Rhetoric of Decline in a Neo-liberal Context: Workers’ Committees and the Decline of Labor in Contemporary Israel

Abstract

This study of twenty workers’ committees in Israel’s private sector sheds light on the adaptive mindset accompanying labor’s decline. Using ethnographic methodology, the article exposes varied dimensions of reception of neo-liberalism among its potential contestants. We found that the committee’s activists, accepting the fundamentals of neo-liberalism, rhetorically reproduce the notions of the determinism of the laws of the free market and their presumed inferiority in the workplace, and that their defensive strategies often mimic management tactics. While these de-politicized tactics allow the survival of the committees and their ongoing provision of services to workers, they forgo any ambition to reshape employment relations or to thwart the decline of organized work.