National Strike Research Articles

A Tale of Two Locals: The Strategic Choice of a Trade Union during the 2019 GM–UAW Strike and Member Satisfaction

Industrial relations (IR) scholars emphasize the strategic choices of industrial relations actors to explain IR processes and outcomes. This article asserts that union member satisfaction is critical to realize unions’ objectives and that the local union and work context shapes satisfaction. The authors study the 2019 national UAW strike against General Motors in two, at first sight, very similar union locals. Union members of one local approved the agreement while the other local rejected the agreement. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, the authors explain the different outcomes. Their analysis of a unique worker survey conducted during the strike shows that general member satisfaction was an important dimension for supporting the union’s strategic choices. Qualitative case studies of the two locals highlight the importance of shares of transfer workers—“invisible divides”—when examining member satisfaction. Broadly, findings contribute to the strategic choice literature and emphasize the local union context as a key locus for producing successful outcomes.

Radios y Cacerolas

This article elaborates a feminist digital activist perspective on the Colombian national strike of 2021 through the work of two women-led collectives (colectivas) in which I participated from afar, as part of the Colombian diaspora. Radio Lila is a collective of women living in Cali’s oriente, and Cacerola Collective is formed by Colombians in the diaspora, mostly people working in the creative industries. Through the study of these colectivas’s praxis, this article argues that women-led collectives use digital tools and the internet not only to set up political actions but also to create online places for care and mourning. This argument makes conspicuous how there is a gap in the research on digital activism, concerning the emotional tools activists seek to transit political uprisals and their aftermaths. In other words, we see here how feminist research on social media can also focus on retreating, going offline, as a way of personal and communal care.

New imaginaries of social protest in Colombia. Socio-spatial analysis of the National Strike 2021

Resumen La protesta social en Colombia ha sido altamente estigmatizada, al considerarse que va en contra de las instituciones democráticas, lo que ha generado un imaginario general de quien protesta es un “guerrillero” o terrorista. Así, el objetivo de este artículo es analizar las construcciones territoriales que han posibilitado la emergencia y permanencia de los imaginarios sociales sobre la protesta social en Colombia, en el marco del Paro Nacional de 2021. Se hace uso de una metodología mixta, con técnicas como el análisis crítico del discurso, cartografía sobre los resultados electorales y la espacialización de hechos de violencia policial en Cali, Bogotá y Medellín. Los principales resultados a los que se llegaron es que la protesta social se dio con pretensión de reclamar por problemas estructurales y no la de derrocar al Estado bajo presión popular; pero la respuesta institucional sí logró incentivar cambios en los imaginarios sociales de la protesta.

Violence and Video in Cali, Colombia

In 2021, a national strike was called in Colombia as a protest to the unpopular government's reforms. During the protests in Cali, the country's third‐largest city, there were high levels of violence and vandalism by the protestors, but also by the government and infiltrators. Nonetheless, La Primera Línea (The First Line) were blamed for the criminal acts, and up until today, with a left‐wing president now in power, they continue to be blamed, killed, and imprisoned.

Comparative Analysis of the Journalistic Agenda between Corporate and Community Media in Ecuador National Strike 2022

This article presents a comparative analysis of the journalistic coverage of the Ecuador social mobilizations of June 2022. It takes as case studies the corporate media Ecuavisa, with 215 news of the stellar newscast Televistazo, and the community media Televisión del Movimiento Indígena de Cotopaxi (TV MICC), with 437 publications on its Facebook page. Based on the Critical Discourse Analysis, we investigate the media disputes of meaning and power in the journalistic agenda and framing, from which the legitimization and delegitimization of the protest were configured. Among the main results, Ecuavisa focused its news agenda on the defense of governmental actions and the support to the productive business sector, generating a frame of support for the actions of the public forces in defense of democracy, while TV MICC, in a practice of communicational sovereignty, generated journalistic coverage vindicating the political agenda of the mobilization led by the Indigenous Movement. Additionally, it made visible the multiple violations of human and cultural rights carried out by the public force within the framework of a racist culture.

Rebuilding Together Through Buen Vivir: Democratic Collectives and Ecuadorian Liberation Theologies in the Face of the IMF and Disaster Capitalism

ABSTRACT Disaster capitalism and shock doctrine have come to the fore in Ecuador after the 2016 earthquake and 2022 economic crisis and national strike. In opposition to the form of shock doctrine these two disasters highlight are theological anthropologies and praxis of religious alternatives to care and rebuilding. A disrupted research trip explores the competing visions of development, governance, and flourishing between the International Monetary Fund’s presence in Ecuador with shock doctrine and local economic collectives’ and the national solidarity movement’s liberative pastoral responses through Buen Vivir, an indigenous praxis of interdependence. The formation of democratic economic collectives and the validation of solidarity in large-scale national strikes demonstrate the power of pastoral theological responses holding to an expansive vision of Buen Vivir and theological anthropologies insisting on interdependent practices of care, justice, and liturgy to bring about fundamental shifts to our understanding of good living and subjectivity of all living things.

Between negotiation and confrontation in Ecuador: the re-emergence of CONAIE during Lenin Moreno’s presidency in light of resource mobilization theory

ABSTRACT During President Rafael Correa’s term, Ecuador’s most relevant indigenous organization, CONAIE, entered a legitimacy crisis that severely weakened its representativeness. However, in October 2019, the organization surprisingly joined several social organizations in a national strike that paralyzed the country and forced President Lenin Moreno to derogate a controversial decree (833) that had eliminated oil subsidies. To explain CONAIE’s re-emergence, this article relies on resource mobilization theory to analyze how the organization benefited from the political turn implemented by Moreno within the Citizen Revolution Movement’s project. More concretely, this article argues that Moreno’s government reverted the institutionalization process in the country, abandoned the use of indigenous cultural markers, and tried to re-establish a positive relationship with CONAIE. In this context, CONAIE was able to recover resources lost during Correa’s presidency through co-optation and appropriation, increasing its legitimacy and influence within the indigenous communities.

On the “Expropriation of Dignity.” A report on the situation of the national strike in Colombia, 2021.

On the “Expropriation of Dignity.” A report on the situation of the national strike in Colombia, 2021.

Indigeneity coalesced: The 2022 national strike in Ecuador

This article analyses the national strike in Ecuador in June 2022, which paralysed most of its cities and roads for 18 days. The uprising has relevance for understanding the historical path of Indigenous movements in Latin America. We address two main questions. First, we analyse the 2022 uprising in the context of the extended timeframe of Indigenous revolts stretching back to 1990, considering what this popular mobilization tells us about recent highs and lows of Indigenous organizations and their relationship with current government regimes. Second, we delve into a tactical aspect of the uprising, exploring how the Indigenous population, among the most impoverished sectors in Ecuador, could block and freeze the country’s economic and commercial activity for so long.

(Re)signifying the Past of Violence: Emerging Memories and Voices at Colombia’s National Strike in 2021

ABSTRACT The 2021 National Strike in Colombia laid bare social discontent exacerbated by structural inequalities in its society. It provided a much-needed platform for those historically excluded voices, including those of young people. They raised their voices to challenge the meanings of the violent past to construct an activist and politicized citizenship. I will analyze from a discursive-performative stance the meanings that emerge in the protest taking as corpus two graffiti. These materials’ irruptions give room to doubts, complaints, demands of justice, and new questions about the memories of violence as they open the space to a political we.

El diálogo social y la cultura del encuentro

A theological and pastoral contribution is made about social dialog, inspired in Evangelii Gaudium, to illuminate the social crisis caused by the national strike in Colombia. Rediscovering the dimension of the subject produces dynamism: come out from oneself to meet the other and together, moved by truth, reach agreements. Interpersonal dialog creates a pedagogy of dialog and personal encounter. The principles emerging from the first Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis allow proposing a pedagogy of polyhedral social dialog to include all its interlocutors – government, unions, citizens – looking for consensus and promoting the comprehensive development of Colombian peoples. The social dialog and the culture of encounter favor the full development of the human being, seek common wellbeing, and show the path of peace for the country devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Mahsa Amini's killing, state violence, and moral policing in Iran

Iranian cities have been the scene of daily antigovernment protests by young women and men since September 16, the day Mahsa Jina Amini died in the custody of the “morality police” in Tehran. Over the next weeks, the waves of protests snowballed as the often very young demonstrators poured into the streets in some 160 cities, chanting antiregime slogans. Many women removed their mandatory headscarves at street protests to call for an end to the dual life forced upon them by the state's dress code. The protesters’ anti-authoritarian outrage met with broad public sympathy, moved beyond the discontented middle classes, and engaged significant segments of working-class youth and the ethnic Kurdish and Baluchi communities. However, workers, teachers, and other sectors of organized labor, who saw no immediate victory in sight, did not join the call for a national general strike. An estimated 500 demonstrators were killed, including 67 children, and more than 15,000 people were arrested. Three months of ongoing protests in Iran have garnered more international sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Though initially shaken, regime has doubled down in its brutality to eliminate the movement. The regime's reluctance to reform has convinced many observers that new waves of protest will follow, converging to break Iran's political impasse. This article outlines an analytical lens for understanding the movement's cultural transformative power as well as its challenges in achieving its political goals. I examine four critical aspects of this protest movement to explore where it stands in Iran's recent political turmoil. These include the radicalization of politics in Iran due to rising state violence over the past decade, the growing number of forced veiling dissidents, the contribution of the youth crisis to the protests, and finally, the confluence of ethnic outrage with women's and youth anti-authoritarian politics.

Alternative and Traditional Media on Twitter: Ecuador National Strike of 2019

The constant demands of citizens to be informed in real time have made Twitter an ideal tool for mass use. This social network has originated a new user of social communication, and is used to present public images and appeal to the population, at the same time that it is displacing the pre-eminence of traditional communication media. During the national strike in Ecuador in October 2019, alternative and conventional media used this platform to inform, generate debate, carry out calls and mobilizations, and position perspectives. This study analyzes the tweets and hashtags published on the most viral days of the strike. A mixed methodology was applied, i.e., qualitative and quantitative. The techniques applied were discourse analysis and the systematic review of each hashtag. The sample was taken from the hashtags published by traditional and alternative media from October 3 to 13. As the main result, it was concluded that the published hashtags had a high impact on informing users and, to a certain extent, on the calls that were made.

Back-to-Work Order: Outdated legal boundaries of the fundamental labour rights

Back-to-Work Order:Outdated legal boundaries of the fundamental labour rights Aelim Yun (bio) On 24 November 2022 the Owner-Truckers' Solidarity Union (hereafter "TruckSol") went on a national strike. Just after a few hours, President Yoon and the Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport stated their intention to issue a 'Back-to-Work Order' to the striking owner-truckers, violation of which carries heavy fines or prison sentences and revocation of licence for trucking transport service. On 29 November, the Korean Government actually issued the Back-to-Work Order to bulk-cement trailer drivers whose strike could disrupt construction work. Even before the strike, the Government has decried owner-operators' collective action as illegal. The public authority has long maintained that owner-operators cannot do legitimate collective action as they are not "employees" under Korean labour laws. Moreover, the Government has directly cracked down on the strike of TruckSol since their collective action could disturb logistics in which large corporations have a dominant position. In this article, I explain legal and political debates over an "employee" under labour regulations in Korea. Further explanation about the criteria for the "legitimate collective action" under labour regulations will follow. In conclusion, I explore the implications of legal tools such as the Back-to-Work Order for suppressing freedom of association and the right to strike. Legal debates over an "employee" in Korea In Korea, an "employee" is entitled to labour law protection. Traditionally, the definition of an "employee" in labour laws was basically interpreted as a person working in an employment relationship. While various indicators regarding the existence of an employment relationship were listed in judicial precedents, the courts traditionally noted such factors as whether the employer exerted direction or supervision over the performance of work, and whether the employer offered remuneration for the price for labour. In other words, many judicial precedents have interpreted the existence of direction/supervision as exerting detailed directions over performance of work, for example, asking whether or not a hirer instructed drivers to take specific roads. Moreover, the courts quite often denied a worker the status of "employee" in cases where the worker owned the work tools such as a truck or provided his/her labour for multiple hirers. Such a narrow interpretation of the employment relationship has contributed to an increase in "bogus self-employed". In the Korean road freight transport sector, for example, most trucking companies forced their drivers to become "independent contractors" since the 1990s. Additionally, the government legitimated previously illicit practices of the trucking transport business in the use of owner-operators through the amendment of the Trucking Transport Business Act (TTBA) in 1997. In such regulatory changes, trucking companies were not required to own trucks or hire drivers, and they just contracted out the entire performance of carriage to other subcontractors or owner-operators. As a result, the trucking transport sector is characterised by a multi-layered structure of subcontracting and the widespread use of owner-operators. A survey in 2020 found that the level above the tri-level of subcontracting accounted for 20.3 percent in the trucking sector. It was also reported in 2018 that these owner-operators accounted for over 91.5 percent of all truck drivers1. As these owner-operators have their own trucks and bear the expenses of the operation of vehicles, they have been regarded as "independent contractors" or the "self-employed". In reality, however, they are dependent on the particular freight transport companies or transport buyers, and they drive trucks by themselves without employing others. Commercial pressures passed down through multi-layered subcontracting lead to reductions in truck drivers' rates. Owner-operators are the most vulnerable, as they often must absorb the costs of ownership, maintenance, and other vehicle-operating costs, while they may not be protected from labour protection such as statutory minimum wage and working hours regulation. Against this, owner-operators attempted to form trade unions to improve their working conditions. In 2002, owner-operators in the trucking transport sector formed a union – called "Cargo Truckers' Solidarity Union" (TruckSol), which was a special branch of the existing union (the Korean Cargo Transport Workers Federation)2. Under Korean labour laws, all...

Constitución de sentidos instituyentes en la universidad colombiana del siglo XXI. El caso del movimiento estudiantil

This article discusses the role of the Colombian university student movement between 2011 and 2018 in terms of its ways of constituting political subjectivity and achieving discur­sive hegemony through resistance practices associated with the social imaginary, memory and identity. The forms of student political participation or their practices of resistance are shown in moments of latency (or daily university life when there is no strike), as well as in contentious moments (those when there is confrontation or strike, specifically, national strike). In terms of political subjectivity, the university student movement has generated optimism and hope in the social movement, new repertoires of action with which values and meanings are installed, but they will surely be replaced in the future by other new meanings.

Colombia’s Cultural Explosion: Vivir Sabroso and Ollas Comunitarias as Pedagogies of Solidarity

This article analyzes the cultural explosion of “28A,” the largest national strike in Colombia’s recent times. It aims to further understand the protest from the point of view of young artists that went out to protest. Following analytical tools borrowed from the performance studies, I bring a decolonial approach to the performance studies debate, analyzing social protests as “epistemological struggles” in relation to alternative pedagogies of resistance and solidarity. I join the decolonial commitment of this special issue by thinking from and with Indigenous, Black, Mestizxs, and Youth discourses and praxes, while opening Indigeneity, Blackness, and decoloniality to other spaces like the performing arts, circus, and the mestizo nation. I draw attention to Afro and Indigenous philosophies and practices that influence circus practice in Colombia. As those praxes transcend specific Afro and Indigenous communities, the cultural explosion not only challenges the idea of the mestizo nation but also reveals the prevalence of inter-epistemic dialogues and pedagogies of solidarity among young artists in Colombia. In the aftermath of 28A and its cultural explosion, those dialogues have been joined by other sectors of society as revealed in the current presidential elections, where Afro and Indigenous philosophies are finally being considered as valid alternative forms of governance within the mestizo nation.

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

“A Revolution in Labor”: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era

We, campesinos: The potentials and pitfalls of agrarian populism in Colombia's agrarian strike

AbstractThis contribution aims to explore the potentials and pitfalls for the emergence of a popular agrarian movement capable of offering a progressive alternative to the far‐right. Taking the case of Colombia's national agrarian strike, the paper argues that food sovereignty can offer a mobilizing framework for a multiclass, antineoliberal agrarian coalition. However, the possibilities for building a counter‐hegemonic movement should be taken with more caution. An examination of the class differentiation between and within campesino movements reveals how the interests of certain groups may be prioritized over others. While agrarian populism may offer an important political strategy for building coalitions and framing demands, a closer class analysis points to limits to its transformative potential.

Author Response

Author Response

JATARISHUN: indigenous peasant uprisings of Ecuador and Good Living

This article analyzes the Indigenous Peasant Movements (IPM) of Ecuador as a social force and political actor. By proposing an alternative to the Ecuadorian crisis based on the Sumak Kawsay (Good Living) values, the IPM expand democratic spaces and formulate an extended sense of citizenship. The text focuses on the events of the 2019 national strike in Ecuador, in retrospective dialogue with previous uprisings. It draws on the testimonies of the Kayambi people, collected before and after the strike, in semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic work. Results show that the memory of previous struggles was an essential motivation for the emergence of the uprisings. Besides, unity and solidarity among rural actors and other sectors of Ecuadorian society were the basis for the strike’s strength and power. Finally, in dialogue with the Emancipatory Rural Politics, the article contributes to critical approaches to the role of indigenous peasant peoples in struggles for life alternatives.