This blog is written in a personal capacity. Its mission is to both maintain and reflect my interests in activist/worker education, as well as those areas of interest allied to my equalities and diversity role at Equity, the union for workers in the creative industries. No aspect of this blog reflects Equity policy.
I've been reading material from Henry Giroux for many years as my experience and knowledge of being an adult educator matured. A great place for those unfamiliar with his writing: www.henryagiroux.com/
As I work to draft my thesis findings I have been encouraged to re-read Border Crossings: Cultural workers and the politics of education. For Giroux borders are not just physical, but political, philosophical and ideological, for example in the construction of the neo-liberal university and the commodification of learning and knowledge. Border crossing is about the role of educators shaping the capacity of others to know of the restraints placed upon them through for example, racist ideology. Thus we must cross the border between those restraints to understand, for example, the way in which the poor portrayal of black people across the media perpetuates racist assumptions and stereotypes.
Ultimately, the pedagogical approach here is the formation of a postmodern resistance. It's relevance to my research findings is the encouragement by Giroux of educators to work collaboratively. Thus, one of my over-arching arguments is a greater degree of inter-play between educators in the trade union and allied social movements around knowledge production and education.
This interplay should involved a dialogue which as Giroux states in the book:
Such a discourse must be informed by a postmodern concern with establishing the material and ideological conditions that allow multiple, specific, and heterogeneous ways of life to come into play as part of a border pedagogy of postmodern resistance. This points to the need for educators to prepare students for a type of citizenship that does not separate abstract rights from the realm of the everyday, and does not define community as the legitimate and unifying practice of a one-dimensional historical and cultural narrative. Postmodernism radicalizes the emancipator possibilities of teaching and learning as a part of a wider struggle for democratic public life and critical citizenship. It does this by refusing forms of knowledge and pedagogy wrapped in the legitimizing discourse of the sacred and the priestly; its rejecting universal reason as a foundation for human affairs; claiming that all narratives are partial; and performing a critical reading on all scientific, cultural, and social texts as historical and political constructions.
Manny Ness has, yet again, produced a book (co-edited with Jake Alimoahed-Wilson) which reveals the startling, unyielding capacity of workers' agency in the context of global capitalism. Very much like my particular favourite, New Forms of Workers' Organisation, this book provides space for insights and argument directly from those groups of workers at key nodes, or choke points, in global supply chains.
Further details (and access to sample pages) is available here:
I was fortunate to get the chance to interview Manny when he was in the UK in 2014 to promote New Forms of Workers' Organisation. This was a particularly valuable opportunity for students of the MA ILTUS to spend time with him, and as the MA explored the future of trade unionism globally to gain his insight and perspective.
The review below has been submitted to the journal Work, Employment and Society. It was a real pleasure to read Crossing the Divide, and , as I've said in the review, paid more attention to it given the activist credentials of the authors. Despite the book's focus on precarious work in the informal economy of the Global South, it carries considerable lessons for those engaged in similar work in the Global North.
Crossing
the Divide: Precarious Work and the Future of Labour
Edward
Webster, Akua O. Britwum, Sharit Bhowmik (Eds)
Durban:
University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2017, R. 315, pbk, (ISBN: 9781869143534)
pp.280
A
key strength of this edited book, is its reflection of that rich, historical
tradition of activist-scholars applying rigorous intellectual coherence to the
on-going re-shaping of labour within the context of capitalist politically
economy, and assessing its implications for the future of workers’
organisations.
Similarly,
this empiricist insight borne of activist experience, ensures that this book,
opposed to others on a similar theme, is predicated on a degree of
practicability and relevance to those engaged in organising and educational
activity in the context of precarious, poor work. Thus, the focus in the
introductory chapter on the sources of power open to precarious and vulnerable
workers, is as relevant in analysing the on-going success in the United Kingdom
(UK) of the McStrikers, as it is when applied in the second part of the book,
to domestic workers in Accra, Ghana.
The
book applies an ethnographic approach across a series of case studies of
organising experience in Ghana, India and South Africa to examine the
challenges and opportunities of organising across the informal economy. It
addresses questions of how informal workers come to organise, and helpfully
examines models of self-organisation, and the use co-operatives as a means to
generate and sustain decent work. Importantly for those engaged in issues of
trade union renewal, the book offers insights on the ways in which organisations
comprised of precarious workers engage with trade unions and other civil
society organisations, and their respective response.
The
first part of the book caters for the broad theme of agricultural work
including a focus on tea plantation workers in India, oil palm plantation
workers in Ghana and in South Africa coverage of farm workers based in the
horticultural sector in Gauteng, and wine farms in the Western Cape. The second
part of the book is more diverse, and across six chapters examines: the experience in India of home-based workers
in Maharashtra and steel utensil manufacturing workers in Delhi; the experience
of organising through the collective agency of domestic workers in Accra,
Ghana; waste pickers in Accra, Ghana, and Pune, India; and a chapter on
municipal workers in Johannesburg South Africa.
This
approach to critical comparison works well, as it helps underline that which is
common, for example, in distinguishing the legacy and endurance of colonialism
as a key feature differentiating the experience of precarious work and the
typologies of workers between the Global South and North. And, that which
differs across the case studies, for example, between clumsy attempts by the
‘official’ labour movement in South Africa to absorb the informal economy into
its purview, contrasted with wholly independent, new forms of workers’
organisation emerging in India.
The
introductory chapter to the book outlines its conceptual and theoretical basis.
As such we start with a clear sense of how processes of globalisation,
accelerated by neo-liberal policy, have induced the rapid, yet uneven
informalisation and casualisation of work and employment.
Thus,
whilst the readership of the book will span trade union activists and
officials, as well as students of political economy, development studies and
labour studies, it will have an appeal also to radical geographers also, as the
book is reflective of the following dominant themes.
The
Organising Space
Conventional
analysis of strategies to organise and mobile workers is typically predicated
on conventional forms of work, workplace/space and worker. Precarious work
often by its nature, and whether formal or informal, takes place in the
unconventional, whether this is the street, the home, or performance space. A
considerable strength of the book are those chapters, like that of Wilderman on
farm workers in the Western Cape, which bring fresh dynamic insight to the
relevance of the ownership of public space as a feature of organising strategy.
Here, the takeover by striking farm workers of a motorway held significant
symbolic power as a counterweight to their otherwise subdued state through a
form of paternalistic feudalism whilst living of farmland.
Worker
Identity
A
major impediment in the informal economy to strategies to collectivise workers’
interests, and express these through representative channels, is that work,
sometimes undertaken in an educational context as the book documents, which
helps shape a collective consciousness of being workers located within the
economy. Gartenberg’s insight on this work with poor women workers in
Maharashtra, is a considerable asset to those engaged in similar work in the
Global North. The generation of identity and agency is achieved here through
the relatively simple device of using existing activists in the LEARN Women Workers Union to
overcome an often innate sense of inferiority held by informal economy workers,
but compounded here by patriarchy and the caste system.
Worker
& Employment Status
Intrinsic
to those challenges of organisation and mobilisation identified above, is that
caused with the fragmentation of work across supply chains at both global and
level levels. Similarly, as witnessed in the UK postal and package delivery
service, the concerted effort to fragment workers between core and periphery,
has led to widespread concern around the abuse of workers engaged in false
self-employment. Those chapters dedicated to the experience of organising waste
pickers helps shed considerable light on the ways in which work in the informal
economy, and the status of workers involved, reflects a complexity of status,
and the challenge of organising those workers.
Between
these chapters clear delineation of status can be established which then helps
distinguish strategies for organising. As Gadgil and Samson reveal when examining the narratives of waste
pickers in Pune, India, attempts to regularise and formalise work through the
formation of co-operatives enables negotiation with local government to improve
the conditions of work, and the safety of workers. As is known through others
studies of the union-co-op relationship in organising workers and creating
safe, decent work, hybridity can generate solutions, as well as challenges.
This chapter does not shy away from acknowledging these, and this approach
ensures that the approach overall in the allied chapters, combine to provide
rational, honest assessments of the durability and resilience, or not, inherent
to organising in the informal economy.
Ultimately, the book retains an optimistic,
rational tone. Its strength is to make the often invisible work of poor,
vulnerable workers in the informal economy, open to scrutiny and analysis. It
conjures an honest assessment of the relative strengths and weaknesses of organising
approaches to-date, and most importantly, establishes a constructive sense of
informal workers as capable of creating organic models of solidarity to protect
and promote their collective interests.
I had previously reported on the latest publication from veteran scholar-activist Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital Reshaped the Battleground of Class War. I'd promise to post a review of the book that I've written for the British Journal of Industrial Relations, which is below. Below also is an excellent interview with Kim by Left Voice Magazine.
Having read the book thoroughly for the review, I would wholeheartedly recommend that you buy a copy. If you are interested in the future of organised labour, and what may impede or accelerate this, you won't regret it.
As co-founder of the rank-and-file media,
educational and organising initiative Labor
Notes, and leading intellectual of the United States (US) labour movement,
Kim Moody has come to represent through books like An Injury to All (1998) a critically important barometer of the
state of the ‘official’ labour movement and of sources for the generation of
new forms of workers’ political and industrial mobilisation and organisation.
For those engaged in activist education in the United Kingdom (UK) Moody’s
analysis at a global, comparative level of significant change in production
regimes through analysis including Workers
in a Lean World (1997) has helped shape educational approaches to
critically analysing the failure of the neo-liberal era of New Labour and
labour movement leaders to arrest trade union decline, thus engendering the
need to explore a new broad-based radicalised form of worker’s organisation
through social movement unionism (SMU). For Moody SMU is "deeply democratic, as
that is the best way to mobilize the strength of numbers in order to apply
maximum economic leverage. It is militant in collective bargaining and in
the belief that retreat anywhere only leads to more retreats-- an injury to one
is an injury to all" (p.121).
In his latest book Moody revisits the need to
re-examine the failure of traditional political alliances to assert the
interests of organised labour within the context of recurrent transformation in
the composition of the working class precipitated by unprecedented change in
the organisation of capitalism in the US. As such the central aim of the book
is to present capitalism as having entered a new phase in the recent era, in
which the restructuring of the working class consolidates new terrain for a
renewed upsurge of labour and social rebellion.
The book is structured in three parts. The
first examines the effects of lean production, new technologies and the rise of
flexible working from the early 1980s and the resultant industrial and
occupational restructuring of the US working class. Part two moves on to
examine the arguable shift in the terrain of class conflict through corporate
processes of merger and acquisition, but most notably via the ‘logistics
revolution’ required to support global supply chain infrastructure. The final
section of the book explores the potential for a radical class politics in the
US which provides an alternative to the ‘big money’ influences of the
Republican and Democratic Parties. Here, Moody argues, that a confluence of
organising potential in the workplace combined with urban-based mass working
class political activism is key to generating a socialist-appealing body of
politics outwith conventional party machinery and that will “go beyond
conventional social democracy.”
It is the second part of the book which is
its arguable strength, and certainly from the perspective of trade union
activists and organisers (like myself) dedicated to examining how the landscape
of capitalist political economy derives new, thoughtful opportunity to generate
diverse forms of politicised workers’ organisation. It is in this section that Moody
argues, for example, that the fixation on the rise of precarious work and the
rise of the ‘gig economy’, not least from an organising perspective, ignores
bigger change (and as witnessed in the UK and across industrialised economies)
in the relative decline in living standards of an increasingly heterogenous
working class set against increases in productivity derived from new production
regimes. He concentrates on this using data illustrating how wages of working
class adults have stagnated, remaining below their average level in 1972, with
share of total national income going to the top 10% shifting from 35% in 1982
to 51% in 2012. The extreme forms of income inequality in the US leads Moody to
state that, “this makes the United States more unequal economically than any
other European nation, even though inequality has grown there as well”.
The significance of the approach is an
argument, not necessarily new, or original, that the failure of the Democratic
Party to address the parlous state of labour, both economic and political, has
created a vacuum in which radical, socialist alternatives have increasingly
gained legitimacy and status. Similarly, this section of the book carefully
exposes the over-reliance in the national and global logistics supply chain of a
relatively low-paid, ethnically diverse labour force inviting vulnerability to
disruption through spontaneous direct action, or the deployment of crafted
labour movement strategy to generate leverage, as in the UK case of UNITE’s
Industrial Hub initiative. As Moody writes, “The vulnerability of logistics
systems and supply chains is increased by the fact that for the most party
their reorganization and tightening has meant that on average each supply chain
employed in the production of a final commodity has seen a reduction in the
number of suppliers, making the task of organizing them somewhat simpler and
the impact of direct action in any one ‘node’ in the chain more effective.
Thus, whilst the readership of this book will include those interested
in political economy, labour geography and labour studies, it is a critically
valuable resource for labour educators and organisers also.
In saying this however, it’s important to acknowledge that whilst the UK
economy mirrors that of the US in many ways, the relative under-development of
the logistics network, which Moody acknowledges, is one.Nevertheless, Moody’s cogent analysis helps
explain the UK’s ‘new terrain’ laying the basis for new forms of worker’s
organisation, and the more traditional, having organising success amongst
groups notably comprising migrant workers across service industries from
cleaners to Uber drivers and Deliveroo couriers.
Whilst the strength of the book is a careful surveying of the US economy
politically and industrially across the 20th century, a critical
weakness broadly, but more specifically in terms of crafting authentic labour
movement organising and education practice, is the absence of coverage of the
implications of climate change on production regimes, and the response of
organised labour. The burgeoning literature of ‘climate solidarity’, and
activity including that of the UK Fire Brigades Union (FBU), has meant that it
is an issue we ignore at our peril.
References
Moody, K. (1997) Workers
in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy. London. Verso
Moody, K. (1998) An
Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism. London. Verso
I am very pleased to report that I'll be attending (representing Equity) a conference on 18th April in Manchester with the critically important theme of exploring ways in which the labour and co-operative movements can better collaborate to organise and represent the interests of precarious workers. The event falls under the umbrella of a recently published report following an extensive research exercise.
The report, titled 'Working Together: Trade Union and Co-operative Innovations for Precarious Work' calls for increased collaboration between trade unions and co-operative to protect the rights of part-time, zero hour contract, temporary, self-employed and freelance workers.
Supported by the Network for Social Change, Wales Co-operative Centre and the Institute for Solidarity Economics, the report highlights Indycube as a blueprint for how partnerships between trade union and co-operatives can flourish.
Cilla Ross, Vice-Principal at the Co-op College (and my thesis supervisor) outlines in the clip above the crisis of precarious work in the UK and the opportunity provided to create a resurgence of worker's control in the way that the labour and co-operative movements respond.
Further details of the report and event are here: https://www.co-op.ac.uk/news/working-together-report-launched
I'll post a short comment on the outcomes of the event at some point after 18/04.
Although I have plugged this book before, as I continue to work on writing-up my thesis findings, I need to record my thanks for the output of Aziz Choudry. His edited book (with Dip Kapoor) Learning from the Ground Up, was my early introduction to what my thesis could reflect in examining how my work at Ruskin through the MA ILTUS, could impact upon labour movement renewal.
It was however Choudry's last book, Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements, which most influenced my thoughts on the political purpose of my research, not least in championing a greater alliance between the learning that takes place between trade union and other social movements.
I've been grateful to see this happen recently in a number of ways, but am particularly thankful for the work of John Page in enabling this to occur under the umbrella of the Ella Baker School of Transformative Organising: http://londonsocialisthistorians.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/the-roots-of-organising-in-uk-working.html
What I am keen to do once the thesis is submitted is work more closely with John, and others, in realising other forums which allow for a reflection on how activists in progressive movements learn through and from their activism, and how this shapes their political consciousness.
Just a short break from thesis writing to stress how much I have benefitted from adopting a simple, yet profoundly important, stage in the process of critically interpreting and analysis data generated from fieldwork.
The analytic memo (AM) is the simplest device: constantly write short sharp, precise notes to yourself as you review what you have found as you sift through your data, and in particular document those moments, events etc. which are what you feel critical stages in developing an argument, theory etc.
We were introduced to the AM early on in the professional doctorate programme, but as with most part-time programmes you forget a lot, and don't adopt everything which is suggested as making your life easy. As I was fortunate to have a sabbatical from Ruskin College at the time of coding/analysing my data, I had the chance to review those early notes from sessions on how to make this process as easy as possible, but also how to yield the greatest insight from what you've gathered.
There is plenty of material out there on the role of the AM (some links below) and of course the standard textbooks like Alan Bryman's Social Research Methods, provide a solid introduction. What I would say though is, don't get bogged down in thinking there is a right/wrong way to do write these.
My pointers would be:
Write them often and in clear as language as possible. You'll be reading them months/years later and you might not remember certain acronyms, phrases etc you use at the time.
Accurately record date, time etc.
Write statements on why you feel the need to write what you are writing e.g. you have been tired and missed earlier connections between findings.
Don't feel that you are writing comments that will prove unhelpful later - you can decide later on what's helpful/useful or not, but best to have too much to sift through than too little.
Keep the notes regularly backed up. I used Cloud options, but would also email myself a copy of each set of AM at the end of each day.
There is loads of useful material, and sample AM out there:
http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415801065/pdfs/Chap-4-Examples-of-Analytic-Memos.pdf
http://tobaccoeval.ucdavis.edu/documents/Tips_Tools_20_2012.pdf
http://methods.sagepub.com/reference/sage-encyc-qualitative-research-methods/n260.xml
Right then, back to my writing. It's good to get these thoughts out of your head and posted. Hope they are useful.
