In the early 1970s Jack Mundey led a union of builders labourers that took strike action and imposed bans on developments that were then worth around $5 billion. At the time, Jack and his union, the Builders Labourers Federation, were intensely vilified. Death threats were common. The BLF [...]
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Since the 1970s, increase in capital’s bargaining power vis-à-vis labour has caused immense difficulties for labour movements. Workforces have responded by developing different ways to protect themselves. As new expressions of working-class organisation and mobilisation emerge to better [...]
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It is inspiring to see such a wide variety of comments to my new book, Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India. I will try to address them in a way that synthesises the problems and challenges of the field of labour studies and working-class politics as such. I believe [...]
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At the height of apartheid in 1972 veteran sociologist Heribert Adam published a book where he predicted strikes were not possible in South Africa. Never had the predictive powers of sociology been more cruelly tested when in January 1973, six months after the book was published, [...]
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The idea of mass strikes within the Marxist tradition has been most powerful against capitalism. With the idea of strikes, Marx wants to bring about an epistemological change in the working class, “so they would know that they are, together, ‘the agent of production’, and that if they [...]
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Mass strikes and social movements in Brazil and India, by Jörg Nowak is a very timely and important book, which I think can help to reflect on the forms of organisation and action of the working class in the global context, redefining the theoretical assumptions that have dominated the [...]
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Jörg Nowak’s book Mass Strikes and Social Movements in Brazil and India has the front cover of a “European style” house surrounded by a garden with pink flowers, and I pondered about its relevance to a study of workers’ strikes in Brazil and India. The book begins with the [...]
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The main problem with much of the mainstream literature on labour and globalization is that it tends to conceive of labour as a passive victim of the new capitalist trends, the malleable material from which globalization will construct its new world order. Capital is seen as an active, [...]
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