divisions in the workplace. Thus, in all
the cases, grassroots initiatives born out of economic necessity consoli-
dated their organization in the struggles by engaging with democracy
as a practice and as a narrative. However, the existence of contextual
variables – such as employer action, union policy and external socio-
economic conditions – and the interplay of these with the role of left
agency and leaderships, affect the success of these developments and
the concrete way through which workers pursue democracy as a con-
stitutive element in the structure of grassroots organizations. In this
context, clandestine activity was inevitable for fear of company or official
union retaliation and was paradigmatic of the way in which actual

democracy was progressively built up. At the same time, while the role
of left leaderships has been important to firmly install democratic prac-
tices, the political mandate of left political parties has at times become
dominant, compromising the sustainability of grassroots organizing
(see below).
Left-wing leadership and collective action

Recently, the problematic of left agency has been re-addressed. Darling-
ton (2002, 2006), drawing upon insights from classical Marxism, eth-
nographic studies of workplace dynamics and mobilization theory, has
re-examined the agitator’s theory as a means of analysing workplace
leadership and left agency. His overall conclusion is that the role of
leadership by union militants and left-wing activists is a crucial variable
in understanding collective workplace mobilization. This is so because
as Darlington (2006: 493) summarizes, this kind of leadership ‘can
stimulate awareness of grievances and of the potential for collective
action for redress, they can spread a belief in the desirability and feasi-
bility of strike action, they can take the lead in proposing or initiating
such action, and they can provide cohesion to a general discontent by
generalizing from workers’ specific economic grievances to broader,
even political concerns’. While recognizing the significance of left
agency at the workplace, Cohen (2011) has proffered a more critical
view, underlining the paradox of workplace radicalism whereby lack
of fusion between the aim to politicize struggles and the economistic
content of shop-floor issues is characteristic of much left agency. For
Cohen, propagandistic and moralistic campaigns of left activists (contra
initiative-building from below) and the prioritization of party-related
demands and programmes over the promotion of working-class self
activity served to distance left agency from the working class. This
debate is important for analysing the aforementioned grassroots initia-
tives. Indeed, writers on Argentina have underlined the role played by
leftist activists and party members, highlighting how this involvement
has not been free of tensions and contradictions.
A salient feature of the stratum of activists is that most of them
were young (i.e., 25–35 years old). This is most obvious in call-centres,
supermarkets and SIMeCa, where most workers are in their twenties.
But this has also been predominantly the case in FATE, Kraft, Mafissa,
Praxair and underground transport. The youngest among them began
work after 2002 without previous union experience, the only exception
possibly being some participation in community activities. By contrast,
the older workers who entered the labour market during the 1990s
have, in a period of retreat, experienced contact with, and even partici-
pated in, union activities and party politics. The political background
of their activism is diverse. Many are members of left parties, especially
Trotskyist ones like the Partido de los Trabajadores Socialistas (PTS), Partido
Obrero (PO) and Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). They have played an
organizing and leading role in some of the grassroots initiatives, par-
ticularly in industry. Maoist activists from the Partido Revolucionario
Comunista (PCR) have headed the Kraft comisión interna since the mid-
1990s and have an influence at Mafissa. A handful of activist from
Socialismo Libertario (SL) were also influential in the advocacy of grass-
roots politics and democracy in FATE. Others are former Trotskyist
activists, who left their organizations over differences regarding union
politics and practices. A handful of these played a crucial role in the
Buenos Aires underground but also in Praxair. However, the majority
are grassroots workers without previous party or union experience who
adopted combative and adversarial stances. In certain settings, like call-
centres, and to a lesser extent SIMeCa, politicized former and current
students were also involved in activating their fellow workers. They had
sometimes already been members of Trotskyist parties or sympathizers
of autonomist groupings, which gained some ground in the universities
during the rebellion of December 2001.
Nonetheless, the effective collective leadership of these grassroots ini-
tiatives has often been the outcome of a combination of activists with
different backgrounds. Except in Kraft and FATE, where established
comisiones internas were already in place, the initial tiny group of activ-
ists had to work clandestinely in setting themselves up in order to avoid
employer retaliation. This complicated the relationship with fellow
workers and posed serious challenges to the ability to mobilize. In these
processes, these collective leaderships appealed to democratic narratives
and practices to spur organization and mobilization. This had a political
meaning – that is, to confront at the same time employers and also the
top-down decision-making mechanisms of traditional union leader-
ships (or as Cohen puts it, the logics of union as institutions). But these
processes emerged in different contexts, which determined important
aspects of the opportunity structure for organized action.
In union-free workplaces with strong anti-union policies, emerging
leaders spent much of their time collecting data on existing collective
agreements, sharing information about workers’ rights and laws and
overall doing very basic ideological propaganda towards union organiz-
ing. This activity empowered workers and led to conflicts with employers,
individual dismissals of activists as well as union involvement. In call-

centres, Federación de Obreros y Empleados Telefónicos de la República
Argentina (FOETRA) initially supported the struggle, but once the grass-
roots initiative was defeated, activists strongly criticised the union and
the union, in turn, did not attempt to reorganize the remaining workers.
In Walmart, the FEC maintained a conflictual relationship with elected
workers who were critical of the union. In Praxair, instead, the comisión
interna established a working relationship with the chemical union, and
shop-stewards integrated into union representative structures. In this
case, the emerging leadership maintained a conscious policy towards
involving the union in defence of their demands. Union support was
crucial when having to confront the dismissal of one of its most signifi-
cant activists. In Mafissa, the AOT was seen by workers as pro-employer,
and after the 1993 strike defeat the comisión interna became a formal
and powerless body. The AOT did not seek to reorganize the workplace.
In this context, five activists began discussing with fellow workers the
need for self-organization to raise their wages and improve health and
working conditions. In 2005, after almost four years of working under-
ground, the emerging leadership called mass meetings to discuss wages
and the incorporation of contract workers. This organizing process led
to the recognition of the comisión interna. However, after a long and
hard conflict, the employer defeated this grassroots initiative through
repression and dismissals.
The situation in FATE and Kraft was different. In both places, well-
established comisiones internas existed with competition for gaining
election to them. Left activists had been active in both factories for
some time. In the case of Kraft, Maoist militants had headed the
workplace structure of representation since 1993. In 2004, an alliance
between the Maoists, Corriente Clasista y Combativa (CCC), which also
organized and influenced unemployed organizations (piqueteros) and
the Trotskyist PTS, won at several important workplaces in the nearby
industrial areas, including Kraft, PepsiCo and Cadbury-Stani, obtain-
ing some 20% in the election for the food union’s general secretary.
The distinctive feature of this was the success of the left agency in
mobilizing workers through a grassroots democratic narrative and
practices of direct democracy through mass meetings and direct-action
tactics. Finally, the Buenos Aires underground presents a different
dynamic, although with the same combination of mass meetings and
direct action pushed through by new leaders. In this case, three differ-
ent groupings of activists, initially through clandestine methods as a
result of conniving between the UTA and private operator Metrovías,
gradually developed a workplace structure of shop-stewards, which first

replaced union official representatives and then, in the face of a direct
confrontation with the union, led to an organizational split and the
creation of a new union. This case was the most striking of all and a
model for others because of workers’ ability to engage in innovation in
tactics and discourses and to drastically improve wages and the terms
and conditions of employment.
Therefore, leftist leaderships – fulfilling the role ascribed by Darlington –
were at the centre of constructing grievances by identifying demands
and workers’ rights, blaming employers for the grievances, promot-
ing internal group cohesion, opposing the top-down and pro-employer
outlook of many unions by using grassroots democratic narratives and
practices and by building in this manner material conditions for col-
lective action from below. However, Cohen’s observations highlighted
limits and contradictions. Leadership cohesion was often fragile. At Kraft
and FATE there were divisions along political lines during or after indus-
trial conflicts and in the face of competition from established unions.
Sometimes, this undermined rank-and-file support, as in FATE, where
the traditional leadership won back the union election with more than
50% support. Elsewhere, a homogeneous leadership with an agreed sin-
gular perspective of pursuing a hard-line approach almost entirely based
on promoting industrial action contributed to alienating grassroots
support. At Mafissa, this tactical orientation led to isolation and defeat
in the face of the employer’s offensive (and where there were also
different views on how to deal with the employer’s repression). The
influence of electoral politics and party lines has often created obstacles
to developing grassroots support, generating frustration and disillusion-
ment. In call-centres and Walmart for instance, and despite significant
gains, grassroots backing has been limited, bringing about defeat and
disorganization in the former and the establishment of a comisión interna
that depends heavily on just a handful of activists in the latter.
Once again, the leadership built by activists on the Buenos Aires
underground stands out for its complexity and dynamics. Different
ideas and practices about the meaning of democracy competed within
the workplace structure of representation. In the main, three groups with
different and sometimes opposing visions existed: namely, grassroots
fundamentalists, activists belonging to Trotskyite parties and a group of
radical independent activists. While the first two defended – for differ-
ent reasons – mass meetings in the decision-making process as a matter
of principle, the independent activists, who had the greater leading
role, have a more flexible and quite pragmatic understanding of union
democracy. The different understandings amongst activists reflected dif-

ferent views about the role of workers’ delegates. For those advocating
mass meetings as the cornerstone of decision-making within the union,
delegates should be just the voice of the assembly as they consider there
is a high risk of bureaucratization in any decision-making by delegates
without membership consultation. By contrast, the independent activ-
ists believe workers’ delegates’ lack of a clear plan of action signalled
weakness in front of their fellow workers in the assemblies, and thus
they advocated relative autonomy of the delegates. They argued that
delegates must take on collective responsibility and, on some occasions,
decide on behalf of workers. This practice has usually involved later
consultation by which workers could reject delegates’ decisions.
Democracy as a principle and as a practice

A common theme running through all the workplace initiatives was
democracy because it was regarded as the most fundamental principle
guiding and inspiring the practical aspects of workers’ decision-making
and regulating the accountability of elected leaders to their members.
This aspiration to more democratic forms of collective organization is
rooted in the history and structure of labour unionism in Argentina. On
the one hand, the law – following workers’ struggle during the 1930s
and 1940s to gain recognition of workplace structures – now provides
recognition to workers’ comisiones internas and protection to workers’
delegates exercising a union function (fuero sindical). On the other hand,
the vertical nature of labour unionism in Argentina – in which workers
are legally represented by only one union per sector – means workplace
structures are often at risk of being subordinated to centralized decision-
making in national unions. This simultaneously both empowers and
dis-empowers independent organizing in the workplace so that workers’
demand for more democracy and accountability within unions, and the
accompanying anti-bureaucratic struggles against union officialdom,
has been a recurrent issue within the history of the Argentinean labour
movement.
The issue of democracy within unions, and its limits and possibilities,
has frequently been at the centre of analysis of work, particularly from
a Marxist perspective. Its centrality, and more generally a focus upon
the logic of processes regulating unions’ internal practices, has been
approached from different standpoints. One concerns relations between
democracy and collective action/identity. Due to the diversity of inter-
ests amongst workers as a result of the structuring of the labour/capital
relations and of workers’ subordination within it, formal and informal
processes of democracy are considered essential to the redefinition of

workers’ individual interests in collective terms (Offe and Wiesenthal
1980, Norris and Zeitlin 1995). Democratic practices develop conscious-
ness, solidarity and militancy (Lévesque et al. 2005, Levi et al. 2009)
and consolidate the union and legitimate delegates (Peetz and Pocock
2009). A second standpoint places democracy within broader debates
about the very nature of unions, their functions, purpose, political role
and identity. Thus, it is asked whether democracy is achievable within
unions under capitalism. Debates on these aspects within Marxism
have alternated between pessimism and optimism (Hyman 1971). Thus,
unions are organizations with internal contradictions, due to their role
as mediator between workers and capitalists, and growing as institu-
tions within a system of industrial relations, they develop the bureau-
cratic apparatus of experts in negotiation, legislation and mediation,
which for individual and functional reasons becomes detached from the
needs of workers. But Hyman’s early work (1971, 1975, 1979) has been
important in moving beyond the simplistic view that bureaucratization
and institutionalization of unions and their leaderships are inevitable
processes and the distinction and differentiation of interests between
bureaucracy and rank-and-file (see also Darlington and Upchurch 2012).
By contrast, rather than static relations, these features are seen as proc-
esses, resulting from different factors, affecting organizations at different
levels, and are regarded as the outcomes of tensions emerging from hav-
ing to sustain dignified work in a context of powerlessness as Martinez
Lucio (2012: 42) expressed it. Shifting product and labour markets in
which unions try to gain dignified work and the shifting balance of
power between capital and labour in the workplace and society require
an analysis of democracy and bureaucracy (themselves built on contra-
diction and tension).
The focus on these and how material, ideological and institutional fac-
tors act on their production is fundamental in evaluating the limits and
possibilities of democracy within the new grassroots workers organiza-
tions considered in this chapter (Belkin and Ghigliani 2010). Progressive
consolidation of grassroots democracy is not the immediate priority of
workers, but it gradually emerges as the most natural and direct way
to enlarge the base of support for collective actions and organization-
building initially led by small groups of activists. Thus, on the Buenos
Aires underground, initially required clandestine activity did not provide
space to discuss strategies and actions in an open and inclusive way with
all the workers, but later participation in the delegate elections in 1998
and 2000 extended the possibility of more direct participation. However,
it was against company flexibility plans in 2001 that the formal and
procedural kind of democracy gained in the previous representative
elections was transformed into a powerful tool able to mobilize workers
in action. This time, workers’ delegates expanded democracy far beyond
representative elections, actively organizing small assemblies on the
underground’s different sectors/lines through open weekly assemblies
of the workers’ delegates and monthly meetings in the union premises.
This success translated into strengthened solidarity, which in turn
expressed itself in new democratic advances through which an insti-
tutional consolidation of the new workers’ representation was gained.
A similar process of progressive consolidation of grassroots democracy
and of the assembly as the centre of decision-making was observed at
Praxair. Starting in 2003, well-attended assemblies within the factory
became a daily routine, effectively installing democracy as a habitual
practice. Before, discussions were limited to an initially restricted group
of workers who used to meet secretly in the factory’s changing room.
Resentment against the company and the ensuing confrontation fol-
lowing the laying off of a delegate and attempts to delegitimize the
elected comisión interna opened up room for wider discussion and offered
the original small group of activists a way to extend democracy far
beyond the limits of formal procedures and elections.
The employer’s attitude toward the emerging forms of representation
has been particularly important at Mafissa. Here, militants adopted a very
gradual approach to organizing in recognition of the company’s anti-
union policy, a sycophantic official union and a fragmented workforce
comprising workers on different shifts and partly composed of precari-
ous and outsourced workers. Worsening salary levels and labour con-
ditions compelled workers into a more direct confrontation with the
company through the mobilization and the organization of grassroots
workers. They elected new delegates independently of the comisión
interna, but the employer refused to recognize them or negotiate, using
layoffs to retaliate, to which workers responded with roadblocks and
occupations. These actions were initially successful as the employ-
ers retreated; they opened up a period of intense debate and discus-
sion within the factory that further increased the number of workers
involved, contributed to strengthening grassroots democracy through
the assembly method and allowed the activists to call and gain the
election of a new comisión interna. However, continued violent confron-
tation with the company and the politicization of Mafissa’s workers’
struggle, though speeding up and formally extending the assembly
method, did not facilitate democracy. The epilogue was that Mafissa
laid off a hundred workers, and the last activists occupying the factory
were evicted by police in 2007.
This outcome invites further reflection about the most effective meth-
ods of making grassroots democracy not just a principle but a living
practice. Assemblies are almost unanimously considered as the primary
method through which democracy is achieved. Indeed historically,
workers have adopted this method to collectively defend their inter-
ests. Yet, there are factors that contribute to reducing the democratic
nature of the assembly. First, adverse circumstances such as company
and official union opposition have represented material obstacles to
developing assemblies, thereby restricting the number of participants
and the issues discussed, and allowing activists to dominate over silent
majorities. Second, consolidation of grassroots initiatives in a comisión
interna imposes an enlargement of democratic consent for the new
representation and for its leaders, but this can also generate friction
between the collective of workers represented in the assembly and
the comisión interna. Praxair’s workers’ delegates acknowledge this
problem in a publication they wrote about their experience by argu-
ing that consolidation required delegates not to discuss how to relate
the comisión interna to the whole workforce (Areco et al. 2009: 143).
They saw delegates’ subordination and accountability to the assembly
as the answer to the problem. Constituting delegates as executors of
the assembly, however, does not seem a credible solution, not just
because of the necessity to sometimes organize clandestinely but also
because contingent strategies might need to be adopted during conflict
and negotiations by a small, though representative, group of workers.
The case of the underground workers, while often cited as a key example
of the fullest and most inclusive form of union democracy over a ten-
year period, is a good example of how democracy in principle does not
always correspond to democracy in practice. Thus, the main episodes
of these workers’ struggles reveal that in many situations decisions were
taken by workers’ delegates, which sometimes pre-empted the will of
the majority because wider consultation was impossible, would have
prevented action or would have lost the element of surprise. This real-
ity of imperfect grassroots democracy in struggle rests upon recognition
that perfect democracy is often beyond reach within the dynamics of
class struggle and the power relations in which they operate. Thus,
the emerging leadership on the underground tended to differentiate
between construction of conditions for the fullest grassroots involve-
ment through democratic assemblies and assembly-ism, which makes
the means a shibboleth.
While this pragmatic approach has the merit of highlighting the con-
straints upon grassroots democracy and how emphasis on assembly-ism
can be sometimes counterproductive, the risk associated with the rela-
tive autonomy of delegates from the grassroots leading to a growing
detachment should not be underestimated. Indeed, if there are mate-
rial constraints to democracy, it is equally true that centralization of
decision-making in the hands of a restricted, though elected, number
of workers brings forth the possibility of increasing functional bureauc-
racy. The recent transformation of the underground comisión interna
into an independent union, legally recognized to negotiate and repre-
sent the workers of the sector, and the continuation of the historical
group of activists forming the new union structure, has been the cor-
nerstone of the ongoing institutionalization of workers representation
here. While countervailing factors play a part – strong internal opposi-
tion and debate, substantial power of the assemblies and the existence
of informal channels of communication – the danger of reinforcement
of the logic of the union-as-institution as against those of unions-as-
movements does exist. Yet, the dynamics towards institutionalization
can not be fully understood if analysis remains at the level of union
organization. Rather, the logic of Argentinean industrial relations and
the role within it of labour law, and concomitantly, of the state, remain
explanatory variables. Workers without recognition are legally limited
in exercising power through collective bargaining. The state imposes
institutionalization upon worker initiatives. SIMeCa, for example, passed
through this process; initially a grassroots initiative, which rested almost
exclusively on mass meetings and direct action, it formed a legal union
in order to negotiate and close agreements with employers and abide
by labour law.
Conclusion
All these grassroots initiatives recounted in this chapter have shared

some basic features. Activists and delegates involved were part of a new
generation of workers without previous participation in union activity
and often with few experiences of work. Many of them had experiences
of left-wing political parties and grew up in the context of popular
protests and working-class mobilizations that characterized Argentina
at the beginning of the 2000s. This was the cauldron in which these
future grassroots leaderships grew up. The role played by left-wing
party members in building organization and consciousness cannot
be considered in isolation from the developments outside the workplace
in radical, popular social consciousness. A key aspirational aspect of

this emerging consciousness was found in the practical activity of
establishing grassroots democratic decision-making processes within
workplaces and by the accompanying rejection of bureaucratic prac-
tices associated with the existing unions and their leaderships. This led,
in turn, in many cases to the emergence of violent conflicts, with work-
ers using direct action in opposition to employer and established union
officialdom, resulting in some cases in the creation of new unions or
the complete renewal of existing structures. While these features can
explain why grassroots organizations have re-emerged at this particular
juncture in Argentinean history, it remains more difficult to assess the
future of the most successful of these experiences. This partly relates to
a series of external factors (company’s attitude, role of official unions,
economic and product market context, industrial relations system, role
of the state) and partly to the extent to which the grassroots initiatives
are aware of the challenges that therein arise and how they respond
to them.
Contradictions and tensions exist in many aspects of the internal life
of the grassroots initiatives and their organizations. Although the dis-
course of grassroots democracy remains pivotal, in practice the dynam-
ics of the employment relationship and the Argentinean system of
industrial relations regularly challenge the widespread use of democratic
decision-making and compel the institutionalization of collective forms
of representation. Efficient organization to defend workers’ interests
in this context necessarily requires delegation. But the unresolved
challenge is to combine democracy with efficiency. In many cases,
grassroots initiatives and organizations have been forged in the context
of a double struggle: namely, an economic struggle to defend rights,
improve working conditions and demand for salary increases and
a struggle for autonomy and independence involving gaining rec-
ognition from employers and consolidating organization. While the
dynamics of collective bargaining for wage increases help to maintain
shop-floor-level participation, a separation of roles and personnel con-
sequent upon formal recognition and operating within the institutional
arena potentially de-activate many from participating in the internal
life of their organization. This, in turn, could lead to a centralization
of decision-making and the monopolization of leadership, once again
representing a challenge to democracy as a practice. Yet, historically,
the resilience of grassroots organizing with its emphasis on democracy
and participation is a continuous reminder and expression of not just
conflict in workplaces but of working people’s power in ‘cracking’, to
borrow Holloway’s (2010) phrase, the system of contention that capi-

talism imposes upon society.
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Peter Lang, Dusseldorf.
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Revista Lucha de Clases, 8, Ediciones IPS, Buenos Aires.
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activismo gremial de base en Argentina posdevaluación’, Margen, 55, Buenos
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izquierda clasista y la ‘vacancia’ de representación sindical’ Conflicto Social,
2/2: 256–91.
Ventrici, P. (2009) Organización sindical, práctica gremial y activismo de base en el
Subterráneo de Buenos Aires, MA Thesis, Buenos Aires.
6
The Collective Expression of
Workplace Grievances in Britain
Gregor Gall and Sheila Cohen
Introduction
As not only employer power but also its exercise in a unilateral manner
have grown in Britain since the late 1970s, the independent and effec-
tive collective means for employees expressing and resolving collective
grievances have declined. The starkest signs of this have been the falls in
strike action, union membership and union recognition. In the 1980s,
there were over 750 strikes per annum but since the early 1990s there
have been less than 250 strikes per annum. Indeed, in 2009 and 2010
there were less than 100 strikes per annum and since 1989 less than
100 days were not worked per thousand workers as a result of strikes.1
Concomitantly, according to the Labour Force Survey, union member-
ship has also declined markedly, being around 50% lower in 2010 than
in 1979 and standing at 26% in 2010, with only a 14% density in the
private sector. According to the Workplace Industrial Relations Survey/
Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WIRS/WERS) surveys, in 1980,
64% of workplace establishments were covered by union recognition.
By 2004, this had fallen to 27%. All three phenomena are indicative of
a weakening of collective worker influence in the workplace. The emer-
gence of European Works Councils, the Information and Consultation
Regulations and the statutory union recognition procedure have arrived
too late and their powers are too weak to alter the dimensions of decline
of the independent and effective means of grievance articulation and
resolution. Consequently, a ‘representation gap’ for employee voice and
mandate exists.
The decline in strike activity, the seemingly primary traditional means
of grievance resolution, is largely attributable to the relative costliness,
ineffectiveness and difficulty in organising strikes in the current period
86
Gregor Gall and Sheila Cohen 87
of enhanced employer power. Although the number of workers involved

and the number of days lost per year varies widely as a result of large
single strikes amongst groups of public sector workers, these types of
strikes are primarily bureaucratically and centrally led, serving to indi-
cate that the prospect of locally initiated and led strikes continues to
remain very limited. Indeed, the dominance of extant strike activity
by such political leverage strikes – where the government is the target
of pressure – merely highlights the fact that the number of employer-
specific economic leverage strikes in the private sector has experienced
massive retrenchment over the last thirty years. Of further note here
is that lawful strike action is now significantly more regulated and its
scope considerably narrowed following the 1979–1997 Conservative
governments’ employment legislation (and its maintenance by the
1997–2010 Labour governments). This restriction on what constitutes
lawful, and thus protected, strike action has been accentuated by
developments in case law following the interpretation of the legisla-
tion. Consequently, industrial action which has immunity in law – for
the union – from prosecution for loss of business by the concerned
employer must comprise balloted action which is notified and speci-
fied to the employer in advance. Action which does not accord with
these prescribed regulations is liable to be injuncted by courts follow-
ing the actions of employers as litigants.
Given the continuation of significant employee dissatisfaction at
work and employee aspirations for change (TUC 2001, 2003, Speechly
Bircham 2011, 2012), this situation raises the issue of how workers can
now attempt to express, articulate and, critically, resolve their collective
grievances. While the use of individual-based avenues of employment
tribunals, Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) indi-
vidual conciliation and Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB) has increased sig-
nificantly (Kelly 1998, Abbott 2004), relatively little is known about how
workers express their collective grievances other than through official
strike action. Thus, if official strike action is no longer so feasible or has
become too difficult or costly, what other forms of collective action are
available to workers to express and resolve their collective grievances?
Consequently, this chapter examines the frequency and nature of
other forms of collective industrial leverage which do not deploy official
strike action. These compromise those actions associated with unionisation
such as official industrial action short of strikes (such as work-to-rules,
overtime bans and go-slows), the use of legally required ballots – and
consequent mandates – for industrial and strike action as bargaining
chips, unofficial industrial action like sits downs and ‘wildcats’, and the
88 Collective Expression of Workplace Grievances in Britain
use of collective conciliation cases dealt with by ACAS. In the context

of the cost and difficulties of organising official strike action having
increased as its effectiveness has also decreased, the four propositions to
be examined for the period 1980–2010 are;
i) the balance of ‘cut price’ action to official strike action has changed,
with the relative preponderance of ‘cut price’ action increasing
while the relative preponderance of official strike action has
decreased;
ii) the balance of unofficial action to official action has changed, with
the relative preponderance of unofficial action increasing while the
relative preponderance of official strike action has decreased;
iii) the balance of mandated ballots for official industrial action (strike
and non-strike) to official action (strike and non-strike) has changed,
with the relative preponderance of mandated ballots for official
industrial action (strike and non-strike) increasing while the relative
preponderance of official strike action has decreased;
iv) the balance of collective conciliation through ACAS to official
industrial action (strike and non-strike) has changed, with the rela-
tive preponderance of collective conciliation increasing while the
relative preponderance of official strike action has decreased.
These propositions are intended to help open up a discussion of the

salient issues in order to explore and understand the dynamics of the
relative volumes of the different means of expression and resolution as
well as their inter-relationship. The central premise upon which they
are based is that of the displacement effect. Simply put, this means as
one method of the expression and resolution becomes relatively less
available (by dint of cost, ease and effectiveness) then other means are
used as alternatives and substitutes. In the case of strike action being
replaced by non-strike action, this premise is easily understood. In the
case of official strike action being superseded by unofficial strike action,
this relates to the legal regulation of official strikes (see below). This
notion of the displacement effect is, in this chapter, necessarily not sen-
sitive to spatial (inter- and intra-geographical or sectoral) dimensions
and dynamics but it is to overall, temporal dimensions and dynamics.
It, thus, retains some familiarity with previous studies and writings (see,
for example, Sapsford and Turnbull (1994), Hebdon and Stern (1998),
Gall and Hebdon (2008), Bélanger and Edwards (this volume)) whilst
not having the ability to probe more deeply into the more concrete
relations between means at the lived, workplace level.
The data for this exercise is derived from secondary data sources, com-
prising the TUC Trade Union Trends surveys, the DTI/ESRC/ACAS/PSI
WIRS/WERS, ACAS annual reports, DLA employment law surveys, and
reporting from the Financial Times, Guardian, Morning Star, Socialist
Worker and regional press accessed through the Lexis-Nexis electronic
database. Although the consequent generated data from press sources,
in particular, is not inclusive of all incidences of the different types
of action under study, because of degrees of under-reporting or non-
reporting, putting together all the sources produces the most compre-
hensive and robust data yet available.
Three caveats are in order before proceeding. One is that it should be
noted that this chapter is not intended to shed light upon the processes
by which collective grievances are or are not formed (even though the
availability and efficacy of the means of articulation and resolution
clearly have a bearing on their usage (see Kelly 1998)). The second is
that other forms of collective action like campaigns to damage brands
and reputations as well as consumer boycotts are not considered as
being sufficiently widespread to warrant inclusion. In these, as else-
where, the use of new social media is merely a tool to organise this and
other quite traditional forms of collective action. New media means
are techniques for action, not forms of action. The third concerns the
effect of the lawful restrictions on strike and industrial action. It is rea-
sonable to suggest that the noose has progressively tightened around
the neck of the unions in this regard since 1980 but it is hard to quan-
tify the exact extent of this either in total or by the stages by which
the legislation was progressively implemented and developed through
case law. Moreover, as this legal noose also applies in equal measure to
industrial action short of a strike, it is not possible to disentangle the
impact of its effect so that a ‘pure’ version of industrial action short of
a strike can be examined in this chapter.
Strikes – always the traditional weapon?
Strike action has nearly always been taken to have been the traditional
weapon of choice in the industrial armoury of (unionised) workers.
Such conventional wisdom was challenged by Milner (1993), as a result
of the decline in strike activity in the 1980s (see Table 6.1), prompting
a re-examination of other means of collective industrial action. Using
the CBI Databank, Milner (1993) demonstrated that between 1979 and
1989 industrial action short of a strike, primarily overtime bans and
work-to-rules/go-slows, was considerably more frequent than strikes.
Table 6.1 Strike activity, 1981–2010
Year No. of strikes No. of workers No. of days Days not worked
involved not worked per 1,000 workers
1981 1,388 1,513,000 4,266,000 184

1982 1,528 2,013,000 5,313,000 234
1983 1,364 574,000 3,754,000 168
1984 1,221 1,464,000 27,135,000 1,207
1985 903 791,000 6,402,000 282
1986 1,074 720,000 1,920,000 85
1987 1,016 887,000 3,546,000 155
1988 781 790,000 3,702,000 157
1989 701 727,000 4,128,000 172
1990 630 298,000 1,903,000 78
1991 369 176,000 761,000 32
1992 253 148,000 528,000 23
1993 211 385,000 649,000 28
1994 205 107,000 278,000 12
1995 235 174,000 415,000 18
1996 244 364,000 1,303,000 55
1997 216 130,000 235,000 10
1998 166 93,000 282,000 11
1999 205 141,000 242,000 10
2000 212 183,000 499,000 20
2001 194 180,000 525,000 20
2002 146 943,000 1,323,000 51
2003 133 151,000 499,000 19
2004 130 293,000 905,000 34
2005 116 93,000 158,000 6
2006 158 713,000 755,000 28
2007 142 745,000 1,041,000 38
2008 144 511,000 759,000 28
2009 98 209,000 455,00 17
2010 92 132,000 365,00 14
Source: Employment Gazette/Labour Market Trends/Economic and Labour Market Review

(various).
Moreover, and examining previous surveys carried out between 1966

and 1978, industrial action short of a strike was found to be at least
as frequent as the strike. The rationale for again questioning the pre-
eminence of the strike as the major modus operandi of collective griev-
ance expression and resolution of unionised workers is predicated on not
only the further decline of strike activity (see Table 6.1) but also a) the
prevailing wisdom that the changed legal position of a lawful strike
has meant that the vast majority of strikes are now both official and
lawful (whereas in the 1960s some 95% of strikes were not official), and
b) the prevalence of the use of balloting for industrial action as a means
of creating bargaining leverage. The import of these two latter points is
that, on the one hand, unofficial and unlawful strikes may now have
a purchase in a way that official and lawful strikes do not because the
former can ‘strike while the iron is hot’ and retain the element of sur-
prise, whilst, on the other hand, because of the restrictions on official
and lawful strike action, unions are compelled to investigate alternative
avenues for exercising leverage, and these other methods, thus, have
increased purchase.
To re-affirm, it is clear that the frequency of strike action on any meas-
ure has fallen substantially. The significance of this is all the more evi-
dent given the expansion in size of the labour force over the period. Yet
it may be self-evident that this was likely to be the case as the number of
union members halved between 1979 (13m) and 2010 (6.5m) and that
strikes by non-union members are almost unheard of. For the moment
and in light of this, it is worth acknowledging that in effect this chapter
is largely – if not quite solely – then concerned with the behaviour of
an ever declining pool of unionised workers. This does mean that the
issues of how non-unionised workers express and resolve their collective
grievances cannot be directly addressed (assuming that they are able to
form collective grievances).
‘Cut price’ action
Data on the preponderance of industrial action short of a strike (of

any status) continues to be sparse. State collation of data on industrial
action has always focused exclusively on strikes because lockouts are
exceptional and industrial action short of a strike is regarded as diffi-
cult to quantify. That data which does exist is found in the WIRS/WERS
(Millward et al. 2000, Kersley et al. 2006), Trade Union Trends (TUC
1995–2001) and DLA (1994–2004) employment law surveys. WIRS/WERS
indicates a fall in the incidence of ‘cut price’ action across the period
1980–2004 (see Table 6.2), although with some stability around the
2%–4% mark since 1990. Given that WIRS/WERS covers both unionised
and non-unionised workers and workplaces, this may seem to slightly
underscore the preponderance of the action given that the chapter has
effectively concerned itself with only unionised workers and workplaces.
Table 6.3, concerning just overtime bans and from a wholly unionised
sample, suggests that this form of industrial action continued to be rea-
sonably prevalent – at a 31% average annual incidence – in the period
Table 6.2 Industrial action activity, 1980–2004
All workplaces 1980 1984 1990 1998 2004
None 75% 69% 80% 98% 97%

Non-strike action only 10% 8% 4% 1% 2%
Strike action only 9% 11% 11% 1% 2%
Both strike and non-strike action 7% 11% 5% >1% n/a
Threatened action, any type n/a n/a n/a 3% 4%
Source: Millward et al. (2000: 178), Kersley et al. (2006: 209).
Table 6.3 Incidence of overtime bans, 1995–2000
Year Number of cases of Respondent unions’ Overtime ban

industrial action membership (% of TUC as either sole or
affiliated membership) joint means of
industrial action
1995a 132 3.3m (48%) 45%

1995b 162 4.9m (68%) 40%
1996a 134 4.7m (70%) 20%
1996b 96 4.6m (68%) 20%
1997a 179 4.5m (66%) 30%
1997b 82 6.0m (88%) 27%
1998 n/a n/a 34%
1999 n/a 4.6m (n/a) 14%
2000 n/a 5.2m (n/a) 46%
Source: TUC (1995–2001).

Note: The surveys were six-monthly for the first three years before becoming annual.
1995–2000, although this was subject to wide fluctuations. Table 6.4,

based on a survey of large unionised and non-unionised employers, indi-
cates that again industrial action short of a strike – this time covering all
types of such action – in the period 1994–2004, although again subject
to wide fluctuations, was common at a 15% average annual incidence.
The different sampling methods and populations in the three surveys
make any direct comparison extremely hazardous. Nonetheless, and
despite incomplete data for the period under study within and across
the available data, all three suggest that ‘cut price’ action has been of
some level of significance. Roughly speaking, it might be thought of
as on some kind of par with strike action. Yet, it has also experienced
decline and has been less prevalent in the period of the 1990s onwards
than might have been expected given Milner’s (1993) earlier research.
Table 6.4 Incidences of industrial action short of a strike, 1994–2004
Year Experience of industrial Experience of Number of employer

action short of a strike strike action respondents
1994 14% 7.8% n/a

1995 26% 5.5% n/a
1996 7% 8.0% n/a
1997 12% 7.0% 220
1998 10% 11.5% 230
1999 14% 9.0% 220
2000 14% 8.0% 249
2001 21% 18% 252
2002 n/a n/a n/a
2003 10% 20% 370
2004 8% 7% n/a
Source: DLA (1994–2004).

Note: Although DLA continued to publish intermittent reports on industrial relations, it
ceased conducting its own surveys in 2004 and its 2010 report did not ask the same ques-
tions as previously.
Table 6.5 Incidences of industrial action short of a strike,

2000–10
Year Number of incidences Number of workers involved
2000 10 34,747
2001 16 123,385
2002 25 48,375
2003 11 7,048
2004 111 2,212,478
2005 81 1,280,009
2006 64 154,129
2007 68 47,327
2008 82 51,080
2009 81 17,904
2010 33 252,816
Source: Newspaper reporting – see methodology.
From this data, it would be hard to conclude that ‘cut price’ action has
received much of a fillip as strikes declined, indicating that there has
been little of a displacement effect of workers not taking strike action
but taking industrial short of a strike as an alternative instead. Data
for the period 2000–2010 (Table 6.5) suggests that the later part of the
period under study has witnessed a broadly similar trajectory in the
number of incidences of industrial action short of a strike, again being
significant and on a similar kind of par with those of strikes but not
representing any evidence of a displacement effect.
In addition to the common challenges of mobilising for collective
industrial action per se in a period of labour quiescence and increased
legal regulation, these sets of observations concerning volumes may be
explained by industrial action short of a strike needing to overcome
some additional hurdles, which in the current situation make the accom-
plishment of mobilising for such industrial action even more difficult.
These pertain to the longer period of time which industrial action short
of a strike, generally speaking and outside sectors like transport, takes to
have a significant impact upon an employing organisation with regard
to creating bargaining leverage, and the more porous nature of indus-
trial action short of a strike with regard to policing its exercise vis-à-vis
a strike. Yet despite these difficulties in mounting industrial action short
of a strike, its relative prevalence may relate to the costs of such action
being less front-loaded, the lower costs being more sustainable over the
longer period, and the industrial action not necessarily constituting a
breach of contract (for example, when voluntary overtime is not worked
en masse).
Unofficial strikes
Traditionally, some 95% of strikes were assumed to be unofficial – this

figure being derived from the Donovan Commission for the period
1964–1966 (RCTUEA 1968: 97). This picture of only a minority of strikes
being official was true for the period 1960–1980 (Jackson 1983: 198–
200). Thereafter, in the absence of the breakdown of strikes by the state
of strikes into official and non-/un-official from 1981, it was assumed,
particularly with the restrictions on what constituted lawful industrial
action (i.e., action that had immunity in tort), that this situation was
somewhat reversed. But the Department of Employment (1989: 1), in
an exercise for the Green Paper for the Employment Act 1990, recorded
that for the two years 1987 and 1988, around 75% of all strikes were
unofficial. This concurred with the observation of the Labour Research
Department (1992: 48) and Simpson (1993: 296) that, respectively, ‘the
majority of strikes are unofficial’ and ‘most industrial action remains
unballoted’ for the period of the 1980s. However, the enactment of the
Employment Act 1990 in November 1990 led to a large and immediate but
temporary fall in the number of unofficial strikes as a result of the aware-
ness that the Act allowed the dismissal, even selectively, of those partici-
pating in unofficial strikes without recourse to unfair dismissal claims.
Nonetheless, that Taylor (1994: 230) then asserted that ‘Unofficial strikes
are all but a memory of a by-gone age’ and Edwards (2001) observed that
‘unofficial, workplace-led action being a rarity’ are both unfounded.
Table 6.6, based on newspaper reporting, indicates – on the one hand –
that the number of unofficial strikes has fallen markedly if unevenly,
while on the other, some 35% of all strikes were unofficial (with just five
years being below 20% and seven above 35%). After 2001, a significant
decline took place in the number of unofficial strikes. This is attribut-
able in the main to the decline of unofficial strikes in the Royal Mail
(see Gall 2003). In terms of the number of workers involved, the pro-
portions varied widely on an annual basis with a clear decline recorded
towards the end of the 2000s. And, in terms of the days not worked,
seldom has the contribution of unofficial strikes been significant to
the annual totals and this was true for the period 1990 to 2010. This is
not surprising in that unofficial strikes have always largely been short,
sharp actions – indeed, their purchase is often based on this where the
element of surprise is crucial.2 Nonetheless, the scale of extant unof-
ficial strikes reported in Table 6.6 would seem to be somewhat contra-
dicted by Table 6.7 displaying data from the Trade Union Trends surveys
(TUC 1995–2003). However, the actual discrepancy may be much
less than would initially seem to be the case for several reasons. First,
Table 6.7 also includes action short of a strike; second, the number of
incidences of industrial action per survey is low; and third, centralised
union bureaucracies are not effective in capturing and recording small,
short and localised instances of industrial action where national union
involvement is absent (e.g. through a ballot).
Turning to the issue of the displacement effect, and notwithstanding
the significant fall in the number of unofficial strikes after 2001, the
continued, and in some ways surprising, prevalence of unofficial strikes
per se after the introduction of the Employment Act 1990 may be taken
to suggest that where perishable disputes exist and workplace unionism
remains sufficiently resilient, one salient impact of the Conservatives’
employment laws has been to increase the relative potential for unof-
ficial strike action to be taken, as the only method of an immediate
and effective response to managerial action, given that a strike which
is lawful and retains immunity requires a postal ballot and can take up
to 35 days to organise. Yet the fall from 2001 onwards is all the more
notable in that usage of the Employment Act 1990 to selectively dismiss
the organisers of unofficial actions has neither widely nor successfully
been used so that such a negative demonstration effect has not been
established.
96
Table 6.6 Unofficial strikes in Britain 1990–2010
Year Number of % of all strikes Known number of % of all workers Known number of % of days
unofficial strikes workers involved involved in strikes days not worked in not worked
in unofficial strikes unofficial strikes in all strikes
1990 190 30% 136,240 46% 279,195 15%

1991 57 15% 19,338 11% 25,766 3%
1992 101 40% 28,097 19% 46,275 9%
1993 76 36% 17,643 5% 45,621 7%
1994 99 48% 48,922 48% 88,827 32%
1995 91 39% 48,893 28% 89,104 21%
1996 116 47% 33,940 9% 49,087 4%
1997 78 36% 65,457 50% 96,193 41%
1998 82 49% 47,531 51% 162,842 58%
1999 93 45% 47,001 33% 63,307 26%
2000 162 80% 36,023 20% 85,345 17%
2001 114 59% 77,173 43% 81,045 15%
2002 56 38% 39,778 3% 41,250 4%
2003 43 32% 62,147 41% 127,827 26%
2004 47 36% 9,712 3% 8,244 1%
2005 17 15% 5,250 6% 9,552 6%
2006 24 15% 9,125 1% 15,500 2%
2007 38 27% 29,267 4% 29,642 3%
2008 11 8% 1,687 0% 4,765 1%
2009 33 34% 26,752 1% 63,338 14%
2010 16 17% 3,124 2% 3,360 1%
Source: Newspaper reporting – see methodology.

Table 6.7 Trade Union Trends surveys – industrial action by status
Period % No. of cases % % %

Affiliated of industrial official unofficial unknown
membership action action action status
reported for
which data
exist
1995 58% 30 80% 20% 0%

11/95–4/96 68% 63 94% 6% 0%
5/96–8/96 70% 96 93% n/a n/a
9/96–2/97 68% 40 85% 15% 0%
3/97–8/97 66% 37 85% 5% 10%
9/97–4/98 88% 82 88% 4% 8%
6/98–5/99 61% 34 80% 15% 5%
6/99–5/00 68% 34 82% 18% 0%
6/00–5/01 76% 47 94% 6% 0%
6/01–5/02 n/a n/a n/a n/a n/a
6/02–5/03 74% 98 47% 0% 53%
Source: TUC (1995–2004).
There is then little sense in which unofficial strikes can be said to

have comprised a displacement effect vis-à-vis official strikes. Not only
did their number not rise to take up any sense of slack from official
strikes but they fell significantly and they fell roughly in line with the
annual frequency of official strikes. This raises an important issue about
the relationship between different forms of collective and industrial
action. Following the observations above concerning ‘cut price’ action,
it appears that when the overall level of strike action (based as it is
mostly on official strikes) falls so too do others forms of industrial (but
not necessarily collective) action. This suggests that rather than see the
other forms of collective industrial action as singular and competing
alternatives to official strikes, it may be better to look upon them hav-
ing a rather more complimentary and inter-locking relationship.
Finally, and as with ‘cut price’ action, analysis of unofficial strikes
needs to be mindful of sectoral dimensions. Just as some sectors are
more prone to – and dependent upon – working overtime and the like
which – all other things being equal – increases the potency of over-
time bans and work-to-rules, it is also the case that unofficial strikes are
more potent and have more purchase in sectors where the employer’s
operations are immediately and substantially affected by the action.
Transport and communications are such examples. This then focuses
attention upon the changing nature, and political economy, of the
labour and product markets in those sectors. Put simply, the decline
in the frequency of unofficial strikes may reflect not just changes in
the existence of workplace unionism capable of exercising the strategic
leverage afforded by operations highly susceptible to disruption but also
whether the disruption still wields the bargaining influence it once did.
Again, Royal Mail is a case in point here with its loss of monopoly and
privatisation.
Balloting
Although (voluntary) balloting for industrial action before 1980 was

more widespread than is usually acknowledged (Undy and Martin 1984),
Elgar and Simpson (1993: 103–104, 1996) and Undy et al. (1996) pre-
viously noted the use of the legally prescribed balloting procedure for
lawful industrial action as a means of engaging in mobilisation to create
bargaining leverage. Whilst the number of ballots for industrial action
has regularly exceeded the total number of strikes (i.e., both official
and unofficial) per annum since the early 1990s (see Tables 6.1, 6.8
and 6.10), working out what proportions of ballots with mandates for
industrial action per annum were not implemented – and, thus, may
have been used as a bargaining chip only – is not a straightforward
task. This situation arises because of the inclusion in the statistics of
ballots for both strike action and industrial action short of a strike as
well as ballots of just industrial action short of a strike, and the signifi-
cant existence of unofficial strikes. Therefore, it is not as easy as saying
the total number of ballots for strike action minus the total number
of strikes provides for even rough figures of how many ballots were
used as just bargaining chips. Indeed, using (non-implemented) ballot
mandates as evidence of bargaining chip activity is problematic as their
usage in this way is not necessarily separate from the implementation
of the mandate, for some employers will prove to be more resistant
than others and the threat of action may have less purchase than the
action itself. However, the Trade Union Trends surveys (TUC 1995–2001)
provide a sufficiently detailed breakdown to allow a deeper understand-
ing to begin to emerge.
Before examining it, Undy et al. (1996: 219) recorded that ACAS data
from 1985 (the year following the Trade Union Act 1984 which began the
process of compelling ballots) to 1993 showed the number ranging from
253 at the lowest to 359 at the highest. Although the data was far from
being complete and inclusive, it does indicate that the level of ballots
after 1993 has risen considerably.
Table 6.8 Balloting incidences and outcomes
Year Number Ballots Ballots for Ballots for ‘Yes’: ‘Yes’: ‘Yes’: Overall Mandate
of ballots for strike strike and industrial ballots ballots for ballots for ‘yes’ ballot implemented
action industrial action for strike strike and industrial outcome
action action industrial action
action
1995a 494 45% 57% 36% n/a n/a n/a 66% 25%
1995b 423 36% 41% 24% 69% 73% 82% 74% 46%
1996a 559 40% 45% 15% 83% n/a 90% 81% 37%
1996b 609 48% 27% 24% 73% n/a 81% n/a n/a
1997a 615 54% 30% 15% 77% 73% 89% n/a n/a
1997b 700 46% 35% 18% 74% n/a 78% n/a 27%
1998 464 31% 48% 22% 79% n/a 83% n/a 40%
1999 983 51% 42% 7% 95% n/a 91% n/a 32%
2000 690 13% 24% 63% 81% 87% 91% n/a 54%
Source: TUC (1995–2001).

Note: The surveys were six-monthly for the first three years before becoming annual. For the year 2000, the total number of ballots was actually
2,053 because of an NUT school strike where each school was balloted separately, but this would unduly skew the figures so the dispute is entered as
comprising just one ballot.
99
Table 6.8 indicates for the period 1995–2000 high levels of ballots
returning ‘yes’ votes, suggesting a tactical choice of only balloting where
‘yes’ votes were likely to be achieved. With these mandates gained,
less than half were commonly exercised, around the same proportions
found by ACAS in the ballots it organised in 1991 and 1992 (Undy et al.
1996: 223). The overall level of industrial action ballots indicated by
Table 6.8 is an understatement of the actual numbers of ballots, for data
from the two major balloting service providers (Unity Balloting Services
[UBS] and the Electoral Reform Balloting Society [ERBS]) indicates that
the whole union movement ran a much higher number of industrial
action ballots. Moreover, the levels of ‘yes’ votes were similarly high
in comparison with those recorded in Table 6.8. Thus, for instance, for
the period July–December 1996, both organisations ran 770 ballots in
total (of which the 142 UBS ballots had an 83% ‘yes’ vote), while this
increased to 1,068 during the period January–June 1997 (of which the
152 UBS ballots had an 81% ‘yes’ vote) and between July 1997 and May
1998: 1,759 ballots were run (of which 1,502 ERBS ballots had an 80%
‘yes’ vote, and 257 UBS ballots had a 75% ‘yes’ vote). Notwithstanding
these caveats, the number of ballots per annum from Table 6.8 was 917
(1995), 1,168 (1996), 1,315 (1997), 464 (1998), 983 (1999) and 690
(2000), indicating certainly not an increase and a peak in 1997 but
where the average was 923 per annum. Using these figures, the number
of ballots for strike action that deliver ‘yes’ votes runs somewhere in the
region of 50% above the number of actual strikes.
For the period 2002–2010, data from the now main (but not sole) bal-
loting organisation, Electoral Reform Services, (see Table 6.9) indicates
that balloting for both strikes and industrial action short of a strike
remained roughly as high (where the average was 874 per annum) and
with similarly high returns for mandates for action. Data from DLA also
indicates unions seeking to use the threat to ballot after having declared
a formal dispute (Table 6.10). In 2004, the only year in which the break-
down was possible, 18% of employer respondents indicated they had
received a threat to ballot while 15% of employer respondents had expe-
rienced a ballot. In this regard, it is pertinent to note that unions have
also begun to deploy in the last decade the tactic of a consultative bal-
lot, where they conduct a (voluntary) ballot about whether they should
conduct a mandatory ballot for industrial action.
Three observations can be made of the aforementioned data. The first
is that there is a reasonable basis to suggest that the balloting process
is being used as an important part of the armoury by which unions
Table 6.9 Ballots for strikes and industrial action, 2002–10
Year Total Ballots for % votes Ballots for % votes for

number strike action for strike industrial industrial
of ballots action action short action short
of a strike of a strike
2002 806 738 83% 537 97%

2003 899 825 83% 637 95%
2004 952 919 97% 756 94%
2005 815 775 95% 606 93%
2006 1,341 1,290 84% 579 93%
2007 767 713 89% 583 95%
2008 834 786 84% 598 93%
2009 579 561 82% 435 94%
2010 578 555 88% 411 91%
Source: Labour Market Trends/Economic and Labour Market Review (various).

Note: Ballot options vary from ballots just for strike action, just for industrial action short
of a strike, and both.
Table 6.10 Balloting and threat of balloting, 1996–2004
Year Experience of ballots or threats Number of respondents

of ballots for industrial action
1996 26% n/a

1997 23% 220
1998 44% 230
1999 66% 220
2000 54% 249
2001 57% 252
2002 n/a n/a
2003 63% 370
2004 33% 300
Source: DLA (1996–2004).
attempt to create leverage over the employer. The second is that it is

unclear why and when the use of ballot mandates is successful in gaining
bargaining objectives. Given that this concerns delimited periods of
time, it is maybe more convincing to see the use of ballot mandates as
an overall process of mobilisation, which may or may not involve the
implementation of the mandate depending on particular circumstances.
The third is that it is not apparent that balloting as a means of leverage
has experienced the result of the displacement effect as this would have
seen far greater numbers of ballots per annum for strike action as the
number of strikes declined. Indeed, given the intimate link between
balloting for (official) strike action and (official) strikes as a result of
legal regulation, it is not unexpected that as one has experienced some
decline so too has the other. That said, the picture is more complex for
although the number of ballots has fallen from a high point in 2006, it
would appear to have risen to that point notwithstanding the deficien-
cies in the available data. Therefore, a period from the mid-1980s to the
mid-2000s may show some evidence of a displacement effect being in
evidence but this cannot be stated categorically.
Collective conciliation
After the declaration of a formal dispute with an employer, a union

has a number of options open to it in prosecuting its interests in the
dispute. At any stage up to and including industrial action (as well as
after), it can seek the involvement of ACAS to undertake collective
conciliation. Nonetheless, most requests for collective conciliation will
predate industrial action, given the dominant perspective amongst
both unions and employers is that industrial action, and particularly
strike action, are weapons of ‘last resort’. Table 6.11 shows the number
of requests for collective conciliation per annum and the proportions
of requests which are initiated by a) unions, b) jointly with employers
and c) by ACAS itself. While the total number of requests fell consider-
ably between 1981 and the late 1980s, it stabilised around the 1,300
mark per annum until 2006 when it they fell below 1,000 per annum.
Moreover, the percentage of requests from unions has fallen in absolute
and relative terms across the whole period (albeit some of these requests
are likely to have been channelled into persuading employers to make
joint requests and soliciting direct ACAS intervention given that ACAS
intervention is more likely to be accepted by the employer where there
is not a unilateral request from the union side). This, nonetheless,
means that the fall in union requests is still likely to be sharp, indicat-
ing that collective conciliation on its own has not been subject to any
displacement effect – and this observation does not appear to be any
less correct for the fact that collective conciliation will be seldom used
on its own to express and resolve grievances. Indeed, as unions’ power
has waned, it may have been expected that their willingness and need
to use ACAS has increased3 but, by the same token, employer power to
resist ACAS involvement has also increased.
Table 6.11 Collective disputes received by ACAS
Year Collective % requests % joint % ACAS request

conciliation by union employer-union
request request
1981 2,091 53 30 3
1982 1,865 42 41 3
1983 1,789 37 48 4
1984 1,569 40 46 2
1985 1,475 40 46 2
1986 1,457 36 50 3
1987 1,302 32 53 4
1988 1,163 32 54 4
1989 1,164 33 54 3
1990 1,260 32 54 5
1991 1,386 37 48 6
1992 1,207 36 51 7
1993 1,211 31 49 8
1994 1,313 31 47 13
1995 1,321 35 43 11
1996 1,306 35 40 14
1997 1,281 32 41 16
1998 1,301 32 41 17
1999 1,533 34 40 16
2000 1,500 30 40 17
2001 1,472 30 44 14
2002 1,371 31 47 10
2003 1,353 26 49 9
2004 1,245 28 47 11
2005 1,123 30 42 14
2006 952 31 42 10
2007 949 26 36 17
2008 917 29 39 8
2009 966 29 38 10
2010 915 27 39 12
Source: ACAS (1980–2011).

Note: The year 1999 covers 15 months. Thereafter, the years run to twelve-month duration,
albeit not calendar years.
Conclusion
This chapter put forward four basic propositions; ‘cut price’ action
ascending vis-à-vis official strike, unofficial strikes ascending vis-à-vis
official strikes, mandated ballots for official industrial action ascending
vis-à-vis official industrial action, and collective conciliation ascend-
ing vis-à-vis official strike action. The context of these four heuristic
propositions has been not just that overall strike activity – but par-
ticularly official strike action by the three measures of the number of
strikes, workers involved and days not worked – has declined but also
that brief, discontinuous official strike action (such as one-day strikes)
has become predominant in unionised workers’ industrial armoury.
So, in terms of the displacement effect, has the slack of workers’ col-
lective grievances being taken up by these other means of collective
expression and resolution? Certainly, there is no evidence that any
one particular means on its own has experienced a displacement
effect. Moreover, the cumulative evidence from considering each of
the four alternative means would also seem to provide for a fairly
clear negative response overall to the question posed. The reasoning
behind this conclusion is that for each of the four alternatives to have
registered some measure of a displacement effect would have seen
not necessarily such extant declines (as opposed to actual increases).
Moreover, there is not even the sense that the four alternative means
level out in their declining incidence while the frequency of official
strike declined. The hardening of employer attitudes towards indus-
trial action over the period may help explain why the softer means like
ballot mandates and ‘cut price’ action have, in general, less purchase.
In the context of this chapter – and without examining absence and
quit rates inter alia, it seems as if, to use Sapsford and Turnbull’s (1994)
balloon and iceberg metaphors, the balloon is losing air and the ice-
berg is melting.
But the incomplete nature of the available data does not allow for
more detailed or definitive conclusions to be made. Of course, data on
absence and quit rates, inter alia, is necessary to gain a more rounded
picture, particularly in regard to the balloon and iceberg phenomena.
That said, there are a number of issues that warrant further considera-
tion in order to more fully assess the available data. First, the conclu-
sion reached above was perfectly predictable well in advance – and that
the four propositions were not very heuristically productive – simply
because the halving of union membership from 13m in 1979 to 6.5m
in 2010 would necessarily and inevitably lead to a commensurate reduc-
tion in all means of expression and resolution of grievances. This is
based upon the legitimate and reasonable premise that non-unionised
workers are far, far less able than unionised workers to articulate col-
lective grievances and then organise collectively to express and resolve
them. Added to this is that the depressed state of union members’ con-
sciousness, partly as a result of the depressed state of union member-
ship itself, is likely to disincline them from taking industrial action.
Thus, the propositions may have been based on rather erroneous or

exaggerated expectations for a displacement effect. Second, the rela-
tionship between strike action (predominantly official) and the other
means should not – except in the case of unofficial strikes – be viewed
as being quite so uncomplementary. Especially in a period of weakened
union power, the official strike might be buttressed ever more by these
other means so that where strikes are still used they are not used on
their own but alongside other means. As a result, it would seem logical
that if strikes decline then so too would these other means (especially
‘cut price’ action and collective conciliation). Third, the tightening up
of restrictions on what constitutes lawful, protected industrial action
applies equally to industrial action short of a strike as well, so although
such cut price action may be less costly and less risky compared to strik-
ing, there is no reason to necessarily expect that it would not also have
been affected by the impact of these aforementioned legal changes.
Linked to this is that the more extensive and complete data on the
alternative means of grievance expression and resolution for the whole
period under consideration would allow for a more detailed longitu-
dinal investigation whereby the impact of the separate Acts could be
assessed. Short of this, it has been assumed that their impact has been
steady and cumulative.
Acknowledgement
The research to develop the data set on unofficial strikes was carried
out by Sheila Cohen and funded by a Nuffield Foundation grant for
which the grant holder was Gregor Gall. We gratefully acknowledge
the financial support from the Nuffield Foundation to undertake
this work.
Notes
1. There was a slight revival in 2011 with 184 strikes involving 1,536,000 work-
ers and the loss of 1,387,000 days not worked, representing 52 days not
worked per 1,000 workers.
2. Unfortunately, no substantial data exist by which to examine the preponder-
ance of unofficial industrial action short of a strike. The only data that does
exist comes from the DLA employment law surveys which record unofficial
industrial action short of a strike at 2% in 2003 and 2004 (2% also for unof-
ficial strike action in 2003 but 1% in 2004).
3. Union willingness to use collective conciliation may also have increased for
it involves lower costs for union members (even if its purchase is less).
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7
New Dynamics of Industrial
Conflicts in China:
Causes, Expressions and
Resolution Alternatives
Fang Lee Cooke
Introduction
The industrialization and marketization of the contemporary Chinese

economy since the 1980s has been accompanied by a rising level of con-
flicts between the workers and employers in both the private and public
sector. If industrial conflicts in western economies have increasingly
been expressed in less radical, more indirect and more individualized
forms due to their changing political and economic climate (Bamber
et al. 2011, Roche and Teague 2011), then expressions of labour discon-
tent in China are becoming bolder, more frequent and more aggressive
(Chan 2001, Gries and Rosen 2004, Lee 2007, Perry and Selden 2010).
For example, in the mid-2000s, rural migrant workers voted with their
feet en masse in protest against exploitation. In the late 2000s, they
turned to the legal channels to seek justice following the enactment of
the Labour Contract Law (LCL) and the Labour Disputes Mediation and
Arbitration Law (LDMAL) in 2008. In 2010, emboldened workers organ-
ized their own strikes to demand higher wages and better working con-
ditions in foreign-funded manufacturers. The materialization of these
labour rights has been aided, amongst other conditions, by tightening
labour markets since the mid-2000s.
More generally, industrial relations (IR) in China in the last three dec-
ades have experienced a period of contested institutional transformation
and legislative experimentation. In the 1980s and 1990s, the reform of
the IR system was marked by the dismantling of the former centralized
state-planned system and the transition to a more market-based employ-
ment relationship. This period saw the abandoning of the old social
108
Fang Lee Cooke 109
contract, which was a consequence of the radical state sector reform.

Workplace welfare has been rolled back, millions of workers have
been displaced, life-long employment has been replaced by contract-
based employment, and seniority-based reward has been replaced by
performance-based pay. In the marketized economy, local governments
tend to prioritize economic growth as this has become the key measure-
ment of their performance upon which their rewards are based. Overcome
by growing performance pressure and motivated by personal gains, they
create opportunities for (private) employers to pursue profit in a hard-
nosed manner at the expense of workers’ rights and interests. This has led
to a diverse range of employment modes and exploitative employment
practices characterized by casualization and informalization (Cooke
2012, Friedman and Lee 2010). The growing income gaps1 and the
declining proportion of wages as a percentage of GDP (Chen 2010) are
indicative of the marginalization of grassroots workers’ welfare in China’s
economic development. This inequality has become a threat to politi-
cal and social stability. The political ideology – ‘building a harmonized
society’ – promoted by Hu and Wen’s government since the mid-2000s
is an aspirational response, if less so an administrative achievement, to
address this growing inequality. In the 2000s, therefore, the develop-
ment of the IR system was characterized by institutional building and
expansion. This has been attempted through expanding and realign-
ing union functions, broadening the coverage of collective bargaining
beyond the enterprise level, and improving the legal framework through
the introduction of new laws to extend labour protection.
In view of the changing institutional context and the new dynamics
of IR in China, this chapter examines, through structural and cultural
lenses and drawing on examples from firms in different ownership
forms:
1. What are the main sources of conflicts at work? What are the forms
(e.g. strikes, riots, suicides and others) that Chinese workers are using,
collectively and individually, in expressing their discontent with
the employer?
2. What mechanisms do the workers use to organize the collective actions
in view of the institutional constraints of the All-China Federations
of Trade Unions (ACFTU) to do so? And what have been the reactions
of the government/state to these industrial actions?
3. What official labour-dispute resolution mechanisms exist and how
effective are they?
110 New Dynamics of Industrial Conflicts in China
Types of conflict
While not all labour conflicts turn into open disputes, terms and condi-
tions remain the main cause of conflicts in current IR in China. This
is evident in the officially recorded labour disputes statistics (Table 7.1,
also see Cooke 2008), and in the issues of discontent that have led to
the rising number of labour protests and strikes organized in recent
years. As per Table 7.1, disputes over remuneration made up over one-
third of the cases filed for resolution. This is confirmed by smaller-
scale studies. For example, Liu and Yuan’s (2005) study of 36 privately
owned enterprises in Zhejiang Province found that remuneration of
workers was by far the most common cause of labour disputes, and that
nearly half of the disputes were about wage levels being too low. Poor
working conditions was the second major cause of conflict (at 20%).
Table 7.1 Labour disputes and resolutions, 2007–9
Items 2007 2008 2009
No. of cases left from previous year 25,424 33,084 83,709

No. of cases accepted in the current year 350,182 693,464 684,379
No. of collective labour disputes 12,784 21,880 13,779
No. of cases filed by workers 325,590 650,077 627,530
No. of cases by cause of disputes
Remuneration 108,953 225,061 247,330
Social insurance 97,731 – –
Change of labour contract 4,695 – –
Relief of labour contract 67,565 139,702 43,876
Termination of labour contract 12,696 – –
No. of workers involved 653,472 1,214,328 1,016,922
Collective labour disputes 271,777 502,713 299,601
No. of cases settled 340,030 622,719 689,714
By means of settlement
Mediation 119,436 221,284 251,463
Arbitration lawsuit 149,013 274,543 290,971
Others 71,581 126,892 147,280
By result of settlement
Lawsuit won by employing unit 49,211 80,462 95,470
Lawsuit won by workers 156,955 276,793 255,119
Lawsuit partly won by both parties 133,864 265,464 339,125
Cases mediated 151,902 237,283 185,598
Source: Compiled from China Statistical Yearbook 2010 (National Bureau of Statistics of China
2010: 885).
Fang Lee Cooke 111
The reform of the official labour disputes resolution system marked by

the enactment of the LCL and LDMAL in 2008 provided workers with
a timely venue for ‘legal mobilization’ (Friedman and Lee, 2010: 517),
as evidenced in the sharp growth of the number of dispute cases filed
for arbitration in 2008 and 2009.
According to Liu and Yuan (2005), lack of social security contribu-
tions from the employer (statutorily required), long working hours,
lack of entertainment/leisure activities, and poor management attitudes
were also sources of employee dissatisfaction with the employer and
causes of labour disputes. In particular, entertainment was seen as an
important mechanism for workers to relax and socialize, and for man-
agement to communicate and bond with the workers in a more relaxing
environment. Without these socializing lubricants, labour–capital rela-
tions became more tense and deteriorated. In a string of high-profile
strikes in 2009–2010 in foreign-funded manufacturers (see below),
demands for wage increases and better working conditions, includ-
ing shorter working hours, have been the main issues for bargaining.
According to Xu (2011), export-oriented manufacturing plants adopt a
low-price competition strategy to win orders from international clients.
As there is little room to reduce the cost of materials, logistics and so
forth, labour is the main area where profit can be squeezed through
increased productivity. For example, Foxconn, a Taiwanese-owned elec-
tronic component manufacturing firm, achieves its fast-speed supply
of high-quality products through intensive pace of work on standard-
ized mass-production lines. Foxconn’s machines operate round the
clock and workers work a 12-hour shift. They have a designated time
and place for meals and sleep. They are not allowed to leave their post
without someone else replacing them. In order to increase efficiency,
Foxconn provides free accommodation and meals, laundry and other
services. This military type of disciplined management turns workers
into machines and they become a mechanical part of the factory (Xu
2011). According to the Labour Law of China (enacted in 1995), work-
ers should work no more than 44 hours per week. Overtime should not
exceed 36 hours per week. In reality, the majority of workers in the
private sector work far longer hours, often without adequate overtime
payment as specified by law.
In order to maximize profit, employers violate workers’ legitimate
rights and interests through proprietary prerogative, including unlawful
actions such as non-signing employment contract to avoid legal respon-
sibility, suppressing workers’ wage levels, reducing welfare benefits and
work-related injury compensation, chronic wage arrears, and poor health
and safety protections (Cooke 2008, Wei and Xu 2011). It is clear that
labour conflict in contemporary China involves largely rights-based
disputes (e.g. violation of contracts, violation of legal rights, fighting
for a living wage and basic working conditions) for the grassroots work-
ers. As the problem of skill shortage exacerbates, there is also a trend of
moving towards interest-based disputes. Workers are beginning to feel
a greater sense of wealth entitlement and are demanding a larger share
of profits through increases in wages, bonus and benefits (see below).
However, these are primarily economic, rather than class, struggles (Lee
2007, Watts 2010). Material interest, nevertheless, is not the only cause
of workers’ grievances. For example, the absence of opportunity for
self-fulfilment, compounded by the military management style, inten-
sive work pressure and low wages, is believed to have led to thirteen
suicides in Foxconn in 2010 (e.g. Wu and Xu 2010).
Forms of expressions and resolutions
Labour conflicts may be issue-specific as well as more generalized

and on-going. They may be expressed in various forms: open/hidden,
individualized/collectivized, informal/formal, passive/active, and con-
tingent upon the nature of the discontent and opportunities that exist
for expression and obtaining satisfactory resolution (see Table 7.2).
Attention on labour disputes in China has primarily focused on the
formal labour disputes as officially recorded on the one hand, and on
spontaneous collective actions organized by workers, on the other.
Labour protests and strike actions

A key feature of Chinese IR since the 1990s, and particularly since the
mid-2000s, has been the increasingly public and high-profile protests and
strikes undertaken by the workers, in both the public and private sector,
to seek justice. According to the ACFTU, nearly 10,000 collective actions
took place in 2009, including strikes, go-slows, appeals, demonstrations
and so forth (Lu 2010). These events are officially referred to as ‘mass inci-
dents’ to disguise or underplay their disruptive and antagonistic nature.
This euphemism is not only characteristic of the confrontation-avoidance
tendance and harmony-seeking nature of the traditional Chinese culture,
but also a current political ideological demand to maintain stability. The
right to strike is neither denied nor granted in the Chinese labour laws.
Nor does the state-controlled ACFTU have the right to organize industrial
actions. Instead, strike actions are dealt with by the local governments
pragmatically as and when they emerge in the absence of legal guidance.
Fang Lee Cooke 113
Table 7.2 Forms of conflict expressions adopted by workers
Characteristics Individual Collective
Overt and direct, Complaints to Legal actions, strikes,

episodic, issue-specific management, appeals to walk-outs, protests,
labour authorities and sit-ins, go-slows,
legal channels collective resignation,
(mobilization of demonstrations,
official/formal voice petitions, containment
mechanisms) of government buildings,
road blocking
Disguised, on-going, Non-compliance with Non-compliance with
hidden, organizational goals, organizational goals,
absentia, slow work pace, collective absentia
job quit without notice,
sabotage, theft (no use of
voice mechanism)
Predominant location Small privately owned/ State-owned enterprises,

self-employed businesses large privately owned
enterprises, foreign-
funded enterprises
2010 marked the turning point of the labour–capital power relation-

ship as a result of a string of high-profile strikes organized by workers
themselves in a number of foreign-invested plants in various major
cities. These include, for example, Honda in Foshan and Zhongshan,
Hyundai in Beijing, Toyota in Tianjin, Brother in Xi’an, Panasonic in
Shanghai, and Carlsberg in Chongqing. Higher wages and better work-
ing conditions were the main demands. According to the ACFTU, a quar-
ter of the Chinese workers have not had a pay rise in the past five years
(Wasserstrom 2010). And these strikes have yielded positive results – all
employers have agreed to a substantial pay rise of 20–40% after rounds
of negotiation (Watts 2010).
Causes of protests and strikes differ between the two main groups
of workers: those from the state-owned enterprises and those from
the privately owned and foreign-funded enterprises. The former tend
to be a bit older than the latter. They are mostly urban residents who
have been employed by the state for their whole working lives. The
abandoning of the state commitment to their employment and welfare
in return for their loyalty and obedience abruptly ended this social
contract of mutual dependence (Morris et al. 2001). The latter are
mostly young migrant workers in their late teens and early twenties.
They may be less well educated and less experienced but are certainly
more mobile than their counterparts in the state-owned firms. They
have not been indoctrinated by the Communist Party education to the
same extent as the earlier generation of state-owned-enterprise work-
ers. As the generation of the one-child policy brought up with great
care by their family, they are not accustomed to hard work and harsh
treatment. Compared with their parent generation, they are more con-
scious of their rights and more confident and vocal in expressing their
needs. They have different expectations of work and life than their
parent generation, including greater desire for social acceptance, self-
development and career achievement, and are more ready to fight for it
(Wu and Xu 2010).
Lee (2007) contrasts labour protests in the rustbelt (the heartland
of state-owned enterprises) and the sunbelt (new economic develop-
ment zones). The former involved collective actions from state-owned-
enterprise workers who have lost their livelihoods as a result of the
radical reform in the state sector in the 1990s. They protested by
besieging government buildings and pleading to have their jobs back,
compensation and social security provision. Their grievance was
directed at the state as their (former) employer. By contrast, labour
protests in the sunbelt were collective actions from workers employed
by privately owned and foreign-funded enterprises where wage
arrears, poor terms and conditions, excessive overtime and hire-and-
fire at will have been the main causes of grievance, as noted earlier.
They are not directly against the state but are against the (globalized)
capitalists.
In Western countries, industrial action usually takes place as organized
events following the failure of negotiations to reach an agreement. By
contrast, industrial actions in China in recent years have taken the reverse
order where strikes and protests took place without any forewarning and
prior to negotiation attempts for dispute settlement. These spontaneous
events often take the enterprise, union and government by surprise, and
exert an enormous amount of pressure on unions and government to
deal with the situation rapidly to avoid contagion. Inexperienced local
governments and union officials have been reported as having taken
harsh measures, including physical force, to crush strikes and protests,
with disastrous political damage to their reputations (Chan 2001). The
high-handed repression did not calm the aggrieved masses but provoked
them to take more radical actions. Increases in mass incidents in recent
years expose the incapability of the enterprises, unions and government
Fang Lee Cooke 115
in detecting employee dissatisfaction, preventing and resolving disputes

(Wu and Xu 2010).
Extreme forms of actions

Aggrieved workers may also take on more extreme forms of actions
including suicides, imprisonment of enterprise managers, and the kill-
ing of employers to express their discontent and rage. As noted earlier,
in 2010, thirteen young Foxconn workers committed suicide, attracting
widespread debate and global media attention. Other events proved to
be highly destructive to public life. For example, over 1,000 workers
from the Wuhan Boiler Factory (state-owned) blocked the road three
times, and over 1,000 state-owned textile workers from Baoding City
marched to Beijing along the national highway (Lu 2010). The more
extreme events included: the stoppage of seven blast furnaces in the
state-owned Tong Steel Works, Jilin City and beating to death the gen-
eral manager, and the imprisonment of a senior government official in
charge of the ownership reform of Lin Steel Works in Henan Province
(Lu 2010). These events often erupted without warning, involved hun-
dreds and thousands of participants and became increasingly organized
and well prepared, measured by the quality of the slogans and banners
used for demonstration and the bargaining strategy (Wu and Xu 2010).
Participants were also becoming more confrontational, from the non-
violent resistance style adopted in the earlier protests to engaging in
physical clashes with the police and government officials. Actions
from one striking workplace would soon be modelled by others, aided
by social media, and escalate into larger-scale social actions (Wei and
Xu 2011).
Changing patterns of action in the state sector

Within the state sector, changing patterns of resistance from those who
have kept their jobs has emerged. Lee (1998), in her study of the Chinese
workers in state-owned enterprises, found that a typical form of workers’
resistance was ‘collective inaction’. Indifference, non-cooperation, lack
of motivation, absentia and low efficiency were typical. They were iso-
lated, fragmented and somewhat passive actions. This form of covert
resistance that existed in the 1980s and 1990s, however, had largely
disappeared by the late 1990s. For example, in Liu’s (2003) study of
five ex(-)state-owned enterprises in four cities including Shanghai,
Shenyang, Taiyuan and Nanning, she found that the type of collective
inaction behaviour observed by Lee (1998) hardly existed in part as a
result of the shift to performance-related pay that was accompanied
by work intensification due to the radical reduction of staffing levels.

Workers felt lucky to have a job and looked forward to having more
work in order to raise their income. In a manager’s words, the removal
of job and income security meant that workers were now happy when
there was work to do, whereas during the socialist planned-economy
period, workers rejoiced when there was no work (as their wages and
jobs were secured whether they worked or not). Workers interviewed
by Liu (2003) showed their fear of being punished by the state appara-
tus if they went against the state (e.g. strikes and protests). According
to Liu (2003), those who chose this option of inaction, or obedience
and co-operation, were mainly those who had relatively low levels of
educational qualifications, technical skills and other competences and
therefore had little labour market mobility. Families and friends became
the only accessible mechanism for aggrieved workers to voice their
grievances (Liu 2003).
In addition to this choice of inaction, Liu’s (2003) study revealed two
other forms of actions, namely exit and voice. Those who chose to exit
were those who were marketable and able to develop new careers. They
left their state employer in order to seek better opportunities. They were
mainly managerial workers and professional staff, rather than ordinary
workers. Those who chose the voice route might take action in one of
the two, or both, forms: individual or/and collective actions. Individuals
may complain to their superiors or publicly at the workplace. These
were mild forms of action that had little negative impact on the sta-
bility of the firm or society, as remarked by managers interviewed by
Liu (2003). By contrast, collective actions commonly took the form of
petitions, disputes, strikes, protests and demonstrations. They had more
serious and wider repercussions, as noted above. It is interesting to note
that not all collective actions have been organized in a confrontational
manner. The inability of the government to admit to the divergence of
its political course from socialism towards (state) capitalism has enabled
workers to mobilize the socialist discourse, which the state had created
to rule the country, to justify and thus disarm suppressive force on their
actions from the government (Weston 2004). By calling for the return
to the socialist values as the pretext of their protest, they cleverly steer
clear from a course of head-on political collision with the government.
New dynamics of labour–management conflict in the

private sector
Within the domestic private sector,2 a diverse range of expressions of
workers’ discontent and power-wrestling with proprietors, often covertly
Fang Lee Cooke 117
and subtly, and on a day-to-day basis, has been revealed. For example,
in their aforementioned study, Liu and Yuan (2005) also found that
slack attitudes, low efficiency, material waste and go-slows were the
main forms of (covert) actions adopted by the workers surveyed to
express their dissatisfaction with the management. Similarly, the owner
CEO of a large privately owned vehicle component manufacturer in east
China reported many of its shopfloor workers (mostly young males)
display a low level of organizational citizenship behaviour and a high
level of negligence. This ranged from leaving the water tap running and
lights on, to doors kicked open and glass windows smashed (see Cooke
(2012) for more detail). Workers in this firm were relatively well paid
(performance-related) with an extensive range of workplace benefits.
Working hours were not long (eight hours per day, six days per week)
due to the physically demanding nature of the job. However, work tasks
were repetitious and uninteresting. An owner CEO (interviewed by the
author in January 2012) of a large privately owned restaurant in south-
east China also reported that theft was a serious issue. For example,
employees used hot-water flasks to steal rice and smuggled them out of
the restaurant. While the true motives of sabotage and theft behaviour
may never be known, the CEOs interviewed felt that resentment of
control and jealousy of the proprietor’s wealth were part of the reasons.
As the restaurant CEO remarked:
The [workers] feel … entitled to a bigger share of your profit. If they

can’t get it from their wage, they take it secretly. They also demand
pay rise[s] and promotion frequently. A waitress will need to be pro-
moted to a supervisor position after 2–3 years. If you don’t meet their
demands, they will leave. We now have too many supervisors and
they are doing the same waitressing job [as before] but for higher pay
and more benefits. We have no choice but to meet their demand[s]
because it is difficult to recruit staff and we need our waitresses to be
nice to the customers in order to win repeat businesses.
In small privately owned businesses, employers also reported difficulty

in securing workers’ commitment and that they had to think of all the
tricks to keep workers happy. As an owner-manager of a decoration busi-
ness revealed (interviewed by the author in January 2012):
Now it is not about workers being afraid of the boss, but the other
way round. I have a team of 15 or 18 workers. It is a game. They are
very unreliable. They will turn up to work when they want to and
may be absent without telling you. Our business is based on short-

term contracts with tight deadlines. They usually choose the most
critical moment to bargain with you for higher pay. Their wage is
already very high and as the owner of the business we are finding it
harder and harder to make a living. We rely on their goodwill and
we try to keep them happy by bonding with them and be[ing] nice
with them when they have family or personal problem[s]. We lend
them money when they have financial difficulty. We take them out
for dinner regularly … But this can only keep them working for us a
bit longer. There is no loyalty in them at all. It is all about money …
One day, a worker cut his finger a little with a hand saw. It was not
a serious injury and no stitches were required. I took him to the hos-
pital and paid his medical bill. The next day when he came to work,
he yelled, ‘Boss, I lost a lot of blood yesterday. What do you think
I should do?’ I had no choice but to say, ‘Go and have a chicken hot
pot and bring me the receipt.’
Another small business owner (IT retail) narrated a similar story (inter-
viewed by the author in January 2012):
My shop employs six workers and we operate seven days a week. On

one Friday, four of them [the technical ones] phoned in for sick leave
one after another. They did not sound sick at all. When I rang them
in the afternoon and told them that I have decided to raise their
bonus, they all said they would be well enough to come back to work
the next day. I had to give in because weekend is the busiest time
when we can make some profit. My business has not been doing well
the last year and I am actually earning less than my workers.
Existing Chinese IR studies have often highlighted the powerlessness

of the Chinese workers vis-à-vis capitalist/management control. Little
attention has been paid to the workers’ (growing) capability to seek
greater control and reward, especially in smaller businesses. In spite of
the lack of unionization and formal mechanisms of collective bargain-
ing, workers appear to be able to gain the upper hand in controlling the
labour–proprietor relationship. The evidence above suggests employ-
ers of small and micro-businesses are increasingly dependent upon
the goodwill of the workers and are often held at ransom by their key
employees. Under no illusion of long-term loyalty from them, owners
deploy paternalistic management styles to develop emotional ties with
their workers in exchange for temporary co-operation. Recruitment
Fang Lee Cooke 119
difficulty has been a key factor that swings the bargaining power in
favour of the workers.
But not all workers in the domestic privately owned firms are able
to flex their muscls with their employers in a covert or overt manner.
The small size and diverse nature of the private businesses mean that
workers’ solidarity is far more difficult to achieve in this sector. Where
accumulated dissatisfaction is unresolved, workers tend to choose
exit as the common mechanism to end their grief, if only temporar-
ily with the current employer. For example, Cooke’s (2005) study of
24 small and micro privately owned businesses revealed that owner-
managers typically determined the employment package unilaterally.
Some employees were not fully aware of their terms and conditions
until the issue came to the fore. While many of the workplaces were
neither ‘a big happy family’ nor ‘a sweatshop’ as perceived by the work-
ers, employment relations in these businesses were characterized by a
high level of turnover, voluntarily and involuntarily. Few workers had
worked for their employer for more than three years at the time of the
research. Similarly, Liu and Yuan’s (2005) study showed that 84% of
the workers surveyed would choose to leave their employer if disputes
are not resolved. More noticeable, over 7% said they would do some-
thing to give the boss a hard time prior to their departure, including
unlawful acts.
So the largely transactional nature of employment relations suggests
that the traditional Chinese culture which values trust, loyalty and
reciprocal relationship has been marginalized, if not abandoned, in the
wave of marketization and individualized materialism.
Why do workers opt for radical actions to seek justice?
It is clear that labour conflicts expressed in the form of spontaneous

collective actions in China have become more destructive and violent
in recent years. Workers, particularly those in export-oriented foreign-
funded plants, have opted for the high-cost radical actions directly
without following the official dispute-resolution procedures to seek
settlement in a more civilized way. They do so for several related reasons
(Wei and Xu 2011). First, much of the dramatic economic development
of Chin since the 1980s has been achieved through the willingness of
rural migrant workers to take up employment with harsh terms and con-
ditions as the only alternative to unemployment/under-employment.
They had, and many still have, little bargaining power in determining
wages and conditions vis-à-vis management hegemony. Their suppressed
grievance developed into anger and was eventually unleashed in a vol-

canic manner. While the earlier generation of the rural migrant workers
were more willing to tolerate exploitative employment practices, their
offspring generation is much less accommodating, being more highly
educated, more aware of their rights and more ready to demand them.
This partially explains the trend of a rising level of radical collective
actions. This endurance-eruption mode of conflict expression appears
to be common in developing Asian countries whose labour regime was
shaped by an autocratic political system as well as a high level of cul-
tural paternalism, such as in Indonesia (Ford 2012).
Second, ill-equipped with bargaining skills and unsupported by unions
in most workplaces, workers are generally the weaker party in workplace
negotiation. Assuming a superior position, employers refuse to negotiate
and workers are afraid to negotiate (Wei and Xu 2011, also see Howell
(2008)). As Friedman and Lee (2010: 530) argued: ‘none of the series of
recent laws that are supposed to strengthen workers’ legal rights, [nor] the
power of the official … unions have seemingly done anything to reduce
labour conflict or increase adherence to the law’. Xie’s (2011) study of
union chairmen, HR managers and other managers of 71 enterprises of
various ownership forms revealed that only 41% were familiar with col-
lective negotiation. Nearly 10% were unfamiliar with the concept. Only
14% believed that collective wage negotiation played an effective role
in protecting workers’ rights and interests, whereas over 60% felt that
collective negotiation was a formality task to satisfy the higher author-
ity. Only 29% reported that their collective agreement was developed
based on negotiation between the workers and the employer that took
into account the enterprise’s characteristics and workers’ needs.
Third, official dispute resolution, while emerging and improving in
principle, is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to pursue, with
many hurdles to jump through that involve hierarchies of organiza-
tional management and labour authorities (Wu and Xu 2010). Eager
to fulfil their own agenda, local governments, employers and employ-
ment agencies may also collude to create space for employers to avoid
legal responsibility and dilute the impact of the labour protection laws
(e.g. Cooke 2011). As Friedman and Lee (2010: 518) argued: ‘When
workers are encouraged to seek legal and bureaucratic redress, only to
find that the local state often colludes with employers, they are embold-
ened to resort to collective action to draw the attention of superior lev-
els of government to right local wrongs.’
Fourth, the increase of radical collective actions, in spite of the decline
of collective dispute cases filed for labour-dispute resolutions as officially
Fang Lee Cooke 121
recorded, suggests that workers are actually becoming more aware of

the impact of their collective power outside official channels. They are
taking these radical actions as a deliberate strategy to raise public-
ity, mobilize social support and force rapid government intervention
for settlements in their favour. In spite of the initial grievance being
against their employer, aggrieved workers may eventually turn their
anger towards the government because of the inaction or poor actions
of local governments in intervening in disputes. Having high-profile
public protests is believed to be an effective way to seek prompt inter-
vention from the higher-level authority (Wei and Xu 2011) and, in
Friedman and Lee’s (2010) words, to rectify another local wrong.
It is important to note the changing, or more precisely, softening,
stance of the central government towards mass incidents in recent years
has provided the necessary condition for workers to make this choice of
actions. Initially nervous of their political implications, the government
tended to clamp down upon collective actions, branding them as move-
ments attempting to undermine social stability. Since the mid-2000s, the
government has become more concerned with the deteriorating nature
of employment relations and workers’ terms and conditions. This was
shown in the enactment of three major labour laws in 20083 and the
Social Security Law in 2011. Strikes are now seen more as economic dis-
putes than political threats to the government. In the string of strikes
in foreign-funded plants in 2010, the authorities have verged on the
supportive side, claiming that the workers’ demands were ‘reasonable’
(Milne 2010).
Fifth, collective actions protect individual workers from being vic-
timized. During the strikes, tactics have been used by the workers to
prevent their leaders from being identified. In the past, strikes may not
have been without cost to those who organized them, particularly in
the state sector (Chen 2003a, 2006). Whilst strikes in foreign-funded
enterprises were likely to result in victimization of strike leaders, they
were less likely to be repressed harshly by the local authorities due to
the government’s willingness to indulge nationalist sentiment. Another
reason for the government’s tacit support of strikes has been the pres-
sure it has been facing to increase wages in order to address the widen-
ing income inequality and to stimulate internal consumption demand
to offset drops in exports as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis
(Cooke 2012).
In short, the rising volume of highly public and confrontational
labour unrest in the Chinese IR landscape not only indicates the dete-
rioration of employment relations in many sectors, but also signals the
opportunities that have been made available for workers to choose

this route as a result of the emerging political tolerance of industrial
disputes in the contemporary Chinese political economy. While the
labour militancy demonstrated in the string of strikes, especially the
Honda (Nanhai) case, highlights the growing mobilization of labour
activism in fulfilling workers’ demands and the impact of worker-led
collective bargaining,4 these achievements have only been made pos-
sible with the support of other key institutional actors, including the
active lobbying by the government and unions to broker deals, and
the involvement from media, scholars and other pressure groups (Xie
2011). Nonetheless, the success of the worker-led collective bargaining,
facilitated by worker-elected representatives rather than state/enterprise-
appointed union officials, suggests that effective bargaining can only
take place where workers play an active part in it, with the support
of state institutions and other social actors. In many ways, the gov-
ernment’s continuing involvement in dealing with labour disputes
reflects the institutional inefficacy in dispute resolution and the low
level of confidence of the workers in this system. It is to this issue that
we now turn.
The (in)efficacy of official labour-dispute resolution

channels
The official labour-dispute resolution system in China has only been devel-
oped in the last two decades with the promulgation of the ‘Regulations
on Enterprise Labour Disputes Treatment’ in 1993, the Labour Law in
1994, and the LCL and LDMAL. The system consists of consultation,
mediation, arbitration and litigation. The emphasis on consultation
and mediation results from government hopes to resolve labour dis-
putes in an efficient and peaceful manner in line with its ideological
objective of building a harmonious society (Cooke 2011). The notion
of ‘collective consultation’ was introduced in China in the early 1990s,
after the Trade Union Law 1992 authorized unions at the enterprise
level to conclude collective contracts with employers.5 The tripartite
consultation system has been promoted by the government as an
important mechanism for the government, unions and enterprises
to strengthen social dialogue and co-operation in coordinating labour
relations in response to the new dynamics of industrial relations during
the period of economic transformation (Clarke et al. 2004, Brown 2006,
Lüthje 2011, Taylor et al. 2003). The reality has been that few enter-
prises have established the tripartite consultation system, and for those
Fang Lee Cooke 123
that have, it remains more of a formality than an effective mechanism

(Liu 2011). Directed by the government and organized by the Party-led
unions, collective consultation is a bureaucratic process in which the
two main parties in IR (i.e., employer and employees) are not the main
driving forces (Clarke et al. 2004, Liu 2011). Collective agreements are
often no more than the minimum labour standards as specified by
the local government based on the labour laws. Many workers are not
even aware of what has been agreed upon in their collective contract
(Cooke 2012): so much so that the signing of the collective contract/
agreement is often no more than a formality that has little impact on
regulating the behaviour of both parties.
The labour-dispute mediation mechanism is multi-layered and aims
to provide workers with several channels to seek settlement in a co-
operative and constructive manner. However, there exist some loopholes
in its design. First, there is no specific legal requirement for establish-
ing a mediation committee at the enterprise level. Employers are left
to make a choice as to whether they ‘have the conditions’ to set up a
committee or not, and if so, how it is to operate. The absence of an
independent third party in the committee is common. Second, media-
tion bodies external to the enterprise lack authority, legal position and
power, a problem exacerbated by the deficiency in legal competence
of the mediators whose rulings are often perceived as being unfair and
challenged by those involved (Cooke 2011). In addition, local govern-
ments have been found to force labour-dispute cases back down to the
workplace. Employers are told to resolve the dispute internally ‘for the
sake of building a harmonious society’, although resource constraints
to handle the rising number of cases may have been a main reason for
this (Cooke 2011).
The inadequacy of the role of the unions in dispute resolution, and
in regulating IR more generally, is noticeable, despite their positive,
if modest, role in improving workers’ rights and conditions strategi-
cally and operationally (Chan 2010, Chen 2003b, Choi 2008, Dai 2009,
Cooke 2012). The ACFTU’s role is, by and large, rights-based rather than
interests-based. Its legal position in labour-dispute resolution is to play
a mediation role rather than an organizing role to defend workers’
rights and interests (Wu and Xu 2010). Institutionally subordinated
to the Communist Party’s leadership, union officials are unable to
conduct their mediation work independently. Victimization from the
local authority may occur as a penalty for defending workers. In state-
owned enterprises, unions play an extended management role (Warner
2008). They are incentivized to help achieve organizational goals and
may, therefore, tend to side with the management when dealing with
disputes (Dai 2009). In collective disputes, workers often turn to the
government directly for intervention, bypassing the unions (Choi 2008,
Gallagher 2005).
Unions’ capacity in dispute mediation and arbitration is further
undermined through the hollowing out of their role, despite their leg-
islative position in these procedures and processes. In mediation, most
enterprises do not have a labour-dispute mediation committee; media-
tions mainly exist in name rather than reality. As shown in Table 7.1,
mediation made up less than 40% of the labour-dispute cases settled.
In arbitration committees, union officials make up only one of the
three representational parties, with the other parties being labour and
economic authority representatives. In addition, arbitration committees
are located in labour authority departments, and the committee chair
role is assumed by the labour authority representative. Finally, while
the Chinese labour laws were silent in terms of the legal right to strike,
within the formal industrial relations system, radical collective actions
are not encouraged or endorsed as a norm. As a subordinate organiza-
tion of the Communist Party, the socialist unions’ primary task is to
maintain labour discipline and peace keeping (Pringle and Clarke 2011).
Self-organizing and self-representation then seems to be the inevitable
alternative for the workers.
Conclusions
This chapter began by charting the changing dynamics of the industrial

relations context, the rising level of workplace conflicts and emerging
forms of expression in China. Some of the forms of conflict expression
are not necessarily new to other parts of the world of work, but have
appeared relatively recently in China. The opportunity for – and ability
of – Chinese workers to take collective action to assert their rights and
advance their interests is contingent upon their demographic profile
and the type of businesses (e.g. ownership form, size) they work for.
Strikes and other similar forms of collective actions are more likely to
be taken up by workers in the state-owned enterprises against their
economic and social dislocation, and by workers in foreign-funded
manufacturing plants in protest against exploitation. In the case of the
latter, the incidences of labour activism since 2008 suggest that the
younger generation of Chinese workers have become more vocal and
organized than their parent generation of rural migrant workers. This
‘collective bargaining by riot’ directly challenges the low-pay labour
Fang Lee Cooke 125
regime upon which much of China’s competitive advantage has been

hinged. The issues of disputes are not just rights-based, but are moving
towards being interests-based. The struggle is shifting from a fight for a
living wage to a fight for a larger share of the wealth. By contrast, work-
ers in smaller domestic private firms are less able to take such collective
actions. Instead, they are more likely to opt for various forms of covert
resistance or to exit. While violation of social and psychological con-
tract has been a major reason for the lack of engagement of the work-
ers with their employing organization (Yuan and Li 2010), workers are
believed to contribute to the tense labour relationship due to their lack
of accountability towards the organization (Wen 2010).
It is clear that the Chinese IR system is moving from a unitarist
approach to a pluralistic perspective that recognizes the different inter-
ests and levels of bargaining power between the labour and capital, and
that makes an attempt to create institutional mechanisms through
which reconciliation of fundamental differences may be sought. The
non-adversarial approach to labour-dispute resolution is characteristic
of the Confucian value that emphasizes social harmony, the existence
of which is dependent on the extent of social justice rather than wealth
(Yan 2010). The quality of the institutions and the role of institutional
actors in an IR system influence the forms, mechanisms and resolutions
of labour conflicts (Lipsky and Avgar 2004, Mahony and Klaas 2008). In
China, the simultaneous growth in the protection for workers through
the widening collective bargaining coverage and legislative provision on
the one hand, and the rise in labour disputes on the other, is indica-
tive of the inefficacy of the institutional mechanisms designed by the
state actors to regulate contemporary IR. Operating largely outside the
workplace, or under the control of management/proprietors within
the workplace, grassroots union officials have limited power and resources
to play an effective role in dispute resolutions. The continuing involve-
ment of the Chinese government in dispute resolution is characteristic of
the developmental state in which the centrality of the state is a defining
feature of its economic and other related development. Not only are state
institutional actors inefficient, but also employer associations under-
developed, and workers continue to turn to the state directly for unmet
expectations. For example, persistent labour shortage and strike actions
have forced some local governments to raise their minimum wage level.
In the twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011–2015), the government launched ten
action plans aimed to improve the living standard of its citizens, includ-
ing the target of an average annual increase of at least 13% in the mini-
mum wage (Yangcheng Evening News 17 March 2011).
The ability of workers to organize and participate in strikes is indica-

tive of not only their awaking awareness of the power of collective
action, their psychological strength and financial ability to take action,
but also arguably the increasing tolerance of the political system of
economic conflicts. Tacit political endorsement has emerged, if only
on an ad hoc basis, within the broader environment of institutional
curtailment. If poor terms and conditions have been the essential pre-
conditions for collective action, then the shift of government attitude
from repression to concession (in the state sector) and facilitation
(in the private sector) towards self-organized labour activism has been
one of the institutional conditions that contribute to strike victories.
Nevertheless, victorious strikes remain a small part of the IR reality,
magnified by media publicity and the enthusiasm of labour movement
optimists. In view of foreign capital’s engagement in aggressive regime
shopping, often using the threat of exit to force regulatory conces-
sions from the host governments, it remains unclear the extent to which
these high-cost industrial actions may have deterred foreign firms from
investing in China, thus retarding its long-term competitiveness and
economic growth. Equally, without the right to form autonomous
unions with sustainable resources and leverage, the prospect of workers’
self-organizing on a continuous basis may remain opaque in the foresee-
able future.
Notes
1. According to a study conducted by the All-China Federations of Trade Unions
in 2009, the monthly wage of over two-thirds of the workers felt below the
national average wage (2,152 yuan). Meanwhile, the income distribution gap
between frontline workers and senior managers of state-owned enterprises
was widened from 6.72 times in 2006 to 17.95 times in 2008 (cited in Liao
et al. 2010).
2. The domestic private sector consists of two major types of businesses: pri-
vately owned enterprises and self-employed businesses. The latter are very
small private businesses that employ no more than eight members of staff.
3. These are the Employment Promotion Law, the Labour Contract Law, and the
Labour Disputes Mediation and Arbitration Law.
4. Honda (Nanhai) raised wages three times in 2010 as a result of the collec-
tive bargaining between the workers and the company. Workers employed
Professor Chang Kai, the Beijing-based most influential industrial relations
scholar in China, as their expert adviser to guide them through the negotia-
tions.
5. The term ‘collective consultation’ rather than ‘collective bargaining’ is pre-
ferred by the state as a more constructive approach than ‘bargaining’ as it con-
forms to the Chinese culture of non-confrontation and conflict avoidance.
Fang Lee Cooke 127
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8
Egyptian Workers Rediscover
the Strike
Anne Alexander
Introduction
For millions of people worldwide who watched the uprising against

Mubarak unfold in Tahrir Square on television and through social media,
it is probably the mass occupation of public squares which is the form of
collective action most associated with the Egyptian Revolution of 2011.
Yet the five years or so before the downfall of Mubarak also witnessed
an equally important change in workers’ repertoire of collective action:
namely, the rediscovery of the strike. This chapter argues the shift in
workers’ tactics was a reflection of deeper changes in the relationship
between the state, capital and labour since the mid-1970s, and had pro-
found consequences both for the Mubarak regime and its opponents. The
pivot of these changes was Anwar Sadat’s turn from the Soviet Union to
the USA, which was in turn prompted by the crisis of the Nasserist experi-
ment in import-substitution industrialization. Sadat’s policy of ‘opening’
(infitah) began a long-drawn-out process through which the Egyptian
ruling class attempted to withdraw from its side of the Nasserist ‘social
contract’ without triggering a major explosion of protest. By the late 1980s
economic stagnation and the looming prospect of a default on loan repay-
ments to the USA opened a period of much more aggressive liberalization
and the extension of neo-liberal policies to large areas of the economy.
In the Nasserist era, Egyptian workers were asked to forgo the right to
strike in return for a commitment from the state to provide jobs, housing,
education and healthcare through the public sector. In the period of
neo-liberal reforms the state’s role in the redistribution of wealth down-
wards was dramatically reduced, but its repressive functions increased.
Thus in its final years, the Mubarak regime was an increasingly complex
amalgam of institutions and practices inherited from the Nasserist era
130
Anne Alexander 131
of the 1950s and 1960s combined with new policies promoted by the
clique of neo-liberal reformers who dominated the governments of the
last years before the revolution. In particular, the Mubarak regime’s
continued dependence on the repressive functions of the corporatist
‘unions’ (which Nasser created) at the same time as aggressively strip-
ping them of their role in the redistribution of wealth through its neo-
liberal reforms meant that the post-2006 strike wave uniquely targeted
both elements of this unstable compound. As the strikes were organized
almost entirely outside and in defiance of the official Egyptian Trade
Union Federation (ETUF), they played a crucial role in further under-
mining the ETUF’s structures in the workplace, rendering them impo-
tent at the crucial moment during the uprising of 2011 when Mubarak
attempted to use them to mobilize the appearance of a ‘popular’ counter-
revolution against protesters in Tahrir Square.
The primary sources for this chapter are a series of interviews car-
ried out between 2008 and 2012 with worker activists involved in
strike organizing and building independent trade unions (full details in
Alexander 2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b), including leading figures in the
Property Tax Collectors’ Higher Strike Committee (later the Real Estate
Tax Authority Union), the Textile Workers’ League, the Independent
Union of Workers at Manshiyet al-Bakri Hospital and a number of unions
affiliated with the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions
(EFITU)which was founded during the revolution of 2011. In its analy-
sis of the development of the workers’ movement during the Nasserist
era, it engages primarily with the work of Beinin (1989, Beinin and
Lockman 1988) and Posusney (1997).
Development of Nasserism
From the end of World War Two until the early 1950s, strikes were a
key weapon in Egyptian workers’ social and political struggles. Waves
of strikes over the rising cost of living and unemployment intersected
with a mass movement against the large British military presence, and
coalesced during the final crisis of the monarchy over the winter of
1951–1952 in a peak of protest which would not be surpassed again
until 2011. Moreover, independent workers’ organizations played an
important role in organizing strikes and in the wider political move-
ment against the monarchy and the British presence. In contrast to
previous decades, when workers’ organizations were generally led by
non-worker ‘patrons’ from the liberal nationalist Wafd party or rul-
ing class mavericks like Prince Abbas Halim, independent unions led
132 Egyptian Workers Rediscover the Strike
by worker activists grew rapidly, particularly after 1945 (Beinin and

Lockman 1988, Al-Bishri 2002, Alexander 2007).
The seizure of power by junior army officers in 1952 dramatically
changed the context in which workers’ collective action took place.
Strikes had previously been seen as a legitimate and necessary tactic by
broad layers of Egyptian society, particularly when they were directed
against the British. From the start, the Free Officers sought to repress
them on the grounds that strikes against their newly formed regime
would play into the hands of ‘imperialism and feudalism’ (Alexander
2007). By the mid-1950s, Nasser had emerged as undisputed leader of the
officers and president of the republic. Within a few years, he launched
Egypt onto a trajectory of state capitalist economic development which
would see a dramatic shift towards import-substitution industrialization
with the creation of new heavy industries, nationalization of large sec-
tors of the economy and financial system and the elaboration of a new
political system. The incorporation of workers’ organizations into the
state played a pivotal role in the political economy of Nasserism. The
single officially sanctioned union federation assisted in the repression
of workers’ protests and strikes, mobilized workers to meet produc-
tion goals and controlled their remaining legal channels for political
expression through control of nominations to the various representa-
tive bodies set up by the regime (Posusney 1997, Beinin 1989). It was,
however, also a key partner in a limited redistribution of wealth which
the Nasserist regime chiefly achieved through investment in workers’
social welfare, education and housing combined with subsidies on basic
consumer goods and fuel, as much of this was organized directly through
public sector workplaces.
The role of the working class in the Nasserist system was shaped by
a number of different factors. Firstly, unlike in the USSR itself, indus-
trialization was not accompanied by the systematic driving-down of
urban workers’ living standards (Waterbury 1985: 65). Workers’ wages
rose significantly during the first phase of state-led industrialization
between 1960 and 1965 (Mabro and Radwan 1976: 144). Both ideologi-
cally and practically, this system of social welfare was made conditional
on workers’ economic and political quiescence. As Beinin (1989: 86)
noted, the word ‘strike’ literally disappeared from the political discourse
during the early years of Nasserism. At the same time, the state began
to take a pro-active role in shaping the union movement. Having
vigorously opposed the creation of a national union confederation,
Nasser finally agreed to a founding meeting taking place in 1957. The
leadership of the new confederation was approved by the regime, and
Anne Alexander 133
later leaders were to be appointed directly by the state (Posusney 1997:

62–63).
The incorporation of unions into the state lay at the heart of the
regime’s relationship with the working class. It was a policy designed
to maintain peace on the shopfloor and make unions watchdogs of
productivity. There was also a corresponding political impact, as the
officially sanctioned unions came to control a large proportion of the
nominations to the representative bodies of the regime. From the mid-
1960s, 50% of seats in the National Assembly were reserved for workers
and peasants. The bureaucratic apparatus that managed the unions on
behalf of the state developed in parallel with the wider state bureauc-
racy which managed the public sector enterprises. Although some
union leaders had played roles in the independent unions which had
emerged in the 1940s, their role in the Nasserist system was much closer
to that of other members of a class of state administrators and managers
than to a union bureaucracy. With union dues collected by compulsory
deductions from wages, the leaders’ positions did not depend on their
ability to maintain independent organization and wrest concessions
from employers or state, but rather on their effectiveness in policing
workers’ discontent. The integration of the union leadership into the
wider Nasserist bureaucracy did not preclude some or even the majority
of them occasionally acting as a relatively coherent bloc to protect their
own interests against attempts to redistribute material resources and
political power within the ruling class. It is in this light that the oppo-
sition of some union leaders to the economic liberalization policies of
Nasser’s successor, Sadat, is best understood.
Infitah and the long crisis of the Nasserist state
The first Five Year Plan (FYP) of 1960/1961 set ambitious goals for the
rapid economic transformation through industrialization and increased
agricultural productivity. Having failed to provide enough capital to
meet the state’s needs for this project, large sections of private capital
were nationalized. Foreign loans, including funding from the USSR,
provided another source of finance for projects such as the construc-
tion of the High Dam at Aswan. However, as Waterbury and Richards
(2008: 189) noted the ‘Achilles heel’ of Nasser’s import-substitution pol-
icies became quickly apparent – Egypt’s inability to earn enough foreign
exchange to prevent a balance of payments crisis. Despite notable suc-
cesses in other respects, including the creation of a million new jobs and
an annual rate of GDP growth of 6%, the first Five Year Plan proved to
be unsustainable (Beinin 2010: 12). The second FYP was abandoned as

the government failed to raise sufficient investment capital and instead
found itself having to negotiate with international lenders for loans to
close the widening gap between imports and exports. Compensation
agreements with foreign investors for the first wave of nationalizations
in 1956 further drained foreign currency reserves. By the mid-1960s,
Nasser had already embarked on an austerity programme which forced
down workers’ wages and increased working hours. Sadat embarked on
a series of reforms which aimed at opening the economy to Western
investment.
Sadat’s ‘turn’ from East to West was a pivotal moment in Egyptian
history. The policy of infitah (‘the opening’) was a shift from a trajectory
of state capitalist development in partnership with the USSR towards
a new set of economic and foreign policies which broadly followed the
lead of the USA. At the level of practical policy, infitah was a set of meas-
ures which liberalised and partially re-privatised foreign trade, encour-
aged private sector imports, initiated steps towards multiple exchange
rates, reformed the Egyptian banking sector, reorganized the public
sector and extended privileges to the Egyptian private sector (Waterbury
1985: 70). The goal of these policies was to attract external finance to
Egypt, primarily from the Gulf and the West. However, although the
language of infitah’s supporters still echoed the rhetoric of the previous
era, the logic of their reorientation marked a more profound change.
The conditions attached to Sadat’s application for a junior partnership
with the US ruling class and its allies would be set by the global shift in
economic policy prompted by the end of the long boom of the 1960s
and the crisis of state-led development, which in turn precipitated the
abandonment of Keynesianism in favour of the neoclassical and neo-
liberal schools of economic thought.
The new economic orthodoxy held that retrenchment and austerity
would not be enough to restore profitability. Cutting wages, enforcing
longer working hours and slashing spending on welfare all played a
part in making the poor pay for the crisis. However, they were to be
supplemented by concerted efforts to reconfigure the balance between
the extractive and redistributive functions of the state for the benefit of
a new coalition of state and private capitalists. Thus, neo-liberalism in
Egypt cannibalized the mechanisms which states of the previous gen-
eration had used for the redistribution of wealth, such as health, educa-
tion and welfare systems and public infrastructure, and turned them
into machines for generating profit. State-run industries would suffer
a similar fate, whereby the more profitable elements would be directly
Anne Alexander 135
sold to private capital, while the rest faced neglect, decay and eventual
closure. Some of this transformation was achieved on a short-term basis
through ‘asset stripping’ operations where those in closest proximity to
the state could make fortunes by purchasing public property cheaply (or
as brokers for purchases by regional and international capital). In other
areas, the neo-liberal turn rested on a longer-term perspective based
on the marketisation of public services (particularly health, education,
sanitation and social care). Neo-liberal reforms also provided new forms
of state subsidy to private capital, for example, by facilitating the aggres-
sive reshaping of urban landscapes for the selective benefit of private
construction companies through the building of new roads to gated
communities (Mitchell 1999). Naguib (2011: 5) noted none of these
strategies involved shrinking or rolling back the state for neo-liberals
were as heavily interventionist as their predecessors:
The policies of neo-liberalism were never about dismantling or

even reducing the role of the state in the economy but rather about
increasing the role of the state as facilitator of capitalist profit-making
at the expense of the working class. This created an even more inti-
mate relation between state and capital.
Infitah necessarily involved a rebalancing of the relative economic and

political weight of different sections of the ruling class and, therefore, it
was likely there would be winners and losers. There was, thus, intense
debate and occasional conflict within the ruling class about tactics,
despite a general and long-lasting consensus that there was no other
viable strategy. Crucially, infitah also necessarily ran the risk of igniting
resistance from below in the form of protests and strikes. The seriousness
of this threat was made obvious to Sadat in 1977 with the explosion of
the ‘Bread Uprising’, a spontaneous wave of mass protests and riots in
response the removal of some subsidies on basic goods, including bread,
at the urging of the IMF. The protests erupted against a backdrop of
increasing social and political tension, including a rise in street dem-
onstrations and strikes, including one by Cairo bus workers in 1976.
Thus, infitah was a protracted process which proceeded through several
stages. The ruling class sought to put off for as long as possible the need
to ‘bite the bullet’ and risk further social explosions. Sadat therefore
used Egypt’s strategic value as leverage to gain access to massive US sub-
sidies. This combination of limited liberalization and the expansion of
private and foreign capital combined with a new subsidy regime worked
for a while but, by the end of the 1980s, Egypt was perilously close to
defaulting on interest payments on the US loans agreed in the 1970s

(Alexander 2009).
Once again, economic crisis and shifts in the geopolitical balance
intersected. The Mubarak regime’s support for the US-led assault on
Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was essentially traded
against a write-off of much of Egypt’s ‘Paris Club’ debts. However, the
aggressive assertion of US hegemony in the Middle East and the final
collapse of the Soviet Union further narrowed the regime’s space for
manoeuvre, giving the international lenders’ insistence on the imposi-
tion of a programme of structural adjustment much greater force. The
changed geopolitical circumstance was one factor behind the achieve-
ment of a greater level of consensus within the ruling class about the
need to impose economic reforms which were likely to ignite serious
social discontent. In particular, the ETUF leadership – sections of which
had previously expressed opposition from within the regime to neo-
liberal economic reforms – supported the Economic Reform and Structural
Adjustment Programme (ERSAP).
Structural adjustment: the state withdraws from the

Nasserist social contract
In his analysis of the first ten years of infitah, Waterbury (1985: 69) argued
the Nasserist social contract was ‘centered on the commitment of the
state to provide goods and services to the public in exchange for politi-
cal docility and quiescence’, representing ‘the charter of Egypt’s soft
state’ while infitah merely attempted to locate new sources of external
income with which to fulfil its commitments. Here, the bargain struck
between state and people was essentially a negative one, and Waterbury
(1985: 69) quoted approvingly complaints of the authors of the Egyptian
Five Year Plan of 1978–82 that ‘the end result is a society lacking disci-
pline or supervision, distribution without production, promises without
obligation, freedom without responsibility’. With hindsight, it is easier
now to see how infitah was part of a global reorientation of economic
strategy, which did represent an ideological and practical break with
the policies adopted by states worldwide during the previous genera-
tion. Announced in 1991, ERSAP was an extension and deepening of
infitah which resulted in a qualitative shift in the relationships between
the state, capital and labour. While infitah represented a public declara-
tion by key sections of the ruling class of their intention to abrogate
the Nasserist social contract, ERSAP put this declaration into effect.
Anne Alexander 137
It is also problematic to couch the Nasserist social contract in passive

and negative terms, particularly in relation to the specific contract
between workers and the Nasserist state. Indeed, the time it took for the
workers’ movement to recover from the profoundly debilitating effects
of Nasserism was both a reflection of the Mubarak regime’s increasing
use of authoritarian methods to control dissent, and an expression of
the long decay of what Naguib (2011: 3) calls the ‘relative consent’
between ruled and rulers created by the Nasserist social contract.
For urban workers, the attraction of Nasserism lay in its promise to
tilt the balance between the extractive and redistributive functions of
the state in their favour. The state’s self-proclaimed role as the direct
organizer of the extraction of surplus value from workers through the
creation and management of state-run industries was balanced by its
commitment to redistribute some of these profits back to workers both
directly and indirectly. The ideology of production under Nasserism
was from the start strongly shaped by a nationalist agenda in which
the idea of workers as partners in national development came to play
an increasingly important role (Beinin 1989). The ideology of autarchic
state capitalist development was not a reflection of the actual practice
of the Egyptian state, which even at the height of Nasserism was forced
to strike a balance between mobilizing internal and external resources
(Waterbury 1985: 65). That direct US aid to Egypt in the form of dona-
tions of wheat under Public Law 480 continued to flow throughout the
Nasserist period (with the brief exception of a short interruption during
the 1960s) underlined that both in its state capitalist and neo-liberal
moods, the Egyptian ruling class has been relatively successful in using
its geo-strategic value as leverage to gain access to these external rents.
It is fruitful to think of Nasserist social contract as a balance between
different kinds of ‘bargains’ struck between the state, capital and labour.1
The primary bargain between workers and the state was that a public
sector offering secure (if relatively low-paid) employment and welfare
benefits in the form of housing and healthcare would form the core
of national economic development. State commitment to redistribute
wealth to workers by this means was, thus, conditional on both positive
and negative behaviour. Workers were expected to actively participate in
economic development, rather than only avoid disrupting it. The ideol-
ogy of the public sector found expression in workers’ choice of tactics
for their protests, which until the mid-2000s very rarely took the form
of strikes, and more often involved ‘work-ins’ or other forms of action
which not only allowed production to continue, but actually emphasized
notions of workers’ self-sacrifice for the good of national economic

development (Bassiouny and Said 2007). In addition to refraining from
striking, workers were also expected to give up political and union organi-
zation outside the frameworks created by the state itself. The analysis of
the Nasserist social contract advanced here is based on the understand-
ing that the ‘offer’ made by the state was never one which workers could
refuse without facing direct and brutal repression. However, the rela-
tively consensual aspects of the relationship are important in explaining
why it took so long for traditions of independent collective action and
trade union organization to revive.
Forswearing the use of strikes and independent organization were crit-
ical components of the social contract but it was a Faustian pact struck
between parties with vastly unequal access to the means of coercion.
Thus, even when the state honoured its side of the agreement, workers
never benefited as much from the arrangement as the Egyptian ruling
class. A pivotal role in the drama was played by the left. The majority of
Egyptian Communist activists, who had played a leading role in nurtur-
ing independent workers’ organizations and recruited widely from the
1940s generation of worker activists, agreed to dissolve their independ-
ent organization despite suffering severe repression. Beinin (1989) makes
a persuasive case for seeing the articulation of a distinctly ‘workerist’
version of Nasserism by the left and worker activists as playing a crucial
role in embedding Nasserism within the workers’ movement during the
early years of the regime. In addition to the specific contract imposed on
workers by the state, the Nasserism created other social contracts. The
most important of these was made with society at large, whereby the
state committed to provide a wide range of public goods, including a
minimal level of universal health care and education, a modern social
infrastructure, and high levels of employment in the public sector, in
return for Egyptian citizens’ rejection of forms of political expression
and organization outside those directly organized by the state. The idea
of the Nasserist social contract as a bartering of social peace for bread
makes most sense when applied to the commodity subsidy regime which
provided cheap food and fuel for the poor.2 The power of the Faustian
pact lay not only in the balance between consent and coercion in rela-
tions between the state and workers, but also between the state and
private capital. A large part of Nasserism’s mass appeal was connected to
the application of coercive measures to private landlords and capitalists
through the redistribution of agricultural land, rent controls and forced
nationalizations, which gave the impression that the state really was
acting in the interests of the poor against the rich.3
Anne Alexander 139
ERASP represented an assault on the poor, which cannibalised the

Nasserist mechanisms of redistribution and turned them into mecha-
nisms that either directly or indirectly, enriched the wealthy. Some
of the wealthy were managers of state capital and some of them were
private capitalists. Structural adjustment reconfigured the internal com-
position of the ruling class somewhat and, as it took place in a regional
and global environment which favoured the intensification of trans-
national connections between state and private capitals, altered its
external relationships. Nevertheless, the process benefited Egyptian
capitalists as a class, whether they were located in the upper levels of the
state bureaucracy, at the head of the armed forces or in the boardrooms
of private enterprises. The centrepiece of the structural adjustment pro-
gramme was the privatization of the public sector. The most important
legal instrument in this process was Law 203 of 1991, which identified
314 state-owned enterprises (SOE) as targets for privatization. The SOEs
were grouped into sector-wide ‘Holding Companies’ which were given
the legal right to dispose of state assets by sale to the private sector.
Although the outright sale of SOEs was at first slow, a clear legal and pol-
icy route to privatization had been mapped out. The World Bank (2000:
1–2) identified two phases in the privatization programme between
1991 and 1999. The government sold or partially divested from fewer
than 20 companies out of 314 between 1991 and 1995. Between 1996
and 1999, privatization speeded up and the government also pursued
other reforms more aggressively whereby the state sold its controlling
interest in 65 companies and a minority interest in a further 16. Further
privatizations between 1999 and 2004 raised the level of formal state
divestment further to nearly 200 companies out of 314 (OECD 2010: 4).
The government of Ahmad Nazif, which took office in 2004, acceler-
ated the privatization programme once again, expanding its operation
outside the framework of Law 203. Privatization receipts accounted for
2.5% and 1.9% of GDP in 2005–2006 and 2006–2007, largely accounted
for by the sale of a big state-owned bank, the Bank of Alexandria and
the part-privatization of Telecom Egypt (OECD 2010: 4).
At the beginning of the privatization programme official estimates
gave the size of the total labour force as 15.2m. The government was
the largest employer and the combined size of the government work-
force including all public sector companies, local and national gov-
ernment, those employed in military-owned industries (but not the
armed forces), and other state institutions was around 5.5m, or around
37% of aggregate employment. The workforce employed by the SOEs
targeted for privatization by Law 203 numbered slightly more than 1m
(Privatization Coordination Support Unit 2002: 39). By 2001, the work-

force which remained in the Law 203 companies had been reduced
to around 453,000. This drop had been accomplished by a variety of
mechanisms, including restructuring before privatization through an
early retirement scheme (affecting 167,000 employees), state divestiture
to the private sector (222,000 employees) and attrition of the workforce
through retirement (148,000) (Privatization Coordination Support Unit
2002: 40). Transfer of employment out of the public sector affected the
workers concerned and their families negatively in a number of ways. In
the mid-1990s, real wages in the public and private sectors were approxi-
mately equal and continued to rise in a relatively synchronised fashion
until 2000, when the gap began to widen. By 2005, the index of private
sector wages stood at 120 against a baseline of 100 in 1995, whereas the
public sector wage index had increased to 180 (Hassan and Sassanpour
2008: 13). Moreover, public sector employment carries with it access
to important non-wage benefits, including health benefits, retirement
pensions and shorter working hours (which allow employees the time
to take on a second job), as well as far greater job security (Said 2004).
Bassiouny (2009: 11) noted the overall dramatic rise in job insecurity
and declining access to social insurance across the workforce during the
1998–2006 period, correlating with the second and third accelerations
in the privatization programme. Between 1998 and 2006 the percentage
of the workers with an employment contract fell from 61.7 to 42, while
the percentage covered by social insurance dropped from 54.1 to 42.2
(Bassiouny 2009: 11).
In addition to the loss of wages and non-wage benefits to directly
affected workers and their dependents, the neo-liberal assault on the
Nasserist system of universal health care and education had a negative
impact on far wider layers of the poor. Since the 1991 reforms, the cost
to the poor of access to health and education has risen dramatically,
and ‘increased their vulnerability to exploitation by exposing them to
a wide range of ‘hidden’ and informal fees’ (Tadros 2006: 237). Across
both the education and health sectors neo-liberal reforms followed a
similar pattern – namely, policies of ‘benign neglect of basic welfare
programmes’ (Tadros 2006: 240) – which has led to a relative dete-
rioration of publicly funded services, the imposition of cost-recovery
mechanisms (which in turn led to the institution of user fees or their
increase) and various schemes introducing forms of direct privatiza-
tion. Expenditure on private education in an effort to offset the impact
of the deteriorating quality of publicly funded education rose signifi-
cantly during the 1990s, and the greatest share of this increase was
Anne Alexander 141
among the poor. Studies from the late 1990s and early 2000s found
poor families reporting that between 20% and 50% of total household
income was taken up by the costs of education (Tadros 2006: 241,
Hartmann 2008: 60).
Other elements in the neo-liberal reform programme included the
elimination of subsidies on some consumer goods, including sugar,
cooking oil and dairy products (Sharp 2005: 11). The Egyptian govern-
ment passed legislation in 1992 (delaying implementation until 1997)
which removed restrictions on land ownership, thereby reversing the
1952 Land Reform, and worked systematically to undermine the rent
control system, which kept rents below market levels in around a third
of Egypt’s rental housing stock (Bush 2002, US Embassy in Cairo 2008).
The taxation and tariff systems were changed to the benefit of corpo-
rations and high-earners so that income and corporation taxes were
slashed by Ahmad Nazif’s government and restrictions on imports cut
(Enders 2008).
Neo-liberalism and the ETUF
Neo-liberalism had a paradoxical effect on the repressive functions of

Nasserism. On the one hand, economic liberalization was accompanied
by a general process of deliberalisation in the political sphere (Kienle
2000, Langhor 2000). In the case of the ETUF, the 1990s saw a tightening
of authoritarian control from above through reforms of its structure, and
increasingly aggressive interventions by the ruling National Democratic
Party in its elections. In 1995, structural reform increased the weight of
the higher levels of the bureaucracy which was dominated by the ruling
NDP. The term of election for ETUF officials was extended from 4 to 5
years, retired members were allowed to continue in post, and candidates
for senior offices were no longer obliged to pass through the lower levels
of the bureaucracy before seeking election (Bassiouny 2009). The ETUF’s
2006 elections are widely regarded as having been the focus of a system-
atic campaign of fraud and intimidation by the ruling party, and the
results were formally annulled following the overthrow of Mubarak in
2011 (ITUC 2011, Alexander 2012b). The appointments to its National
Council in 2006 brought into post the heads of 23 sector-wide ‘General
Unions’, 22 of whom were members of the National Democratic Party
(Charbel 2006).
The interaction of economic liberalization with political deliberal-
isation created a new, hybrid regime which retained the repressive
attributes of Nasserist corporatism at the same time as it attacked the
redistributive functions which had played a central role in maintaining

its social and political stability. However, neo-liberalism also weakened
the ETUF both organizationally and ideologically. The assault on the
public sector workforce through the privatization programme directly
cost the federation hundreds of thousands of members, while the neo-
liberal attack on the idea of the public sector undermined the federa-
tion’s efforts to contain workers’ discontent through the old formula of
appealing to their sense of pride in the national economy. There was a
rapid decline in its membership before the onset of the strike wave in
late 2006, which continued afterwards. Membership stood at 4.5m in
2003, falling to 3.8m in 2006, and 2.9m by 2011 (Bassiouny 2009, ITUC
2011). Moreover, the ETUF was not a passive observer of the neo-liberal
turn, but played an active and important role in supporting its reforms.
It formally endorsed Law 203 after its passage through parliament in
1991, and supported the enactment of a new Labour Law in 2003, which
was explicitly aimed at making it easier for employers to dismiss workers
(General Authority for Investment 2009). The strike wave was accompa-
nied by workers’ first steps in creating independent rivals to the ETUF,
a process spurred on by the ETUF’s unwillingness to protect them from
the effects of privatization (Alexander 2010).
Similar contradictions can be seen in operation in relation to the right
to strike. A key term of the Nasserist social contract was that workers
should refrain from halting ‘the wheel of production’ through strikes.
This exchange was framed as an act of self-sacrifice by workers, whose
refusal to use this collective power in the interests of national develop-
ment was rewarded by the state with secure employment and political
recognition. At a formalistic level, the architects of the neo-liberal pro-
gramme proposed a new exchange between workers and employers,
trading the workers’ right to strike against the employers’ right to hire
and fire at will. However, in reality, as the formal recognition of the
right to strike in the 2003 Labour Law was set in the context of tighten-
ing authoritarian control of the ETUF, this exchange was in practice in
one direction only. Legal strikes could only take place with prior notifi-
cation and with the approval of two thirds of the NDP-controlled ETUF
General Council. Other restrictions included the banning of strikes in
a wide range of ‘essential services’, where collective bargaining agree-
ments are in force, and during periods of compulsory arbitration (ITUC
2011). Yet, the combination of deepening authoritarian control and
neo-liberalism was inherently unstable, as the neo-liberal reforms them-
selves undermined the very mechanisms on which the government was
relying to contain rising levels of workers’ discontent.
Anne Alexander 143
The strike wave: nature and consequences
The eruption of the biggest and longest strike wave in Egypt for around
half a century after 2006 represented the working-out of these contra-
dictions. On the one hand, the conditions for the upsurge in workers’
collective action were shaped by the reconfiguration of the relation-
ship between the state and capital ‘from above’, in that the neo-liberal
onslaught on the public sector also weakened the ideological and mate-
rial hold of Nasserism over large sections of the working class (Bassiouny
and Said 2007). On the other, the strike wave represented workers’
de facto abrogation of the Nasserist social contract ‘from below’, even if
they were frequently attempting to defend the benefits it had offered.
Analysing the dynamics of strike action in Egypt through any kind
of quantitative analysis has always been extremely difficult. Before the
2011 revolution, as almost no strikes were recorded officially by the
Egyptian government, the only source of information about workers’
collective action was the media. However, until the early 2000s and the
growth of a privately funded press, the absence of strikes from official
data mirrored their absence from the largely government-controlled
media. While the opposition press did report on strikes, the extremely
small circulation of these newspapers and the weakness of opposition
groups in general meant that their sporadic reports on workers’ collec-
tive action rarely, if ever, reached a mass audience. Within a few years
the media landscape had changed significantly, for independent news-
papers accounted for around 25% of readers by 2007 – up from 3% in
2003 (Diehl 2007). Thus, the upsurge in workers’ protests was chroni-
cled by labour correspondents working for the independent press, such
as Al-Dustur’s Mostafa Bassiouny. In addition to the commercial media,
the growth of internet use and the advent of websites such as the video-
sharing website YouTube provided an outlet for activist and ‘citizen jour-
nalist’ reporting on strikes. NGOs such as the Land Centre for Human
Rights (Markaz al-Ard) and the Sons of the Earth Organization (Awlad
al-Ard) began to publish regular reports which collated data from media
reports, categorised different types of collective action and analysed
evolving patterns of workers’ protests in different economic sectors and
over time.
Despite the huge expansion in the information about strikes since the
mid-2000s, there remain a number of significant problems with the data.
The media reports on which much of the figures here are based incon-
sistently report numbers of participants, the duration of the action and
the demands of the workers involved. It is likely that some strikes will
have been over-reported (for example a strike lasting two days reported
as two separate episodes of collective action), wrongly categorised (as
a strike rather than a demonstration), and the number of participants
exaggerated or underestimated. The ‘underground’ nature of strike organi-
zation means it is very likely that many strikes will have simply not been
reported at all.
These difficulties notwithstanding, it is possible to draw some conclu-
sions from the mass of data available about the dynamics of the upsurge
in workers’ collective action. First, there is incontrovertible evidence
that the scale of workers’ protests, in terms of numbers of episodes of
action and participants, was dramatically larger than in previous dec-
ades. Estimations of the scale of all forms of workers’ collective action
between 1998 and 2008 show a huge upturn in the number of episodes
of action and the number of participants after 2004 (Beinin 2010: 16).
Bassiouny and Said (2007) argued that the December 2006 strike by
24,000 workers at Misr Spinning in al-Mahalla al-Kubra marked another
turning point and triggered a dramatic qualitative shift in the nature of
workers’ protests. The principal features of this transformation were the
increasing adoption of strikes as opposed to other forms of protest dur-
ing the course of 2007, and a shift towards longer and better-organised
strikes in contrast to the brief explosions of protest which characterised
the period before the Misr Spinning strike. Figure 8.1 shows a significant
rise in the numbers of workers taking strike action in 2007, as opposed
to other forms of collective action, in contrast to the years immediately
Estimated no. of participants (000’s) – all forms of protest

Estimated no. of participants (000’s) – strikes
600
500
400
300
200
100
Figure 8.1 Strikes and all forms of workers’ collective action, 2004–8
Source: Beinin (2010: 16).
Anne Alexander 145
Table 8.1 Numbers of episodes of workers’ collective action, 2004–11
Year Sit-in Strike Demonstration Static rally Gathering Total
2004 90 43 46 n/a 87 266

2005 59 46 16 n/a 81 202
2006 81 47 25 n/a 69 222
2007 197 110 43 n/a 264 614
2008 253 122 60 n/a 253 609
2009 126 84 42 n/a 180 432
2010 209 135 80 83 23 530
Sources: Beinin (2010: 16) for 2004–2009 and Awlad al-Ard (2012: 1) for 2010.
preceding or following. Table 8.1 indicates that the frequency of forms

of industrial action (sit-ins, strikes) preponderated over other forms of
collective action towards the end of the 2000s.
Some workplaces experienced repeated episodes of collective action,
and workers developed a wide range of protest tactics, which were
honed and adapted over time, including strikes, sit-ins, lobbies of union
and government officials, street demonstrations and petition campaigns
(Alexander 2012a). A combination of factors allowed a generation of
workplace activists to gain a qualitatively different experience of strike
organizing to their colleagues in previous decades. Longer strikes dem-
anded more sustained organization than had been possible in the past.
The decision of state officials to negotiate directly with strikers’ elected
delegates in an attempt to resolve disputes broke the ETUF’s monopoly
as workers’ representatives. Although this ‘recognition’ of negotiators
was grudging and generally restricted to the duration of the strike, it
marked a highly significant shift in tactics by the authorities, which
enabled worker activists to gain valuable experience in negotiations.
The willingness of the independent media to report strikes, and work-
ers’ recognition of the importance of using this channel to spread news
of their action, brought new opportunities to learn skills in managing
relations with the media (Koubaissy 2008).
Two processes of generalization were at work in the pattern of work-
ers’ collective action between 2006 and 2010. Firstly, strikes and protests
spread from the public to private textile sectors, and then to other sectors
of the economy, involving groups of workers with little tradition of col-
lective action or organization. The strike wave began in Misr Spinning in
al-Mahalla al-Kubra in December 2006, spreading to Kafr al-Dawwar, and
the recently privatized Indorama textile mill in Shibin al-Kom in February
2007 (Workers’ Coordination Committee 2007). By April 2007, workers’
protests and strikes were erupting in other areas of the textile sector,
including a strike by 2,700 workers at the privately owned Makarem

Group factories in Sadat City and another by 6,000 workers in privately
owned Arab Polvara (EWTUW 2007b, Beinin and El-Hamalawy 2007).
Although the garment industry has traditionally been characterised
by low pay, job insecurity and a largely unskilled, female workforce,
it was also drawn into the strike wave (Morsi 2008). The workforce at
the Mansura-Espana garment factory near al-Mansura occupied the
factory and went on strike in April 2008, sleeping over on the shop-
floor in order to pre-empt management efforts to close down the plant
(EWTUW 2007b). Even those parts of the economy which the govern-
ment had sought to remove completely from the Nasserist model of
state-capitalism, the Free Zones, were affected by workers’ protests and
strikes (EWTUW 2007a).
By the end of 2007, new patterns of strike activity and other forms of
workers’ protest were well-established across a large number of economic
sectors. A report by Egyptian Workers and Trade Union Watch (EWTUW)
compiled from media sources in the last two weeks of October lists
collective action by workers in textiles and garment production, tel-
ephone manufacturing, electrical-goods manufacturing, building, light
and heavy engineering and general contracting (including cement and
brick-making), transport (including port workers employed by the Suez
Canal Company and Cairo Metro train drivers), energy, food production,
hotels, commercial establishments, hospitals, schools and civil servants
(including a national strike by property tax collectors) (EWTUW 2007a).
Over the following years, strikes in particular, and self-organised collec-
tive action in general, have been adopted by workers across a similarly
wide range of economic sectors, even penetrating the military-owned
factories which operate under martial law (ITUC 2011).
The second process of generalization, which was less widespread, but
extremely important, was the evolution of demands and campaigns
which targeted government policy directly, rather than responding
to problems within a specific workplace or institution. Workers at Misr
Spinning in al-Mahalla al-Kubra organized protests and called a strike
demanding a rise in the national minimum wage in early 2008.4 In this
case, workers’ collective action played a positive role in building wider
opposition to Mubarak. The post-2006 strike wave erupted at a moment
when the security forces had achieved a degree of success in forcing
pro-democracy activists of movements like Kifaya off the streets. Striking
workers, therefore, not only claimed the streets as a stage for their own
protests, they re-opened them for others. The 2008 textile workers’
protests in al-Mahalla coalesced with a new upsurge in pro-democracy
activism around the call for a general strike on 6 April to support the
Anne Alexander 147
demand for a rise in the national minimum wage. A Facebook group,

which was set up to mobilize a solidarity movement for the 6 April strike
call, rapidly attracted around 80,000 members, demonstrating the wider
political resonance of workers’ demands. Although the planned strike
by workers in the Misr Spinning plant was aborted through the inter-
vention of the security forces in the mill, the events triggered a popular
uprising in the town, which was in many senses a ‘dress rehearsal’ for
the 2011 Revolution (Alexander 2012a).
The strike wave was also an incubator for the first successful attempt
to establish an independent union outside the ETUF since its creation
in 1957. A national strike by property tax collectors succeeded in forcing
the Ministry of Finance to transfer the Property Tax Service from local
to central government, thereby raising employees’ salaries by over 300%.
The strike was organized through a network of elected workplace and
regional strike committees, which were represented at a national level
by the Property Tax Collectors’ Higher Strike Committee. The strike’s
victory in 2008 did not prompt the dissolution of the strike commit-
tee, but instead began a process of consolidating a new organization,
which in late 2008 declared itself as the Real Estate Tax Authority Union
(RETAU). The new union’s founding congress was attended by around
4,000 activists from across the country (‘Uwayda 2008). The property
tax collectors’ success was followed by the foundation of independ-
ent unions representing teachers, health technicians and pensioners
(Alexander 2012b). Strikes in 2009 played a direct role in developing
networks of activists in the postal service and the Cairo Public Transport
Authority, who would successfully found independent unions in the
wake of the 2011 Revolution (Alexander 2011, 2012b).
A similarly complex dynamic between the extension of neo-liberalism,
the deepening of authoritarianism in ETUF and the rising tide of work-
ers’ collective action can be observed in relation to independent union
organization. A number of important strike leaders lost their elected
positions at the lowest levels of the ETUF in the rigged union elections
of 2006. Kamal Abu-Aita, one of the organizers of the 2007 property
tax collectors’ strike, a founder of the tax collectors’ independent union
and first president of the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade
Unions is a case in point.5 Leading activists in the 2006–2007 strikes at
Misr Spinning in al-Mahalla, and Indorama in Shibin al-Kom were also
defeated in the 2006 union elections (DuBoc 2009). In both these cases,
strikes accelerated the decline of the ETUF-affiliated unions. Activists
in al-Mahalla organized a campaign of mass resignations from the
General Union of Textile Workers (GUTW) in the wake of the December
2006 strike. The leaders of the 2007 property tax collectors’ strike were
successful in recruiting more than 40,000 members to the new inde-

pendent union during its first few months, despite a campaign of physi-
cal and legal intimidation against them by the ETUF-affiliated union.
The ETUF leadership went to considerable lengths in a failed attempt to
undermine the new union. For example, they won over Makram Labib,
one of the activists in the 2007 strike, to leading a newly formed ETUF
affiliate, which aimed to recover the membership who had defected to
the independent union (Al-Nagar 2009).
On the eve of the 2011 Revolution, the ETUF had then been seri-
ously weakened by the combined impact of the neo-liberal reforms, the
strike wave and in small number of cases by direct competition with
the emerging independent unions. Its decline was most apparent in the
inability of the regime’s last-ditch attempts to use the ETUF to mobilize
a semblance of popular support for Mubarak during the 18-day uprising
in February 2011. However, the shell of the federation survived the rev-
olution intact and it was able to later reconstitute itself with an infusion
of Muslim Brotherhood cadres, meaning that in the short to medium
term at least, the ETUF is likely to retain some of its significance.
Conclusion
The rediscovery of strikes by Egyptian workers is crucial to understand-

ing the 2011 Revolution. As this chapter has outlined, the conditions
which made that rediscovery possible arose out of the realignments
within the relationship between the state, capital and labour as a result
of the neo-liberal turn by the Egyptian ruling class. Paradoxically, it was
neo-liberalism which ‘freed’ Egyptian workers from Nasserism by abro-
gating the social contract from above. However, as they confronted the
neo-liberal looting of the Nasserist state through their strikes, Egyptian
workers also freed themselves, not only from the ideological constraints
which Nasserism had placed on workers’ collective action and organiza-
tion, but eventually from Mubarak’s dictatorship itself. At present, it is
too soon to say whether this liberation will be temporary or permanent.
The continuation in power of the core of the Mubarak regime, and the
attempts by his generals to ban strikes and restrict workers’ rights to
organize, suggest that there are still many battles to come.
Notes
1. My understanding of the relationship between ‘the state’ and ‘capital’ here
follows Harman (1991), who argues it is mistaken to see them as either
Anne Alexander 149
entirely separate entities or as entirely fused. Rather, the state is simultane-

ously an expression of the basic contradiction in capitalist society between the
interests of capital and labour, and the primary means by capitalists as a class
to maintain their economic and political domination over workers as a class.
2. Even in this case, however, it could be argued that it was not Nasser’s institu-
tion of the subsidy but Sadat’s reinstatement of the scheme in the wake of the
1977 Bread Intifada, which properly fits such an analysis.
3. That the Nasserist state did dispossess some private capitalists and landlords and
redistribute a greater proportion of the national wealth to workers and the poor
than its predecessors does not contradict the idea that its managers were still
acting in the collective interests of Egyptian capital in their attempt to create the
most favourable environment possible at the time for capital accumulation.
4. Textile Workers’ League activist, interview, Cairo, 28 March 2008.
5. Kamal Abu-Aita, interview, Cairo, 29 March 2008.
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9
Direct Action in France: A New
Phase in Labour–Capital Conflict
Sylvie Contrepois
Introduction
The world over, it seems, citizens of France are seen as having a strong
tradition of radical class struggle. Paradoxically, it is seen as being very
alive but also being very out of date. The recent radicalization of a
number of local and national conflicts within France, as well as some
other spectacular actions largely covered by French and international
media, were taken as vestiges of the direct action strategy developed at
the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, Ancelovici (2011:
132) observed: ‘Social movement scholars often associate radicalism
with the use of particular modes of action. For example, Sidney Tarrow
and Hanspeter Kriesi treat, respectively, the diffusion and intensifica-
tion of disruption and the increasing use of violence as an indicator
of radicalization. Following this logic, the growth of certain forms of
labour contention since the 1990s in France could be interpreted as the
sign of a renewal of labour radicalism. The “boss-nappings” of 2009 and
2010 and the blockage of oil refineries during the protests in the fall of
2010 were presented as such by the media.’ More recently action has
been taken that was successfully aimed at attracting media attention,
such as small farmers bringing sheep to town, or workers brandishing
Lejaby lingerie during their demonstrations against redundancy – a
giant patriotic brassiere in the national tricolour of red, white and blue
which they had made. As a result, some commentators have argued
that French workers are today re-engaging with their radical roots in a
context where they, paradoxically, feature amongst the least unionised
workers in the world. Thus, analysing the Autumn 2010 mobilization
against new retirement laws, which became famous when workers
decided to block France’s twelve oil refineries, Ancelovici (2011: 122)
152
Sylvie Contrepois 153
expressed his scepticism: ‘If there is any radicalism left in France, it

resembles in some respect what Craig Calhoun has called the “radical-
ism of tradition” […] In France the use of contentious modes of action
is fostered by the institutional and political weakness of unions rather
than being an expression of labour power’. But Groux (2010) gave a
quite different interpretation. According to him, while some isolated
radical actions have attracted most media attention, they have served to
hide a deeper evolution of French industrial relations, whereby French
unions were recently empowered by the 2007 and 2008 laws, giving
more weight to collective agreements in law and helping explain the
greater moderation of France’s union confederations. Both interpreta-
tions can be supported by strong evidence. The sharp decline of union
membership and labour conflicts, and increases in collective bargain-
ing activity and individual formal complaints can be substantiated, as
can be the ideological void left by the disappearance of Communist
praxis. Yet, it seems unproductive, if not difficult, to reduce contem-
porary forms of direct action to old fashioned echoes of a distant past.
Different forms of direct action can be observed throughout the whole
period (Sirot 2002) and they have always been linked together with
institutional action. Rather, by cross-checking research conducted at
local and national level, using archives, oral testimonies, observation
and documentation (see Contrepois 1999, 2001, 2010), contemporary
radical actions are better characterised as components of a new phase
in capital – labour relations.
Such a perspective cannot exist without necessarily going beyond
the most famous analysis of the decline of union and collective action
during the 1980s and 1990s. In these, the reorganization of the employ-
ment relationship, the institutionalization of unions, their division and
separation into different organizations and the decline of individual
commitment to collective action were identified as crucial factors with
clear effects (Touraine 1996; Labbé and Croisat 1992; Rosanvallon 1988).
We know from Groux and Mouriaux (1992: 49–65) that expansion and
decline of union membership is more likely to follow cycles, resulting
from the dialectic relationship between capital and labour. We have
also learned from Le Crom (1995, 1998), who analysed different key
moments in the institutionalization of unions, that institutionaliza-
tion has had ambiguous effects regarding unions’ power. Finally, from
Lojkine’s (1996) arguments it becomes apparent that workers’ inter-
vention in management and worker’s control are likely to become the
modern form of capital–labour struggle. Such works helped to build the
historical model suggested in this chapter, around three key phases.
154 Direct Action in France
The first phase began in the nineteenth century, ending during World
War One. The first mutual aid associations and then unions appeared
over this period. The latter were often described as ‘anarchist’ and
‘revolutionary’ organizations. They developed direct action strategies.
But, as we will see below, these strategies were very diverse and different
reformist currents had a significant influence. The main challenge for
workers was to build their unions as independent actors and organiza-
tions. The second period, beginning after World War One, was domi-
nated by the institutionalization of unions in the field of employment
relations, whereby they were progressively recognized as the official
workers’ representatives and their actions were constrained by the
legal framework. Unions intervened mainly in the field of employment
relations (wages, working conditions, disciplinary, career development
and collective representation). Despite their growing public legitimacy,
some conflicts, like the 1936 and 1968 general strikes or the miners’
strike in 1947, were particularly hard and long, suggesting that the
process of institutionalization was not a complete one. This second
period ends at the beginning of the 1970s. The third phase, from the
early 1970s onwards, has seen a growing and contested union penetra-
tion into the fields of economic strategy and management. In other
words, unions began to be more active, stepping up their demands in
fields where they were previously only entitled to consultative rights.
This situation produced new forms of direct action, while some older
forms were also developed in modern ways. These three periods can
be considered as successive layers, overlapping in some respects. For
example, some important steps of institutionalization took place before
1914, as well as after the 1960s, and the autonomy of union was not
fully established after World War One. In the same way, some attempts
to penetrate the fields of economic strategy and management can be
observed in the World War Two French Resistance programme. In spite
of such imperfection and fluidity, such a periodization can fruitfully
underpin efforts to contextualize contemporary events in the light of
French union history.
Phase 1: difficult birth
Although writers have carefully analysed the context in which the first
confederation, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was created in
1895 (Groux and Mouriaux 1992; Lefranc 1937; Lojkine 1996), the period
before 1914 in France is often described as a period of glorious revolu-
tionary unionism, proud to remain outside of all kinds of institutions.
The principal document quoted is the famous CGT Amiens charter

from 1906, which is often interpreted as the official rejection of parlia-
mentarianism and political action in favour of direct action and class
struggle. When analysing today’s situation, it is useful to deconstruct
this picture. First of all, it is important to keep in mind that during the
whole period, unions and collective action were mainly illegal. After a
period of sharp repression, the French government began to regulate
workers’ voices in a very restrictive way.
In 1791, the Chapelier Act made all forms of collective organization ille-
gal, leading to severe repression. Nonetheless, some embryonic organi-
zations reappeared briefly in the early nineteenth century. They were
mainly mutual aid associations. Although their main purpose was to
set up social welfare for their members, some of them developed into
political and union activity. But in 1852 a law was passed and the
government began to regulate their activities. Their role was restricted
to social welfare and they were obliged to appoint honorary members
among the local notability. According to Soubiran-Paillet and Pottier
(1996: 29), they became instruments for the control of workers. New
types of worker organizations then appeared, focusing on workers’
demands. As Dreyfus observed (2001), this workers’ quest for autonomy
resulted in a lasting separation between the management of social wel-
fare and collective action. Two other important laws were passed during
the second half of the nineteenth century. One, in 1864, established
the right to strike; the other, in 1884, legally acknowledged unions.
Both laws were very restrictive and aimed at channelling workers’ voices
(Le Crom 1998; Rosanvallon 1988: 98–100; Soubiran-Paillet and Pottier
1996). The 1884 law stated, for example, that the aim of union action
was ‘to study and defend the economic, industrial, business and agri-
cultural interests of workers’, thus, deliberately excluding political
interests, and its application was limited to industry, excluding railway
workers, public services and civil servants. Even if they were opposed
to these laws, workers could not fully escape their effects and had to
adjust their practices and, of course, the status of their organizations.
Soubiran-Paillet and Pottier (1996) indicated, for example, that union
members systematically excluded political goals from their union stat-
utes in application of the 1884 law. In such a context of limited rights,
it was particularly difficult for workers to fully develop their own inde-
pendent organizations. This situation shaped most of the arguments
that took place between reformists, on the one hand, and anarchists
and revolutionaries, on the other, during the creation and early devel-
opment of local trade union branches and federations.
Findings from fieldwork are particularly useful here in order to better

understand unions before 1914. Over the past twenty years, significant
research has been conducted in the Corbeil-Essonnes and Évry areas.
These two adjoining urban areas are located some 30 kilometres to the
south east of Paris. Corbeil-Essonnes was a regional economic, admin-
istrative and industrial centre from the Middle Ages but today is in
decline. Évry, by contrast, was built as a new town at the end of the
1960s. Altogether, these two urban areas have more than 160,000 inhab-
itants, containing 7,800 companies with a total workforce of 85,600.
At the heart of a mainly agricultural region, Corbeil and Essonnes began
to be industrialized in the twelfth century. Up to the early twentieth
century, milling, textiles, tanning, and then paper making, printing and
engineering were the main activities, with companies of national and
international importance located in the area. While textiles and tanning
disappeared before the end of the nineteenth century, milling, printing,
paper making and engineering remained important until after the World
War Two. A shift then occurred towards engineering with firms like
IBM, aircraft engine manufacturer Snecma, Hewlett Packard and Digital.
Attracted by grants available in the new town, some of these companies
went to Évry and its satellite towns. From the end of the 1990s, these
new technologies gradually were replaced by bio-sciences and genetic
research. The Généthon, the new hospital and Évry University with its
institute of biology are symbols of this latest development.
Some traces of labour conflicts could be found in local tribunal archives
from the very early nineteenth century. Although these conflicts were
expressed through individual actions and, therefore, were almost invis-
ible, they were sharply repressed. Several workers who encouraged their
colleagues to refuse an underpaid job in the Chantemerle textile com-
pany in Essonnes in 1822 were fined or sent to prison, for example. The
first attempts to create workers’ organizations date back to this period.
These were mutual aid associations for the provision of sustenance in
case of illness. One of them, the Société des amis réunis (Friends Reunited
Society) may have had union activities. The Chantemerle workers’ asso-
ciation, by contrast, appeared clearly to have developed a cooperative
relationship with local employers. It was the first saver at the local
Caisse d’Epargne (Savings Bank), as soon as it was founded by the social
Christian businessman, Ernest Féray, in 1835 (Contrepois 1999).
Repression was not the only treatment that workers faced. During
the 1848 revolution, about three hundred Corbeil and Essonnes work-
ers blocked the Royal Road (today the National Road) to delay the
arrival of military troops in Paris. Some animosity broke out against
Stanislas Darblay, the paper making and Great Mills owner, with the
workers wanting to burn down his castle. But Ernest Feray, head of the
Chantemerle textile factory, supported by the local authorities, obtained
the removal of this local barricade after long informal collective bar-
gaining. Sixty five protesters were brought to court, of whom only
twenty five were found guilty and imprisoned for five months on aver-
age. At the same time, thirty kilometres from there, thousands of peo-
ple were killed during the repression of Paris barricades (Bianchi 1999:
252–253). In this context of alternation between sharp repression and
employers’ paternalism, the local mutual aid associations were prompt
to conform to the 1852 law and to choose honorary members amongst
local employers and notabilities.
Some twenty years later, the Commune de Paris encouraged workers
from everywhere to find innovative ways of protest. A first local occu-
pational organization appeared in the Corbeil-Essonnes area, at the hat-
making company. In 1876, the Essonnes hat-makers’ union collected
funds in order to send some of its members to the universal exhibition
in Philadelphia. In 1879, it participated in the creation of the Société
générale des ouvriers chapeliers de France, one of the first national occupa-
tional union federations. However, the 1884 law was followed in France
by a general decrease in unionization (Soubiran-Paillet and Pottier
1996). By 1885, the local hat-makers’ union had disappeared. And, in
1891, when requested by their Parisian colleagues, the Essonnes hat
makers refused to strike in order to obtain an increase in their wages
(which were very competitive with those in Paris (Vial 1941: 314)).
According to the data available in local and national archives, labour
conflicts were quite rare at the end of the nineteenth century and were
centred on wages and working conditions. Surprisingly, the minutes
of the local authority did not mention any union presence, and the
Regional Prefect’s annual reports indicated that most of conflicts did
not require administration intervention and ended with amicable agree-
ments. It was only at the turn of the twentieth century that a manifest
union presence developed. Several were founded in local companies
from 1899. But, like the hat makers, they were very fragile and some
disappeared rapidly.
The first reason for this fragility was the isolation experienced by
most. The CGT, created in 1895, was still weak and was not capable of
providing effective support for local initiatives. Out of the 21 unions
founded in the period between 1885 and 1910, only ten were affiliated
to it (suggesting the CGT and unions were stuck between a rock and a
hard place as the CGT would not get stronger without more affiliates,
and without being stronger more unions would not affiliate to it).
Another complementary factor explaining the fragility was the crisis
within the CGT following the Amiens Congress. In their study, Groux
and Mouriaux (1992: 50–55) suggested several reasons for the flatten-
ing out in the number of affiliations and the loss of activists – namely,
corruption of leaders charged with creating a comfort zone of reliance
on local state grants, tougher government anti-union repression, socio-
demographic changes linked to Taylorism and the growing ideological
pressure arising from the approaching World War One.
Local multi-occupational union structures were also in their infancy.
It was only in 1905 that seven occupational unions in Corbeil and
Essonnes formed a kind of local organization, the ‘union of Corbeil-
Essonnes trade unions’. Its statutes did not mention affiliation to the
CGT although some of the unions that created it were affiliated. In fact,
its aims were close to those of the CGT, being to ‘raise the moral and
economic level of the workers’ and ‘strengthen the ties of solidarity
and unity in a single block of all workers in order to fight against the
exploitation of workers and to arrive at freedom in work through the
socialization of the means of production for the exclusive benefit of
the producers of national wealth’ – in other words, the communist goal
‘from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs’.
This local union federation asserted its independence from the employ-
ers and local notables – its statutes insisted that it would rent an office
paid for by member subscriptions, and that it would not allow honorary
members. At the same time, however, in 1905 the local union requested
a grant from the Town Hall to build a labour hall or labour exchange
(Bourse du Travail). This request was the subject of failed negotiations
over many years.
For their part, in 1907 other local unions formed the Federation of
Independent Trade Groups and Trade Unions of the Corbeil District. This
local competitor union immediately affiliated to the National Federation
of the French Yellows (la Fédération nationale des jaunes de France), which
had been founded in 1902 by the former Guesdist1 activist and trade
unionist, Pierre Biétry. Initially, it grew very rapidly before disappearing
very quickly in 1910. Its ideology was based on the rejection of Marxism
and class struggle. The yellows attacked socialism and supported class
collaboration through profit sharing and advocated the purchase of
shares in their companies by the workers. Their principal objective was
‘the emancipation of human beings through property’ (Trempé in Willard
1993: 348). Nonetheless, the organization’s short existence indicated
that from the very beginning there were conservative and liberal visions
of what workers’ interests were and how to defend them (see also
Hyman 1996, 2001). These views were far from being marginal, since
the yellows represented around 25% of union members nationally, and
40% in the Corbeil-Essonnes area (Contrepois 2002). This current reap-
peared in other guises later on.
The influence of the reformist trend was also of note. Analysis of the
statutes of the twelve unions at the time shows that four of them (paper
makers, carriage makers, engineers and mechanics) explicitly sought to
gain the intervention of the public authorities to promote their inter-
ests. They wished to ‘take initiatives for fair reforms’ or ‘to pressure
public authorities to vote in laws’. Correspondence and reports confirm,
in addition, that there were frequent contacts with the local authori-
ties. Of course, most of these were constrained by the legal framework
requiring the unions not only to deposit their statutes with the Prefect,
but also at the Town Hall. Further, many of their activities were subject
to authorization: not just the right to demonstrate, but also the possi-
bility of meeting since they still did not have their own office and were
forced to request the hire of municipal rooms in order to meet. Beyond
these strictly formal contacts, another kind of exchange was also sought
by the unions, whether through requests for support for the activities
that they presented as being ‘public services’ (providing information to
workers, training and educating them, finding them work…) or through
the setting up of formal institutions. Thus, for example, the unions and
the municipal councils of Corbeil and of Essonnes formed their first alli-
ance to secure the location of an industrial tribunal at Corbeil, which
began to operate in 1902.
Focusing on conflict management, it becomes clear that union stat-
utes were trying to introduce a kind of ‘collective conflict discipline’ for
eight out of the twelve enacted rules concerned how members should
conduct conflicts, and the dominant theme was the search for concilia-
tion before any strike took place. Seven of the union rule books referred
to the necessity to attempt conciliation. The same rather peaceful tone
also characterises strikes. Few acts of worker violence were recorded
including the historically significant labour conflicts. This was the case,
for example, in the 1908 strike of workers in the Seine sand quarries,
some 15 kilometres from Corbeil-Essonnes. This strike, known as the
Draveil sand-workers’ strike, was particularly savagely put down by the
Clemenceau government, and then became one of the iconic events of
French union history. Two to three hundred strikers, some accompa-
nied by their wives and children, met in a café at Vigneux to wait for
the return of a delegation they had mandated to negotiate a wage rise.
The police used force to try to enter the meeting room. Pushed back by
the workers and the café owner, they then surrounded the building and
opened fire on the crowd through the windows. They killed two work-
ers and wounded several more. This bloody episode in French work-
ing class history even today fuels the collective imagination about the
revolutionary character of unions prior to 1914. However, the Draveil-
Vigneux sand-workers’ strike was basically an ordinary strike about
wages, and what gave it celebrity status was the shocking attitudes of
the police rather than the activities of the strikers, who limited them-
selves to exercising their rights within the limits of the law of the day.
Indeed, before 1914, union actions that can be characterised as radical
were quite rare. The revolutionary objectives flagged up by the CGT co-
existed, on the ground, with pragmatic strategies emphasizing concilia-
tion and negotiation. Despite their rejection of parliamentarianism and
the strong criticisms they made of the state, union activists agreed to
work with and request support from the local state authorities. A kind of
union pluralism can thus be observed, which leaves a significant place
for liberal and social Catholic currents of thought. Finally, overall, at
that time French unions were extremely fragile, with local unions often
able to survive for only a few years.
In his comparison of French and British syndicalism, Gallie (1983:
192–193) made a similar observation: ‘The CGT was in no sense commit-
ted to an insurrectionary programme for achieving socialism, and the
more extreme views of its leaders about parliamentary politics and the
role of violence were personal statements and did not constitute agreed
CGT doctrine. … Despite the centrality of the strike to revolutionary syn-
dicalist strategy, there was little distinctive about the French strike pat-
tern in this period that could be attributed to the influence of syndicalist
ideas. … Collective bargaining was certainly relatively rare in France at
the time, but this reflected the employers’ unwillingness to bargain and
had little to do with the character of union ideology. … The level of
violence in France was not distinctive.’ As Ancelovici (2011) points out,
such a picture makes it difficult to simply contrast a radical/revolutionary
past with a moderate/conservative present. The main characteristic of
the period before 1914 seems to reflect, more than anything else, the
difficult birth pangs of an independent union movement.
Phase 2: institutionalization
The place and significance of unions in society and the economy grew
considerably after World War One, partly because of union struggles
and partly because of government policy. A body of legal measures

was passed covering the freedom of association, collective bargaining,
employee representation and the way representation should be decided.
These provisions were ambiguous, providing both a support for union
action and a restrictive framework for it. Freedom of association was
increasingly seen as a collective right and not simply an individual one.
The 1884 legislation had recognized unions as voluntary organizations,
which workers were free to join or not join. One of the consequences of
this essentialist approach was that members could only act in their own
name. The Act of 12 March 1920 broadened the scope of intervention
of unions by recognizing their right to act to defend their occupational
interests. This development was accompanied by the creation of rules
covering collective agreements. During phase two, three Acts on col-
lective agreements were passed in 1919, 1936 and 1950. The two last
laws provided mechanisms for extending signed collective agreements
to all who worked within the same industry across the whole country
or, more widely still, to all workers. The areas over which collective
bargaining may take place, however, were confined to the employment
relationship and to union rights.
From 1936, the legal right for workers to be represented in the work-
place was introduced. Initially, this covered workplace representatives,
then works councils in 1945 and, finally, workplace union branches
in 1968. Despite the ambitious programme covering worker involve-
ment in strategic economic decisions drafted by the National Resistance
Council in 1944, these institutions remained effectively confined to
intervening on employment relations. The works councils were given
the management of social activities, but only limited scrutiny of cor-
porate management. In the nationalized large industries of the time,
however, the situation was a little different since their Administrative
Councils included employee administrators from this point on. At the
same time, the unions secured access to management in a number of
key organizations, primarily in the area of social welfare (social security),
and secured representation in many of the state consultative bodies (like
the Economic and Social Council).
Throughout this period, the union movement became more diverse.
The different existing currents prior to 1914 transformed themselves
into five main confederations: the CGT, the Confédération Française
Démocratique du Travail (CFDT), the Confédération Générale du Travail–
Force Ouvrière (CGT–FO), the Confédération Française des Travailleurs
Chrétiens (CFTC) and a managers’ union – the Confédération Générale des
Cadres (CGC). They were officially recognised through a 1966 decree.
Regardless of the size or their memberships, or even their ability to win

votes, these five confederations were officially entrusted with a number
of tasks, mainly related to the formulation and enforcement of labour
regulations, and to the management of social bodies. In particular
(and until quite recently), they had a monopoly in negotiations and
of workers’ representation at every level, including firm level, and of
candidacy in the first round of all workplace elections.
Such public recognition facilitated the growth and development of
federal and confederal trade union hierarchies. Moreover, it made possi-
ble the creation of a substantial network of elected and appointed repre-
sentatives within firms and public services, as well as within the public
bodies dealing with employment, labour, training, housing, social secu-
rity and contingency funds. This institutionalization of union action at
local, regional and national levels stood alongside the development of
industrial relations conflicts. Some, like the strikes of 1936 and 1968,
reached a national scale. Others resonated strongly in public opinion,
like the miners strikes of 1947 and 1948. In general, strikes were much
more frequent than before 1914. The Corbeil-Essonnes and Évry regional
archives clearly demonstrate this change of pace. Struggles that can be
described as ‘conflicts about power’ were, nonetheless, rare. Despite
a language strongly impregnated with the theme of class struggle, the
division of labour between employers managing a business and a work-
ing class having responsibility for producing the wealth seems to have
been fairly widely accepted. The two world wars certainly reinforced
this view, with the holy alliance against the enemy during World War
One, and then the national effort at reconstruction in the aftermath of
World War Two. A symptom of this situation was that all the conflicts
recorded in the Corbeil-Essonnes and Évry regional archives related
to the respect of union rights and various aspects of the employment
relationship, especially wages. And although these conflicts could start
suddenly, and take on massive proportions, they generally led to nego-
tiations and at least partial victories. They left the idea of a strong and
combative working class in the collective memory. But this strength was
relative. The daily repression of strikes and union actions remained in
force, even if it was less visible than it had been before 1914. Depriving
workers of work through firing or vetoes on hiring through to blacklists
established by the employers has replaced armed intervention quite
effectively.
An example is the Campanaud case concerning the Paris-Lyon-
Marseille (PLM) railway workers that arose in February 1920. Jean-
Baptiste Campanaud, a carpenter at the Villeneuve Saint-Georges depot
(some 15 kilometres from Corbeil) and head of trade propaganda, had

requested a two-day leave from the company management to attend a
meeting of the committee of the PLM joint-union that was taking place
in Dijon. This leave was refused, but Campanaud rejected this, arguing
that the company had promised to give him all the facilities available for
union representatives to do their work. He was then disciplined and given
a two-day layoff. This immediately triggered a strike of the 1,600 railway
workers at the depot. The strike spread quickly to the whole of the PLM
line and then turned into a general strike. At the centre of the demands
there was, of course, the requirement to respect union rights, but there
were also questions of the status of the railway workers and their wage
scales. The strike, with a break of several weeks, continued, ending in
failure and the dismissal of 18,000 workers across the country.
Such sackings have had serious consequences upon the workers’ lives
(Contrepois 2010). For example, former miners went to court to try and
re-establish their rights after having been fired in the 1947 coal strikes
when around a hundred strikers were sentenced by the Criminal Court
for ‘interference with the freedom to work’, designated as ‘bad French
[citizens]’ and not reinstated to their jobs after the strike. Deprived of
their social rights such as housing allowances, heating and the like, they
were also banned from working both in their profession and in the
firms in their region. Many sank into extreme poverty, sometimes fail-
ing to extricate themselves until several years later. Even their chil-
dren were subject to political discrimination in their own working and
professional lives.
The outcomes of the aforementioned railway workers’ and miners’
strikes, and the victimization of union members and the limitation of
the scope for bargaining on wages limited by law indicate, inter alia, that
although unions became recognized institutions during this phase, there
were subordinate institutions. With the exception of the nationalized
firms, the union movement remained largely excluded from strategic
decision-making. This subordination did not create any major upsets as
long as economic growth allowed a sufficient majority of the population
to have secure employment which permitted rising living standards. This
became, however, problematic with the onset of a huge economic crisis
during the 1970s and, especially, with its sharpening after the 1980s.
Phase 3: late 1960s to the present
The year 1968 put back on the agenda an issue that had to a large extent
disappeared during the debates on the law setting up works councils in
1945: namely, that of the ability of workers to intervene in the economy

and in society (on economic issues). The late 1960s were marked by
the emergence of workers’ demands to share in management and for
workers’ control (Contrepois, 2001: 272–273). Mallet (1969: 98–99)
explained this development as a result of the stabilization of the work-
ing class through the years of economic expansion, whereby this cre-
ated expectations for job security and workers began to be concerned
with the economic situation of the firms and industries in which they
were employed. New mobilizations posed the issue of the kind of
structural reforms that would be needed to guarantee the stability of
the whole economy.
One of the most symbolic struggles from the start of this period was
that of the Lip clock-makers at Besançon. On 12 June 1973, during a
special meeting of the works council, the management announced its
intention to file for bankruptcy. The workers then seized the briefcase of
one of the administrators present, and discovered that the management
expected 480 redundancies and planned to dispose of its engineering
and associated activities leaving only the watch-making. The workers
then held the Director overnight to get more information. Searching
in the offices, they also learned that the management was proposing to
freeze all wages. The workers then immediately occupied the factory.
During the night the stock of 25,000 watches was taken from the fac-
tory and hidden by the activists. A general meeting of the workers on
18 June 1973 decided to restart production under workers’ control in
order to ensure ‘a living wage’. The Lip struggle was then popularised
with the slogan: ‘It’s possible: we make, we sell, we pay ourselves.’ On
2 August 1973, the industrial development minister appointed a medi-
ator, and on 15 August, the police then seized the factory and forced
the occupying workers out. They remained there until February 1974.
On hearing this news several other workplaces in Besançon and in the
region went on strike. Union members intervened to prevent a violent
clash between workers and the police, but despite this some 30 workers
were arrested during the week of protests that followed. Clandestine
production then restarted. On 29 September 1973, a huge national
march took place at Besançon. Despite pouring rain around 100,000
people took part in what became known as ‘the 100,000 march’ and
several employers started to help in exploring solutions and ended by
finding someone ready to take the business over. On 29 January 1974,
the Lip delegation signed the Dole Agreements. The European Watch
Company resumed watch-making at Lip and 850 workers were re-hired.
The strike then ended.2
Many other French strikes also challenged employers’ decisions over

their industrial strategies and aimed to save jobs (Lojkine 1996). In the
Corbeil-Essonnes–Évry region, the unions of the nationalized company
which built aircraft engines, Snecma, reacted to a major redundancy
plan in 1970 with a tremendous struggle to get the firm to diversify
production by entering the civil aviation engine market. A first step
into this market had already been taken through an agreement with
Rolls Royce, and by which Snecma had been involved in producing
engines for Concorde. But the unions demanded a more systematic reo-
rientation, insisting that the company begin manufacture of engines for
aircraft built for mass passenger transportation. It was already known
at the time that passenger transport numbers were expected to grow
considerably and that Snecma could put itself into the ranks of the
major engine producers to take advantage of this development. The
workers’ campaign led to a reorientation of production, so while 100%
of its engines were for the military market at the start of the 1970s,
by the 1990s 75% were for the civilian market. This campaign made a
deep impact upon the workers’ strategic demands and still today is a
point of reference in developing union proposals within the aerospace
industry.
This atmosphere of challenge to the conventional foundations of eco-
nomic power favoured the 1981 election of a left-of-centre government
within which there was a Socialist Party majority. A new wave of nation-
alizations put the main financial, banking and insurance companies
under state control. The Auroux laws, implemented from 1982, intro-
duced new rights for workers, particularly in terms of intervention in
fields that had until then been reserved for employer decision-making.
Works councils became designated recipients of a wide set of economic
and employment data and had to be consulted about any restructuring
proposals. Health-and-safety and working-conditions committees had
to be systematically consulted on any proposed reorganization of work
and were given the power to veto it. These changes took place alongside
the development of company bargaining politics. As Groux (2010: 2)
observed:
Collective bargaining developed considerably after the 1970s, first

at national level, then at firm level. French trade unionism can no
longer be reduced to postures of protest. The CGT was involved in
this as the other major unions. It still often refuses to sign agree-
ments at national or industry sector levels. But at the firm level, and
now for very many years, its rate of signing company agreements is
in second place, just behind the CFDT, and considerably higher than
the FO, the CFTC or the CGC. In 2007 the CGT approved nearly 55%
of the 20,170 agreements arrived at that year (CFDT: 61%, FO: 43.5%,
CFE-CGC: 38%, CFTC: 32%). The bargaining practices of French
unions are thus deeply embedded and often contrast with the image
they are given by the media and by activist speeches.
The sharpening of the economic crisis as a result of globalization has,

however, considerably weakened the unions. Membership declined by
more than half, falling from a little over four million at the end of 1960s
(Lefranc 1969) to around two million by the end of the 1990s, a level
that has now stabilised. French union density has fallen to a quarter of
what it was, from 25% to 6.5% (Amossé and Pignoni 2006). Against this
background mobilizations became weaker and the outcomes of negotia-
tions less favourable to workers. The Ministry of Labour recorded 3m
days not worked per year due to strike action (journées individuelles non
travaillées pour fait de grève or ‘JINT’) in the private sector at the end of
the 1970s. But by the mid-1990s, this has fallen to between 250,000
and 500,000 JINT. During this period of time, the major union con-
federations moderated their basic goals. The CGT partially renounced
its commitment to ‘class struggle’ in order to join the European Trade
Union Confederation. It still believed in opposition and resistance to
capitalist globalization but no longer advocated socialism as the alterna-
tive. The CFDT abandoned its support for workers’ control (autogestion)
and adopted a more pragmatic attitude, accepting most of the propos-
als made by the employers and right-wing governments. It argued that
workers needed some strategic union responses to neo-liberalism in
France – through state action – in order to compete fairly and success-
fully as well as to protect workers from the worst effects of neo-liberal
globalization and ‘the race to the bottom’.
Despite this, industrial conflict did not disappear. Significant strike
waves against the dismantling of public services took place in 1986, 1995
and 2002. Moreover, the Ministry of Labour, which introduced a new
way of assessing conflict with the REPONSE survey, showed that conflict
increased at firm level (Contrepois 2011). The REPONSE survey focuses
upon ‘establishments involved in conflicts’. It lists the different forms
of collective action – strikes of two days or more, strikes of less than two
days, work stoppages, go-slows, demonstrations, petitions, absenteeism,
tensions and incidents. It makes it possible to record forms of protest at
the crossroads between collective and individual actions, such as refus-
ing to work overtime and disputes filed with the labour courts.
Examining the content and conduct of strikes, security of employ-

ment has become one of the major stimulants to taking action, whereby
the economic rationale behind restructuring and plant closure plans
has increasingly been challenged, with the employees accusing the
employers of prioritizing a purely financial logic to the detriment of
the health and economic viability of the firm. The social contract that
implicitly bound the social actors, unions and employers together to
service economic growth during the post-war boom has broken down.
Workers are now quick to denounce ‘stockmarket-driven redundancies’,
thus, attacking and stigmatising the immorality and irresponsibility of
the new employers. One of the most symbolic conflicts over these issues
was that of LU Danone, and of which one biscuit manufacturing fac-
tory is in the Corbeil-Esssonnes–Évry area at Ris-Orangis. On 10 January
2001, its employees learned in the press that Danone was going to close
11 biscuit factories in Europe and 7 in France, with the loss of 3,000
jobs in Europe and 1,700 in France. The reason given, the lower levels
of profitability in the biscuit sector, created a scandal well beyond the
factory walls. Profitability was effectively at 7.9%. The Danone workers
immediately went on strike, with very wide support. On 14 February,
the first call for a boycott of Danone products was launched in the press.
It was very successful but, despite this, the factories were closed and
many workers who could not be reclassified were laid off. Today, this
struggle is one of the most often quoted, since it is considered particu-
larly representative of the defensive strikes that have characterised the
last two decades. As well as the massive job losses that contributed to
the impoverishment of a growing part of the population, the workers
denounced the nonsense they saw in dismantling successful and profit-
able businesses. They railed against the immiseration and desertification
of the regions they lived in and against the fundamentals of the new
division of labour which resulted – through relocation – in the concen-
tration of productive activities in regions with lower labour costs.
In challenging employers’ power, these conflicts are thus taking on
a political dimension, particularly where workers mobilize and they
engage also in intense institutional and legal actions. All means of
delaying the implementation of redundancies were used by employees’
institutional representatives, as were steps before the courts and the
galvanizing of support from local authorities. Actions in public spaces
were also used to bring the issue to public and press attention. In
these ways, workers were trying to secure the postponement of these
decisions by their employers and the operationalising of alternative
solutions laid down by state officials. They are claiming their share of
ownership, as were the workers of the Ormoy Independent Transport

Company (the STA, Société de Transport Autonome, next to Corbeil-
Essonnes) who were on strike when this chapter was being written. In
front of the bus depot gates, they hung up banners saying: ‘No to the
sale of the STA’ and ‘This place is ours!’
In a context where the real decision-makers are becoming increas-
ingly inaccessible, these struggles are rarely successful and usually at
best lead to improved terms for redundant workers. It is the violence
and brutality of the social situation which stimulates the radicalization
of several of the conflicts, which at their outset were quite ordinary. The
example of Molex is a case in point, for when the workers realised that
their company management did not respect court decisions, they took
their actions beyond the framework of the law (Contrepois 2010, 2011).
It seems that the propensity to radicalization is especially strong where
the firms concerned are located in economically distressed areas where
workers have little chance of finding other work.
Conclusion
The historical perspective deployed in this chapter suggests that con-

temporary radical conflicts do not have precedents dating far back
in French labour history. First, the actors are in completely different
situations from those occupied by their forebears. Thus, before 1914
workers saw their actions easily repressed under a highly restrictive legal
framework, and those of the decades from the 1920s to the 1970s were
being increasingly drawn in – in a definitely conflictual way – to the
protection of the French nation, to the efforts of reconstruction and to
the benefits of growth. Employees from the 1970s up to the present, in
contrast, have largely become the victims of successive economic crises
and of the spread of neo-liberal policies. If their organizations benefit-
ted from a stronger institutional legitimacy than they did in the past,
this remains limited and gives them few opportunities to effectively
express their views on economic developments. Thus, Ancelovici (2011)
was right on this point – it really is a lack of power that is behind the
radicalization of some of the conflicts that are woven around issues
linked to the financialization of the economy and the dismantling of
French manufacturing. These conflicts combine forms of direct action
with other forms of action, using employee institutions, the courts and
the media. Their violence and duration reflect the extent of the exclu-
sion experienced by the workers who have devoted a period of their
lives to the firms of which they feel, as a result, to be partial owners – in
least in a morale sense. This radicalization is symptomatic of the evolu-

tion of capital–labour relations. While the captains of industry of the
past were respected and recognized for their involvement in the success
of their companies, today’s senior managers and directors are described
in the union press and popular leaflets as unscrupulous types who deny
their responsibilities to their workers and who do not respect the law.
This image has become increasingly sharp over the last twenty years.
It legitimizes the incursion by workers and their organizations into
areas that previously they rarely entered: those of industrial strategy,
economic development and management.
Notes
1. Jules Basile, alias Guesde, was one of the founders of the French Workers’
Party (Parti Ouvrier Français, POF) in 1880. He refused all compromises with
capitalist governments and opposed the reformism policy of other parties and
groups.
2. The workers engaged in a further lengthy occupation and work-in in 1976 –
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIP_(company)
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10
Violent Industrial Protest in
Indonesia: Cultural Phenomenon
or Legacy of an Authoritarian Past?
Michele Ford
Introduction
Indonesia has a long history of violent industrial conflict involving riot-

ing and wide-scale destruction of property, in addition – and sometimes
as an alternative – to more orthodox strike actions. Violent actions
taken by wage labourers on the plantations as a form of protest against
their employers were recorded in the archipelago in the nineteenth
century (Stoler 1985, 1995). Episodes of violent industrial protest con-
tinued through the twentieth century, but were particularly common
in industrial areas in the late 1980s and 1990s, at a time when inde-
pendent labour organizing was forbidden under the punitive labour
relations regime implemented by Suharto’s authoritarian New Order
(1967–1998). Despite dramatic changes to the industrial relations system,
including significant improvements in collective bargaining structures
and in workers’ access to the freedom to organize, industrial violence
continues to have a place in the repertoires of action of waged labour
in contemporary Indonesia.
Many Indonesian authority figures, and some anthropologists, have
described episodes of sudden and unexpected violent protest in cultural
terms, drawing on concepts such as to run amok (mengamuk) and spirit
possession (kesurupan). But, as the discussion that follows shows, while
cultural (and historical) patterns may have a role in determining the
contours of contemporary incidences of violent industrial protest, they
clearly have roots in economic structure and the disjunctures between
the rhetoric and practice of industrial relations. In the first part of the
chapter, the cultural and structural arguments about violent industrial
protest in Indonesia are mapped out with reference to major incidents
of industrial violence in the 1980s and 1990s. In the second part, the
171
172 Violent Industrial Protest in Indonesia
chapter provides a detailed description of two very different large-scale

incidents of industrial violence in the Batam free trade zone, the first
apparently a culturally motivated protest, the second clearly linked to
an industrial dispute over the wage determination process, before going
on to demonstrate that these incidents actually have a great deal in
common. The chapter concludes by arguing that, despite dramatic
changes in the industrial relations landscape since the fall of Suharto’s
New Order regime in 1998, violent protests are likely to continue to
occur as long as more ‘modern’ alternatives (like lawful strikes and col-
lective bargaining) are perceived to be ineffective.1
Cultural and structural explanations of violent industrial

protest in Indonesia
The question of collective violence, both communal and economic,

has long fascinated Indonesians and scholars of Indonesia, not least
because of the apparent incongruity of sudden outbursts of violent
protest in cultures – most notably that of the majority Javanese – that
place a high value on harmony and restraint in the expression of emo-
tion. Some observers have found recourse in cultural explanations of
this phenomenon.2 According to Prabowo Subianto, the son-in-law of
President Suharto and one-time commander of Indonesia’s controver-
sial Special Forces: ‘Indonesians can very quickly turn to violence. The
word “amok” comes from the lingua franca of this archipelago. This is
something that we are aware of, something we do not like, and some-
thing that we would like to address, to control and to manage’ (cited in
Collins 2002: 582). Prabowo was speaking at a time of great violence,
much of it communal. Suharto’s New Order – which had seized power
ostensibly to foil a coup attempt by communists during which six gen-
erals were murdered and, in retaliation for those murders, massacred
hundreds of thousands of leftists (Cribb 1990, Kammen and McGregor
2012; Roosa 2006) – had itself fallen amid violent protest in the wake
of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997–1998. In the early months of the
post-Suharto period, anti-Chinese violence rocked the Indonesian capi-
tal, Jakarta, as well as a number of other major cities. Several regions
across the country subsequently fell victim to widespread inter-ethnic
or inter-religious conflict, and the iron fist of state and military control
over rent-seeking from businesses was replaced by privatized rackets run
by preman (gangsters).3
Research suggests that communal conflict was responsible for the
greatest number of deaths as a result of collective violence, not just in the
Michele Ford 173
Table 10.1 Collective violence in fourteen Indonesian provinces, 1990–2003
Category Incidents Percentage Deaths Percentage
Ethno-communal 599 16.6 9,612 89.3

State-community 423 11.7 105 1.0
Economic 444 12.3 78 0.7
Other 2,142 59.4 963 9.0
Total 3,608 100.00 10,758 100.00
Source: Varshney et al. (2008: 379).
immediate aftermath of regime change but over a much longer period

of time. However, communal conflict accounted for little over one sixth
of the 3,608 incidents of collective violence identified by Varshney et al.
(2008) in Indonesia’s fourteen most violence-affected provinces over
the fourteen years between 1990 and 2003. As Table 10.1 shows, the
category ‘economic collective violence’, accounted for nearly as many
incidents, although a much smaller percentage of deaths. While this
category is not limited to industrial incidents, industrial violence is
clearly an important element within it. Significantly, a vast majority
(362 out of a total 444) of the incidents of economic violence identified
by Varshney and his colleagues occurred in Java, the most populous –
but also the most industrialized – of Indonesia’s islands, where they
accounted for 15.6% of all incidents of collective violence between 1990
and 2003.
Many incidences of industrial violence are spontaneous. However,
in a detailed study of labour strikes in the 1980s and 1990s, Kammen
(1997) identified a significant number of instances in which workers
threatened to use, or escalate, violence during an industrial dispute –
something which, he argues, was far more common than the actual
use of violence.4 Similarly, Tjandraningsih (1995: 54) described cases in
which women garment workers expressed displeasure with their super-
visors not only by failing to follow orders, but with abusive language
and anonymous letters threatening bodily harm. Kammen’s analysis
indicated most occurrences of industrial violence involved symbolic
acts rather than serious attacks on people or property.5 When personal
attacks did occur, they were most likely to take place when workers had
been taunted by a manager or a member of the security forces (Kammen
1997: 334).6
In explaining these attacks, it was not uncommon – as Prabowo’s mus-
ings attest – for journalists, employers, government officials and military
officers to draw upon cultural explanations for outbursts of violence.
Kammen (1997: 255–257, 319) documents the use of a number of such

cultural constructs within Indonesian authorities’ explanations for the
strike wave of the 1980s and 1990s. Among these were a 1989 case where
workers at a South Korean ceramic toy factory were reported as having
‘run amok’ (mengamuk); a 1992 case when a local district military com-
mander in Tangerang criticized the strikers for having a ‘floating men-
tality’ (mental ngambang) because they had not yet fully transitioned
from an agricultural to an industrial mode of production; and a labour
department official in East Java who described a series of strikes in 1991
as a mass outbreak of latah, a condition common among older women,
in which individuals experience sudden, uncontrollable seizures,
repeating foul words as if in a trance.
These assertions echo culturalist explanations employed by some
scholarly observers to help explain elements of the Indonesian indus-
trial relations system (Hess 1997) or specific aspects of the waged labour
relationship, notably hysterical outbursts on the part of first-generation
female industrial workers in the Malay world. Perhaps most famously,
Ong (1987: 7–8, 220) claimed that the mass spirit possessions (kesurupan)
that occurred in factories in neighbouring Malaysia were a form of
resistance to the social dislocation caused by the women’s experiences
of capitalist production:
Spirit possession episodes, in which women become violent and scream

abuses, are to be deciphered not so much as a noncapitalist critique of
abstract exchange values … but as a protest against the loss of autonomy/
humanity at work … Spirit attacks were indirect retaliations against coercion
and demands for justice in personal terms within the industrial milieu.7
A second kind of culturalist argument, which sits beside accounts of

these psycho-social responses to the proletarian condition – but is per-
haps more legible to scholars of Western labour history – is the claim
that Indonesian workers are particularly easily manipulated by ‘third
parties’ (pihak ketiga). Invocations of the threat of Communism were
used by government and military officials throughout the New Order
period to justify tight control over the industrial relations system and
to discourage independent labour activism.8 However, they became
most vociferous immediately after incidents of large-scale or violent
industrial action initiated by groups within the ‘alternative’ labour
movement. The largest incident of collective industrial violence in
contemporary Indonesia was the Medan riots of April 1994. Following
strikes involving tens of thousands of workers, around 20,000 workers
Michele Ford 175
from 23 factories marched on the Provincial Legislative Council on

13 April to demand a resolution to the matters in dispute. Joined by
workers from 19 other factories on the following day, they marched
to the office of the Governor while a second group of workers waited
to hear a promised address by the Minister for Manpower and the
Governor. When the Governor did not materialize, workers began attack-
ing passing cars and motorcycles and ransacking shops (Hess 1997).
The protest quickly descended into ten days of wide-scale destruction
and anti-Chinese violence, after which Muchtar Pakpahan, the head
of the Indonesian Prosperous Labour Union (Serikat Buruh Sejahtera
Indonesia, SBSI) – one of three ‘alternative’ (unregistered) trade unions
that emerged in the 1990s – was arrested on charges of inciting the
violence and subsequently imprisoned, serving a number of months of
his sentence before being released in response to intense pressure from
the US and elsewhere.
References to the role of ‘outside’ labour activists dominated official
statements in the wake of the Medan riots.9 In many of these, labour
activists were likened to communists or drew parallels between the
destruction and unrest in Medan and methods used by the Indonesian
Communist Party. The Minister for Defence and Security, General Edi
Sudrajat, commented: ‘Many people were brought together at the
same time in the same place, then filled with demands for wage rises,
then mobilized. That’s the Indonesian Communist Party way’ (Kompas
29 April 1994). Major-General Pranowo was reported to have said that
the Medan riots proved the workers’ movement to be no longer ‘pure’
because ‘outside forces’ with ‘certain purposes and objectives’ had been
involved (Republika 19 April 1994). According to General Feisal Tanjung:
‘The people behind that demonstration were born into ex-Communist
Party families’ (Barata Week 1 May 1994). These accusations were used
to shift attention from the initial demands of the strikers and in justifi-
cation for the decisive action taken against unionists and labour NGO
activists in the wake of the riots.
Another massive and violent strike, which prompted similar assertions
about the involvement of ‘outsiders’, occurred in the following year in
West Java, when between 7,000 and 12,000 workers employed at Great
River Industries garment manufacturer went on strike to demand the
minimum wage. When the workers marched on the local parliament
building, they were met by riot police, who failed to stop them from
forcing their way into the grounds of the parliament and ultimately
into the building. Several protesters were badly injured and a number
arrested, including Dita Sari, a former student activist and the leader
of the Indonesian Centre for Labour Struggle (Pusat Perjuangan Buruh

Indonesia, PPBI). Like Pakpahan before her, Sari was subsequently
charged with inciting the violence.
It was clear that PPBI, the most radical of the three ‘alternative’ unions
of the New Order period, played a pivotal role in the protest against
Great River Industries and in another round of strikes in Surabaya
in the following year, during which dozens of workers were injured.
However, officials again emphasized the role of outsiders in such a way
as to discredit the strikers and to shift attention from their demands.
Significantly, in this case, public statements by officials also empha-
sized the inability of workers to resist incitement by ‘non-workers’
who came from ‘outside the factory environment’. For example, the
then Commander of East Java’s Brawijaya Division, Major-General
Imam Utomo, condemned the outsiders, saying: ‘Thousands of workers
who just want to do their work properly were forced to demonstrate
or strike.’ He went on to announce that the armed forces were planning
to hold ‘dialogues’ with the workers to spread the message that workers
should resist being ‘influenced by talk from outside’ (Surya 2 June 1996).
President Suharto himself encouraged workers to focus on ‘national
consolidation’ so that they would not be easily influenced by incitement
from ‘third parties’ who ‘claimed to act for workers’ (Surya 2 June 1996).
More generally, during the New Order period, non-worker activists
were regularly accused of having menghasut (incited), memancing (enticed),
menggerakkan (mobilized), mempengaruhi (influenced), menyusupi (infil-
trated) and melakukan intimidasi (intimidated) workers in order to make
them go on strike. They had done this, officials argued, because they
saw workers as alat politik (political tools) or komoditi politik (political
commodities) to further their own political interests. In their attempts
to do so, these outsiders were accused of having memakai, menggunakan,
memperalat and memanfaatkan (used), mengeksploitasi (exploited), mema-
nipulasikan (manipulated) or menunggangi (ridden) the workers they
claimed to be helping to act collectively in response to exploitation by
their employers or oppression by the state.
These accusations were used to justify the use of what was known as
the ‘security approach’ to industrial relations (Hadiz 1997, Ford 1999).
In its role as the guardian of national stability and industrial peace,
the government encouraged bureaucrats, along with functionaries
from the New Order’s political vehicle, Golkar, and decommissioned
military personnel to ‘assist’ in the development of industrial relations
procedures and institutions. Military intervention reached unparalleled
heights in the early- to mid-1980s when Admiral Sudomo was head
Michele Ford 177
of the Command for the Restoration of Security and Public Order

and later Minister for Manpower. Evidence collected during this period
suggested it was common for employers to go to the military for a quick-
fix solution rather than persevering with the official system (INDOC
1983, 1984, 1985). Although subsequent Ministers for Manpower
attempted to dispel the hard-line image of military involvement in
industrial relations, Kammen’s (1997: 191) analysis showed that up to
68% of strikes were subject to military intervention in some locations
in the early 1990s.10
The kinds of cultural explanations used to explain worker unrest in
this pivotal period have been countered by two overlapping but distinct
structural explanations of the patterns of industrial relations in the
New Order. The first, exemplified by the work of Hadiz (1997), calls on
neo-Marxist theories about the emergence of working-class conscious-
ness as a consequence of the process of proletarianization that took
place within Indonesia’s increasing commitment to a neoliberal model
of export-oriented industrialization. The second, exemplified by the
work of Kammen (1997), points to the failure of Indonesia’s industrial
relations mechanisms to accommodate (or contain) workers’ demands.
Reflecting on the wave of strikes in the 1990s, Kammen (1997: 30)
noted the New Order’s decision to maintain ‘older political appara-
tuses (the structures established at the beginning of the New Order)’ in
new export-oriented industries – a decision that ‘created a disjunction
between the economic and the political’, the costs of which were ‘passed
on to and borne by labor’. Reflecting more specifically on the relatively
high incidence of industrial violence in the mid to late 1980s, Kammen
(1997: 316) argued large-scale violence occurred ‘[i]n the absence of for-
mal procedures through which to express and forward grievances and
without the legal recognition of the right to strike’, citing as evidence
for this thesis the fact that that the use of violence during industrial
strikes steadily declined after the right to strike was reinstated in August
1990 (Kammen 1997: 318–326).11
As Kammen suggested, industrial relations practice during the New
Order was characterized by deep contradictions. The regime made
extensive use of informal policies, as well as of rules and regulations
issued from the ministerial level down, to circumvent pro-worker legis-
lation. In 1993, for example, the Director-General of Industrial Relations
and Labour Standards issued a controversial regulation which gave
employers, in consultation with the Department, the right to retrench
striking workers despite the fact that it contravened legal provisions on
retrenchment and dispute resolution. Similarly, although the industrial
relations system included provisions for collective labour agreements

and bipartite cooperative bodies, as well as a range of tripartite institu-
tions, these mechanisms had little relevance in the day-to-day conduct
of labour relations (Ford 2000).
Along with restrictions on freedom of association, these mechanisms
were the target for the massive restructuring of the industrial rela-
tions system that took place after Suharto’s resignation in May 1998.
One of the very first things his successor Habibie did was to ratify ILO
Convention No. 87 on the Freedom of Association and Protection of
the Right to Organize, in doing so effectively abandoning the New
Order’s rhetorical and policy commitments to a single union. This was
followed by a suite of changes to the legal architecture of the industrial
relations system, which saw the ratification of four more ILO conven-
tions and the passage of three major new laws between 1999 and
2004.12 The first of the laws to be passed was Law No. 21/2000 on Trade
Unions, under which as few as ten workers could form a union and
multiple unions were permitted to operate in a single workplace. The
provisions of the law were much less prescriptive than earlier regula-
tions, permitting workers to organize not only on a sectoral basis but
also according to occupation or on any other basis. The second ele-
ment of the package was Manpower Law No. 13/2003, which covered
a wide range of issues, including industrial relations but also labour
force planning, vocational training, the regulation of foreigners work-
ing in Indonesia and wage-setting. While maintaining a seven-day noti-
fication clause and outlawing strikes before negotiation processes were
exhausted, Law No. 13/2003 embodied a relatively strongly worded
commitment to the right to strike.
Law No.13/2003 also foreshadowed changes in dispute-resolution
procedures under Law No. 2/2004 on Industrial Disputes Settlement,
which abolished the central and regional dispute-resolution commit-
tees that had sat at the centre of the New Order’s tripartite dispute-
resolution process. Under the 2004 law, there is a renewed emphasis
on bipartite negotiations at the firm level. If bipartite negotiations fail,
disputing parties are offered arbitration or conciliation services which,
if refused, trigger a mechanism through which the dispute is taken to
formal mediation. If all of these processes fail, either party has the right
to take the dispute to the newly convened industrial court, presided
over by a local magistrate and two ad hoc judges, one nominated by
employers and the other nominated by the trade unions.13
The other major change that took place in Indonesia’s industrial rela-
tions system in the post-Suharto period was the devolution of industrial
Michele Ford 179
relations functions, along with a whole range of other responsibilities,

to the local level. Under Law No. 22/1999 on Regional Autonomy, mini-
mum wage determination and a range of other industrial relations func-
tions became the responsibility of local parliaments and provincial, city
or district administrations. These changes have moved the locus of the
majority of industrial relations processes from the national to local level,
greatly empowering local union branches, while at the same time pre-
senting them with new challenges in terms of the range and complexity
of tasks demanded of them. In addition, decentralization has increased
the importance of local government agencies, alongside employers,
not only as interlocutors, but also as targets of localized industrial pro-
test. The growing importance of the local scale has been enormously
significant in reshaping the landscape of industrial conflict from one
dominated by spontaneous factory-level events to one characterized
by broader regional campaigns, often targeted at least in part at local
bureaucrats and politicians, as evident in the protests described below.
Violent protest in Batam
The island of Batam, in Riau Islands Province, lies in the Straits of

Malacca to the north-east of Sumatra and directly south of Singapore.
Formerly a heavily forested, sparsely populated no-man’s-land, Batam
was transformed in the 1980s and 1990s into a bustling industrial
enclave. Although not the first attempt to establish economic coop-
eration between Singapore and Indonesia on Batam, the Indonesia–
Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle (IMS-GT) constituted the pivotal
advance in the island’s industrial development. An initiative of the
Singaporean government in response to the rising cost of local labour
and the movement of multi-nationals out of Singapore into more
cost-efficient manufacturing sites in other parts of Asia (Lee 1991), the
underpinning philosophy of the IMS-GT was one of economic comple-
mentarity, in which Singaporean capital and Indonesian and Malaysian
labour and land would be combined to facilitate cross-border regional
growth (Sparke et al. 2004). Under the agreement, the Indonesian gov-
ernment relaxed minimum capital investment requirements; allowed
100% foreign ownership, subject to the divestment of 5% to local
ownership after 5 years; and agreed to calculate duty payments on the
value of imported raw materials rather than on finished products made
in Batam (Peachey et al. 1998: 14).
Batam began to attract high levels of foreign investment under the
IMS-GT initiative, experiencing a fifteen-fold increase in annual private
investment in the five years up to 1993 (Peachey et al. 1998: 1).

Although the IMS-GT was marred by numerous setbacks – most notably,
the economic and political uncertainty following the Asian Financial
Crisis (1997–1998), which prompted many multi-national investors
to downscale the level of their investment – Batam continues to be
one of Indonesia’s most important centres of industrial production.14
The island is now home to 26 industrial parks, including the flag-
ship BatamIndo Industrial Park at Muka Kuning and the shipyards
at Tanjung Uncang. These industrial parks are host to 4,000 local and
multi-national firms, which exported an average of USD 5.73 billion
worth of products per annum from 2005 to 2009 (Badan Pengusahaan
Batam 2011).
As a consequence of Batam’s industrial development, large numbers
of migrants have moved to the island from elsewhere in Indonesia seek-
ing work. In the early 1970s, Batam’s population was approximately
6,000, increasing to 105,820 by 1990, the year in which the IMS-GT was
formally established. By the end of 2004, it had reached 633,944 (Lyons
and Ford 2007). The 2010 census indicates that by that year the popu-
lation of Batam had risen to 944,285 (Badan Pusat Statistik Kepulauan
Riau 2012b). Of a total workforce of just under 449,000, some 186,000
are employed in manufacturing (Badan Pusat Statistik Kepulauan Riau
2012a) in a community that enjoys one of the highest percentages of
formal sector employment in Indonesia. In terms of the proletarianiza-
tion thesis, Batam is thus a prime site for the emergence of a local labour
movement, not only because so many workers are in formal sector
occupations but also because so many of them are new migrants, who
live in factory dormitories or in densely populated worker communities
close to the factories.
In the absence of the kind of close study conducted by Kammen in
the 1990s, is impossible to quantify the number of strikes that occur in
Batam – or anywhere else in Indonesia for that matter – much less the
percentage of them that have involved violence.15 However, along with
Bekasi and Tangerang in the Greater Jakarta area, it is clear that Batam is
a prominent site of industrial unrest, a significant proportion of which
has involved some level of violence. What follows are accounts of two
key incidences of industrial violence in recent years: the 2010 shipyard
riots and the 2011 minimum wage campaign.16
The 2010 shipyard riots

On 22 April 2010, thousands of shipyard workers ‘ran amok’ in the
Drydocks World Graha (DWG) complex in Tanjung Uncang Industrial
Michele Ford 181
Park. Drydock World Graha, which is run by PT Graha Trisakti Industri,

is one of three yards owned by Dubai-based investor, Drydocks World,
all of which are situated at Tanjung Uncang, which is located on the
north-western coast of Batam.17 The chaos was triggered when Ghesa
Prabaharan, a 27-year-old Indian expatriate working at DWG, told work-
ers that Indonesians were stupid. News of this statement quickly spread
through the 8,000-odd local workers employed in the shipyard and,
through them, to workers elsewhere in Batam, who took to the streets
shortly after, protesting in solidarity with the DWG workers. The pro-
testers tracked down the expatriate supervisor in the company complex,
in the process clashing with security guards. The spontaneous rally
became violent, and within a very short time the angry workers had
destroyed or burnt two offices and another building, damaging some
27 cars, including six that were totally burnt out. The demonstrators
subsequently gathered near the entrance gate and continued their pro-
test. Total losses were estimated at trillions of rupiah. There were no
deaths but a number of Indian expatriates and local workers were hos-
pitalized. Around 400 police officers rushed to the scene, where they
evacuated foreign employees and attempted to quell the riot. Other
expatriate workers fled to Singapore.
The incident sparked a flurry of activity. Prabaharan was appre-
hended and detained. The Chief Executive Officer of Drydocks World
South East Asia met with several local officials including the Deputy
Mayor, the Police Commander and the chair of the Batam Free Trade
Zone Authority. The Ministry for Manpower and Transmigration dis-
patched a negotiating team almost immediately, and within days of
the riot, the Indonesian Employers Association (Asosiasi Pengusaha
Indonesia, APINDO) had sent a letter to its 13,000 members stat-
ing that PT Drydocks World had been at fault because it had dis-
criminated against local workers and cautioning its members of the
potential risks of engaging in discriminatory practices. A local Indian
community leader made a public apology for the incident, as did
the Indian Consul General in Medan, both of whom worked closely
with local authorities to minimize the damage to community rela-
tions. Initial statements were made by a police spokesperson that
Prabaharan could face up to four years in jail. However, although
some, including members of the local parliament, agitated for an
extended criminal investigation, ultimately an out-of-court settlement
was reached.
This was certainly not the first time that expatriate managers had
come under fire. In the early 1990s, there was a spate of strikes protesting
against abusive or disrespectful actions by Taiwanese and South Korean

expatriates in the greater Jakarta area (Kammen 1997: 160).18 On one
occasion in Bekasi, a strike broke out after workers were repeatedly
beaten by their Korean manager, who had also – according to the
workers – forced them to work excessive overtime and ‘farted at them’
(an Indonesian expression describing the actions of someone who fails
to show respect). Similarly, although the DWG riots were the most
dramatic, they are not the only case of violent rioting in Batam in
response to a perceived personal slight. Another incident of industrial
violence involving shipyard workers occurred in September 2011 at PT
Nexus Engineering Indonesia, located on the other side of the island
in the Kabil industrial estate. The riot was triggered by a security guard
who beat a worker for wrongly parking his motorcycle. Hundreds of
subcontracting workers went on a rampage after the incident, severely
damaging the shipyard’s facilities.
Violence in the 2011 wage campaign

Another major incident of industrial violence occurred in Batam in
November 2011, this time over the annual determination of the local
minimum wage. On 23 November, electronics factories in the industrial
parks of Batam became ghost towns, with members of the major electron-
ics unions choosing not to turn up to work. While many simply stayed
away, around 30,000 workers gathered in a park and marched to the
office of the Batam Mayor in a protest organized by the Confederation
of All Indonesian Worker Unions (Konfederasi Serikat Pekerja Seluruh
Indonesia, KSPSI), the Federation of Indonesian Metalworkers Unions
(Federasi Serikat Pekerja Metal Indonesia, FSPMI) and the Confederation
of Indonesian Prosperous Labour Unions (Konfederasi Serikat Buruh
Sejahtera Indonesia, KSBSI). Many shops closed their doors, fearful of
violence. The march resulted in gridlock, leaving Batam City paralysed.
The protesters planned to meet Batam’s Mayor, Ahmad Dahlan, to com-
plain about the unrealistic level at which the cost of living index – the
tool used to determine the regional minimum wage – had been set for
2012. According to workers, it cost at least IDR 1.76 million (USD 185)
per month to live in the city. The proposed minimum wage was IDR
1.28 million (USD 135) per month, a figure just below the government-
calculated monthly cost of living of IDR 1.3 million (USD 137). Upon
arrival the protesters discovered that Dahlan had fled to Singapore to
avoid confrontation. The rally ended in chaos when the protesters
clashed with police and damaged a number of properties located around
Michele Ford 183
the Mayor’s office. One worker was shot by police attempting to contain
the riot.
Having failed to meet the Mayor the previous day, thousands of work-
ers again gathered at his office on 24 November. With backup from the
police unit of the civil service (Satpol PP), police officers attempted to
prevent the workers from forcing entry into the Mayor’s office. Tensions
rose, and the police and the protesters engaged in throwing stones at
one another. Warning shots were fired, and protesters set a Satpol PP
post alight. In an attempt to bring the temperature down, Vice Governor
Surya Respationo and Chief of Regional Police Raden Winarso met the
angry workers and arranged a meeting between worker representatives
and Mayor Dahlan. After a long, exhausting process of negotiations, the
Mayor agreed to send a letter to the Governor of Riau Islands Province
recommending that the minimum wage be set at the official cost of liv-
ing index figure of IDR 1.3 million. Thousands of disappointed workers
rejected the recommendation, demanding that the minimum wage be
set at the real cost of living. With the meeting in deadlock, the police
attempted to disperse the mass of protesters who were still occupying
the Mayor’s office. Clashes erupted again when security officers dam-
aged motorcycles belonging to some of the protesters, this time spread-
ing throughout the city. Police posts and public property were damaged
or destroyed and twelve people injured.
Some blamed the Mayor for not responding to the workers’ demands
while unions had threatened to strike several days earlier if their
demands were not met. The situation was exacerbated when the Mayor
fled to Singapore rather than facing the protesters on the first day of
the rally. According to Saiful Badri, the chair of KSPSI’s Batam branch,
if the Mayor had handled the case swiftly, the riot would not have
occurred. Others blamed APINDO. There has been a history of con-
flict over the wage-setting in Batam, but the unions and APINDO had
reached an agreement the previous year, which unions felt APINDO
had not honoured in the latest round of negotiations. Before the
protest, bipartite meetings had ended in deadlock on eight separate
occasions.
As in the case of the shipyard riots, the violence surrounding the 2011
minimum wage determination process was certainly not an isolated inci-
dent. Similar clashes are common in areas of industrial concentration
across Indonesia, and violence, albeit on a lesser scale, has occurred on
other occasions during the minimum wage negotiation period in Batam.
Where it differed from the 2010 shipyard riots was that, in contrast to
the earlier incident, which was sparked by a perceived personal slight,

the trigger for the 2011 riot lay clearly in an interests dispute involving
several unions, along with employers and local authorities – and, more
particularly, in a perception of bad faith on the part of both employers
and local authorities.
From cultural explanations to structural roots

On the surface, these two cases of industrial violence appear to have
stemmed from very different causes. On closer inspection, however,
it becomes clear they had very similar roots. Although a racial slur
was the trigger for 2010 shipyard protest, that slur was effectively the
straw that broke the camel’s back, coming after accumulated pressure
on local workers as a result of poor enforcement of labour regulations,
particularly as they pertain to the practice of outsourcing and almost
non-existent inspection regimes. According to the president of FSPMI,
the massive use of outsourcing workers was the real issue behind the
industrial unrest in April 2010. The union estimated that, at the time
of the riot, up to 97% of Drydocks World Graha workers were indirectly
employed on salaries of just IDR 900,000 (USD 95), with no health
insurance and no pension allocation. This type of employment is not
unique to DWG. All of the 60-odd shipyards in Batam employ the
bulk of their local workforce on a short-term contract basis through
subcontractors under far less favourable conditions than their perma-
nent local employees, who in turn earn much less than their expatriate
counterparts. Moreover, in the lead-up to the riot, one subcontractor
had failed to pay workers’ wages for a period of three months on the
grounds that the shipyards had not yet transferred the funds. When
workers demanded payment directly from the shipyards on the urging
of the subcontractor, they were told that they had to deal with the sub-
contracting firm because the shipyards had no direct responsibility for
the payment of their wages.
Another issue raised by workers was the question of paid overtime.
According to them, the vast majority of shipyard companies do not pay
for overtime in contravention with Ministerial Decision No. 102/2004
concerning Overtime and Overtime Wages, which stipulates that
time worked beyond regular working hours should be recompensed.
Moreover, workers complained that there were no written overtime
agreements between the company and its employees, as stipulated by
2003 Manpower Law. In addition, DWG and many other shipyards
discourage workers from establishing trade unions. Workers attempt-
ing to assert their collective rights are further confounded by the
Michele Ford 185
complex relationship between contract workers, their subcontracting

firm, and the shipyard itself. The Minister for Manpower later acknowl-
edged that outsourcing was, indeed, a factor in the 2010 shipyard riots
(Kompas 21 May 2010). However, more generally – as in the New Order
period – attempts were made by officials and military officers to shift
attention from structural issues. The National Police Chief General was
quoted as saying that the conflict was ‘purely internal’, and ‘merely
caused by insulting language’, a message reinforced by the Coordinating
Minister for Economic Affairs, Hatta Rajasa, who described the riot as an
‘internal incident’ and ‘not a problem caused by a regulation’ (Antara
News Service 23 April 2010). It appears, then, that cultural explanations
for violent industrial protest are alive and well in Indonesia.
Cultural proclivity, proletarian consciousness or

institutional problem?
If, as Kammen (1997) claims, violent industrial protest is a consequence

of the failure of industrial relations mechanisms to accommodate
changes in Indonesia’s industrial relations landscape and not a product
of Indonesians’ cultural proclivities, there are a number of reasons to
think that the incidence of industrial violence should have declined
rapidly, if not completely disappeared, in the post-Suharto period.
Not only has independent unionism been reinstated, but industrial
relations processes have been restructured to include a much greater
emphasis on collective bargaining and mechanisms for dispute resolu-
tion at the firm level, as well as more inclusive higher-level dispute-
resolution processes. Why, then, do large-scale incidents of industrial
violence, such as those described here, continue to occur? Are indus-
trial relations scholars too quick to dismiss the cultural explanations
advanced by Indonesian officials and some anthropologists? Or is the
persistence of violent industrial protest an example of entrenched rep-
ertoires of action (Boudreau 2004), where workers continue to engage
in established modes of practice because of their familiarity rather than
their effectiveness?
There is some element of truth in the culturalist explanations insofar
as they give insight into the ways in which the dynamics of particular
incidents unfold – although perhaps less as a form of ‘innate’ cultural
expression than in the sense of reflecting entrenched repertoires of
action, which have evolved not only as a result of social and political
constraints on freedom of expression during the New Order but also
more specifically within blue-collar formal-sector workplaces and worker
communities during and after that time. As the proletarianization thesis

suggests, these repertoires of action emerge (at least in part) from the
experience of industrial labour and the opportunities and challenges
that it presents. In the Batam case, this experience is heightened by a
very high level of foreign ownership – which, while in itself is often an
indicator of better industrial relations practice, in the Indonesian con-
text brings increasing complexity as a result of the expatriate presence,
which sharpens workers’ sense of injustice. At the same time, however,
there is little evidence – even in an industrial centre like Batam – that
workers identify primarily in class terms.
More important is the fact that spontaneous protest, including its
more violent manifestations, remains a key weapon in a context where
formal structures continue to fail to accommodate workers’ demands.
Despite dramatic changes in the industrial relations landscape since the
fall of the New Order – which have undoubtedly improved the mecha-
nisms through which workers’ interests are represented – Indonesia’s
industrial relations system remains riven with inconsistencies and ongo-
ing problems with implementation both within the workplace and at
higher levels. In such a situation, violent protests are likely to continue
so long as the formal industrial relations system is perceived by workers
to be unable to channel their demands.
Notes
1. The research on which this chapter is based is part of an Australian Research
Council Discovery Project entitled ‘The Re-emergence of Political Labour in
Indonesia’ (DP120100654).
2. For example, see Welsh (2008) for a detailed discussion of a non-communal
form of mob violence called keroyokan (ripping someone apart) and its cata-
lysts and Colombijn (2002) for an historical perspective on contemporary col-
lective violence.
3. It is important to note that some close empirical studies of violent conflicts
suggest that collective violence is not as widespread as it seems (Collins 2002;
Varshney et al. 2008).
4. In one case cited by Kammen (1997: 316), workers in Sidoarjo threatened to
use black magic on a Taiwanese personnel manager if she was not replaced.
5. For comparison, see Teitelbaum (2010: 694) for statistics on violent protest in
South Asia and Pun Ngai and Hulin Lu (2010) on the use of violence by sub-
contractors in post-socialist China.
6. As Saptari (2008: 7) noted there is a very limited literature on Indonesian
labour movement and labour protest in Indonesia. Indeed, Saptari’s account
of the 1999 strike at PT Mayora, a biscuit and confectionary company, is one
Michele Ford 187
of the few in-depth academic accounts of individual strikes available for the
post-New Order period. Another less detailed account of a post-New Order
strike is provided in Ford (2009: 1–3). Kammen (1997) describes a number of
strikes that occurred in the 1990s in depth. For a detailed account of strikes
in the late colonial period, see Ingleson (1981, 1986).
7. Ong’s account and similar arguments made about young factory workers
in Indonesia are just some of several reports of mass hysteria among young
female factory workers in the 1970s and 1980s (Smyth and Grijns 1997: 15).
For a very different account of young women’s acculturation to the indus-
trial workforce in Indonesia, see Warouw (2008).
8. The discussion that follows on the threat of outsiders draws heavily on Ford
(2009: 77–80). See also Ford (2010).
9. Accusations about other kinds of ‘outside influence’ were made in the
wake of the riots, with some observers claiming that the military had inter-
vened to exacerbate the protests and to shift their focus to the Chinese
community.
10. Kammen also identified some cases in this period in which military officers
supported striking workers. For a discussion of the use of community figures
to discipline workers, see Warouw (2006).
11. After this time, violent incidents were most common in large establish-
ments, most often in textiles, footwear and timber. Over half of all strikes in
the early 1990s occurred in the textile garment and footwear industries and
other forms of light manufacturing – a dramatic change from the situation
in the early 1980s, when strike intensity was highest in heavy industry, and
particularly in the metal and chemical industries (Kammen 1997: 148–40).
12. For a detailed discussion of the politics of the early stages of this reform, see
Caraway (2004).
13. These ad hoc judges serve a five-year term, are required to hold a Bachelor’s
Degree (in any field) and must have at least five years’ experience in the
field of industrial relations. The new industrial court system has seen a rapid
professionalisation of legal advocacy within the trade union movement,
with many union officials undertaking law degrees so that the unions are
not forced to rely on external representation.
14. In 2006, in an effort to re-invigorate the economies of the islands, Singapore
and Indonesia announced the creation of Special Economic Zones in
Batam, Bintan and Karimun (the BBK SEZ). The SEZ Framework Agreement
on Economic Cooperation outlines seven key areas that Indonesia and
Singapore will cooperate in to ensure that business, regulatory and labour
conditions in the islands are favourable to investors.
15. Some statistics are available on the website of the Ministry of Manpower and
Transmigration. However, they are wildly inaccurate. For example, in 2010,
the year in which the shipyard riots occurred, the statistics indicate that
there were no demonstrations or strikes in Kepulauan Riau Province.
16. The accounts of the two incidents provided here were compiled from inter-
views with trade unionists and newspaper reports.
17. The other two companies are are Drydock World Pertama and Drydock
World Nanindah (also known as PT. Nan Indah Mutiara Shipyard). See http://
www.drydocks.gov.ae
18. Interviews I conducted with workers in Bekasi and Tangerang in the late
1990s and early 2000s confirmed that there was indeed a hierarchy of prefer-
ence when it came to employers, with the Europeans on top, followed by the
Americans, the Japanese and the Singaporeans, with the South Koreans and
Taiwanese very much at the bottom. Trade unionists interviewed in Batam
in 2007 confirmed that a similar hierarchy exists in Batam.
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11
Conflicts at Work in Poland’s New
Capitalism: Worker Resistance in a
Flexible Work Regime
Adam Mrozowicki and Małgorzata Maciejewska
Introduction
This chapter explores the dynamics and emerging dimensions of conflicts

at work in one of the new capitalist economies of Central and Eastern
Europe, namely Poland. Critical labour studies in the first decade of
transformation have focused upon the weakness of organized labour as
the result of neo-liberal transformation and the legacies of communist
and postcommunist unionism (Crowley 2004, Ost 2005, Bohle and
Greskovits 2006). However, as demonstrated by a number of studies
(Hardy 2009, Hardy and Kozek 2011, Meardi 2000), the general asser-
tion of union passivity does not fully capture the reality of conflict at
work in the course of capitalist neo-liberal transformation. First, it is
based on the analysis of union-led, organized forms of worker resistance
(such as strikes and collective disputes) and underplays other forms
of conflict at work, including the various types of misbehaviour and
dissent in the workplace (Collinson and Ackroyd 2006). Second, the
assertion about the durability of cultural and structural factors imped-
ing worker resistance makes it difficult to explain the emergence of new
conflicts at work by the end of the 2000s. The latter involved the rapid
growth of strike levels in 2007–2008 and the development of a more
assertive labour unionism in the public sector and some multinational
companies (Hardy and Kozek 2011, Meardi 2007a).
Consequently, this chapter undertakes to document and explain the
sources and mechanisms of new conflicts at work in Poland in the sec-
ond decade of transformation. Following Gall and Hebdon (2008: 589),
conflict at work is understood as a ‘central, ever-present and ongoing
dynamic of contemporary work’, including both latent and manifest
forms, organized through unions or not. In accordance with the labour
191
192 Conflicts at Work in Poland’s New Capitalism
process theory, we believe conflict at work is central to all capitalist soci-

eties as it reflects the dialectic of managerial control and worker resist-
ance against it, which underlies capitalist–labour relations (Thompson
and Ackroyd 1995: 615). We also see the emergence of conflicts at work
as a part of broader political and economic transformations, which are
defined by increasing competitive pressures on nation states to seek
new sources of competitive advantage in the global capitalist economy.
Industrial disputes in Poland in the 1990s mostly focused upon the
consequences of restructuring and privatisation (Gardawski et al. 1999),
while the conflicts at the beginning of the 2000s concentrated upon
the issues of unionization of new multinational enterprises (Gardawski
2001, Meardi 2007b). In this chapter, it is argued that the re-emergence
of manifest labour conflicts in the late 2000s marks a new cycle of
worker resistance, which directly reflects the state-led policies aimed at
the flexibilisation of the labour market in the second decade of post-
socialist transformation.
The relationship between conflict at work and flexible employment
in Poland has seldom been addressed in extant studies. Research docu-
menting an increasing labour assertiveness in the late 2000s has focused
upon worker mobilization in the public sector and newly unionized
multinational companies, without paying much attention to the issue
of flexible work arrangements and their impacts (see Czarzasty 2010,
Krzywdzinski 2010, Hardy and Kozek 2011). Despite notable exceptions
(e.g. Hardy 2009), much less attention has been paid to conflicts at
work emerging at the intersection of state policies aimed at the increas-
ing labour market flexibility (especially temporal and contractual) and
the expansion of multinational enterprises making use of these new
opportunities. As a result, the research has rarely explored the mecha-
nisms of new conflicts at work in low-paid, labour-intensive, insecure,
non- and weakly unionized workplaces dominated by highly flexible
employment, including temporary agency workers and employees on
fixed-term contracts. Addressing this gap, this chapter is then divided
into two main parts, beginning by discussing the claim of ‘labour
quiescence’ in the 1990s to demonstrate the limitations of the concept
and to explore the sources of an increasing labour assertiveness in the
late 2000s. It then focuses upon available quantitative data to illustrate
the dynamics of conflicts at work and explore the expansion of flex-
ible labour arrangements in the 2000s. The second part of the chapter
presents a case study of the development of conflicts at work at Monitor,
an electronics factory located in Lower Silesia, in one of 14 Special
Economic Zones (SEZ). This demonstrates how the mechanisms, forms
and limits of worker resistance intersect with managerial practices at
Adam Mrozowicki and Małgorzata Maciejewska 193
work and state- and local authorities-led policies aimed at attracting

foreign direct investments to Poland. Moreover, it suggests that labour-
intensive, export-oriented factories in the SEZs’ business-friendly envi-
ronment can be considered as the laboratories of Poland’s new capitalism
in which fresh types of conflict emerge along with new forms of employ-
ment and work regimes.
Dynamics and sources of conflicts at work after 1989
One of the remarkable features of Poland’s new capitalism was a relative

quiescence of organized labour in the face of harsh neo-liberal economic
reforms after 1989. According to Ekiert and Kubik (2001: 184) between
1989 and 1993 ‘protest [in Poland] was more frequent and became a
more salient element of political transformations than in other Central
European countries’. However, the number of strikes decreased thereaf-
ter and remained relatively low in the years 1994–2007, except for the
year 1999, when higher number of strikes reflected the public sector
workers’ protests against the government reforms aimed at marketisa-
tion and liberalization of public services, and the years 2007 and 2008
(see Table 11.1). Thereafter, the level fell back considerably but not to
the level of the early 2000s.
Although strike statistics do not fully capture the dynamics of con-
flict at work (Collinson and Ackroyd 2006, Gall and Hedbon 2008), the
decline in the number of strikes in the years 1993–2007 does reflect
important developments in Polish industrial relations. Accounting for
the relative social peace during economic restructuring, existing studies
have referred to the strategies of unions (Crowley 2004, Ost 2005) and
the properties of changing structural, institutional and organizational
contexts (Bohle and Greskovits 2006). Structuralist explanations have
focused upon the demobilizing impacts of privatisation, unemployment
growth, the decline of socialist heavy industries and the relocation of
low-wage, labour-intensive light industry to Eastern Europe in the first
phase of economic transformation (Bohle and Greskovits 2006). The
proponents of the culturalist (‘ideational’) approaches emphasized the
limited traditions of unionism independent of state and employers,
support granted by former anti-communist unions to market reforms
(Ost 2005), and the expansion of market and individualistic ideologies
and pragmatic life strategies among workers themselves (Mrozowicki
and Van Hootegem 2008). New partnership discourses and practices
promoted after 1989 in Poland have also impacted. The idea of maintain-
ing ‘social peace’ during the period of economic transformation under-
lay the creation of the tripartite social dialogue institutions, strongly
Table 11.1 Strikes in Poland, 1990–2011
Year Number of strikes Number of strikers
1990 250 115,700

1991 305 221,500
1992 6,362 730,000
1993 7,443 383,200
1994 482 211,400
1995 42 18,100
1996 21 44,300
1997 35 14,200
1998 37 16,900
1999 920 27,100
2000 44 7,900
2001 11 1,400
2002 1 13
2003 24 3,000
2004 2 200
2005 8 1,600
2006 27 24,600
2007 1,736 59,900
2008 12,765 209,000
2009 49 22,400
2010 79 13,900
2011 53 18,700
Source: National statistics by Central Statistical Office, www.stat.gov.pl
supported by the EU, among others via the Poland and Hungary:
Assistance for Restructuring their Economies (PHARE) Social Dialogue
Project (1992–1993). Ironically, the expansion of the rhetoric of social
dialogue was accompanied by the decentralisation of collective bargain-
ing and the decline in its coverage, currently around 20–25% (Gardawski
et al. 2012). As the result of increasingly union-hostile institutional and
economic environments, combined with the growing discrepancy between
union strategies and workers’ expectations, union density fell from around
38% in 1987 to 15% in 2010 (Wenzel 2009: 540, Wa˛dłowska 2010: 1).
However, the labour quiescence thesis has important limitations.
Hardy and Kozek (2011: 383) argued that in the 1990s ‘the realities of
workplace restructuring were met with fierce struggles to maintain con-
trol and representation, as well as implacable opposition to redundan-
cies’. The continuous importance of workplace conflict is also visible in
the statistics of collective disputes and employee grievances registered
by the National Labour Inspectorate (NLI), the collective dispute being
the first legal step to organize strike action in Poland (see also Towalski
2005). The highest unemployment in the post-1989 Polish history
was noted in 2002–2004, with unemployment rates oscillating around
18–20% of the economically active population. In the same period,
the number of registered collective disputes declined from 203 (2002)
to 165 (2004). Simultaneously, the number of individual grievances
has remained relatively high: 32,000 grievances in 2002 and 30,000 in
2004.1 As Gall and Hebdon (2008: 582) noted: ‘if workers are less able to
strike, then there is likely to be, all other things being equal, a relative
growth in the expression of grievance by other means’.
Contrary to the predictions of the continuous weakness of organized
labour, Polish unions have not remained passive even in the period of
the highest unemployment and economic downturn. The conflicts over
unionization of large multinational enterprises in some sectors (e.g.
automotive and retail) constituted a new dimension of conflicts at work
at the beginning of the 2000s (cf. Gardawski 2001). By the end of the
1990s, the Independent Self-governing Trade Union ‘Solidarity’ (NSZZ
Solidarność) established a Union Development Office (DRZ), and the
second biggest union, formerly the ‘official’ socialist confederation, the
All-Poland Alliance of Trade Unions (OPZZ), founded the Confederation
of Labour, with an explicit aim of organizing non-unionized workers.
As observed by Ostrowski (2009), Mrozowicki and Van Hootegem (2008)
and Hardy (2009), the emergence of unions in many multinational com-
panies preceded the favourable economic conditions (in 2005–2008).
It was usually accompanied by bottom-up worker mobilization against
low wages, power asymmetry and the perceived injustice at the work-
place level.
Although the workplace conflicts have never disappeared from Polish
industrial relations, a new wave of strikes was observed in the years
2007–2008. The number of strikes in these years was higher than in their
previous peak at the beginning of the transformation, in 1992–1993.
Individual grievances – noted by NLI – decreased in 2005 (30,800 cases),
in 2006 (25,770 cases) and in 2007 (24,397), but then grew again in
2008 (34,100 cases). Increasing union assertiveness in the years 2007–
2008 can be explained by several factors. First, workplace bargaining
power of workers grew due to labour shortages caused, among other
factors, by quick economic growth in 2005–2008 and mass migra-
tion abroad after the EU enlargement (Meardi 2007a, Kaminska and
Kahancova 2011). In a more favourable economic climate marked
by falling unemployment, both the private sector and the public
sector employees started to formulate more assertive pay demands
(Meardi 2007a). Second, comprehensive union organizing campaigns in

the private sector carried out by NSZZ Solidarność and the Confederation
of Labour since the late 1990s created a mobilization potential in mul-
tinational companies, such as hypermarkets or the automotive sector
enterprises. They also brought to unions a new generation of more prag-
matically oriented activists whose main motivation to join the unions
was to improve working conditions at the company level (Krzywdzinski
2010). Third, the discourse of tripartite social dialogue had been sys-
tematically challenged in the wake of economic crisis by the end of the
2000s as the neo-liberal Civic Platform government has proven to be
largely disinterested in tripartite negotiations (Czarzasty 2009).
However, the conditions of conflicts at work in the late 2000s have
proven to be different from those in the 1990s due to the effects of the
global financial downturn that began to be visible in Poland from the
end of 2008. Unemployment again began to increase, from 9% at the end
of 2008 to 13.5% at the beginning of 2012, contributing to a decline
workers’ labour market bargaining power. This was reflected in the
decreasing strike rates in 2009–2010 (see Table 11.1). In the same years,
the number of individual grievances grew from 34,900 cases in 2009 to
42,700 cases in 2010. In 2010, the great majority of these concerned pay
(37%), labour conditions (20%) and working time (18%), with the two
latter categories systematically growing over recent years. Indirectly,
the growing importance of the conflicts over working time might
indicate the effects of the anti-crisis legislation, which, among other
things, extended the reference period for calculating working time from
(maximum) four to (maximum) 12 months and introduced a 24-hour
work cycle of flexible working (Czarzasty 2009). The extended reference
period increased employers’ influence on working time depending on
companies’ situations. It translated into periodical work intensifica-
tion interwoven with the periods of lack of work, which in some cases
created new sources of workplace conflicts. In 2010–2012, facing the
weakness of the tripartite mechanism in alleviating the consequences
of financial crisis, the main union confederations were more likely to
organize street demonstrations and protests against austerity measures.
One of the new problems tackled by the unions was low-paid flexible
employment. Union confederations were strongly involved in the debate
on ‘junk contracts’ – fixed-term contracts and civil law contracts which
are not governed by labour law and exclude workers from minimum
pay regulations and social security contributions (Pańków 2012). In
spring 2012, NSZZ Solidarność gathered almost 2m signatures against
governmental plans to extend the retirement age to 67 for women and
men. This initiative referred, among others, to the problem of growing

numbers of workers who are not included in the pension system at all
due to the ‘junk’ nature of their employment. The issue of precarious
work was also addressed in the union campaign to fix the minimum
wage at 50% of the national average. However, in both cases, union
mobilization did not affect the governmental decisions.
Nevertheless, the debate on precarious work and junk contracts indi-
cated a new dimension in conflicts at work. The problems of flexible
work contracts rarely featured in the mainstream unions’ agenda before
the economic crisis, despite the expansion of these types of contracts
in the 2000s (Trappmann 2011). In the years 1998–2010, the share of
employees on temporary contracts (including both fixed-term and civil
law contracts) rose from 4.7% to 27%. This was conditioned, among
other things, by the liberalization of the Labour Code (in 2002–2003),
which cancelled the maximum duration of a fixed-term contracts and,
more recently, by the anti-crisis legislation passed in July 2009, which
temporarily (until 31 December 2011) suspended (currently binding)
legislation that allows for only two consecutive fixed-term employment
contracts. In 2011, the number of workers permanently employed on
civil law (freelance) contracts was estimated by the Ministry of Finance
to be 800,000 (Grochal and Szacki 2011). The estimated number of
workers employed by the temporary work agencies also grew quickly,
from 31,628 in 2003 (when the Act on Temporary Work was passed
and the temporary work agencies began to operate) to 433,102 in 2010
(Ministry of Labour and Social Policy 2011) and around 534,000 in 2011
(Polskie Forum HR 2012). Meanwhile, the share of the self-employed,
denoting the type of labour flexibilisation extensively used in the late
1990s, has decreased from 35% (1998) to 23% (2008).
The flexible work regime, understood as a combination of institu-
tional, economic and political measures enabling the expansion of flex-
ible work and employment, was an important factor that limited the
effectiveness of union representation and, consequently, the extent of
union-led forms of collective action. From a legal perspective, the Trade
Union Act 1991 has effectively limited the category of those eligible
for union membership to employees, excluding those self-employed or
employed on the basis of civil (freelance) contracts. From the perspec-
tive of unions, the unionization of those employed on flexible work
contracts is an expensive and time-consuming business which does not
guarantee membership gains given their unstable employment relation-
ship. Simultaneously, the expansion of precarious employment, involv-
ing the combination of flexible work arrangements and low wages, has
tended to limit the trust of precarious workers towards unions which

are seen as representing the interests of the privileged segments of the
labour force (see Kretsos 2011). According to the ‘Working Poles’ survey,
in 2007, 18.4% of full-time workers were union members, while the
figure for part-time workers was 3.4%, and among those in precarious
employment (including freelance contracts and fixed-duration con-
tracts), 10% were members (Gardawski 2009:551).
With notable exceptions (Kozek 2011, Hardy 2009, Trappmann 2011),
worker resistance against the flexible work arrangements in Poland has
rarely been analysed. Thus, to address this gap, the next part of the chap-
ter will explore to what extent the expansion of precarious and flexible
employment in the labour-intensive workplace influences the mecha-
nisms of workers’ resistance and struggle. In the case study of the Monitor
factory in an export-oriented SEZ in Lower Silesia below, the role of local
authorities and the state in promoting the flexible work regime in SEZs
is analysed, showing how the state policies introduced at the end of the
1990s to attract foreign direct investments have also created new sources
of worker discontent.
The Monitor case study
Methodology and background

The case study of Monitor, an electronic assembly plant, relied on
the methods of participatory action-oriented research (Gatenby and
Humphries 2000). It was conducted by Małgorzata Maciejewska while
she was employed in the plant through a temporary work agency,
during a production peak, and worked on a production line for three
months, from September 2011 to December 2011. The research was
designed as an effort to overcome the limitations of the methodology
of mainstream SEZ studies produced from a ‘top-down perspective’, on
behalf of and for the use of the state and investors (e.g. Fiedor 2007).
Drawing on the feminist and critical Marxist theoretical framework
(Harding 1987, Haraway 1988), the research aimed at exploring prob-
lems, conflicts and tensions connected with foreign investments in the
SEZ through analysing the experiences and strategies of the workers
themselves. The ethnographic studies carried out in Shenzen factories in
China (Pun 2004, 2005), in an assembly firm in Silicon Valley in the US
(Pellow and Park 2002) and in maquiladoras in Mexico (Fernández-Kelly
1983) showed that research itself could become a political tool – firstly
as an intervention in public and academic discourse and secondly as a
part of a networking process for workers’ struggles. Thus, by producing
knowledge ‘from below’, the study created a space for building workers’
political visibility and agency. One of its (unintended) outcomes was
the formation of the first union in the factory. Below, the conditions,
methods and the possibilities of workers’ resistance in the labour-
intensive system of global factories, exemplified by Monitor, are dis-
cussed. At the outset, in order to reconstruct the conditions in which
the flexible, low-paid work regime at Monitor was embedded, the con-
text of the development of SEZs in Poland is briefly presented. Next
follows a discussion, through a first-person account, of the specific
mechanism which contributed to the evolution of the work-related con-
flict at Monitor from non-organized, informal dissent to an overt and
organized resistance via a newly established union.
SEZs as laboratories of Poland’s new capitalism

Foreign direct investments based in SEZs provide the basis for analys-
ing of power dynamics between global capital and the working class in
Poland. The development of SEZs is part of the process of the Polish
transition after 1989. At present, there are 14 zones. They began their
legal existence in the mid-1990s but became functioning production
sites at the beginning of the 2000s. As many studies on export-led
industrialization point out, the worldwide development of Free Trade
Zones, Export Processing Zones and Special Economic Zones was in
most cases preceded by economic and indebtedness crises (Elson and
Pearson 1981, Mitter 1986, Bakker 1994, Halim 2008). Core government
motivation surrounds creating a special juridical and industrial environ-
ment to overcome the crisis by attracting foreign investors. The ideo-
logical background used to legitimize such investments was based on the
assumption that global capital would create jobs and help to repair local
economies, and in Poland the story was of the SEZs being a tool to fix
the deep socio-economic crisis resulting from job loss during economic
restructuring in the 1990s (Pilarska 2009). Consequently, SEZs were
established in post-industrial areas marked by very high unemploy-
ment rates.
The key motivation behind the establishment of the SEZs in Lower
Silesia concerned the decay of industry heavily related to the region’s
natural resources. The decade-long liquidation or restructuring of the
state-owned enterprises resulted in huge job losses, which, in turn, led
to the deterioration of working and living conditions in the region. In
order to rebuild the market, the state and local authorities launched a
legal framework and built a technical infrastructure (roads, power and
water supply) to attract capital into the SEZs. In exchange for high
reimbursements for investments and tax exemptions for nearly twenty

years, the investors were expected to create jobs to reduce the unem-
ployment rate. The zones, with their new industries, are often seen as a
land of ‘neo-liberal exceptions’ or ‘a country within a country’, where
citizenship and workers’ rights are suspended (Ong 2006). However,
this argument gives the impression that SEZs were only juridical gaps
or unique geographical locations which stand in contrast to the rest of
the country/region (Pun 2004, Cross 2010). Instead of looking for devia-
tions and pathologies in the global flow of the capital, it is preferable to
see the zones as a structural continuity of neo-liberal changes, for they
play a key role in shaping the wider economic and social landscape of
the region, and determine new forms of work and employment regimes.
As a result of the ‘business-friendly’ legal framework, new investors in
SEZs produce a new working environment, in which new conflicts at
work can take place.
Factory case study: first-person account

The SEZ in which Monitor is located is surrounded by corn fields – the
nearest village is several kilometres away. Marked with toll-bars and
fences, the Zone symbolizes an isolated territory. Along the streets with
Asian-sounding names there is no social or housing infrastructure. The
Zone, composed only of factory floors, resembles a temporary city which
could be disassembled as quickly as it was assembled. Operating as a
coherent organism, the Zone is a part of a global LCD TV production
chain. Assembled parts are imported to Poland from China, Indonesia
or Bangladesh, and when the final product is completed, it is distributed
over almost the whole of Europe and North Africa. While components
are imported from all over the world, the workforce is ‘imported’ from
all over the region. Workers are transported to the Zone from the south-
ern part of Lower Silesia, some commuting for as long as 4 hours per
day by bus. To arrive at their workplace and get back home, they often
have to travel more than 160 kilometres each day. To meet the needs of
just-in-time production, workers usually cross the borders of the Zone
30–50 minutes before their shift begins. The Zone’s area of 400 hectares
draws a workforce from an area of 3,500 km2 (from 8 districts of Lower
Silesia), in which the unemployment rate approached 20% in 2011.
Having limited alternatives besides working in the Zone, the workers are
forced to extend their working day up to 12–13 hours.
I was one of 150 temporary employees performing a variety of tasks:
visual inspection, electronic tests and montage. At the time, the firm
employed 300 assembly workers, 90% of whom were women, mostly
quite young. One hundred workers operated 14 production lines, the

majority performing quality control and assembling components – the
most feminized form of labour in the factory. Men usually worked as
technicians on fixed contracts and earned a higher wage than women.
Those women on the line who had been hired directly by the company
mostly had fixed-term contracts for one or two years. At the bottom of
the hierarchy was the workforce employed by temporary work agen-
cies, mainly composed of young women (between 18 and 30 years old).
Hired on a weekly or monthly basis, they earned the lowest salary (Euro
250–300). The work was supervised by a production manager, shift lead-
ers and their assistants (mostly men). Next in the hierarchy were the
Chinese managers sent to Poland to run the company.
The work and production dynamic in the factory was ruled by two
interrelated regimes – of gender and of flexible work. Hiring a feminized
workforce was a conscious management strategy. Young and unskilled
workers could easily be subsumed under the labour regime. ‘Quick’
and ‘nimble’ female bodies constituted the ground for arduous, labour-
intensive work (Elson and Pearon 1981). The linkages between gen-
der, skills and wages in export-led industrialization were interrelated.
Women, especially young women, were preferred workers since they
are seen as more submissive, agile and keen on working for low wages
at a faster pace (Pun 2005, Elson and Pearon 1981). The situation of
temporary employees reflected the precarisation of the workforce in the
labour-intensive workplace. Yet the situation of the regular employees
was no better. Of the 150 production workers, fewer than 20 had an
open-ended contract, while the rest were employed on the fixed-term
contracts, under constant threat of being dismissed. During the down-
times, employment falls to 50%, meaning the entire temporary work-
force and part of regular one-year-contracted workers are dismissed. At
the time, the women would usually say that ‘you never know if you will
have your job tomorrow or not’.
The double bind of a feminized workforce and precarious flexible
employment was the core axis of discipline and subordination in the
factory. Most of the women workers had families with one or more chil-
dren, and some were the only breadwinners for their household. Being a
mother has several consequences for women workers. Care and house-
hold duties double the amount of work. Repetitious manual labour on
the line, exhausting daily commuting, care work and working three
shifts leave little time to think about resistance. Raising a child makes
you more vulnerable to job loss because the management is not keen on
prolonging contracts for women who have a history of taking sick leave
for themselves or their children. Thus women have to be fully flexible

and fit their lives into Monitor’s production rhythms, otherwise they
risk losing their jobs.
At Monitor, workers had no formal representation to the management.
They were expected to work hard but not to discuss the work or employ-
ment arrangements. Their voices, claims and requests were suppressed
by means of disciplinary techniques. The Polish supervisors and temp
agencies embodied a buffer zone between the workers and the Chinese
management. The anger and frustration was suspended by the fear of
losing one’s job and lack of tools for expressing the collective discon-
tent. In addition, the conflicts at work were suppressed by the flexible
work regime. During the three months of research at the factory, each
week resulted in new dismissals and the arrival of new recruits. The
regular workers had few or no relations with the temp workers, and
said that they did not feel the need to associate with them because
‘the temp worker probably won’t be here a week from now.’ Precarious
conditions of work deprived the workers of a common voice and shared
knowledge.
Flexible production and voiceless-ness as sources of dissent and

friction
The subordination of workers’ bodies and lives was incorporated at
many levels in the factory-system, which started at the level of micro-
practices of labour discipline – the assembly line regime which bound
their motions to the workstands2 – and continued through to the gen-
dered division of work and fluctuations in production and employment
in the course of the year. One might ask, ‘How is workers’ resistance
possible in this kind of work regime; where are the points of conflict
which might spark off the workers’ anger; and can this anger be articu-
lated into collective action?’ Each day, the workers, to a greater or lesser
degree, resisted being a part of the symbiotic, fragmented and precisely
measured machinery of the line. They complained about the tiring and
boring work and the outrageous behaviour of management; they made
jokes, slowed down the line, smoked cigarettes during the shift, took
sick leave, intentionally damaged the components or broke the product-
safety regulations. Such often invisible transgressions and insubordina-
tion took place all the time, easing the pace of the work and the shop-floor
discipline, while the everyday experience of work built the basis for
sharing common interests, knowledge, anger and frustration.
But these moments of sharing were also an intrinsic element of the
labour regime, acting as a safety valve and part of the production-logic
in the factory. Indeed, the catalyst of the workers’ anger lay beyond the
assembly line regime, and was related to the factory’s history. The plant
was set up five years before the study took place. Workers employed
from the beginning recalled that flexible employment through the
temp agency increased around two years ago, saying that when the fac-
tory first opened ‘things were not so bad’. An employee benefit fund
consisting of employers’ contributions resulted in workers receiving
vacation subsidies and holiday coupons, and gross salaries were higher
(Euro 425–475). Over time, the terms of employment deteriorated and
salaries began to drop. When questioned about these changes, the
workers usually associated them with the onset of the economic crisis
in Poland, for when management introduced the worsening conditions,
they invoked the company’s poor financial condition, the economic
slump and the requirements of flexible production. Using the crisis
as an excuse, the management simultaneously took full advantage of
the opportunities created by the anti-crisis legislation, including the
suspension of the Labour Code regulations which allowed for only two
successive fixed-term contracts. As a result, the number of people with
one-year contracts increased. After a time, the only new hiring was done
through the temp agency. The competitive pressure among the staff
made it possible to reduce wages by Euro 100. Meanwhile, the employee
benefit fund was dismantled and bonuses were cut.
Work at Monitor was intensified through changes in the production
process. Initially, most of the components were assembled manually, but
after the implementation of new technologies and the improvement of
production lines the bulk of the work was mechanised. In addition, the
company also introduced the policy of ‘processing cost innovation’, which
meant a basic drive for the intensification of work through job cuts at the
manual assembly work stands. Simultaneously, the constant rotation of
temporary agency workers negatively affected the quality of production.
Since the new temporary workforce had limited experience and skills,
the number of damaged components increased, thereby increasing the
amount of work needed to fix them and re-inspect them. As a result, the
workers barely managed to meet the production rates, which impinged
upon their bonuses and, therefore, their wages. If there was a need to
raise the production rates or fix large amounts of damaged components,
the management ordered workers to put in overtime. Initially, the extra
work was also paid extra, but since the flexibilisation of employment and
the resultant increase of damaged products, the overtime bonuses were
cut back to the statutory 50% and the workers had to work longer hours.
When the workers became reluctant to work extra hours, to force them
to work harder the management introduced ‘obligatory overtime work’

in return for extra days off. However, when it came to taking the day-off,
workers were often informed that they had to show up for work.
Given the different perspectives of the regular and temporary workers,
the possibilities of worker resistance were differentiated by their distinct
biographical experiences. When a temp worker was required to adjust
to the work regime for a month or two, she did not know the history of
her workplace. By contrast, the regular workers could refer to their past
experiences. They knew more about the dynamics of production and
the recruitment process. Thus, they knew more about how their lives
are merged with and subjected to the company’s plans. They were also
more sensitive about the costs they themselves bore in terms of health
and quality of life so that the company might increase its profitability.
Arguably, this kind of knowledge itself became the most important
political tool to build the potential of collective organizing. With it,
new forms of control implemented by the management changed the
anger into agency, and dissent into resistance.
Turning anger into action

Effectively being silenced, which increasingly happened at Monitor,
raised the level of anger and frustration among the workers. Therefore,
when an opportunity came up (occasioned by the fact that I had con-
tacts with union activists), a group of regular employees took a step
towards organizing themselves, and the first union committee was estab-
lished at the factory. A single spark was enough to ignite the labour
conflict and consolidate people. Flyers (which I received from women
activists of the All-Poland Trade Union Workers’ Initiative (OZZ IP),
a very small but radical left-wing union established in 2001) were scat-
tered around the factory and served as the spark. As the workers said,
it was ‘the grist to the mill’. The formation of the union showed the
determination of the workers, for as one of the activists explained: ‘I’m
not concerned about anything now. If they fire me then they’ll fire me,
but things have to change around here.’ It also revealed the workers’
sober view of the situation, for as another worker put it: ‘We don’t want
miracles. We want things to be normal here.’ The question of whether
‘normalcy’ can be achieved by forming a union in a global labour-
intensive factory may lead to contradictory answers, as it led the union’s
activists to shift their initial strategy based on the normalization of work-
ing conditions.
After operating for five years, the factory had experienced no worker
revolts. Convinced that it had a docile and fully subordinated workforce,
management was completely taken aback by the emergence of organ-

ized resistance. Thus, the strength of the union was the very fact of its
formation. The pioneering character of workers’ formal organizing was
an additional advantage. As it was the first and only union at Monitor,
it could represent all the workers and, in effect, serve as the collective
voice of the entire crew. The structure was established in December
2011 with less than 20 members. Membership then grew rapidly: after
a month there were 45 union members, and three months later 73
workers declared their participation. The level of union density was
maintained, comprising 45% of regular workers. This kind of ‘quantity
success’ was closely related to the process of further deterioration of
working and employment conditions at Monitor. As membership grew,
challenges began to emerge. In order to protect workers on fixed-term
contracts, most union members decided to remain anonymous to the
employer. While this was our strength, for the employer did not know
who was a union member, it also caused considerable problems when
it came to formal issues such as organizing meetings and strategic plan-
ning. More generally, the problems with communication and planning
resulted from three interrelated regimes: the production line, commut-
ing and the dynamic of production (shift work). The pace of work on the
line left little time for union activism, and neither was there time after
work because people dispersed in a hurry to get home. Consequently,
the only time for meetings and strategic planning was before work.
The first steps taken by the union consisted of formal and legal pro-
cedures aimed at starting the process of negotiations with the employer.
Yet we soon realized that the union law and Labour Code do little to
protect workers and union activists, allowing limited room for collective
action, particularly when it comes to consolidating temporary and regu-
lar employees together. The heated exchange of letters between union
and management dragged on for weeks without producing any results.
For a long time, management refused to give us the employee handbook
of terms and conditions of employment, to issue an explanation con-
cerning the dismantled social fund, and to allow the union to put up a
notice board. In addition, there was the problem of protecting workers
hired by temp agencies because they were covered by different regula-
tions and had a different employer, so it was not possible to include the
majority of the precarious workforce in the union structures. One event
which occurred at the factory showed how deep the rift in the workforce
was and how destabilizing for union activism. Once, when the tempo-
rary agency workers were forced to work for a lower salary than per-
manent employees, they decided almost unanimously that they would
not go to work. On that day, 7 of the 14 production lines stopped.

Unfortunately, the permanent workers did not back the strike. The situ-
ation showed the deep divisions among workers in a system of labour
where half of the workforce depends on flexible employment. While
claiming their rights proved to be very difficult for the regular employees
who had established the union, the temp workers were forced to resort
to the wildcat strike carried out from outside the factory gates. This event
made it particularly clear that different and more radical forms of resist-
ance were needed in factories based on flexible production and flexible
employment. It also made union activists realize that ‘normalcy’ was
simply beyond their reach.
Responding with letters and refusing to recognize the union, manage-
ment barely listened to the union’s demands. Thus, after four months
of management manoeuvres to turn down the request for negotiations,
during which the working conditions further deteriorated, the union
decided to undertake radical action. After my period of employment
ended, the union has started the process of collective dispute, demand-
ing clear and precise employment and work regulations, reduction of
working time and increased wages. At the time of writing (June 2012),
the collective dispute continues, accompanied by a series of demonstra-
tions at the front of the factory. If the management refuses to fulfil the
workers’ demands, the process could lead to a strike. The claim which
underlies the collective dispute is even more radical, for it touches the
very nature of profit-making in a labour-intensive flexible work regime.
By restricting further flexibilisation of the workforce, the organized
workers might threaten the very core of the production process. This
conscious and strategic claim shows the path the union underwent,
starting from merely wanting ‘normalcy’ to the refusal of work by
undermining the core source of profit-making in the company, which
the union claims is developed at the expense of workers’ health and
lives. Having no alternatives and little to lose, the journey revealed the
struggle in a labour-intensive global factory system exceeded the legal
framework of social dialogue and agreement between the employer and
the employees.
Conclusion
This chapter has explored the development and new dimensions of con-
flicts at work in Poland. It first documented the dynamics of labour con-
flicts during two decades of capitalist transformation. The quantitative
data on strikes and individual grievances in the 2000s confirmed the
‘method displacement’ thesis (Gall and Hebdon 2008: 592). The shifts
between organized and individualized forms of conflict can be explained
by the decline in unions’ capacities to mobilize workers and organize
strikes in the period of deep economic restructuring and privatisation
after the end of state socialism and the expansion of non-unionized
private sector enterprises. Yet, contrary to the thesis about the continu-
ing weakness of organized labour in post-socialist countries (Crowley
2004, Ost 2009), the outburst of strikes in 2007–2008 in Poland also
suggests that the decline of overt conflict has not been irreversible. The
most recent developments (in 2009–2012) have been marked by a dete-
riorating labour market situation in the wake of the global financial crisis
and economic recession. Although these have again led to the decline
in the number of strikes, both the quantitative data and the Monitor
case study suggest that the new economic recession has not suppressed
conflicts at work, even if they are not articulated and expressed in such
dramatic ways as strikes.
The main ‘novelty’ of the present situation – which has an impact on
the nature and scope of labour conflicts – is the expansion of precari-
ous and flexible work supported by the neo-liberal state policies intro-
duced by the successive Polish governments throughout the 2000s. The
Monitor case is but just one example of emerging workers’ resistance to
the rise of precarious employment in Poland. Earlier studies have docu-
mented workers’ attempts to oppose the flexibilisation of employment
in the public services (Kozek 2011) and in large hypermarkets targeted
by comprehensive union organizing campaigns (Czarzasty 2010, Hardy
2009). The Monitor case demonstrates that worker resistance can also
emerge in non- or weakly unionized and labour-intensive factories. It
suggests the sources of workplace conflict are intrinsic to the very nature
of the flexible work regime which emerged as a part of the neo-liberal
transformation in Poland. Labour-intensive factories in the SEZs are not
‘neoliberal exceptions’ (Ong 2006), but constitute the laboratories of
Poland’s new capitalism (Hardy 2009). They test new forms of employ-
ment and regimes of work, relying on conducive legal and social envi-
ronments created by state and regions. Yet in addition to encountering
human limits, the flexibilisation and precarisation of work is also
marked by internal contradictions. As revealed by the Monitor case,
the increasing replacement of permanent staff with flexible, temporary
employees challenged the very core of the production process which
relied on the skills and practical knowledge of permanent workers. The
cost of flexibilisation is work intensification which was shifted onto the
shoulders of workers at the expense of their health and lives.
When the human and organizational limits are reached, and union
organizational resources are provided, everyday dissent is likely to turn
into overt collective resistance. In the context of labour-intensive, low-
paid and flexible workplaces, in which formal collective bargaining is
consciously rejected by employers, new forms of union activism and
union organizing are needed. The young feminized working class, cut
off from the work and union experience of older generations, has yet
to develop its own tools of resistance and organizational forms that
would allow it to be able to overcome the divisions between permanent
and temporary workers. The vision of community unionism covering
the precarious workers in the low-paid sectors (including those in the
Special Economic Zones) is appealing, but thus far it is practised mostly
by niche, radical trade unions, such as the OZZ IP. A more attainable
goal would be to develop coalitions between stronger unions in large,
capital-intensive companies and weak, newly established unions in
labour-intensive plants, which are functionally subordinated to capital-
intensive businesses in the logistics and supply chain. A locality-based
unionism of this type has been observed in the automotive sector in
Poland, in which some unions in large car assembly plants cooperate
closely with those in supplier companies and attempt to extend their
activities to temporary agency workers (Mrozowicki 2011). To what extent
this strategy can be transferred to other sectors is an open question and
requires research. Last but not least, it should be emphasized that in a
country like Poland, in which sectoral-level collective-bargaining coverage
is very low, the challenge of precarious work cannot be fully addressed
without union advance at the macro-political level. However, given the
systematic obstruction of union political and legislative initiatives by the
Polish government in recent years, political mobilization needs to be com-
bined with, and supplemented by, innovative forms of bottom-up union
organizing that targets precarious workers. Thus, it can be suggested that
the efforts to mobilize workers in order to tackle the issues of ‘junk con-
tracts’ and flexibilisation of the labour market might lie in the junction
between the macro-political and workplace-centred union strategies.
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by a Polish Ministry of Science and Higher

Education grant (4486/PB/IS/11). The authors are solely responsible for
the views and opinions expressed in this chapter. We would like to thank
the workers and union activist whose knowledge shaped this article and
Dominika Ferens for her help with translating and revising this chapter.
Notes
1. All data on collective disputes and collective grievances are derived from the
yearly reports of the National Labour Inspectorate, available online at: http://
www.pip.gov.pl/
2. The women were literally tied to the line with grounding wristbands
attached to cables which had to be plugged in near the workplace (to neu-
tralize the electromagnetic field of our bodies, which might damage the
components).
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12
Minjung Tactics in a Post-Minjung
Era? The Survival of Self-Immolation
and Traumatic Forms of Labour
Protest in South Korea
Jamie Doucette
Introduction
In November 1970, 22-year-old labour activist and garment worker

Chun Tae-Il committed an act of self-immolation that catalysed the con-
temporary democratic labour movement in South Korea. Chun worked
in the garment sweatshops of the Dongdaemun Market, an area popu-
lated with hundreds of garment shops employing mostly young female
workers in their teens and early twenties. The labour conditions in the
sweatshops where Chun worked were brutal, with workers crowded into
‘attics’ – vertically subdivided floors where sewing machines were dou-
ble stacked over one another, full of cloth fibres and poorly ventilated.
Workers in these sweatshops suffered from overwork and occupational
illnesses. Many were fed amphetamines and continuously worked extra-
long shifts when product orders were at their peak, or were summarily
laid off when they were not (Chun 2003). Chun and his friends who
worked in these export factories were shocked at the disparity between
the principles enshrined in Korea’s labour standards act and the actual
practice of employers in these primarily export-oriented sweatshops.
They tried in vain to address these conditions through a variety of means,
including protesting to their employers and trying to form a union, all of
which failed for under the military dictatorship the employers and the
police easily repressed labour protest.
On 13 November 1970 Chun and his Samdong Friendship Associa-
tion (named for the three markets of the Dongdaemun area – Dongwa,
Tongil and the Peace Market) organized a labour protest that was quickly
repressed by the police. But before they were disbanded, Chun set himself
212
Jamie Doucette 213
on fire just outside the Peace Market, shouting, ‘Obey the Labour
Standards Act’ (Cho 2003: 314–16). This action shocked many workers,
intellectuals and politicians and catalysed both the modern democratic
trade union movement and the larger, populist democracy movement in
South Korea. Chun is remembered as a democratic and labour movement
martyr and his suicide is memorialized as a national day of workers’
struggle in Korea in November each year, rivalling May Day in its sig-
nificance. His tactic has been reproduced by many social activists since
then in a variety of social movements for equality, national reunification
and political democracy. In South Korea alone, a total of 107 protesters
died by suicide protest from 1970 to 2004 (Kim 2008: 545). Furthermore,
Biggs (2005, cited in Kim 2008) reports that Korea accounts for a dispro-
portionate share of a total of 533 incidents of self-immolation which
have occurred during the period from 1963 to 2002 across 36 countries.
This chapter explores the survival of traumatic forms of radical protest,
such as self-immolation, associated with Korea’s democracy and labour
movements from the 1970s and 1980s. While these are tactics that are
often associated with labour and democracy struggles under the dictator-
ships of Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan, they – unfortunately –
remain in use today, particularly among irregular workers and other
social movements of economically marginalized populations. The chap-
ter starts by examining some of the origins of minjung-style labour
protest, and discusses the ways in which these actions are interpreted
within the wider Korean culture and by other unionists and activists.
It then argues that one of the reasons why the tactic has survived fol-
lowing the democratic transition is that when it comes to Korean labour
relations, the goals of the labour movements for greater equality and
labour rights have not been fully institutionalized. While militant union
struggles have established independent unions at large enterprises and,
to a lesser extent, at the industrial level, these gains have recently come
under threat through the expansion of precarious or irregular forms of
employment. In particular, the ranks of these workers have expanded sig-
nificantly following the Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 and through
more recent changes to labour law that aimed to make permanent the
supposedly temporary measures devised during the crisis. This expan-
sion coupled with new forms of punitive labour control that target the
union activities of irregular workers with severe damage claims and
facilitate seizure of workers’ assets has led to a resurgence of these trau-
matic tactics among Korean workers during the last eight years, creating
vicious cycles of labour conflict.
214 Tactics in a Post-Minjung Era?
Self-immolation and minjung protest
Chun Tae-Il seems to be the first person in Korea to have used self-
immolation as a protest tactic. It is not certain where Chun got the idea.
He may have taken inspiration from the self-immolation of Vietnamese
monks opposed to the Vietnam War. However, themes of suicide also
figured in the Korean literature of the time. For example, Kim Dong Ni’s
(2002 [1961]) Deungshim-Bul depicts a Chinese monk’s preparation for
self-immolation to honour his temple, an act that has auspicious conse-
quences. Cho Se Hui’s novel The Dwarf also uses self-sacrifice as a meta-
phor for the human toll of rapid industrialization. Regardless, Chun’s
act had immediate repercussions in stimulating the 1970s democratic
union movement among the largely female work force in the textile
and garment shops that were a key part of Korea’s industrial take-off in
the 1960s and early 1970s. The story of this movement has been well
documented by Chun’s sister who was a participant in the movement
and continues to work with garment workers in Seoul’s Dongdaemun
neighbourhood as both a formidable champion of their struggles and
a civil activist (Chun 2003). Chun Tae-Il’s suicide also provided inspi-
ration for the labour struggles at larger enterprises during the ‘Great
Worker Struggle’ in the summer and autumn of 1987 and similar cam-
paigns for independent industrial unions in the early 1990s.
The student protests and labour movement mobilization that fol-
lowed Chun’s suicide fed into a larger movement known as the Korean
minjung movement. The word minjung translates roughly as ‘the peo-
ple’. The min in minjung is the same suffix used in three key demands
of the minjung or democracy movement. These were known as the three
mins (samminjooui): the people, or populism (minjung), the nation or
folk (minjok) and democracy (minju). As Koo (2001) argues, the political
and economic reality of the 1970s demanded an ideology that could
unite the diverse struggles of students, workers, farmers, the urban poor,
journalists, writers and so on. Koo (2001: 143) describes how minjung,
a political term used by both nationalists and leftists during the colo-
nial period and in the post-war years, ‘suited this purpose eminently’ as
it ‘included all those who were politically oppressed, socially alienated,
and economically excluded from the benefits of economic growth’.
Indeed:
Indeed, at the core of the minjung movement is an ideology that claims
that minjung is the master of history and that Korean history is a his-
tory of the minjung’s oppression by the dominant class and by external
forces; hence, the real national identity and authentic culture of Korea
Jamie Doucette 215
must be found in the culture and daily struggles of the minjung. With
this broad ideological content, minjung became a dominant form of
discourse, slogan, and strategic tool for uniting and mobilizing diverse
political and social struggles in the 1980s (Koo 2001: 143). The connota-
tion here is that this ‘people’ is an active political agent: a mass subject
that included farmers, workers, students, victims of division system, and
others oppressed by the military regime (cf. Lee 2007). The minjung was,
thus, located on the fault lines created by the policies of the dictatorship
and the Cold War division system. It is a term that can be contrasted
with the notions of kukmin, national resident, and seomin, common
people: terms that seem to be preferred by conservative forces and that
have been used to mobilize ideas of duty and national patriotism.
The minjung movement viewed protest acts such as self-immolation and
worker-suicide as a release of han, which means bitterness or resentment.
Such actions were known as hanpuli or outpourings of han. While some of
the minjung philosophers and theologians argue that notions of minjung
and, thus, of han date back several centuries from the subordination
of the Baekje Kingdom to neo-Confucian rule in the 13th century to
peasant rebellions against aristocratic rule and colonial intervention,
the tactic of self-immolation itself is modern. Suicide here is viewed
as a form of sincerity. In minjung theology, the actions of martyrs such
as Chun Tae-Il were, thus, seen as messianic acts of resistance to the
developmental dictatorship that liberated ‘the life of the weaker being
from their pains and exploitations, by absorbing their pains and unjust
exploitations’ into themselves (Lee 1994: 143, cf. Lee 1996, Suh 1981,
Wells 1995). In August 1970, just two months before his suicide, Chun
wrote in his diary that he had ‘come to an absolute decision’ to be
alongside his ‘poor brothers and sisters‘ in the Peace Market. ‘I will throw
myself away, I will die for you,’ he writes, ‘so as not to leave you.’ Chun
concludes his entry by noting the date, 20 August, that he made his deci-
sion, and ends with a short messianic prayer: ‘God, have mercy upon
me. I am struggling to be the dew for countless withering innocent lives’
(Cho 2003: 28).
Chun Tae-Il, as well as many other people who were killed or com-
mitted suicide during the democracy movement such as Lee Han Yeol,
a student killed in the June 1987 uprising, are regarded as martyrs
(yeolsa) of the movement and have commemoration societies that par-
ticipate in a variety of social protests and hold annual memorial events.
Commemorations are common at labour and other protest rallies,
especially during difficult and often violent labour struggles where the
emotional costs of labour organizing are intense. Not all martyrs of
these struggles commit such directly political forms of suicide, and sui-
cides from despair are common among family members during long or
violent strikes. These commemorations bring together union militants,
support NGOs and the workers themselves in attempts to encourage
union members to continue their struggles and to provide solidarity
and support during times of crisis.
As an act of release, suicide protest or self-sacrifice resonates with
both Christian notions of martyrdom as well as with the shamanic
notion of shinmyoung, which signifies a sense of release from the sorrow
of han (Koo: 146, cf. Abelmann 1996 for a description of minjung reper-
toires). Minjung protest used a variety of different tactics to create this
sense of release, with suicide protest being its most extreme example.
However, other practices (such as pungmul – a form of farmers’ or peas-
ant dance) constitute other means of creating this sense of release but
through dance and music. Pungmul was a common feature of minjung
protest and remains a common feature of social protest to this day, as
are other forms of performance that resonate with the ideal of shinmy-
oung. Furthermore, it is not only small or individual practices that were
seen as creating this release: large collective events such as the 1980
Kwangju Uprising, 1987 Democracy Uprising and Worker Struggle, and
even more recent events such as the candlelight protests against the
conservative government’s rollback of a number of progressive policies
in 2008 were also viewed as hanpuli, as mass outpouring of pent-up
emotion.
What is interesting here is that unlike forms of suicide protest in
other contexts, suicide protest seems part of a larger repertoire of strat-
egy and tactics within the organized labour and democracy movement.
Though, certainly, it is a tactic used in difficult struggles, particularly
when the struggle is based upon establishing collective bargaining pro-
cedures and gaining recognition for the union. It often accompanies
wildcat strikes or can happen after other forms of workplace conflict
such as repression of union activity, employer intimidation or, as I shall
discuss further below, the use of legal practices such as damage claims
and seizure of workers’ personal salaries and assets. In other contexts
the tactic seems more prevalent when other avenues of struggle are
non-existent or repressed, such as the more recent use of suicide to
protest about labour conditions by Foxconn workers in China, where
suicide initially seemed to take place as part of largely unorganized and
anomic response to exploitation (cf. Chan and Pun 2010). However,
in more recent protest, the threat of mass suicide – for example, the
recent threats by 300 workers to jump off the factory roofs at Foxconn
Jamie Doucette 217
unless specific grievances are addressed – now seems to represent an

emergent form of labour struggle, albeit in a climate where labour’s free-
dom of association remains relatively more supressed and regimented
than the Korean context. Furthermore, in this instance, the threat of
mass suicide seems to be used as a tool to win direct concessions from
government and management, while in the Korean context the tactic
tends to be equally aimed at creating a response from employers as
well as from other social movement or union activists. It is a form of
release that is meant to lend resolve to a struggle rather than an explicit
bargaining tactic.
This ideal of hanpuli or transformative emotional release used to spur
collective action can be seen in a memorial protest performance in
honour of Park Il Su, an irregular worker labour unionist who commit-
ted self-immolation during a 2004 strike at Hyundai Heavy Industries,
a shipbuilding company located in the south eastern industrial city of
Ulsan. Park was protesting against the discrimination for non-regular
workers and the company’s repression of labour union activity. In the
performance, a union member re-enacts Park’s act of self-immolation.
He pours a liquid over his body, and the act of immolation is symbol-
ized by a large black and red fabric that engulfs the worker. The fabric
represents his han, his bitterness with the world. His fellow workers
gather up this large piece of fabric. Then, in a gesture that seems part
performance, part shamanic ritual, the fabric is torn into individual
flags and the worker disappears: his han is transformed into collective
energy. The workers break into a coordinated dance, holding up the
flags as signifiers that the struggle continues. There is a social alchemy
here; an individual’s traumatic act is transformed into a greater will to
continue with a difficult struggle.
Kim (2008) argues targets of suicide protests are not simply unjust
policies but also other activists and apathetic citizens. The suicide notes
left by suicide protesters often ‘explicitly reveal that they committed sui-
cide protest in order to inspire movement activism among half-hearted
activists and apathetic bystanders’ (Kim 2008: 573). A similar intent
most likely informed Park’s self-immolation. While, certainly, this action
is used to shame the company and draw attention to unjust labour
practices, it is also oriented towards regular workers who are part of
Hyundai’s labour union. While key battles for independent unions were
fought at Hyundai in the early 1990s, after the 1997–1998 financial cri-
sis Hyundai Heavy Industries began employing thousands of workers on
an irregular basis alongside regular workers through ‘illegal dispatch’ – a
system where companies use in-house subcontractors to create a false
employer. In this case subcontracted or irregular workers work inside

Hyundai’s facilities using the company’s tools and machinery and work-
ing under their instruction to produce products sold by Hyundai, but
they are paid less than 50% to 60% of the wages of direct employees
(IMF 2010). Relations in the workplace between irregular and regular
workers have become more strained in recent years, in part due to a
perception of a lack of support for irregular-worker organization from
the regular workers’ unions who have at times put pressure on irregular
workers to end their struggles.
The disappearing minjung?
Although the minjung movement has receded since the 1987 democratic
uprising, the continuation of its tactics and repertoires of protest show
that something of the movement’s structure of feeling remains active
in the present, if only at a residual level. Raymond Williams’ term
‘structure of feeling’ is an appropriate description here. It describes how
social structures and relations are lived and felt as ordinary in ways
that are different from explicit ideologies or worldviews (cf. Williams
1977: 128–141). Thus, it is fair to say that minjung protest continues to
animate contemporary protest as a structure of feeling, rather than a
concrete ideology, although certainly it is a structure of feeling that is
oriented towards demands for equality and recognition of the struggles
of the oppressed. Furthermore, Williams’ emphasis on cultural forms as
emergent, dominant or residual is also useful for describing the survival
of minjung tactics that were the dominant repertoire of oppositional
protest in the 1980s but are only residual now. However, a residual sta-
tus does not signify that the tactic is dying off. Rather, it is important
to examine the ways in which such tactics periodically re-emerge, as well
as the social relations responsible for such re-emergence.
After the 1987 protests, the minjung movement was slowly trans-
formed from an oppositional movement to a more strategic nexus of
social movements, politicians and NGOs. Instead of the people (min-
jung), the idea of the citizen (simin) and civil society (simin sahoe) have
become popular discourses among social movements and NGOs. This
created tension between the larger popular movement and new civil
society groups – like People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy,
Korea’s largest NGO – which have tried to overcome the difficulties by
combining popular mobilization of former minjung movements and
activists with the more strategic political opportunities for consulta-
tion and engagement with the government that have been created by
Jamie Doucette 219
democratization. This transition from minjung activism to more strate-

gic engagement did not happen overnight, but there was a gradual loos-
ening or un-tethering of activism from a coherent mass oppositional
strategy. This does not mean that the general demands of the minjung
movements – for greater equality, liberty and peaceful engagement
with North Korea – or even many of the tactics of the movement dis-
appeared. Indeed, Lee (2007) and others (cf. Kim 2006) argue the goals
and some of the cultural repertoire of the minjung movement have
survived and have provided a basis from which to critique those gov-
ernments that have emerged from the democracy movement.
This transition occurred for several reasons. While the minjung move-
ment did spur a transition to free elections and open up new possibilities,
there also emerged within social movements a critique of the concept
of minjung. Koo (2001: 146–149) notes that even by the mid-1980s
workers began to critique the movement, which they found to be too
broad and fatalistic, regarding it as a form of proto-class consciousness
through which workers passed. Nonetheless, many of the movement’s
practices have remained a core part of everyday protest culture, as have
some of the more traumatic tactics such as self-immolation. It is not
simply the case that the minjung has disappeared, but rather it remains
as a residual structure of feeling, an emotional resource and set of pro-
test practices, which can be drawn upon in the midst of new demands
and subjectivities (cf. Jeong 2004). For example, repertoires of minjung
protest have more recently been re-articulated by newer movements,
such as is seen in the commemoration by migrant worker activists of
migrant deaths in detention or from suicide. After a particularly brutal
immigration crackdown in 2004, migrant labour unionists paraded
commemoration portraits of deceased migrant workers who were killed
or committed suicide during the crackdown through downtown Seoul.
These portraits were similar to portraits carried to honour minjung mar-
tyrs, and the protest took place in key sites of minjung protest such as
Myeongdong Cathedral. Migrant activists learned these repertoires from
the democratic union movement. As one of the South Asian founders
of the Migrant Trade Union, who attended Korean labour movement
protests and applied their tactics to the migrant workers’ struggle, puts
it: ‘They had an inspiring history. I saw lots of cultural events, social
movements, and protests that touched each person in their society. Our
slogans, our rally style, we tried to follow their struggles so that people
that would say: “They are our people, their struggle is our struggle too’’
(Interview, Migrant Trade Union activist, 2009). The fact that migrants
are able to mobilize these repertoires suggests that these styles of radical
protest and the residual structure of feeling they summon forth can be
a powerful tool for creating solidarity across ethnicities.
While migrant labour unionists commemorate the deaths and suicides
of migrant workers in the manner in which minjung martyrs are com-
memorated, they do not commit acts such as self-immolation. In the last
decade, this tactic has mostly been used in irregular worker struggles.
After 1987, tactics such as self-immolation were common in the nation-
alist student movement, which pushed for peaceful engagement and
reunification with North Korea. The tactic was common particularly in
the early 1990s when this movement was undergoing strong repression.
Since 2002, the tactic has been more common among labour unionists
and anti-globalization activists; it has also been used by activists pro-
testing against environmental destruction caused by a number of large
infrastructure projects.1 The recent resurgence of the tactic amongst
irregular labourers in particular can be related to the challenges posed
by neoliberal restructuring since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and,
in particular, the dilemmas this restructuring has created for ongoing
efforts to reconfigure South Korea’s political economy and the place of
labour within it.
Korean labour relations and the politics of democratization
While the 1987 democratic uprising opened up the political system to

competition at the electoral level, the democratization of labour rela-
tions has been a more difficult struggle. Because of internal division
between its two key politicians, who decided to run separate presidential
campaigns, the democracy movement was unable to elect a fully civil-
ian government, separate from the old regime, until 1997. Furthermore,
Kim Young Sam’s ‘ssegyehwa’ or ‘globalization’ reforms in 1993 phased
out policy loans and liberalized short-term borrowing on foreign mar-
kets, which provoked Korea’s exposure to the Asian financial crisis of
1997–1998. The solution of the newly elected Kim Dae Jung govern-
ment and the IMF was to choke the economy of credit so that only the
largest firms survived. This led to a deep contraction and diminished
rates of economic growth. Since the financial market rather than the
old bank-based system of industrial lending was now seen as the main
source of capital for industrial investment, both foreign and domestic
firms argued that they needed to cut back on labour costs to be more
attractive to investors. Kim gave in to these calls and used a tripartite
commission of labour, business and government to come up with an
agreement to allow firms to lay off workers or hire temporary ones in
Jamie Doucette 221
exchange for a moderate increase in welfare spending and a restructur-

ing of the national medical insurance and pension systems. The two
labour federations participated in this agreement, but it was rejected by
the unions’ rank and file; however, the government refused to renego-
tiate and passed the reforms agreed on in the deal.
While the democratic transition gave social movements greater civic
freedoms to advocate for social change, their efforts to democratize
labour relations were constrained by calls for deregulation that strength-
ened oligopolistic powers. As prominent civic activist and critical soci-
ologist Cho (2008) argues:
The breakdown of the former developmental dictatorship brought

with it … two ‘liberations’: one is liberation of civil society and people
themselves from the authoritarian repression, and the other is that of
the market and business from the strong dirigiste state control. The
liberated market and business could strengthen themselves enough
to dominate and colonize the society and politics in a new way. If the
former armed itself with the discourse of democracy, the latter with
that of de-regulation and market autonomy.
(Cho 2008: 29)
Worse yet, the attempt by democratic governments to gain greater

hegemony by partially embracing neoliberal reforms has created fissures
between the labour movement and politicians from the pro-democratic
bloc. This has led many leading progressive intellectuals to argue that
democratization has failed to incorporate the interests of the working
class into mainstream politics (Choi 2005, Doucette 2010a).
Much of this pressure of liberalization can be interpreted as an attempt
by employers to discipline an increasingly mobilized union movement
that amplified its struggle after the June 1987 protests. The Great Worker
Struggle of Autumn 1987 was an intense wave of labour disputes that
resulted in the improvement of wages, working conditions and, eventu-
ally, led to the formation of independent unions. In a period of just three
short months, Korea saw more instances of recorded labour strife than for
the entire period of post-war industrialization that began in 1961 (cf. Koo
2001: 157). This struggle and those that followed in the coming years
strengthened the role of labour in large workplaces, and led to greater
coordination between enterprise unions, eventually leading to the
establishment of a national confederation of democratic trade unions:
the Korean Confederation of Trade Union (KCTU). The KCTU is an
independent counterpoint to the pro-government Federation of Korean
Trade Unions (FKTU), which was established as an anti-communist union

federation in 1946. The FKTU was itself established as an alternative to
the left-wing national workers’ organization, Cheonpyeong, that sprung
up at the end of the colonial period and was viewed as a threat to the
postcolonial regime by rightist conservatives and the US military govern-
ment. During this time, Cheonpyeong’s leadership was arrested or killed,
and Korea’s authoritarian labour relations system was directed through
the FKTU (Gray 2011: 310).
During the authoritarian period until 1987, labour relations faced
strict surveillance and were highly militaristic. Although by law, work-
ers were protected by strong labour standards, these were rarely enforced
and workers were easily hired and fired and coerced to work long shifts
in often unsafe conditions. After democratization, there has been a
long struggle to improve working conditions. Since the Great Worker
Struggle of 1987, the FKTU has had to compete with the militant labour
movements that eventually became the KCTU as well as contend with
grassroots pressure with the union for it to take a more political stance
and participate in periodic collective action. As a result, many enterprise
unions have left the FKTU and joined the KCTU over the last 15 years,
such as the Seoul Railroad Workers’ Union. Nonetheless, the FKTU
remains a pro-government union, and has recently entered agreements
with the conservative government to not demand wage increases or
engage in strike action (Hankyoreh 2011c). This has created problems in
processes of social partnership such as tripartite negotiations between
labour, state and business, as it is difficult for organized labour to nego-
tiate with a single voice.
The survival of the FKTU is not the only obstacle for the democratic
union movement. It also has internal fractures and fissures that are
important to recognize. First and foremost, organized labour is dispro-
portionally oriented towards large enterprises; workplaces with over
300 workers are home to 72% of all unionized workers (Korea Labour
Foundation 2009), while smaller workplaces where the majority of
Koreans are employed remain poorly organized. Although there are
many progressive labour activists in the KCTU that came of age in the
grassroots labour struggles of the 1980s and 90s, the actual enterprise
unions that make up the majority of the KCTU are administratively
oriented toward their large workplaces. Thus it is difficult for the KCTU
to represent smaller workplaces and the many low-paid and irregular
workers. This creates a strategic problem that influences the strategy
of progressive labour unionists in the KCTU in the context of democ-
ratization. On the one hand, during the 1990s there were factions of
Jamie Doucette 223
labour unionists that wanted to take advantage of new opportunities for

strategic engagement with the state through social partnership policies.
Many in this faction criticized the ‘minjung unionism’ of the more mili-
tant, grassroots factions of the KCTU (Gray 2007). Other factions, on
the other hand, felt that the democratic union movement should aim
for a wider mobilization of workers across industries before increasing
its presence in social dialogue lest such agreements exclude the many
rank and file workers that were not presently represented by the large
unions. This faction has been actively involved in supporting irregular
workers’ struggles, particularly in cases of illegal subcontracting where
a large company hires workers on a temporary basis from a firm over
which they retain ownership, but also in other cases such as wildcat
strikes by female service workers who have been irregularly employed
in advance of new labour legislation introduced in 2007.
KCTU activists have not been able to effectively mobilize as much
support for these struggles as they had been able to in the past. Partially,
this is due to the loosening of authoritarian controls over labour, which
has led many workers at large factories to identify with each other based
on occupational skill and/or company affiliation instead of their status
as wage labourers. Indeed, in some cases irregular workers’ struggles
within the same firm as organized workers have been met with apathy
from co-workers because of distinctions in skill: such as the percep-
tion of support staff in canteens and simple assembly line workers as
‘unskilled’ vs. ‘skilled’ complex assembly workers on the floor of heavy
industries. In the past the subordination of independent unions per se
encouraged greater solidarity among these workers. In some cases this
disjuncture has led to an increased sense of desperation and violent
confrontations in the workplace, and in other cases it has encouraged
workers to look for new allies among other civic groups such as the
feminist movement and small grassroots political parties.
Finally, as Gray (2007) documents, when it came to actual tripar-
titism and social dialogue during the 1997–1998 financial crisis, the
experience of the unions has not been much better. In 1998, they were
forced into an agreement on labour restructuring that would allow
the expansion of temporary and irregular work. This deal was negoti-
ated by the union leadership in exchange for formal legal recognition
of the KCTU. It was later rejected by the KCTU when put to a vote, but
the government recognized it as a fait accompli and proceeded to intro-
duce its ‘grand social compromise’. This compromise only allowed the
use of irregular workers in specific sectors, and the conditions under
which workers must be regularized were unclear. Within a few years, the
government came under pressure to both expand the employment of

irregular work and to clarify the conditions under which workers must
be regularized so as to protect irregular workers from working indefinitely
for the same company without the same rights and benefits as other
workers. Without an agreement on the principle of equal pay for equal
work, the KCTU walked out of the Economic and Social Development
Commission (Korea’s main tripartite organization). However, in the fall
of 2006, the government was able to sign an agreement with the pro-
government FKTU allowing for the expansion of irregular work under
the Non-Regular Workers Protection Bill, one of three bills that became
part of the then Roh government’s labour relations road map (see
Doucette 2010b). In summary, while the ruling parties seem content
to expand labour market restructuring, the labour movement seems
strategically divided between efforts to represent workers in tripartite
negotiations and its continuing efforts to mobilize unrepresented work-
ers; however, both of these efforts have been constrained by the expan-
sion of irregular work, which chips away at older solidarities and union
density, as well as individual workers’ livelihoods, resulting in often
desperate cycles of protest.
Vicious Cycles of Labour Protest
Since 1997, the most difficult labour struggles have centred around the
use of irregular workers, with labour unionism restricted by compulsory
arbitration, intense policing and the harassment of union organizers.
There has also been an emergence of corporatism at the large, well-paid
enterprise unions like Hyundai and others, some of which have left the
KCTU. This has made it more difficult to organize regular workers to
support the struggles of irregular workers and led to conflict between
these workers in large workplaces, particularly at those workplaces that
employ large numbers of in-house subcontractors such as Hyundai
Heavy Industries where nearly 10,000 irregular workers work alongside
20,000 regular employees (cf. Liem 2010). Robinson (2011) notes that
this form of in-house subcontracting and other forms of illegal hire
are a model that Korean companies like HHI have employed at their
branches in other countries like the Philippines. Not all irregular work
in Korea follows this model, however. In addition to outsourcing and
disguised employment there has been a proliferation of temporary, part-
time and contract work across industries, with newer service industries
and big-box retailers employing a large amount of irregular and mostly
female workers.
Jamie Doucette 225
By moderate estimates, the proportion of irregular workers in South

Korea peaked by the end of 2005 at around 48% (Grubb et al. 2007),
making Korea an economy with close to the highest incidence of irregu-
lar employment in the OECD. These numbers have been the object of
some contention as perhaps being too moderate. There are at least four
definitions of irregular work commonly used by the OECD, the Korean
government and the union movement. These range from a definition
based on a) the number of temporary, casual and day labourers as a
percentage of total wage and salary earners; b) workers employed under
a year and not paid bonus and overtime; c) a hybrid tally combining the
number of temporary, casual and day labourers as a percentage of total
wage and salary earners and the number of regular workers without
pension or benefits; and d) employment survey data based on contract
duration and self-reporting. Unions prefer to calculate the number using
definition c), which totalled irregular employment as 57% of workers
at surveyed firms for 2005. This reveals that the incidence of irregular
employment is quite high, but also hard to fully measure. A further
drawback is that these numbers do not include the roughly 650,000
migrant workers who work for low wages under the Employment Permit
System, undocumented workers or the large numbers of precarious, self-
employed workers.
The struggles of irregular women workers after 1997 were the first to
prioritize the expansion of non-regular work in a prominent manner.
However, as Chun (2009) notes, the male-dominated KCTU was slow
to embrace the issue as a major rallying point. This created tension in
restructured enterprises that had hired women workers back as irregular
or illegal dispatch workers after 1997. Chun uses the term ‘legal liminal-
ity’ to refer to the ambiguous legal space these workers occupy as they
strive to be reclassified as regular workers or, vice versa, win rights, ben-
efits or enhanced legal recognition of their status. While the struggles
of female irregular workers have been militant and employed tactics
such as hunger strikes and workplace occupations, they have not so far
employed self-immolation or suicide as a form of protest. The tactic
seems to have a more masculine use. While female farmers have com-
mitted suicide in protest at high levels of rural indebtedness and the
government’s lowering of agricultural quotas and subsidies, it seems
that in labour struggles it is a tactic more commonly used by men.
In particular, the increasing use of the tactic in irregular workers’ strug-
gles began after the government announced that it was seeking to intro-
duce a ‘non-regular workers protection law’ which would both expand
and codify the terms of irregular employment back in 2003. In 2003
alone there was a large number of self-immolations and protest suicides.

As Jang (2004a) reports:
In January 2003, Dalho Bae, a 47-year-old worker at Doosan Heavy

Industry Co., committed suicide by burning himself. On October
17 Juik Kim, the chief of the metal labor union branch at Hanjin
Heavy Industry Co, a ship-constructor, committed suicide after a 129
day-siege on the jeep-crane. On the 23rd of October, Haenam Lee,
the chief of the chapter of the irregular laborers’ union at Saewontech
Co., burned himself. He died on November 17. And on the 26th,
Yongseok Lee, the chief of Gwangju-Chonnam branch of labor union
at Korea Labor Welfare Corporation, also committed suicide. He died
on October 31.
It is important to note here that many of these protest suicides were

by irregular workers at large firms. Many of these firms were home to
difficult labour struggles in the 1990s, and regular workers at these firms
enjoy decent benefits, so for many irregular workers there is a sense of
betrayal at their unionized colleagues for not supporting their strug-
gles. Though many of the suicides have been at large firms, the tactic is
also common in smaller sectors like construction and transport where
there are also high levels of disguised employment and where workers
are regarded as owner-operators even though they work in precarious
conditions with very little bargaining power.
There is another key reason for this increase in suicides since 2003 –
that is, as a result of a new form of punitive anti-labour tactic adopted
by the government and business, namely, the use of damage claims
and facilitate seizure of workers’ assets to discourage labour mobiliza-
tion. Claims on unionists multiplied in 2003 and 2004 across both
private and public workplaces (see Table 12.1). Technically, Korean
labour law forbids employers from claiming damages against a union
or workers arising from collective bargaining or other industrial action.
Table 12.1 Monetary amounts of pending damage claims and provisional seizure
of assets
Year Amount
2004 Total: 110.09 billion won (roughly 100 million US) in 41 private and
public workplaces
2011 Total: >100 billion won (75 billion won in 5 largest workplaces)
Source: KCTU (2005) and Hankyoreh (2011b).

Jamie Doucette 227
Jang (2004a) notes, however, that the courts have decided that ‘illegal
strikes’ should not be protected by this law:
The difference between a legal and an illegal strike is superficial: If

a labor union violates government procedures even in a trivial way,
their actions become illegal. For example, the government authori-
ties can intervene in a dispute between a company and its laborers
and decide an arbitration award. If unions do not accept it and strike
in response, they become unintentional violators of the law.
The OECD’s Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Committee

repeatedly expressed the view that the definition of ‘unlawful activi-
ties’ in Korea is unusually broad and encompasses union activities that
would be regarded as lawful in most OECD countries (OECD, 2000).
These include the labelling of strikes against industrial restructuring,
privatization and trade liberalization as illegal political strikes, as well
as labelling strikes by irregular workers as unlawful.
Jang (2004a) also notes that since 2002 companies’ compensation
suits have been extended to regular union members, their families and
individuals who have acted as legal guarantors for these workers. These
claims have been used to seize workers’ salaries, real estate, automobiles
and the deposit money (often several hundred thousand dollars) on their
apartment leases. This policy has been seen by many as a form of col-
lective punishment as it jeopardizes workers’ families’ living conditions
as well as individual salaries. As the KCTU (2007) put it: ‘the seriousness
of the claims and seizures lies in the fact that they lead to not only an
infringement of … union activities, but also to the destruction of fami-
lies and, ultimately, lives as well’. In recent strikes, many of the unionists
involved or their family members have been hospitalized for depression
or are facing the threat of divorce (Hankyoreh 2011a). These claims have
reached as high as $US9.6m for a single unionist. One unionist who
committed suicide at Hanjin Heavy Industries in 2003 received less than
$100 a month at the point of his suicide. Before that, his monthly aver-
age salary had been about 1.5 million won ($1250) (Jang 2004a).
The use of damage claims and provisional seizure increased signifi-
cantly in 2004 and has remained a constant feature of labour conflict
since then. In that year alone the courts made claims upon or attempted
to seize nearly $US110m in unionist’s assets (KCTU 2005). Around 25%
of these claims were against public sector unionists. This shows it was
not simply a tactic adopted by private firms alone. Aggregate data on
the extent of damage suits and provisional seizure of assets is difficult
to come by, but as of the spring of 2011, Hankyoreh (2011a) reported

that the total amount of compensation claims in five of the largest
workplace conflicts amounted to $US69.4m, with around 910 union
leaders and members at these firms targeted by such claims. This shows
the practice is still a common feature of labour relations, even though it
has led to the protest suicide of a number of union activists.
Often, especially in the case of damage claims and facilitate seizures,
the result of these strategies is to generate a cycle of strife that ends in
stalemate, with the company using damage claims to repress a strike but
causing a newer, often more violent one by the severity of the seizures.
This cycle tends to go on until an informal agreement or amnesty is
reached between businesses and their workers and the seizures allowed
to expire (Interview, Society for the Abolishment of Irregular Work,
February 2007). Many of these cases, especially in the case of irregular
workers’ struggles, have ended with the political suicides of impover-
ished workers or persecuted union organizers. This often leads to new
violent protests, while at other times it can sometimes lead to a settling
of labour conflict. According to Jang (2004b), the Hanjin Shipbuilding
Company in 2004 regularized all its irregular workers after the second
suicide by one of its shipbuilders. During the strike, a worker hung him-
self from his crane, leaving a suicide note saying that being an irregular
worker was ‘a frightening thing.’
Unfortunately, not much has changed since 2004. These suicide pro-
tests and other acts of desperation by irregular workers and union organ-
izers continue to occur every year. In 2009 Park Jong-tae, chapter head of
the Kwangju chapter of Korea Cargo Transport Workers‘ Union (KCTWU),
a union of ‘self-employed’ contractors, took his life in protest at redun-
dancies against the union. The struggle over redundancies at SsangYong
Motors has led to 22 deaths of workers and their family members since
2009, many of them from suicide (Ohmynews 2011). SsangYong’s union
were facing over 23 billion won in damage claims for these strikes and
protests by mid-2011 (Hankyoreh 2011a). In December 2011, a Korean
Construction Workers’ Union member committed self-immolation dur-
ing a strike for collective bargaining rights by subcontracted electricians
at Youngjin Electrical Company. Workers there were protesting over long
hours, illegal dispatch, use of workplace bodyguards to repress union
activity and lack of workplace accident compensation (ATMN 2011). The
self-immolation of a non-regular workers’ union member at Hyundai
Motors in 2010 was more recently followed by another self-immolation
in January 2012 by another unionist over long working hours and the
lack of a timeline on the regularization of subcontracting workers who
Jamie Doucette 229
were ruled to be illegal dispatch employees (Hankyoreh 2012). It seems

that as long as high levels of irregular work and illegal dispatch, as well
as repression of labour conflict through damage claims and other means
remain, self-immolations and other traumatic events will continue to
animate the culture of Korean labour protest.
Conclusion
The survival of minjung tactics of social protest such as self-immolation

is informed by the ways in which the challenges raised by neoliberalism
and the difficult struggle to reform Korean labour relations. The con-
tinuation of this traumatic tactic demonstrates how historical structures
of feeling and repertoires of protest, such as the strategies and the tactics
of the minjung movement, continue to shape the present in a residual
manner and point to the ways in which the process of democratization
has not been fully extended to Korean labour relations. If Chun Tae-Il’s
self-immolation began the modern age of the minjung in 1970, the con-
tinuation of the tactic shows that not all of the goals of this movement
have been achieved. While authoritarian government has receded, the
expansion of irregular work and the use of new forms of labour control
such as damage claims and preventative seizures of individual labour
unionist’s assets and livelihoods has expanded under a government
whose key politicians were once part of the broader minjung movement.
Unfortunately, this intersection of democratization and neoliberalism
has created a situation in which labour occupies a very precarious place.
Finally, this use of new repressive forms of labour control coupled with
the expansion of irregular labour highlights the fact that the traumatic
responses of Korean workers is not simply a national issue, but is really
one located at the global–local nexus between the Korean and global
economy. If the labour patterns of the 1970s and 1980s that Chun
Tae-Il protested against were part of an initial integration into the post-
war global political economy through state-controlled investment and
labour repression, the recent transformation of Korean labour relations
from authoritarian developmentalism to a more market-oriented sys-
tem of uneven labour relations between larger and small firms, regular
and irregular, male and female, native and migrant workers speaks to a
new, neoliberal recomposition of the local–global nexus that resonates
with the creation of other flexibilized labour regimes in East Asia. In the
current conjuncture, it is particularly important for labour scholars to
examine how these regimes are shaped not only by the irregular employ-
ment practices and preferences of various fractions of capital, but also
the way in which workers have targeted these employment practices

in culturally specific ways. To understand the latter, it is thus crucial to
pay attention to the ways in which tactics inherited from past struggles
survive and shape contemporary struggles, returning in ways that seek
to challenge new forms of precarious employment and regressive forms
of labour control that have accompanied them.
Note
1. The tactic was used by an anti-Korea US free trade agreement activist in 2007.
Suicide protest was also committed by farmers protesting against the same
agreement. Anti-globalization activist Lee Kyoung-Hae committed suicide at
the 2003 WTO protests in Cancun, a transnational application of this tactic.
Recently, a monk committed self-immolation against the Lee government’s
4 rivers construction project, which has dredged and destroyed habitats along
Korea’s main rivers.
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13
Striking Out in America: Is There
an Alternative to the Strike?
Kim Moody
Introduction
‘The strike is the essence of collective labour activity’, wrote former

Clinton National Labour Relation Board recess appointee and legal
scholar, Craig Becker (1994: 351). The National Labour Relation Act
(NLRA) of 1935, which established the legal basis of collective bargain-
ing for most of the private sector in the US, unequivocally guaranteed
the right to strike. Furthermore, Becker notes the Supreme Court, as late
as 1963, argued that the NLRA had upheld a system of collective bargain-
ing ‘with the right to strike at its core’. Yet, beginning in the 1980s, the
use of the strike has declined from year to year. The number of strikes
has fallen from an average of over 5,000 a year in the 1970s to an annual
average of fewer than 300 in the 2000s (see Table 13.1). How could such
a huge decline in the use of labour’s ‘only true weapon’ (Logan 2008:
171) be explained? Were there alternative forms of industrial action that
workers and their unions could deploy to pressure employers in the proc-
ess of collective bargaining?
This chapter examines the various forces behind this decline as it relates
to workers and unions in the private sector.1 Following an analysis of the
roots of the near abandonment of the strike weapon, the chapter will
then discuss the various alternatives. It will argue that the central expla-
nation for reduced strike activity lies not just in the US legal regime,
which severely limits workers’ ‘self help’, as the NLRA terms industrial
action, or in the ‘global’ economic trends that disadvantage workers,
but in the dynamics of class conflict that these trends have encouraged
or enabled. Furthermore, in examining the alternative forms of indus-
trial action developed by union members and leaders in the last couple
of decades, the chapter will argue that the very forces militating against
233
234 Striking Out in America
workers withdrawing their labour in an industrial dispute present prob-

lems for the successful exercise of these alternatives.
International trends in strikes and union upsurge
As a number of analyses have noted, strikes, labour unrest, and union

growth and renewal come and go in waves (Kelly 1998, Silver 2003,
Clawson 2003). Each has a theory of just what brings about an upsurge
or its abatement. Silver (2003) emphasizes shifts in production systems
and geographic location as well as the rhythms of accumulation and
the impact of World Wars. Kelly (1998: 83–107) relates periods of work-
ers’ mobilization to the movements of Kontratieff long waves of eco-
nomic growth and decline. These theories, and their critiques, are too
complex to do justice to here. However, the empirical fact of waves of
worker militancy is difficult to deny, and the underlying changes in the
economies of the developed countries in these periods are undoubtedly
a major factor. The pictures painted by Silver and Kelly differ somewhat,
but both see the first labour upsurge in the major capitalist countries
in the 1880s, followed by a slump in the 1890s, a rise before and after
World War One, followed, in turn, by a downswing in the 1920s, another
upswing in the 1930s and 1940s, and again in the 1960s and 1970s. The
upsurge of the 1960s and 1970s was the last to date (Kelly 1998: 9, Silver
2003: 127).
The international nature of the recent wave of decline in strike activ-
ity in more developed economies since the late 1970s has been con-
firmed by two recent studies. An ILO study (Perry and Wilson 2004: 37)
shows that strike activity in 38 nations, measured by an index based on
days-not-worked during strikes, fell by 80% from the 1970s to the early
2000s. A similar study of strike trends by the European Trade Union
Institute (ETUI) (Vandaele 2011: 8) showed that the levels of days-not-
worked due to strikes in the 15 core countries of the EU fell by 40% from
the 1990s to the 2000s. As in many studies, the ETUI attributes this
decline in part to the shift from manufacturing to service industries.
However, it also notes that strike levels have declined in both manu-
facturing and services since the 1990s in Western Europe, indicating
that more than deindustrialization is at work (Vandaele 2011: 26–9).
The study speculates that such strikes as still occur may be defensive in
nature as ‘workers resist wage restraint, job losses, work intensification
and so on’ (Vandaele 2011: 30). This would appear to reveal a strong
change in the behaviour of European capital in the vortex of European-
wide market integration. This shift to neo-liberalism in the EU has been
Kim Moody 235
noted and protested by the European Trade Union Confederation

(2011) in its Strategy and Action Plan, 2011–2015.
The notion of waves in strike activity, then, would seem to be con-
firmed at least in the negative. It is not difficult to discern that glo-
balization and neo-liberal marketization lie behind this trend. Two
qualifications, however, must be made. First the behaviour of the par-
ties in the employment relationship, perhaps especially that of capital,
greatly influences whether strikes are viable. Great economic trends
affect that behaviour, but it is the actors in industrial or class conflict
who pick from available strategies and tactics in this on-going strug-
gle over the fruits of production. The second is the distinct context of
labour in the United States, to which we now turn.
Undermining of the strike in the US
It is difficult to make a precise comparison between the fall in strike

activity internationally and that in the US because figures for days-not-
worked during strikes have not been available since 1981. In 1982, the
Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped counting all strikes, recording only
strikes of 1,000 or more workers (Perry and Wilson 2004: 10–14). The
Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) does report all strikes,
but does not report the days-not-worked measure used in the two recent
international studies cited above. Nevertheless, a comparison of the aver-
age annual number of strikes in the 2000s with those in the 1970s in
Table 13.1 shows a sharp drop of 95%. This is a much greater drop than
that measured in Europe by the ETUI and significantly higher than the
ILO measure of 38 countries. It is also larger than the drop in union
membership and density in the US during those years.
One explanation for this above average decline in strikes lies in the
legal environment that governs labour relations in the US. The NLRA
Table 13.1 Average annual private sector union membership, density, strikes,
and duration
Decade Members Density Strikes Duration (calendar days)
1970s 16,500,000 25% 5,254 27.7

2000s 9,074,000 8.7% 285 64.9
% change −45% −65% −95% +134%
Sources: Troy (1986: 81), Lewin (1986: 244), Mayer (2004: 22), USDOC Statistical Abstract of
the United States 1982–83, and USBLS Union Membership 2000–2009 and FMCS Annual Reports
2000–2010.
guaranteed both the right of workers to organize unions and to strike

or engage in other ‘concerted activities’. Its Section 7 specifically grants
the right to ‘concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining
or other mutual aid and activities’, while Section 13 states that nothing
in the Act ‘shall be construed so as either to interfere with or impede or
diminish in any way the right to strike …’ (Schwartz 1999: 10, 20). Yet,
no sooner had the Supreme Court upheld the Act in 1937 than it began
the long process of whittling away the very rights sections 7 and 13 spelt
out. As these court decisions also impact the various alternatives to the
strike, a closer look at them is necessary.
Concerning the major court decisions that would undermine worker
rights to organize and strike, Pope (2004: 518–19) argues that although
it is generally accepted that federal statutes can only be trumped by the
US Constitution, the judiciary has in fact elevated ‘the state common-
law rights of employers over the federal statutory rights of workers’.
These common-law rights were, above all, the right to possess and pro-
tect private property. Human Rights Watch also concluded that ‘many
of the features of U.S. labor law and practice that counter international
norms result from court-fashioned doctrine, not just from statutory
deficiencies’ (Compa 2000: 17). Court-made law is, of course, initiated
by one or another of the parties to a dispute covered by the NLRA. Most
of the challenges to the various aspects of strike activity come, as one
would expect, from the employers. In other words, the bulk of actual
labour law in the US has been initiated by corporation lawyers and
crafted by the courts out of the reach of normal democratic practice and
union influence.
In the first such case, known as Mackay Radio & Telegraph, in 1938 the
Supreme Court found that the employer had a right to hire permanent
replacement workers during a legitimate strike—an act that meant the
strikers had no guarantee of returning to their jobs once the strike ended.
As early as 1936, one NLRB lawyer argued that if employers were allowed
to bring in permanent replacements ‘it would destroy all unions, abolish
all efforts at bargaining and emasculate all strikers …’ (in Logan 2008:
172–3). While this may be somewhat of an exaggeration, Mackay has
made the strike a highly risky proposition in most industrial settings.
The next Supreme Court decision limiting strike activity came in 1939
in the Fansteel case, which banned sit-down or sit-in strikes—again on
the basis of common-law property rights (Pope 2004: 520–6). Sit-down
strikes, of which there had been over a thousand in 1936–1937, were the
major means by which both the new industrial unions and older craft
unions forced union recognition out of giant corporations and smaller
Kim Moody 237
employers alike (Preis 1964: 62–3). Fansteel made sit-down strikes both
illegal and ‘unprotected’ under the NLRA, meaning that workers could
be dismissed for engaging in such ‘unprotected’ activity. In addition, it
narrowed the definition of a strike to one where workers both stopped
work altogether and left the workplace. Fansteel would also be used as
a precedent for declaring other forms of industrial action such as slow-
downs, intermittent, and partial strikes ‘unprotected’ (Pope 2004: 526,
Becker 1994: 351–71). This has implications for some alternative non-
strike forms of ‘concerted activities’.2
Mackay and Fansteel, along with all the court findings that followed,
both narrowed the definition of ‘protected’ strike activity and rendered
the strike in a number of forms a dangerous venture for any union and its
members. Yet, from the end of World War Two until the 1980s, employ-
ers seldom introduced permanent replacements (Pope 2004: 533–4).
Indeed, strike activity remained high in the 1950s and rose dramatically
from the mid-1960s until the late 1970s. The collapse in the frequency
of strikes came between 1979 and 1981 when they dropped by almost
half, partly the consequence of the recession of those years (US Bureau
of the Census 1982–83: 410). By the mid-to late-1980s, however, man-
agers increasingly said they would consider using permanent replace-
ment workers in the event of a strike (Logan 2008: 177). The downward
drift in strikes would continue into the economic recovery of the 1980s
as employers of all sizes grasped, for the first time, the weapons the
courts had handed them four decades earlier.
Renewed management aggression
What had occurred was a change in the terms of industrial conflict as

management altered its outlook and strategy. Even well before employ-
ing permanent replacements, management began responding to falling
profit rates in what Davis (1986: 117–27) has called ‘The Management
Offensive of 1958–63’. This entailed management of the big corporations
taking a harder position on wages and attempting to regain authority
in the workplace. As Pope (2004: 533–4) describes the change: ‘a new
generation of managers had begun to replace those who had experienced
the mass picket lines of the 1940s’. The management offensive would
increase throughout the 1960s and 1970s, as profit rates fell sharply and
international competition intensified. Yet, far from crippling the strike,
management’s aggressive actions in those years brought on an increase
in both official and unofficial (‘unprotected’) strikes until the tide was
broken in the wake of the 1980–2 recession and the wave of union
concessions brought on by the 1979 Chrysler bailout—even before

Reagan broke the PATCO strike in August 1981 (Moody 2010: 105–46).
What the end of the strike wave of the ‘long 1970s’ revealed, however,
was the weakness of organized labour and the increased willingness of
its leaders to grant concessions. Capital, for its part, had reorganized
and regrouped both economically and politically during the 1970s to
dramatically reduce the power of organized labour (Moody 1988: 127–
46). No doubt the era of neo-liberalism that soon emerged encouraged
the newer generation of managers to press the unions harder for con-
cessions, but, perhaps ironically, it was the very weakness of the unions
that encouraged the accelerating use of Mackay by the mid-1980s (Pope
2004: 534).
1982 saw a recovery and the return of profitability that would last,
with the usual ups and downs, until the ‘Great Recession’ of 2008
(Shaikh 2010: 44–63, Mohun 2006: 347–8, McNally 2011: 46–9). Far
from bringing a relaxation on capital’s part, this encouraged a more
aggressive stance. The secret of this prolonged recovery of profitability
was that it was based largely on wage compression and an increased
effort bargain extracted from a retreating labour movement (Moody
2012). From 1983 onward, unions granted almost continuous contract
concessions. Increased work intensification through the introduction
of lean production methods, HRM techniques, labour-management
cooperation schemes, and a long string of defeated strikes in which
permanent replacement workers played a key role all accelerated in the
1980s. By the late 1980s it was not just financially desperate businesses
that deployed permanent replacements, but ‘financially successful firms
that had provoked strikes by demanding sweeping reductions in wages
and benefits established through collective agreements’ (Logan 2008:
175–6, 178). And while international competition no doubt pressured
many companies into seeking concessions, the use of replacement work-
ers had spread to ‘landlocked’ industries such as newspapers, hotels, and
retail (Moody 2012).
Three surveys of between 1,500 and 2,000 union and management
negotiators conducted by the University of Massachusetts for the Federal
Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) in 1996, 1999, and 2003
provide an insight into the extent of the use of permanent replacements
during collective bargaining (see Table 13.2). The actions referred to
could have taken place in the two years leading up to each of the three
surveys. According to the surveyed union negotiators, the threat of strikes
remained fairly high, indicating that union negotiators still thought
these threats credible. The actual use of the strike and other forms of
Kim Moody 239
Table 13.2 Strike threats, strikes, threats of replacements, use of replacements in

collective bargaining, 1996, 1999, and 2003 (union answers)
Year Strike threat Strike* Threat of replacement Use of replacements
1996 N/A 8% 14% 1%

1999 39% 6% 13% 2%
2003 40% 4% 18% 3%
Sources: Kochan et al. (2004a, 2004b).

* Includes lockouts and other job actions.
job actions, however, declined in the period as would be expected.

Management threats to deploy permanent replacement workers were
less frequent than strike threats but grew somewhat over this eight-year
period. The actual use of permanent replacements, though relatively
uncommon in terms of overall bargaining, appears to be frequent and
growing in proportion to actual strikes, rising from one in eight in 1996
to three out of four in 2003. If this survey reflects wider developments,
it is no surprise that the number of strikes dropped from 372 in 1996
to 277 in 2003 and 159 in 2010. The intensification of capital’s assault
on unions is also suggested by the fact that not only had the duration
of strikes become longer since the 1970s, but it rose from an average of
51 days in the second half of the 1990s to 64 days in the 2000s (FMCS
2000, 2006, 2010).
The cost to labour
The impact on collective bargaining was predictable. As union mem-

bership, density, and strike frequency all fell, so did the size of wage
settlements. Median wage increases for the first year of negotiated set-
tlements ranged from 5.9% to 10.2% between 1949 and 1965, growing
much higher in the 1970s as both inflation and strike levels rose. By
the 1980s, they were falling drastically from a high of 9.6% in 1981 to
2.7% in 1988 and 3.4% in 1989. In the 1990s, they levelled-off at 3%,
falling from 3.8% in 2000 to 1.6% in 2010. Although it varied from
year to year, from 2000 through to 2010 an average of 22% of agree-
ments had no first-year increase (Bureau of National Affairs 2000–2007,
2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2010a, 2010b). Benefits, especially health insurance
and pensions, also receded from 1979 onwards. Those covered by any
employer-provided health insurance fell from 69% of the workforce in
1979 to 55% in 2004, while those with employer-provided pensions
fell by 7.8% from 1979 to 2006. The value of pensions also fell as those
covered by defined benefit, as opposed to defined contribution, pension

plans dropped from 39% in 1980 to 18% (Mishel et al. 2009: 123).
These trends extended to the entire workforce, now largely bereft of
the ‘threat effect’ and wage spill-over unions had once provided (Freeman
and Medoff 1984: 151–4). Despite some increases in the late 1990s
and late 2000s, real average weekly wages in private non-agricultural
industries in 2010 remained 13% below those of 1973 (Council of
Economic Advisers 2010: 246). The result was a reversal of the long-term
shift of national income toward labour. From 1959 to 1979, labour’s share
of GDP had risen from 68.3% to 73.9%, but from 1979 to 2006 it fell to
70.4% (Mishel et al. 2009: 86). Perhaps the clearest evidence that capital
was getting its way not only in labour costs, but in the effort bargain as
well, was the enormous and growing gap between labour compensation
and productivity. From 2000 to 2009 productivity grew at more than
twice the annual rate of real hourly compensation (Fleck et al. 2011: 60).
The search for alternatives—outside the workplace
Noting the dramatic decline in the incidence of major strikes since the
1950s and the simultaneous rise in the frequency of unfair labour prac-
tice (ULP) cases filed against employers with the NLRB, McCammon
(2001: 143–52) asked, given the ‘increasing difficulty of using the strike’,
whether ‘workers have substituted legal strategies for labor militancy
in their attempts to organize and preserve unions?’ After extensive
examination of the various circumstances that might lead to such a
choice, including the changing economic circumstances that may lead
employers ‘to act in potentially illegal ways to protect their profitabil-
ity’ she concludes that ‘workers are not choosing between striking and
filing unfair labor practice charges’ (McCammon 2001: 156–60). Given
that ULPs are a very blunt instrument subject to endless delays, and
mostly occur during organizing drives or first contract negotiations,
it is unlikely that this form of ‘legal mobilization’ could be seen as a sub-
stitute for the strike. The search for possible alternatives, however, has
been going on for some time.
Facing increased employer hostility on every front, organized labour
turned again and again to politics and the hope of labour law reform.
Each effort, in 1977–1987, 1993 and 2008–2009 failed to win any legis-
lative relief, including the unsuccessful effort by Clinton to ban perma-
nent replacement workers (Moody 1988: 134, Logan 2008: 183–8). In
the 1970s, however, a different search for increased union power began
in the unlikely setting of the south. At Farah Manufacturing in Texas in
Kim Moody 241
the early 1970s and at J.P. Stevens in South Carolina in the late 1970s,
Ray Rogers, working for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers
Union, deployed what he called the ‘corporate campaign’. One early
study described the Stevens campaign as ‘… a three pronged effort con-
sisting of legal changes of unfair labor practices, a consumer boycott of
Stevens’ products, and a corporate campaign designed to isolate Stevens
from the rest of the business and financial community’ (in Perry 1987: 1).
It was the latter aspect that was new.
The idea was to put public pressure on financial backers of the target
company in order to force the company to recognize the union in the
case of an organizing drive such as Stevens. The Stevens campaign was
largely successful. When the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-
CIO picked up the idea in 1985, it saw its version of the ‘coordinated
corporate campaign’ as reinforcing ‘a well-prepared and well-conducted
strike when necessary’. Based on his experience at Stevens, Rogers went
a step further suggesting that the ‘corporate campaign’ could substi-
tute for a strike (in Perry 1987: 1). In the 1980s, the concept would be
broadened, but almost always involved pressure on board members of
related financial institutions and often an intervention at the target
firm’s stock holder meetings. This had been the case at Stevens, where
Rogers had some success in that the CEO of New York Life resigned from
the Stevens’ Board (Rachleff 1993: 53, Perry 1987: 61). When the same
tactic was applied against the First Bank System (FBS) during the Hormel
strike in the mid-1980s, however, it didn’t work. As Rachleff (1993: 76)
observed: ‘FBS, of course, remained available to Hormel throughout the
struggle.’ Again in 1988, a Rogers-run corporate campaign failed to pre-
vent defeat at International Paper (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1999:
70–1). In the early 1990s, at Tate & Lyle subsidiary A. E. Staley in Illinois
where Rogers picked State Farm Insurance as the target of the campaign,
it had no apparent impact and most locked-out workers judged it a mis-
take (Ashby and Hawking 2009: 224).
Many corporate campaigns also included a consumer boycott, but
this approach could not effectively be applied to companies making
producer goods. Farrah and Stevens sold directly to the public, although
only a third of Stevens’ products were sold directly to consumers, whereas
other targets of corporate campaigns such as BASF, Louisiana-Pacific, and
Phelps-Dodge mainly supplied other businesses. There was also a poten-
tial problem with what amounted to a secondary boycott. The NLRB
had ruled the FBS boycott an unfair labour practice. Later, however, in
the BASF campaign, the Board ruled that ‘use of a corporate campaign
by a union to assist in meeting its goals at the bargaining table does not
violate the Act’ (Perry 1987: 44, 75, Rachleff 1993: 78, La Botz 1991:
129–30). The 1980s also saw the increasing use of labour–community
coalitions such as those at Morse Tool, the Van Nuys General Motors
plant, the Tri-State Conference on Steel, the Austin United Support
Group, and the New Haven Community-Labour Alliance. These were
not really substitutes for strikes, however. The first three were attempts
to stop plant closings, while the latter two were strike-support organiza-
tions (see Brecher and Costello 1990: passim).
Some corporate campaigns, such as that conducted by the Oil, Chemical
and Atomic Workers (OCAW) at BASF, also made use of allegations of
company law-breaking in areas such as taxation, toxic materials, dis-
crimination, and so on (La Botz 1991: 132–4). In all cases, the ‘corporate
campaign’ was preceded by extensive and deep research on the financial
and political vulnerabilities of the target firm. In this sense corporate cam-
paigns are very different from the traditional union consumer boycotts.
Another corporate campaign that employed a wide variety of tactics
was that against Ravenswood Aluminum Company. The workers at this
West Virginia firm were locked out in 1990. Eventually, the Steelworkers
union (USW), which represented the 1,700 Ravenswood workers, put
together a multifaceted campaign to pressure the company to negotiate
and end the lockout (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1999). Unlike Rogers’
campaigns, the USW’s campaign at Ravenswood did not focus on the
firm’s institutional financial backers, but rather on the consortium of
individuals who had purchased the company from Kaiser shortly before
negotiations began. It also included an ‘end-users’ campaign directed
at aluminium companies where the USW had members and at Stroh’s
and Budweiser beer companies, revelations of environmental damage,
and, eventually, proof of financial wrong doing by one of the major
owners. Unlike most earlier corporate campaigns, this one went inter-
national, organizing union demonstrations across much of Europe. The
strike ended in 1992 after eighteen months in a settlement that included
some concessions but was deemed at least a partial victory by the USW.
This partial victory owed much to the unusual fact that the major figure
behind Ravenswood, Mark Rich, was wanted by the US government on
several counts of illegal trading. The union managed to discover his
hiding place in Switzerland and, with the help of European unions, to
demonstrate in his ‘own backyard’ (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1999:
110–19).
It is doubtful if the corporate campaign can be seen as a substitute for
the strike. For one thing, several of the best-known examples occurred
Kim Moody 243
during and often as a response to strikes or lockouts, including BASF,

General-Dynamic/Electric Boat, Louisiana-Pacific, Hormel, Ravenswood,
Detroit Newspapers, and Staley. Nor have most of them ended in clear-
cut victories. Indeed, the record of falling real wages and contract con-
cessions cited above are an indication of the limits of these strategies.
For one thing, as a recent commentator on union tactics argued, ‘an
employer is able to continue operations during the corporate campaign’
(Burns 2011: 76). The company is free to hire permanent replacement
workers, thus undermining the impact of the strike, while the campaign
can do little more than harass the employer. It is for this reason that
they often fail, as they did at Hormel, Detroit Newspapers, and Staley.
Another problem is that the more sophisticated and elaborate the cor-
porate campaign the more it becomes controlled by professionals or
high-level union officials. The Ravenswood campaign was run by the
team assembled by the USW leadership, not by local union leaders or
members. As Juravich and Bronfenbrenner point out (1999: 81): ‘The
local leaders remained in Ravenswood. In the Steelworkers’ tradition,
strategic bargaining decisions remained an international prerogative.’
The research the USW did on Ravenswood and its various owners, prac-
tices, and connections, as well as its international dimension, however,
probably raised the standard for future campaigns.
By the 2000s, outside pressure had evolved far beyond the early corpo-
rate campaigns to include research into the global connections of target
firms, pressure on a variety of corporate decision-makers, international
coalitions of unions, and other social groups, and focused pressure on
specific segments of the business as well as the more traditional financial
backers. As Juravich (2007: 25–39) summarized the research behind what
were now called ‘comprehensive’ or ‘strategic’ campaigns, this research
was ‘directed both at understanding how power flows in firms and iden-
tifying vulnerabilities and potential points of leverage’, which was to be
‘the first step in developing the kinds of multifaceted strategic campaigns
that are necessary to win today’. The global reach of many of these
campaigns of this sort, however, has seldom been seen in the US as a
substitute for striking. Instead, it is seen as a way for unions representing
workers in the same multinational corporation to lend each other sup-
port in bargaining or organizing through pressure tactics. Furthermore,
as strategic campaigns get more elaborate they become very expensive
and time-consuming so that they can only be used sparingly even by
most large unions. With over 20,000 union agreements expiring each
year (FMCS 2010: 7) it is unlikely these sorts of complex campaigns
could be mounted often enough to make a difference. In this sense, they

cannot serve as an alternative to the strike in most bargaining settings.
The search for alternatives—back to the workplace
In 1981 Jerry Tucker, a staffer for Region 5 of the United Auto Workers,
was assigned to help the 500 union members at Moog Automotive
negotiate a new contract. Like so many companies at that time, Moog
management was demanding deep concessions and, with the recession
still on people’s minds, a strike seemed too risky. Tucker devised what
he called the ‘in-plant strategy’, later known more generically as the
‘inside strategy’. As most of the tactics involved, such as work-to-rule,
are ‘unprotected’ during the life of the contract, the union let the old
one expire. It was a collection of old and new tactics—from the work-
to-rule at the centre of the strategy to wearing union T-shirts and but-
tons, singing labour songs during breaks, filing grievances en masse,
demanding meetings between large contingents of workers and man-
agement, etc. The object was to reduce production, or, as Tucker put it,
‘running the plant backwards’. After almost six months, management
gave in and negotiated a concession-free agreement. The strategy was
a success and Tucker went on to apply the same approach in 1983 at
Schwitzer Manufacturing, a small auto parts company, and in 1984 at
Bell Helicopter and LTV, both major corporations (La Botz 1991: 117–25,
Moody 1988: 238).
The inside strategy, as it is more generally known, had great advan-
tages. It activated the membership and built strong solidarity. And, while
slow-downs and other ‘partial strikes’ are not protected by the NLRA,
the legal status of work-to-rule campaigns is more ambiguous. The NLRB
looked at the ‘difficult issues raised by work-to-rule’ and left them unde-
cided in 1996, 1997, and 1998. The Supreme Court had done the same
in 1960 and 1976 (Boal 2005: 137). This is probably because there is
no refusing of direct orders or company policies in a work-to-rule cam-
paign. Indeed, the point is to follow management direction to the letter,
a practice certain to reduce production. Only voluntary tasks, such as
optional overtime, are refused. Like the ‘corporate campaign’, however,
the in-plant strategy has limitations.
In 1992, Tucker organized an in-plant campaign for Allied Industrial
Workers Local 837 at A. E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois. After nine months
of ‘running the plant backward’ successfully, Staley locked the work-
ers out (Ashby and Hawking 2009: 45–93). The lockout, of course,
completely changed the terms of engagement as replacement workers
Kim Moody 245
entered the plant and resumed production. The local union, now part
of the United Paperworkers International Union due to a merger, had to
fall back on two ‘outside’ campaigns—Ray Roger’s corporate campaign
against State Farm, which was not working, and Tucker’s campaign
against two of Staley’s most important customers, Miller Beer and
Pepsi. Miller did, in fact, refuse to renew its contract with Staley—no
doubt worried about its largely blue-collar customer base. Before the
Pepsi campaign was able to produce a similar victory, however, the
International Union pulled the plug on a fight that the local union
activists felt could have been won (Ashby and Hawking 2009: 290–301).
As in the case of the corporate campaign at Hormel in the 1980s, the
inside campaign at Staley made clear that such campaigns require the
support of the national union.
The application of various innovative tactics on the job is not lim-
ited to highly coordinated efforts such as Tucker’s ‘running the plant
backward’. For some unions, the various tactics associated with the
inside strategy have become almost normal ways to conduct a contract
campaign, whether it ends in a strike or not. T-shirt days, brief in-place
work stoppages (too brief to be illegal), lunch-time rallies, community
support and bans on voluntary overtime have become part of the rep-
ertoire of a number of unions. Most notable in this respect, perhaps,
is the Communications Workers of America (CWA) union. Facing an
expected assault on its terms and conditions by the East Coast telecom
giant NYNEX, the CWA began a ‘mobilization’ programme a year before
the contract expired in 1989. This involved months of workplace meet-
ings, wearing anti-concessions buttons and red T-shirts on the job,
lunch-time picketing, working-to-rule, and confronting NYNEX execu-
tives at their annual shareholders’ meeting. This vigorous campaign,
however, was not enough to head off a strike. And when the strike
came, it would last four months before beating the company’s demands
for ‘cost sharing’ on health insurance (Early 1990: 4–10). In 2003, the
CWA did use an inside strategy as a substitute for a strike. This time,
well before the strike deadline, the company—now larger and known
as Verizon—spent millions of dollars and recruited thousands of man-
agers from around the company to act as temporary replacements in
the event of a strike. The union surprised management by letting the
traditional deadline pass and the contract lapse, but refusing to strike.
Workers engaged in carefully planned work-to-rule efforts, carried out
prolonged safety checks of all company vehicles day after day, did all
the ‘five points of contact’ with customers, and followed company
rules and procedures to the letter. The union also organized community
support and demonstrations. After a month of this, the company aban-

doned its most onerous concessionary demands and the union settled
for a contract with some concessions they termed a ‘defensive victory’
(Galpern 2005: 131–4).
Is there really a substitute for the strike?
Despite the example of the CWA’s 2003 Verizon inside campaign, the
evidence on the effectiveness of the potential alternatives is mixed at
best. Outside campaigns often supplement rather than replace a strike
or lockout, while inside campaigns often lead to one or another of these.
Furthermore, the general rule that the threat or deployment of perma-
nent replacements is sufficient to kill the strike weapon altogether has
numerous exceptions. For one thing, in some cases, as at Verizon with
78,000 workers or at UPS in 1997 where nearly 200,000 workers struck,
the use of permanent replacements on the scale required, with the skills
needed, is not practical. Indeed, many large corporations, such as GM,
Ford, and GE have never used permanent replacements despite their
efforts to wring concessions from their workers. For those more vul-
nerable it is sometimes possible to initiate a strike as an unfair labour
practice strike, in which case permanent replacements cannot be used.
Although exceptional, it is also possible in some cases to convert an eco-
nomic strike into an unfair labour practice work stoppage (see Schwartz
2006: 35–9, 112–24). Teamsters at US Foods took advantage of an unfair
labour practice strike of two workers in 2011 to conduct rolling strikes
by over 2,000 workers using a contract clause that allowed them to
decline to cross a picket line—an admittedly unusual contractual fea-
ture (Slaughter 2011: 1–2). Additionally, Becker (1994: 335–421) has
argued that repeated grievance strikes are not ‘intermittent strikes’ and
are protected under the NLRA. He suggests that such repeated grievance
strikes can be used to pressure management on other issues. Nor does the
‘unprotected’ status apply to those workers on railways and airlines who
are covered by the Railway Labor Act. Dubbing their strategy CHAOS,
for example, flight attendants at Alaska Airlines and Midwest Express
Airlines conducted a series of unannounced one-day strikes at different
facilities in 2002 (Association of Flight Attendants-CWA 2002).
For the majority who are covered by the NLRA, there is the additional
problem of the self-imposed no-strike clause that most union agree-
ments include. The nearly universal existence of no-strike clauses was
initiated decades ago as a trade-off for recognition. These clauses mean
unions cannot strike during the life of the agreement unless specified
Kim Moody 247
otherwise, as do the UAW contracts at the major US auto assembly

companies. Between 1994 and 1998, over twenty UAW local unions at
various GM plants conducted grievance strikes during the life of the
contract. Though these were technically over issues such as health and
safety allowed by the contract, they were mostly directed at relieving the
intensity of work by hiring more workers. Most, in fact, were successful
in increasing the workforce, at least for a while. More recently, CWA
members, whose contract allows grievance strikes during the term of
the contract, struck at a silicone plant three times in 2010–2011 (Gaus
2011: 6). Unless the contract specifically allows for grievance strikes
during the life of the contract they can only be conducted when the
agreement expires. In 1974, the Supreme Court took this even further
when it ruled that strikes during the life of contracts with arbitration
of grievances could be enjoined even where there was not a no-strike
clause (Burns 2011: 55–7).
For all the difficulties of striking there does not appear to be an alter-
native that is viable for the labour movement as a whole. As we observed
at the beginning, both union growth and strikes tend to come and go
together in waves that are often brought on by significant changes in
the economy, a circumstance that certainly holds today. Second, these
labour upsurges are seldom respectful of the law. The thousand or so sit-
down strikes that made the rapid growth of the CIO possible in 1936–37
were illegal on the grounds of trespass law well before Fansteel. Even in a
period of relatively low strike activity, defiance can win. The plant occu-
pation of Republic Doors and Windows in Chicago in 2008 was both
illegal and unprotected but, supported by other unions and even some
politicians, was nevertheless successful (Lydersen 2009: passim). Even
more dramatic was the occupation of a coal-processing plant by 99 min-
ers and one ‘preacher’ during the long 1989 strike by the United Mine
Workers at Pittston mines in Virginia. Backed by thousands of mem-
bers from unions around the country who descended on Virginia, the
UMW defied court orders to vacate, facing millions in fines when they
did not. In the end, the union and its allies beat Pittston’s attempt to
break the national master contract (Brecher 1997: 331–5). In 1970, some
200,000 postal workers struck illegally and defied Nixon’s attempt to
end the strike by the use of the National Guard. When in 1978 President
Carter tried to end the coal miners’ strike under the provisions of the
Taft-Hartley Act, the miners successfully disobeyed, chanting ‘Taft can
mine it, Hartley can haul it, and Carter can shove it’ (Winslow 2010:
2–3). Social upsurges after all tend to be disrespectful of the status quo
and its rules.
Is another upswing in strike activity likely?
The aforementioned various theories concerning the waves of labour

insurgency may offer some insight into whether or not another upsurge
in militancy and union growth is likely. Looking at the strike waves of
the late 1800s, 1910 to 1920, and 1964 through 1974, Kelly (1998: 89)
observes: ‘These three waves have one vital feature in common, which
is that all of them occurred at or near the peak of Kondratieff upswings
as the world economy passed from a period of sustained economic
growth into a long period of recession.’ We have certainly seen the end
of the period of growth that began in 1982 and predictions of prolonged
stagnation and austerity, even ‘a decade of pain’, abound (McNally
2011: 21–4).3 As yet, however, there is no evidence of an upsurge in the
US. Indeed, the raw data for fiscal 2011 from the FMCS indicate a slight
fall to 153 strikes (FMCS n.d.). The theory, however, does not predict
that such strike waves will begin in any particular country. Certainly in
2011 and 2012 strike activity has picked up in many countries of the
European Union as a result of the crisis-induced austerity being imposed
there. As the European Trade Union Confederation (2011: 9) recently
noted: ‘Strikes and demonstrations are growing both in terms of fre-
quency and intensity.’ Silver (2003) argues that strike waves rooted in
manufacturing, as most have been, will begin where new production is
increasingly concentrated. Recently that has been primarily in low-wage
developing countries so she (Silver 2003: 123) argues: ‘The epicentre of
world labor unrest in the twenty-first century is thus likely to be con-
centrated in these same countries.’ Here too there is some evidence that
this is happening in the new manufacturing locations, above all China,
where strikes in 2010 and 2011 were on the rise (McNally 2011: 181–2,
see Cooke this volume).
Whether this rising tide of international strike activity will wash onto
the shores of America remains to be seen. One observation made by
Silver, however, deserves comment. Using a distinction made by Eric
Olin Wright, Silver (2003: 13–16, 172–3) notes that the weakening
of labour’s ‘structural bargaining power’ in the market or workplace,
brought on by vertical disintegration in production, has led to the
deployment of ‘associational power’ that flows from organization and
broader alliances. She concludes that ‘links between contemporary labor
movements and other movements need to be traced’. Many of the more
recent versions of ‘outside’ strategies analysed above involve alliances
with other unions or social groups and can be classified as associa-
tional forms of power. But as we have seen, by themselves they do not
Kim Moody 249
necessarily guarantee victory or even head off defeat. They are likely
to work best precisely when they supplement, rather than replace, a
strike. The problem of ‘vertical disintegration’ of production, whether
of goods or services, is primarily a problem for conventional collective
bargaining and can be overcome, as it has in the past, if a new strike
wave sweeps from one industry or location to another in defiance of the
status quo. As Burns (2011: 182–3) concludes; ‘Unions did not expand
one shop at a time during these surges, but rather ballooned up in large
bursts as the result of ordinary working people taking it upon them-
selves to organize and fight for change.’
Yet, the problem, almost unique to the US, of permanent replace-
ment workers remains. For this obstacle to be overcome, the unions and
their allies must be willing to challenge and, if necessary, break a ‘law’
that appears in no statute, is contradicted by the wording of the NLRA,
and fails to meet international labour standards. Sit-in strikes or occupa-
tions remain a strong way to prevent the use of replacement workers.
Aside from local trespass laws, the ban on this tactic, too, is found in no
statute and has often proved unenforceable, as in the 1930s, at Pittston
in 1989, and in Chicago in 2008. In American politics, changing unjust
laws invariably requires a massive challenge in the streets well before
the law-makers act. This was the history of the early unions, the African
American civil rights movement, the women’s movements of differ-
ent eras, and more recently that of the struggle for immigrants’ rights.
The greatest show of power by immigrant workers to date occurred on
1 May 2006, ‘A Day Without Immigrants’, when millions left their jobs
to protest and eventually defeat a draconian law then being proposed
by Republicans in Congress. Although not called a strike, this demon-
stration crippled several key industries for a day. In so far as it was a
political strike, of course, it was illegal (Moody 2007: 211–12). The power
to stop production, distribution and exchange, whether of goods or
services, remains the central source of power for workers of all kinds.
In the final analysis, the search for alternatives to the strike leads us
inevitably back to the strike itself.
Notes
1. Private sector workers on the railroads and airlines are covered by the Railway
Labor Act 1926, which will not be discussed in detail in this chapter.
2. A distinction needs to be made between actions that are illegal and those that
are not ‘protected’ under the NLRA. Unprotected activities may be legal, but
the employer has the right to ‘retaliation’, which usually means dismissal. So,
workers engaged in slow-downs or other unprotected ‘partial strikes’, as the
courts have defined these, can be dismissed without recourse to the law (see
Schwartz 2006).
3. While 2011 was characterized by social upheaval across the world, notably
the ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Occupy Wall Street’, with some union involvement,
these were not primarily worker-led movements.
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Government Printing Office, Washington.
Vandaele, K. (2011) Sustaining or Abandoning ‘Social Peace’? Strike Developments
and trends in Europe since the 1990s, European Trade Union Institute, Brussels.
Winslow, C. (2010) ‘Overview: The Rebellion from Below, 1965–1981’ in
Brenner, A., Brenner, R. and Winslow, C. (eds.) Rebel Rank and File: Labor
Militancy and the Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s, Verso, London,
pp. 1–36.
Index
Absence 10, 11, 20, 21, 31, 94, 104 212, 216, 217, 218, 221, 223,
Absenteeism 26, 27, 302, 32, 34, 35, 226, 233, 236, 237, 239,
36, 38, 44, 57, 166 240, 243
ACAS 87, 88, 89, 98, 100, 102, 103
Anti-communist 193, 222 France 3, 5, 11, 59, 63, 152–69
Argentina 5, 12, 13, 66–83
Godard, John 27, 29, 32, 37
Biocracy 53, 54, 55, 59, 60 Grievances 5, 10, 11, 26, 27, 28, 30,
Bio-politics 50, 52, 54, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39,
Bio-power 54 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 73, 76, 86,
Bio-proletariat 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 64 87, 89, 90, 91, 102, 104, 105, 112,
Britain 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 21, 22, 25, 47, 114, 116, 120, 121, 177, 194, 195,
54, 86–105 196, 206, 217, 244, 246, 247
Call centres 18–21, 22, 23, 53, 55, Hyman, Richard 27, 30, 67, 78, 159
70, 73, 76
Capitalism 28, 37, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, Individual conflict 37, 41, 42
54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 78, Individual resistance 12
83, 116, 146, 193, 199 Indonesia 5, 6, 120, 171–86, 200
China 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 22, 59, Industrial action 3, 5, 23, 32, 76, 87,
108–26, 216, 248 88–9, 91, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99, 100,
Class conflict 54, 233, 235 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 112,
Collective conflict 1, 27, 28, 29, 44, 114, 126, 174, 226, 233, 237
159 Industrial action short of a strike 87,
Communism 60, 150, 174 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100,
Communists 172, 175 101, 105
Communist Party 114, 123, 124, Industrial conflict 5, 27, 30, 37, 76,
175 166, 171, 179, 237
Contestation 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 15, 18, Injustice 186, 195
19, 20, 21, 23
Kelly, John 3, 31, 87, 89, 234, 248
Edwards, Paul 4, 8, 10, 15, 16, 27,
30, 31, 32, 88, 95 Labour conflict 2, 14, 66, 71, 110,
Egypt 5, 130–49 112, 119, 120, 125, 153, 156, 157,
Employers 1, 8, 15, 16, 17, 34, 39, 159, 192, 204, 206, 207, 213, 227,
68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 79, 228, 229
81, 82, 86, 87, 97, 98, 100, 101, Labour markets 5, 12, 13, 15, 39,
102, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 74, 78, 108, 116, 192, 196, 207,
116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 208, 224
123, 125, 133, 139, 142, 156, 157, Labour unionism 55, 67, 77, 91, 224
158, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167,
171, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, Management 10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17,
184, 193, 196, 203, 205, 206, 208, 18, 19, 20
253
254 Index
Manufacturing 13, 22, 108, 111, Sabotage 1, 4, 26, 32, 44, 55, 57, 58,
117, 124, 146, 156, 165, 167, 168, 71, 113, 117
175 179, 180, 187, 234, 240, 244, Self-immolation 212, 213, 214, 215,
248 217, 219, 220, 225, 226, 227, 228,
Maoism 74, 75 229, 230, 231
Socialism 59, 74, 116, 124, 158, 160,
Neo-liberalism 18, 22, 48, 49, 50, 51, 166, 193, 207
52, 54, 57, 58, 59, 63, 67, 71, 130, South Korea 5, 6, 174, 212–30
131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, Stealing 117
142, 143, 147, 148, 150, 166, 168, Strikes 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12,
177, 191, 193, 196, 200, 207, 220, 13, 15, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34
221, 229, 234, 235, 238 General strike 3, 4, 146, 154, 162,
163
Occupation (see also sit-down Official strike 13, 87, 88, 97, 102,
strike) 3, 6, 61, 66, 69, 70, 71, 103, 104, 105
79, 80, 130, 146, 164, 169, 178, Sit-down strike 3, 236, 237
180, 183, 225, 247, 249 Unofficial strike 88, 94–8, 103, 105
Overtime ban 32, 87, 89, 91, 92, 97, Wildcat strike 32, 206, 216, 223
106, 203 Suicide 226–8, 230
Product markets 16, 17, 18, 21, 82 Technology 1, 4, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21,
Protests 8, 12, 13, 14, 31, 61, 81, 27, 56, 156, 203
110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, Theft 26, 31, 32, 36, 113, 117
121, 128, 132, 135, 137, 143, Trotskyism 74, 75, 76
144, 145, 146, 147, 152, 164, Turnover 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34,
172, 179, 186, 187, 193, 196, 39, 40, 41, 119
211, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218,
219, 221, 228, 230, 231 Unionization (see also labour
Poland 5, 191–208 unionism) 12, 37, 40, 118, 157,
Post-communist 191, 209, 211 192, 195, 197
United States 3, 6, 17, 22, 47, 233–50
Resistance 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 12, 18, 20,
29, 32, 36, 37, 115, 125, 135, 154, Vandalism 32
161, 166, 174, 191, 192, 193, 198, Violence 5, 54, 152, 159, 160, 168,
199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 171, 172–3, 174, 175, 176, 177,
208 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186
Collective resistance 32, 208
Individual resistance 12 Workplace conflict 26–32, 35, 36,
Riots 5, 69, 109, 124, 135, 171, 37, 38, 42, 43, 44, 68, 124, 194,
174–5, 180–1, 182, 183, 184, 195, 196, 207, 216, 228
185 Work-to-rule 32, 37, 38, 39, 71, 90,
Riot Grrrl 62 97, 244, 245

New Form and Conflict at Work

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New Forms and Expressions of Conflict at Work

Also by Gregor Gall

List of Figures and Tables ix

1 Introduction – Themes, Concepts and Propositions 1

11 Conflicts at Work in Poland’s New Capitalism: Worker

3.1 Two dimensions of workplace conflict 31

6.1 Strike activity, 1981–2010 90

8.1 Numbers of episodes of workers’ collective action, 2004–11 145

Anne Alexander is Buckley Fellow at the Centre for Research in the

Maurizio Atzeni is Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of

Jacques Bélanger is a Professor in the Département des Relations Indus-

Sheila Cohen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Work and Research

unions. She is also the author of numerous pamphlets and magazine

Sylvie Contrepois is a Reader at London Metropolitan University’s

Fang Lee Cooke is Professor of Human Resource Management and

Jamie Doucette holds a PhD in Human Geography and was a researcher

Paul Edwards is Professor of Employment Relations in the Business School,

Peter Fleming is Professor of Work and Society at Queen Mary College,

Michele Ford is Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre and

Gregor Gall is Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of

Pablo Ghigliani is a full-time Researcher at the Consejo Nacional

Robert Hebdon is a Professor in the Desautels Faculty of Management,

Małgorzata Maciejewska is a PhD student at the Institute of Sociology,

Kim Moody is Senior Research Fellow at the Work and Employment

Adam Mrozowicki is an Assistant Professor (adiunkt) at the Institute

Sung Chul Noh is a doctoral candidate at the Desautels Faculty of

This collection of chapters on new forms and expressions of conflict

of method displacement, method adaptation and method innovation

to avoid de facto acquiescence in the terms of exploitation by finding a

chapters form a foundation for a number of country- and issue-specific

social justice in the workplace. Alongside other tactics like occupation,

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the meaning

Contestation, antagonism and resistance

The delimitation is that we are interested in the employment relation-

of work resistance’ such as strikes have declined, to be replaced by a

a) the generation of an image of a wholesale shift from iron to glass

Like some other scholars, Gabriel is excited by whistle-blowing as a

One approach is to consider the different forms in which contestation

the archetypical ‘individual’ form of action in contrast to strikes. It is

regulation of casual work on the docks changed. In the longer term,

and individual expressions of conflict go together, and unionization

Has contestation moved elsewhere?

lack resources in three respects: weak community-based forms of asso-

First, it underlines that contestation has to be actively managed. Even

Structuring influences on patterns of contestation

We now relate these macro-patterns to the level of the workplace by

relationship, a social structure that is shaped by the antagonism and

call centres. A recurring theme in the recent stream of research on

the diversity of workplace regimes remains a challenge for research.

Illustration: call centres

Call centres provide a useful illustration. National institutional con-

what impresses the observer most is not so much the intensity in

This distinction is revealing in clarifying what is distinct from most

We have offered three lines of analysis to consider the reconfiguration

He explains how the understanding of this trend ‘must take account of

It is impossible to predict future levels of contestation. Periods of qui-

Dick, P. (2008) ‘Resistance, gender and Bourdieu’s notion of field’ Management

Russell, B. (2008) ‘Call centres: a decade of research’ International Journal of

Relatively little is known about the complex inter-relationships between

level: absenteeism, turnover, grievance and misbehaviours. However,

by incorporating insights from the organizational behaviour litera-

that organizations be better understood as a contested terrain of power

Workplace conflict dichotomies