Practices of Labor Activism in Greece: Inside and Outside the Workplace

Abstract

Confronting mass lay-offs, wage cuts, increasingly precarious conditions, unpaid work, employer violence, and mass unemployment, workers in Greece have organized strikes, workplace occupations, action outside workplaces, and attempts at self-management. These practices, and their strengths and limitations in the context of the crisis, are analyzed using secondary data, ethnographic, and documentary material. Contrasting the tactics located externally to the workplace, such as protests and blockades, to practices of self-management, I argue that the former may better represent the contemporary face of labor activism in Greece. This is because these tactics, despite their limitations, reflect most directly the growing expulsion of workers from a secure wage relation. Attention to the specific obstacles encountered by irregular immigrant workers and women in female-dominated occupations also highlights the important dimension of visibility in tactics external to the workplace. Further, the locus of these tactics in the sphere of circulation allows their connection with broader social claims and communities of struggle.