Between Work and Social Movement

Introduction.

Sennett and Baumann have discussed how the greater sense of fluidity in the western economies has contributed to a “corrosion of character,” the creation of “liquid identities” and an overall sense of existential precarity. Traditional organisations and descriptions of class seem ill fitting in this context and jar ever more with the reality it describes, yet Thompson and others have shown how individual subjectivity in the work place still leads to oppositional subcultures and “misbehavior.” Elsewhere Negri has described how it is the aim of the new work discipline to deny radical transformative social action by dispersing the sites of traditionally contested power and the social actors that can contest it. Where class was once defined by a similarity of experience, it is now defined by difference, absence or plurality. The post-modernisation of the economy brought with it a by-passing of the state by corporations, the undermining of traditional welfare rights and a mobilised workforce kept on its toes due to the threat of a highly technologically charged capitalism with the ability to skip country at will. Overall this creates a condition of instability for those outside of power, and has undermined organizations like unions that challenged power in the past.

The term precarity, arising first in the mid to late 1990's as a description of the situation facing the increasing numbers of casualised French workers as recently passed into popular usuage among social movements in the past 18 months. Feminist theorists have defined precarity "as a juncture of material and symbolic conditions which determine an uncertainty with respect to the sustained access to the resources essential to the development of one’s life." This living on the margins arises from a restructuring of work and social rights that has taken place under neo-liberalism. This is most acute in the technologically advanced countries of the west where there has been a shift away from traditional industries towards the tertiary sector, with much of the manufacturing industries shifted to the global south as a response to waves of struggles in the 60‘s and ‘70. Barbara Ehrenreich and others have highlighted in their return to a 19th century investigative journalism mode that explored low paid work; the working class is everywhere and nowhere. The move towards a leisure society has become the colonisation of other areas of our lives by capital. The time we spend in work is increasing, our relative pay is decreasing, and the social and psychological injuries of class are ever more prevalent. The benefits of social democracy (whatever the debates on the dynamics of its origins are) being rolled back, the symbolic victories and institutions of the working class are diminishing and the radical left in the west is ever more impotent on the terrain of work.

The research is also driven by a sharp concern over the apparent closing of spaces for radical social action on a class basis. In academia, post-modernity has rightly decentred the primacy of a class politics that limited the potential for the liberation of “deviant” oppressed minorities. In doing this it also dissolved the potential for the formation of a shared class identity with the power to fundamentally challenge the structure of work along capitalist organizational principles. Trade unions have traditionally being seen as an expression of class identifaction. But in recent years they have been characterized by a marked decline in union density, as well as an apparent lack of relevancy in some terrains of employment. Sennet has discussed how the lack of a coherent life narrative can contribute to the decline of wider social institutions and group loyalties. But alongside this pessimism there has been an increase in the visibility of and participation in popular social movements that define themselves broadly against the structures of contemporary capitalism and by extension its work discipline. This research aims to look at the intersection of social movement activists with both their workplaces and their experience and relationsships with trade unions.