How We Struggle - A Political Anthropology of Labour

When it comes to labour movements, unionised industrial workers on the factory floor have only ever been part of the picture. Across so many different workplaces, sectors of the economy and geographical contexts, the question of how working people struggle in the day-to-day has no single answer.
Here Sian Lazar offers a unique anthropological perspective on labour agency that takes in examples from across the globe, from heavy industry and agriculture, to the service and informal sectors. She asks: how do people strive to improve their lives and working conditions? How are they constrained and enabled in that struggle by the nature of the work they do, and by their own positionality in local histories, cultures and networks?
How We Struggle explores worker action across the spectrum from organised trade unionism to individualised strategies of accommodation, resistance and escape. The book marries a discussion of global political economy and Marxist feminist theories of labour with ethnographic approaches that begin from a perspective of human experience, kinship and radical heterogeneity.

Sommario

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Heavy Industry and Post-Fordist Precarities

2. Light Industry: Gender, Migration and Strategies of Resilience

3. Agricultural Labour: Exploitation and Collective Action

4. Affective Labour and the Service Sector: Work as Relations

5. Professional and Managerial Work: Producing Selves and Processes

6. Platform Labour: Digital Management and Fragmented Collectivities

7. Patchwork Living

8. Social Reproduction Labour

Conclusion

Coda: The Covid-19 Pandemic and Labour: Continuities and the Potential for Change

Notes

Bibliography

Info autore

Sian Lazar is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Social Life of Politics: Ethics, Kinship and Union Activism in Argentina and editor of Where are the Unions? Workers and Social Movements in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe amongst other books.

Riassunto

A comparative, ethnographic approach to the question of labour struggles and workers' political agency

Dettagli sul prodotto

• Autori: Sian Lazar, Lazar Sian
• Editore: Pluto
• Lingue: Inglese
• Formato: Tascabile
• Pubblicazione: 20.01.2023
• EAN: 9780745347516
• ISBN: 978-0-7453-4751-6
• Pagine: 304
• Serie: Anthropology, Culture and Society; Anthropology, Culture, and Soc
• Categorie: Scienze sociali, diritto, economia > Scienze politiche > Scienze politiche e cittadinanza attiva; Sociology, Political Ideologies, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Gender Studies, Anthropology, Sociology: customs & traditions, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Economic Policy, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Labor & Industrial Relations, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Customs & Traditions, Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography, Trade Unions, Political Economy, Social and cultural anthropology, Gender studies, gender groups, Sociology: work & labour, Political ideologies and movements, Sociology: work and labour