Labor Protest Research Articles

Wobbly Religion: Tactical Formations of Religious Idioms and Space in the Industrial Capitalist City

AbstractThis article presents an approach to studying religion, class, and labor that does not focus on workers’ religiosity or religious affiliation. Rather, through three examples from the archive of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century, I examine religion where it flared up, not necessarily as an enduring ideology or position, but emergent in particular material settings in the context of labor protest in urban streets. The concept of wobbly religion recognizes that religion is always situated in dynamics of power, its elements available to be assembled in the name of the status quo or repurposed for tactical goals. The study of religion, this article argues, should be more attentive to the ways that the spaces of the industrial city (and any spaces, for that matter) shape the possibilities and limitations of ideological, cultural, and social expression, and the ways that tactical use of religious space and religious idioms take up and mobilize the energies of religion.

Labour power, materiality and protests in Ghana’s petroleum and gold mines

We examine the role of resource materiality in extractive labour protests in Ghana. Focusing on petroleum and gold mining, we centre contestations as part of the resources’ socio-natural constituents. Research data was obtained from social conflict databases, newspapers and field interviews. The analysis focused on themes and discourses on protest emergence, mobilisation, negotiation and impacts. Findings show how petroleum labour protesters use passivity and chokepoints to impede gas supply to households. Ghana petroleum workers attempt to garner structural power through workplace power, albeit unsuccessfully. Conversely, gold mineworkers protest by actively reappropriating machinery and extraction spaces. They centre protests in mining towns to emphasise their work as lifeblood. The ‘landedness’ of gold and the introduction of surface mining reshaped such protest tactics. Thus, materiality can help excavate the relational and comparative logic, tactics and potentialities of labour power in resource extracting countries. We suggest extractive labour to forge stronger cross-class coalitions to align workplace exploitation with broader issues of accumulation by dispossession. Published open access under a CC BY licence. https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/

Elite Selection in Single-Party Autocracies: Minimizing Protests and Counterproductive State Violence to Maintain Social Stability

Why are some but not other officials selected for promotion in single-party regimes? Understanding inner-elite dynamics of these regimes is important for explaining their resilience. Recent evidence suggests that these polities prioritize patronage connections over competence, when deciding who receives advancement at the top echelons of power hierarchy. By contrast, this paper proposes that, besides patronage, competence (demonstrated as an official’s ability to maintain social stability) also contributes to the promotion of top officials. While it is widely acknowledged that social stability is a key concern for autocracies, prior quantitative research on career outcomes of single-party elites has largely ignored this criterion for promotion. We argue that evaluating officials based on their ability to minimize protests demonstrates another dimension of competence (in addition to economic growth) that is designed to address the problem of authoritarian control, that is, managing popular discontent. We test this argument in the context of China, using a sample of 116 party secretaries in 2003–2017 who faced a total of 10,085 labor protests. Our findings are consistent with this argument.

Robots and protest: does increased protest among Chinese workers result in more automation?

Abstract The rising level of automation has increasingly attracted scholars' attention. On the other hand, there are many studies of the consequences of social movements, but relatively fewer studies focus on their economic consequences, and even fewer studies have examined their consequences on automation. This article bridges the gap between the two literatures by hypothesizing that a rising number of labor protests will lead to a higher level of automation. We argue that political economy factors influence the adoption of more automation. Protests anticipate higher wages and labor costs; contest for social power with employers and the state, and, in extreme cases, pose a public relations challenge to employers, which will likely push employers to replace human workers with robots. We empirically test the relationship by using two protest event datasets in China, the China Labor Bulletin and Collective Action from Social Media and robot data from the International Federation of Robotics. Statistical analysis shows that provinces and industries that have more protests also tend to concentrate more robots, and the results are robust to most specifications and placebo tests. The findings have implications for both understanding the mechanism explaining rising automation and the consequences of social protests.

PREDICTORS OF WORKERS’ PROTEST IN THE USSR AT THE END OF THE 1920S – THE BEGINNING OF THE 1930S: SOCIAL IDENTITY AND SELF-EFFICIENCY (BY THE MATERIALS OF THE LOWER VOLGA REGION)

Justification. The article deals with the protest behavior of Soviet workers of the Lower Volga region in the late 1920s – the first half of the 1930s by analyzing predictors of collective actions: social identity and self-efficacy, which are the subject of the study.
 Objective. The objective of the study is to explore the potential of labor protest in the conditions of social crisis in the Lower Volga region in the late 1920s - first half of the 1930s. The scientific novelty lies in the absence of similar historical studies on this problem in regional historiography, as well as in the introduction into scientific circulation of a number of archival documents.
 Materials and methods. In the article, when studying predictors of collective actions, historical-typological, historical-comparative and historical-genetic research methods are used. Аn interdisciplinary approach allowed the author to analyze the formation and to assess the potential of labor protest in general. The source material is the information reports and reviews of the OGPU, which concentrate data on the protest behavior of the population, and the theoretical basis of the study was the scientific works of domestic authors dealing with this problem.
 Results. In the late 1920s - the first half of the 1930s, a social crisis broke out in the USSR, which led to an increased number of protest actions, mainly strikes. However, the analysis of predictors of collective actions demonstrated their low efficiency and weak potential of labor protest in general.
 Practical implications. The materials obtained in the course of the research and presented in the article can be used by historians studying protest behavior, including that of the proletariat. They can also be applied in the modern educational process.

Studying the dynamics of labor protests: the experience of using linear approximation method

In article we propose a method for the analysis of long time series data of the Monitoring of Labor Protests. This database has been accumulating data on labor protests in Russia since 2008. During 156 months data were collected on 3,951 protests by Russian workers. The article describes the need to control labor protests, the features of the current legal regulation of labor conflicts. The peculiarity of the Russian situation is that the state bodies register only “legal” strikes, ignoring the numerous protest actions of workers undertaken in other forms. Therefore, it is necessary to study their dynamics in order to identify trends that are not visible using conventional analysis. The main difficulty in identifying trends is the high variability of the source data. The article proposes a method for smoothing data and the rate of change of the smoothed function at each point, which makes it possible to find criteria for determining periods of growth and decline in the protest indicator. This makes it possible to calculate periods, their duration, intensity, average rate of growth or decline. In addition to analyzing the overall dynamics, the proposed method allows to study subsamples, for example, of different sectors, and compare them obtaining comparable estimates. The article compares three sectors – industry, transport and healthcare – that accounted for 75% of all protest actions of workers in 2020.

Papering Over Protest: Contentious Politics and Archival Suppression in Early Modern Venice

Abstract This article studies the intertwined processes of popular protest and archival suppression in early modern Venice. It concentrates on a cycle of contention extending over several months in 1569, including a labour protest that started among the workers of the state shipyard and turned into a large revolt, anonymous placards and food riots. Such was the extent of the unrest that a major explosion in the shipyard raised suspicion of sabotage. Eventually, the government had to capitulate to the workers’ demands. This cycle of protests in Venice, a city normally renowned for peace and concord, has left minimal traces in the official records: the government tried to suppress the protests not only in practice but also on paper. It carried out convictions in secret, obliterated the revolt from its archives, buried any mention of protest under countless other records, and elided dissent from published histories. By using a variety of non-governmental sources, it is possible to investigate how contentious politics were written out of government records, and hence of history. Manipulating archives was always easier than subduing people: the more power was contested in the streets, the more it needed to be asserted in the archive.

Repressing worker dissent: lethal violence against strikers in the early American labor movement

ABSTRACT Despite U.S. labor-management history having long been recognized as the most violent and bloody of any Western industrialized nation, unanimity has failed to materialize regarding its impact on concomitant labor protests, organizations, and politics. We examine the impact of striker fatalities on the strength and trajectory of the early American labor movement against the null hypothesis that such bloodshed is largely random and/or inconsequential by building recently constructed measures of fatal strike violence into time-series regression models of strike frequency, union membership, and membership within the Socialist Party of America. The results suggest that killing strikers, labor organizers, and strike sympathizers had deleterious consequences for labor: dampening strike activity through the long-term cumulative history of picket-line deaths – particularly strikes for union recognition; and hampering union and Socialist Party organizational growth. Thus, repressive elite violence appears to have contributed, in part, to propelling the American labor movement along what has traditionally been characterized as an ‘exceptional’ path of weakening labor’s potential power during its formative decades.

Typology of social protests in the subjects of the Russian Federation in 2019

The subject of this article is the dynamics of protest activity of citizens in the regions of Russia following the results of the I-III quarters of 2019, the typology of protests, their causes and prospects, forms and mass character, as well as the impact of such protests on the formation of public demand and the policy of the federal authorities in 2020. There are such categories of protests as political, social, environmental and urban planning, as well as labor protest. The most typical examples of protests in each category are given. The research methodology is based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of sources, primarily publications in federal and regional mass media. The main conclusions of the article are the constructive reaction of the federal authorities to the public request expressed in the civil protests of 2019, while previously such requests usually remained unanswered. In particular, the President stated the need for fundamental changes to the Constitution of the country, primarily related to the system and procedure for the formation of state authorities.

From production to reproduction: Pension strikes and changing characteristics of workers’ collective action in China

Workers in the global South are becoming increasingly sensitive to their pension rights. In recent years, rural migrant workers in China have staged a series of protests to fight for pension protection. Drawing from two in-depth case studies conducted in the Pearl River Delta, we explain why workers staged pension strikes, what these protests looked like, how the employers and the government responded, and how these protests differed from previous strikes. Building upon insights from the sociology of collective action and labour process theory, we formulate a new framework for examining labour protests. In addition to seeing workers’ collective action as defensive or offensive, this framework helps us interpret these actions in relation to the spheres of production and reproduction. It classifies pension strikes in China as defensive actions located in the sphere of reproduction, which are distinct from previous strikes that were either defensive or offensive actions situated in the sphere of production. This synthesised framework assists us in theorising that workers’ protest activities, especially in the global South, are not restricted to the traditional production sphere but can also be found in the reproduction sphere.

New Social Movements as Postmodern Challanges To Neoliberalism and Representative Democracy

In this article, the relationship between new social movements, representative democracy and neoliberalism is examined. Starting with student protests in Europe and the United State, the late 1960s have witnessed the emegence of new social movements. Ecological, anti-nuclear, feminist, student, anti-racist, and LGBTI+ protests all have been examined with the scope of the new social movements paradigm. The remarkable protest wave of the 1970s has been followed by contemporary movements in different forms like the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Although these movements differ in terms of issues they deal with and goals they seek, they have a lot in common. Unlike the old movements like labour protests, these new movements primarily focus on postmaterial issues. Postmaterial identity demands and rights of these movements conflict with material demands of neoliberal governments. Furthermore, modern democracies fail to address these issues. Representative democracy is seen as an obstacle to political participation. On the other hand, postmodernism is a suitable concept to explain internal discrepancies and dispersion of new social movements. It is argued that (a) the legitimacy crisis of representative democracy and neoliberal response of capitalism to its structural crisis have triggered new social conflicts and movements, (b) these movements differ from old movements in terms of their forms, goals, and demands, (c) new social movements are postmodern.

Producing Detroit: Narratives of Space and Place in the 1932 Ford Hunger March and Funeral Protest

ABSTRACT This paper explores competing narratives of the Detroit community after a deadly labor protest against the Ford Motor Company in 1932. Both mainstream and radical newspapers negotiated the meaning of violence through rhetorics of place. Mainstream papers defined protestors as a mob unduly influenced by Communist outsiders, which set up redemption for the police as Detroit’s protectors. Radical journalists re-mapped Detroit to emphasize genuine working-class radicalism and set Henry Ford at the center of a transnational conspiracy. Considering place in the newspaper coverage allows rhetoricians to explore intersections of identity and materiality in labor rhetoric and understand the clashing rhetorical forces of worker solidarity and anti-communism.

Producing Detroit: Narratives of Space and Place in the 1932 Ford Hunger March and Funeral Protest

ABSTRACT This paper explores competing narratives of the Detroit community after a deadly labor protest against the Ford Motor Company in 1932. Both mainstream and radical newspapers negotiated the meaning of violence through rhetorics of place. Mainstream papers defined protestors as a mob unduly influenced by Communist outsiders, which set up redemption for the police as Detroit’s protectors. Radical journalists re-mapped Detroit to emphasize genuine working-class radicalism and set Henry Ford at the center of a transnational conspiracy. Considering place in the newspaper coverage allows rhetoricians to explore intersections of identity and materiality in labor rhetoric and understand the clashing rhetorical forces of worker solidarity and anti-communism.

Women Community Warriors of St. Croix

Abstract This essay highlights some of the unexpected leadership roles that women have played in relation to the oil industry on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) from 1965 to the present. The people of St. Croix (Crucians) have a long and proud history of strong women as community and family leaders. Despite their invisibility in contemporary narratives of oil refining under U.S. colonialism on St. Croix, Crucian women have contested commonly held stereotypes of women’s roles and contributed to, as well as challenged, the refinery on their own terms. This article is part of a broader literature about women’s leadership across civil society, the private sector, and the public sector in the Caribbean and Latin America that focuses on women’s agency. This essay is also about the unequal situations that places like St. Croix face when negotiating with multinational corporations under colonial circumstances. While the oil industry generates income for the USVI, the refinery has environmental impacts injurious to the local population. Despite colonial, neocolonial, and patriarchal characteristics of their societies, women leaders on St. Croix, across the Caribbean, and Latin America have been a constant phenomenon, not just a recent occurrence. All the women in this essay demonstrate the centrality that women’s guidance, leadership, and actions play in the fostering, functioning, and protection of families, communities, and public and private institutions on St. Croix. The women in this essay created their own opportunities and took matters into their own hands, demonstrating alternative expressions of self and community values, as well as local action and agency, whether through personal relations, labor protests, stringent economic negotiations, occupying political office, and/or community-based activism.

Seoul as a Site of Labor Resistance: The Spatial Representation of Inequality and Injustice

Under rising insecurity and precarity in the neoliberal labor market, Korean workers have protested mass job cuts and deteriorating working conditions. Although their grievances originate from the regions and workplaces where they are employed or laid off, the protest sites often move to major political landmarks in Seoul, the nation’s capital, with demands for political redress. These labor protests in the capital demonstrate two distinctive features of Korean labor movements in the 2000s: protests go on for a protracted period of time with few tangible results and take extreme forms of resistance. Approaching Seoul as a site of contentious politics, this study analyses the mutual nexus between labor protests and urban spaces with cases that appropriate various sites, such as Kwanghwamun (Gwanghwamun) Square, the Blue House, and the National Assembly, involving diverse tactics like long-term camp-ins, sambo ilbae (삼보일배) marches, and the occupation of structurally perilous structures. It examines which layers of inequality and injustice in the labor market, or in Korean society at large, are articulated through protest methods that spatially engage with specific urban locations in Seoul. With this investigation, the paper argues that the labor movement practices novel repertoires of resistance to neoliberal precarity by choosing the urban sites with metaphoric significance and by publicly displaying bodily torment. These new forms of contention, in turn, redefine the sense and political implication of the protest site and make the space part of the new protest repertoire.

Using protest event analysis to study labour conflict in authoritarian regimes: The Monitoring of Labour Protest dataset

Using protest event analysis to study labour conflict in authoritarian regimes: The Monitoring of Labour Protest dataset

Post-growth, post-democracy, post-Memoranda: What can the ‘post-growth’ debate learn from Greece and vice versa?

The crisis in Greece in the last decade has led to a wide economic transition, raising the question of whether Greece can be understood as a kind of a ‘post-growth’ society. The article has two aims. First, it examines how the Greek crisis has been discussed within the post-growth debate and focuses on three views: Greece as a post-growth anti-paradigm, Greece as an opportunity for democratic post-growth and austerity in Greece as a path for anti-Keynesian degrowth. Second, the article examines how ideas and projects with a post-growth orientation have influenced specific social initiatives born out of the crisis period in Greece. Some of these initiatives are reviewed (self-organized social and economic collectives, grassroots initiatives for solidarity, solidarity economy actions, etc.). As further discussed in the article, these initiatives were part of a broader ‘countermovement’ (Polanyi), and they faded together with other forms of labour and social protest, in accordance with events at the central political scene, and especially SYRIZA’s adoption of Memoranda politics. It is observed that in the post-Memoranda era in Greece, although past strategies of social reproduction are either unavailable (the pre-crisis finance-led growth model) or no longer equally effective (the familistic social model) and fiscal discipline remains, the search for other alternatives, including social initiatives with a post-growth orientation, did not actually extend as was expected, due to some new growth opportunities, e.g. in the field of tourism. It is finally concluded that, although they constituted an important part of the Greek countermovement, born as responses to the crisis, these social initiatives did not manage to consolidate more permanent structures of social action that could successfully challenge the neoliberal agenda.

Algorithmic work coordination and workers' voice in the COVID-19 pandemic: The case of Foodora/Lieferando

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates the conflictual nature of work in the digital platform economy as if it were ignited under a magnifying glass. In this context, this article focuses on the logic of control of algorithmic labour coordination, adopting a qualitative case study approach. In a situation in which the technical infrastructure of online platforms generally impedes labour protests, it examines the case of Lieferando (formerly Foodora) in Germany, where, unusually, the on-demand workforce is employed. It concludes that in this situation, the algorithmic management of Lieferando facilitates labour protests because of a lack of communication between employer and worker. Furthermore, in the COVID-19 pandemic, institutionalised relationships function as a countervailing power to that of the employer, forcing it to act.

The Marching Priest: The Civil Rights and Labor Activism of Father Sherrill Smith during the 1950s and 1960s

The Marching PriestThe Civil Rights and Labor Activism of Father Sherrill Smith during the 1950s and 1960s Mark Newman (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Father Sherrill Smith of San Antonio holds a Saturday Evening Post from 1965 featuring a photo of him in the Selma-to-Montgomery march. ©Morris Goen/San Antonio Express-News via ZUMA Press. [End Page 300] In 1961, Father Sherrill Smith, the assistant pastor of St. Joseph Church in the city of San Antonio, became the first Catholic priest based in the South to participate in a direct-action civil rights protest when he joined the stand-ins at San Antonio's Majestic Theater, which confined African American customers to an upstairs balcony. For Smith, the denial of civil rights to African Americans was a "moral and religious" issue he felt compelled to address when the movement called for assistance.1 Four years later, Smith was one of hundreds of mainly White clergy and laity from many denominations who responded to Martin Luther King Jr.'s appeal for their participation in the demonstrations at Selma, Alabama, for African American voting rights. The Selma protests marked the first time that a large number of Catholic priests and sisters had joined a direct-action civil rights protest in the South, where Catholic dioceses struggled with varying degrees of commitment and success to overturn decades of segregation in their institutions. Only a handful of the more than 250 sisters and Catholic clergy who marched in Selma were based in the South. Smith was only one of thirty-six White people, and one of only two Catholic priests, whom civil rights organizers permitted to walk the entire fifty-four-mile route of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that marked the climax of the Alabama protests. His experience in Selma made Smith more militant and outspoken. In 1966, he helped mediate during James [End Page 301] Meredith's March against Fear in Mississippi, and he endorsed the idea of Black Power.2 Father Smith's fight against racial injustice was not confined solely to discrimination against African Americans in the Deep South, however. In addition to opposing discrimination against African Americans, he supported the Mexican American civil rights movement. The same sense of morality that took him to the Majestic Theater, Selma, and Mississippi had earlier impelled him to support a Hispanic labor protest in the late 1950s and also informed his subsequent labor activism in the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s. As the first Catholic priest to participate in labor and civil rights direct action in Texas and the South, Smith was an important part of a wider, yet underestimated, Catholic contribution to civil rights and labor struggles in the South.3 Smith's labor and civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s has not received sufficient attention from scholars of Catholicism, civil rights, or Texas history. Smith does not appear in Martin Herman Kuhlman's dissertation on desegregation in Texas. Robert A. Goldberg's study of racial change in San Antonio between 1960 and 1965 only mentions Smith briefly. Saul E. Bronder's biography of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey, who initially supported Smith but clashed with him in later years, discusses Smith's deteriorating relationship with his superior. More recently, Brian D. Behnken's account of the civil rights struggle in Texas acknowledges some of Smith's activism but considers him chiefly regarding Project Equality, an interdenominational program that sought to promote nondiscriminatory hiring by businesses and the Church. Max Krochmal's study of multiracial coalition building in civil rights era Texas mentions Smith briefly on three occasions. Smith contributed to both labor and civil rights struggles, but as an Anglo and a priest who saw his role mostly as supporting these struggles when called upon by those involved.4 [End Page 302] Some scholars, such as Amy L. Koehlinger and John T. McGreevy, have stressed the importance of the Second Vatican Council in encouraging Catholic participation in the civil rights movement. The council, which met in Rome between 1962 and 1965, emphasized the duty of the Church to engage with the problems of...

Local Dynamics as a Resource for Labour Protests: The Case of Wildcat Strikes in the Metal Industry in Turkey, 2012-2016

This article analyses the role of local dynamics on trade unions’ mobilisation capacity at thenational level, with a focus on the wildcat strikes in the metal sector in Bursa, a city in north-westTurkey, from 2012 to 2016. It studies to what extent local dynamics such as alliances with localbranches of political parties, workplace demonstrations, and local electoral and union organisingcampaigns contributed to protests against national government policies. The research andanalysis are based on both qualitative data collected during fieldwork and on quantitative datafrom a variety of Turkish and international sources. Through an analysis of the wildcat strikes,the article contributes to the literature on labour movements and strikes in authoritarian contexts.Differently from the majority of the existing literature on this issue, it focuses on the workplacelevel rather than analysing the relations between government officials and the trade unionconfederations at the national level. By doing this, it shows that, despite the oppressive context atthe national level, trade unions may regain power at the sectoral level.KEYWORDS: trade unions; metal industry; Turkey; authoritarian regime; social movements